POLITICAL BOOK NOTES
political book notes Public affairs books to be published in January The ABC’s of Bureaucracy. Robert B. Jansen. Nelson Hall, $1 1.95. Jansen attempts to portray the failings of bureaucracy...
...The practitioners of the abysmal science, much less the layman, may not be able to filter any useful analysis from the upside-down parallels found in this book...
...First Lady’s Lady: With the Fords at the White House...
...John R. Coyne, Jr...
...The perks still come from the Military Affairs Office, but it is now overseen by a civilian, Marty Beamon, who like so many of his peers, happens to be from Atlanta...
...Two years later, claims our author, Hoover has become an advocate of monetary expansion, but Congress, the Democrats in the forefront, remains adamant on the budget, with recommendations that Hoover “cut to the bone” federal expenses, and one congressman advising that the government “cannot go on expending millions of dollars which it has not, whether it be for the unemployed, or for the sick, or for anyone else...
...it only ensures that the attack is more precisely aimed...
...and he is an engineer, with an engineer’s stolid faith in organization and technical competence, abhorring the wastefulness of a bloated bureaucracy...
...IQ, Heritability and Racism...
...Sheila Rabb Weidenfield...
...That kind of understanding requires, in turn, something more than searching through sociology journals and saving back columns by Jack Anderson...
...And what of the poor and middle class who are displaced in this “urban renaissance...
...Von Eckardt, architecture critic for The Washington Post, is at his sensible best poking holes in the grand “high-rise” visions of modern architects like Le Corbusier...
...Fall In and Cheer...
...Make Up Your Mind...
...No problem...
...Natives and Strangers: Ethnic Groups and the Building of America...
...Weidenfeld suggests that reporters may have nailed the wrong man when they got Peter Bourne...
...There are no new facts here, especially if you’ve read Stephen Brill in Harper’s, nor much insightful reasoning...
...Arlington House, $8.95...
...Looking for America: A Writer’s Odyssey...
...Random House, $10/$3.95...
...That means military protection for the nation, and military perquisites for the White House...
...G. William Domhoff...
...With the approach of an induced recession (slight, moderate, severe-pick your economist) whose effects and reverberations may coincide neatly with the fiftieth commemoration of the Great Crash, there are no assurances, with this latest biography of Hoover, of lessons learned...
...Oxford, $13.95...
...Prince of the City: The True Story of a Cop Who Knew Too Much...
...But what could be called The Political Education of an Engineer, as against the rather dully rendered biographical detail, makes for eerie comparison...
...Norton, $1 1.95...
...What pills were being popped by Richard Nixon and Betty Ford, and who prescribed them...
...Irving Louis Horowitz, Seymour Martin Lipset...
...The American Presidency...
...The Marines offer a fleet of choppers...
...Robert Daley...
...If you forget the facts and stick to the story, Prince Of’lhe Cil.i* is a good read...
...Lexington, $16.95...
...More of the same from Domhoff-onedimensional, overstated explanations of how the “ruling class” operates, relying for “proof” on too-familiar tales (the Lockheed loan, the Council on Foreign Relations), or on footnotes to the author’s previous works...
...Jensen finds one of the most praiseworthy bureaucracies is the Bureau of Reclamation, which has been looked upon in other quarters as the builder and promoter of unnecessary and wasteful pork-barrel projects...
...But if Bill Gully has departed, another of Weidenfeld’s characters, Dr...
...He looks to the business community to set its own house in order and, failing that, to Congress for modest, affordable programs of assistance...
...Paul Sann...
...And it’ll make a wonderful TV docudrama-something Daley must have had in mind when he wrote it...
...Basic, $16...
...They’ll blow both of you away.’” The above is a sample of Robert Daley’s overkill in Prince of’the Cir~D,.a ley tells us that the saga of Detective Robert “Babyface” Leuci is true...
...Doubleday, $1 1.95...
...A bitchy-lively account of life inside the White House by Betty Ford’s former press secretary...
...John D. Arnold...
...When the economy of the nation is threatened, he relies, at first adamantly, on voluntarism, the self-interest that will see the sense in collective restraint...
...This failure is especially damaging in a book like this one, whose stated purpose is to provide a detailed picture of how the ruling classes exercise their will...
...James Fallows Pressure Cooker...
...For a guy who says he is “no stranger to the bureaucratic maze,” Jansen offers very little that is original...
...The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations...
...The Army offers a fleet of chauffeured limousines, and the ability to construct anything anytime to help out...
...Norton, $9.95...
...Bruce R. Bartlett...
...Simon Schama...
...James Earl Carter: The Man and the Myth...
...Isaiah Trunk...
...The Air Force provides a fleet of Presidential planes, ranging from Jet Stars to large transports, to Air Force One, to jumbo jet commando planes...
...Apparently he sits around reading and talking to his friends the rest of the time...
...Leonard Dinnerstein, Roger L. Nichols, David M. Reimers...
...Committee on East-West Accord, eds...
...David Burner...
...Kill him.’ But neither moved...
...Oxford, $10/$2.95...
...The circumstances of our current economic disarray are unlike those of 1929, all that Hoover feared now being present in the prospect of government d o m i n a t i o n of the economy...
...With the factories gone from the cities, “it is time that the people who need jobs...
...Cover-up: The Politics of Pearl Harbor, 1941-46...
...New Republic, $10...
...Michael Charlton, Anthony Moncrieff...
...he is a selfmade, successful businessman...
...Charles Vert Willie...
...be given the opportunity to follow them...
...We find it paralyzingly dull...
...As in his other books, Domhoff is clearly on to something when he claims that elite groups hold power far out of proportion to their numbers...
...Peter Meyer...
...The reminiscences and political philosophy of a one-time speechwriter for Richard Nixon, Spiro Agnew, and Gerald Ford...
...Patricia Nosher How to Manage Management...
...Sara Evans...
...Mary Kaldor...
...The Angry Decades: The Sixties...
...Anything...
...Weidenfield explains: “As Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, the President has at his disposal the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines...
...When DeStefano came to the end of the memo, he looked up and said in an anguished voice, ‘This is not funny.’ “‘You’re right,’ Leuci said, ‘it’s not funny...
...It has always been an anomaly peculiar to American cities that the poorest people should live on the most expensive real estate-downtown, adjacent to the business and cultural district...
...Hill and Wang, $10...
...William E. Perry...
...What it demands is a willingness to go out and talk with real human beings, rather than relying on printed sources, since those humans will always be more complex than the academic patterns to which they are reduced...
...The man in the White House comes from humble, farm origins...
...Jansen attempts to portray the failings of bureaucracy with wit and irony, but he has neither the wit nor the sense of irony to pull it off...
...Juliu Rose The Sociology of Urban Education: Desegregation and Integration...
...What do you mean, kill him?’ cried Leuci angrily...
...Back to the Drawing Board: Planning Livable Cities...
...Crown, $14.95...
...The city is merely changing functions,” he notes with approval...
...Simply by collecting so many familiar facts, however, the books does highlight one of Carter’s least attractive traits-his ‘‘I-am-a-nuclear-physicist” tendency to lie about petty matters...
...Charles Peters Herbert Hoover: The Public Life...
...You guys are in a lot of trouble.’ “DeStefano turned to Lamatina and said, ‘Whack him...
...Lexington, $16.50...
...James Lawler...
...Vanguard, $12.50...
...The Seven Building Blocks to Better Decisions...
...Personal Politics...
...But that’s hard to believe...
...The Navy runs the White House Mess, for example, and the Presidential yacht, Sequoia...
...Richard Rhodes...
...The book is weaker when it falls into general speculation about the Future of the Republican Party...
...Norton, $10.95...
...Lukash, personal physician to the President and his family, is still there...
...A clip-file attempt to derholish Jimmy Carter, with heavy emphasis on Bert Lance and t h e Trilateralists...
...The duPont Family...
...But by late 1930, the consensus is that the budget be balanced at almost any cost...
...Doubleday, $8.95...
...This is mostly a collection of very conventional complaints about bureaucrats and their agencies, except for one startling twist...
...John Kenneth Galbraith says t h i s book is “most interesting, original, import ant , ” and Kirkus Reviews says it is “profound...
...his religious affiliation more than commonly noted, he is celebrated for his humanitarianism...
...But making that case effectively requires full fidelity to the nuances of their power, full awareness of its varying motives, and a full rendering of the ways in which it is exercised...
...Coyne is genuinely entertaining and insightful when writing about his adventures in the government...
...Many Reasons Why: The American Involvement in Vietnam...
...Knopf, $15.95...
...Stein & Day, $15.95...
...Unfortunately, he also tries to be a theorist himself and degenerates into aphorism (“We must reintegrate our disintegrating habitat”) and banality (“Housing projects should have attractive gateways...
...Detente or Debacle: Common Sense in U.S.-Soviet Relations...
...Hill and Wang, $10...
...John D. Gates...
...International, $12/ $3.95...
...Daley’s “reconstruction” of the early 1970s investigation is dramatized almost beyond recognition...
...Sheed, Andrews and McMeel, $9.95...
...Two Rothschilds and the Land of Israel...
...The Disintegrating West...
...Amacom, $12...
...Knopf, $8.95...
...Von Eckardt is particularly enthusiastic about the “new mood” symbolized by the return of the rich to city living...
...Jewish Responses to Nazi Persecution...
...But maybe that’s because he worked there...
...Doubleday, $10.95...
...Allowing for their complexity need not dilute the strength of the analytical attack...
...When the author worked there the man to know at the White House, a man outsiders never heard of, was the Keeper of the Perks, Bill Gully, who was head of the Military Affairs Office under several presidents...
...The names and places in Leuci’s undercover probe of the corruption in New York City’s judicial system are real...
...political book notes Public affairs books to be published in January The ABC’s of Bureaucracy...
...Knopf, $1 5.95...
...Don Biggs...
...Rather than being an industrial center, it is becoming a managerial and cultural center, a place of learning and research...
...Economics, Mental Health and the Law...
...The Powers That Be: Processes of Ruling Class Domination in America...
...Thus, everything from mess privileges to the ability to hail a helicopter comes from the Military Affairs Office...
...As W. W. Kiplinger observed at the time, “The amazing lesson from this depression is that no one knows much about the real causes and effects of anything...
...Dialogues on American Politics...
...Putnam’s, $10.95...
...Christopher Lasch...
...1 have 75 agents outside with machine guns...
...Wolf Von Eckardt...
...Houghton Mifflin, $10.95...
...Lukash may be the only physician in business who practices medicine once every two or three weeks...
...Richard M. Pious...
...Jeffrey Rubin...
...his portrayal of the Ford administration as a “Bring on the Clowns” act reminds us to count our blessings with Carter, and he manages to explain how honorable men could work for Agnew and Nixon...
Vol. 10 • January 1979 • No. 10
