POLITICAL BOOK NOTES
political book notes Public affairs books to be published in October, Almost Everyone’s Guide to Economics. John Kenneth Galbraith. Houghton Mifflin, $8.95. American Caesar: Douglas...
...If British s o c i e t y e v e r d i s i n t e g r a t e s , Americans won’t be able to complain that the news media didn’t warn us...
...Morton A. Kaplan, ed...
...Lexington, $13.50...
...Hell, Jones adds in a throwaway Morris would turn over in his mind for years, that’s just like the stuff they wrote about me...
...Lin Farley...
...Jones had been the center, the heart of the American writers’ colony, dispensing thousands of dollars worth of booze and priceless comfort, and, somehow, writing more books-some very good, some just okay-Some Came Running, The Thin Red Line, The Merry Month of Map-always making lots of money and friends...
...It has not agreed to the other two propositions...
...Doubleday, $10...
...Martin’s, $12.95/$5.95...
...Longman, $12.50...
...Granted, any compassion is a welcome change from bitter remembrances like Hemingway’s Moveable Feast, but reverence bordering on adoration also snuffs out life...
...The Terrors of Justice...
...Lee Sproull, Stephen Weiner, David Wolf...
...Sometimes they would drift into his room to exchange last looks, last touches...
...Steve Neal...
...Murder U.S.A.: The Ways We Kill Each Other...
...The Wired Society...
...Everest House, $10.95...
...A few years after their marriage the Jones moved to Paris, where their house on the Ile St Louis became the expatriate salon...
...Scribner’s, $9.95...
...Legislative Reform: The Policy Impact...
...L.eonard Reed Britain-A Future That Works...
...Morris lived near Jones in the Hamptons and was a close friend only during Jones’ later years...
...James Jones: A Friendship...
...Since after the U.S...
...Jones had no worries on either count...
...Congress and the Budget...
...A World of Men: The Private Sources of American F o r e i g n P o l i c y . Lloyd Etheredge...
...Western Coal: Promise or Problem...
...Lexington, $25.95...
...A super life, a funny, raucous, loving, vivid man...
...A decade after the Beatles a n d Carnaby Street revolutionized popular culture and almost two decades after the “angry young men” produced a distinguished theater and literature, Nossiter predicts that Britain’s new exports will be its art and its lifestyles...
...Nutrition and National Policy...
...LeBoutellier says that his view draws on “true” Republican principles-that is, those of one century ago-but he never successfully explains why it has anything more to do with the modern Republican Party than with post-Great Society Democrats like Carter and Brown...
...The Eisenhowers: Reluctant Dynasty...
...Parties and Elections in an Anti-Party Age: American Politics and the Crisis of Confidence...
...Prices...
...Joseph Nocera Harvard Hates America...
...France and the United States: From the Beginnings to the Present Day...
...Paul Copperman...
...About correspondents’ talent for getting to the point: While Belgian civilians in a state of shock were waiting to be airlifted out of the turbulent Congo, a British TV reporter dashed about the airport perio.dically stopping to bellow, “Anyone here been raped and speaks English...
...Alfred L. Malabre...
...University of Chicago, $18...
...James Martin...
...Peter B. Kenen...
...Diamond’s articles in New York magazine over the years usually have been models of good reporting and keen, thoughtful insight...
...Louis Fisher...
...Paddington, $8.95...
...In Great Britain, as in this country or anywhere else, when the economy stagnates, social meanness ensues...
...Not with a bang or a whimper, but with courage, steady courage, growing sadness, and enduring love for the too much he must leave behind...
...Sexual Shakedown: The Sexual Harassment of Women on the Job...
...An interesting book about the breaking of the Japanese code during World War I1 by a man who worked on the project...
...Alan P. Grimes...
...Dodd, Mead, $9.95...
...Henry Malcolm Steiner...
...Most of the friends’ stories sound slow, muffled-as if Morris interviewed them a week after the funeral when they were still paralyzed with grief...
...John Hohenberg...
...Behr’s anecdotes are best when they illuminate the news business itself...
...Politics and History: Selected Essays...
...World Change and World Security...
...The institutional parties have not been s o m e w o n d r o u s g o o d . They have manifested their own fair share of error, dishonesty, and ineptitude...
...The Constitution Between Friends: Congress, the President, and the Law...
...The Fracturing of America’s Political Parties...
...Where Have All the Voters Gone...
...Morris Janowitz...
...The Politics of Cancer...
...In that chapter, LeBoutellier shows the skill, which has reached full flower in Ben Wattenberg, of making a potentially important case unacceptable through sheer vulgarity of presentation...
...A soldier who hated war, a victor who refused to conquer Japan, MacArthur was’ an educated man who knew much about the history of war and civilization, and too little about himself...
...This book belongs in the “might have been” category of the season, primarily because Diamond and the MIT Study Group have been so good in the past...
...Sierra Club, $6.95...
...Their value lies in their flash insights, more common to journalists than to scholars, which add soupcons to history’s brew...
...Beverly Winikoff...
...MIT, $12.50...
...The North Sea oil will provide a long-awaited spur to the British economy...
...John Godwin...
...Raymond Aron...
...For it seems that in loving Jones, Morris wanted to become Jones, had a slight cotifusion about just which writer was who...
...University of Chicago, $25...
...McGraw-Hill, $12.95...
...But in William Manchester’s gracefully written and wonderfully marbled account, the reader glimpses at not just America’s most brilliant wartime general but a genuinely interesting man...
...There are some parts of this book that rise above the level of the rest, particularly in the first few chapters on campaign reporting in the 1976 presidential elections...
...And while Willie Morris writes it all with beauty and sensitivity, the book never quite lets us reach Jones, touch him, know him...
...MIT, $12.50...
...If there are any severe problems afflicting Britain, Nossiter declares, they are racial and religious, rather than economic-warfare between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland and racial discrimination against Asians, West Indians, and Africans within England...
...If Nossiter had merely refuted the standard gloomy predictions about Great Britain, he would have performed a genuine service...
...Blythe Babyak The Killing Zone: -My Life in the Vietnam War...
...Basic, $12.95...
...Just outside intensive care the people who loved him-family and friends to whom he had given love, advice, encouragement held a vigil round the clock...
...MIT, $27.50...
...Good News, Bad News...
...Prentice-Hall, $12.95...
...Democracy and the Amendments to the Constitution...
...One of his anecdotes is a bureaucratic gem...
...Putnam, $9.95...
...Edwin Diamond...
...Taiwan and its critical role in the Sino-American relationship is the subject of Ralph Clough’s first-rate study...
...Like a good journalist, Behr delights in anecdotes...
...Scandal and Reform: Controlling Police Corruption...
...Ballantine, $10...
...University of California, $14.50...
...The writing is sloppy and repetitive (there are several identical paragraphs repeated in different chapters), and Diamond has an annoying habit of giving us glimmers of good ideas throughout the book and then failing to pursue them or explorc them in any depth...
...The Many Faces of Communism...
...Norton, $7.95...
...After a tour of duty in the bloody Pacific theater, he shouldered his way into Maxwell Perkins’ office with his first novel...
...American military protection is an important deterrent to the forceful conquest of Taiwan by the People’s Republic of China...
...Good News, Bad News has a little of both, but not nearly enough to fill 17 chapters and over 200 pages...
...Bernard D. Nossiter...
...In this book, Washington Post reporter Bernard Nossiter attacks much of the popular media mythology about Great Britain, refuting myths by citing facts...
...Maurice Stans...
...Michael Schudson...
...Little, Brown, $15...
...Gateway, $7.95...
...An intern phoned the bureau and explained that their man was suffering from malnutriti6...
...This clear, well-researched book reports that after a slightly bumpy start the congressional budget committees have begun to ease into the arena of influence, if not power, and it reluctantly concludes that the able, photogenic Alice Rivlin and her Congressional Budget Office have been far less to the point...
...In this rather strange scene he reads the review aloud to Jones, who, with characteristic good sense, tells him to forget about it...
...Person/Planet: The Creative Disintegration of Industrial Society...
...Increasingly apprehensive about Soviet ambitions in Asia, Communist China is unlikely to jeopardize by military adventure its stake in improving its relations with the United States and Japan...
...Miriam B. Conant, ed...
...Conflict in Urban Transportation: The People Against the Planners...
...For instance...
...He concludes: “The institutional parties are crumbling...
...Peggy Anderson...
...Theodore Roszak...
...Jones called for a poem, Yeats’ “Lake Isle of Innisfree,” and read it aloud for his friends until the nurse ushered them out...
...Balance of Payrtients...
...Everett Carl1 Ladd, Jr...
...Norton, $9.95...
...For us haters, Douglas MacArthur made a hell of a target...
...MIT, $14.95...
...The book has two problems, both of which could have been avoided if Morris had waited a few more years before writing, had waited until he better understood where Jones stopped and Morris began, until memories of the man dying no longer shrouded memories of the man...
...University of Chicago, $17.50...
...Children of the Revolution: A Yankee Teacher in the Cuban Schools...
...Jeff Fishel, ed...
...Hired Hands: Seasonal Farm Workers in the United States...
...Lacking the coalescing bonds that parties once provided, the various units of government will find it harder than ever to pull together toward coherent policy...
...But a “normalization” of U.S.-China relations as seen from Peking would require that the United States break diplomatic relations with Taiwan, withdraw all its forces from the island and annul its security treaty with the Republic of China...
...Random House, $10/$4.95...
...Doubleday, $8.95...
...Some, lamentably, are suspect...
...A Model of U.S...
...Books born of moseying aboutBehr has been a-correspondent variously for Reuters, Time-Life, the Saturday Evening Post, Newsweek, and others-are rarely great...
...A Crisis for the American Press...
...other industrial nations have simply been growing faster...
...Organizing An Anarchy: Belief, Bureaucracy, and Politics in the National Institute of Education...
...At least that is the way rough, hard-drinking, fun-loving, gentle-hearted Jim Jones faced the congestive heart failure that ended his life...
...Poor Morris, who doesn’t know what James Jones knew, that a writer’s justification doesn’t come from the critics’ scribbles, but from his works and from his life...
...That philosophy, which he calls The New Homestead, is defensible enough with its suggestions about health care (government-supported catastrophic insurance), higher education (using universities to disburse governmentbacked student loans), and the cost of housing (an innovative mortgage plan...
...Free Press, $14.95...
...Houghton Mifflin, $9.95...
...James B. Whittaker...
...In the hospital with heart failure for the fatal last time, Jones propped himself up in bed to make more notes on the last chapter of the work that was his life, but not all his life...
...Lexington, $17.95...
...What is not defensible about this book is its title-and the one chapter it refers to, a s h r i l l , m e a n - s p i r i t e d , and shallow caricature of the “Liberal mind” at his alma mater...
...Neither democracy nor totalitarian, “Island China,” where, driven from the mainland, Chiang Kai-shek set up headquarters for the “Republic of China,” has been remarkable among developing countries for its political stability and economic success...
...John LeBoutellier...
...Harry k s s e r The Buchwald Stops Here...
...Leroy N. Rieselbach...
...He doesn’t entertain the notion that getting there will be easy...
...He spends far too many pages “correcting” reviews he considers unfair to Jones and generally flailing against the critics in an artlessly immediate way...
...Free Press, $15.95...
...In J a n u a r y , 1941, Joseph Grew, o u r ambassador to Tokyo, reported,“ ‘There is a lot of talk around town to the effect that the Japanese, in case of a break with the United States, are planning to go all out in a surprise mass attack on Pearl Harbor.’ Grew’s information was forwarded to Admiral Kimmel in Hawaii with an evaluation by Naval lntelligence stating that ‘based on known data regarding the present disposition and deployment of Japanese naval and army forces no move against Pearl Harbor appears imminent or planned for the foreseeable future.’ ” You can be certain that on the morning of December 8, ONl’s file copy was pulled and the words “known,” “present,” and “foreseeable” were underlined...
...But these chapters shine precisely because they contain what is missing from the rest of the book-the sense that Diamond and the Study Group did their homework, that they collected their anecdotes by working instead of by taking friends out to lunch...
...American Caesar: Douglas MacArthur, 1880-1964...
...relations with Taiwan in return for changes in the form of those relations...
...Perkins rejected the book but finally gave Jones a $500 advance on his next one, From Here to Eternity, a book that made Jones rich and famous...
...All this resembles the celebrations of the American counterculture of the 1960s, and it deserves no more credence than Charles Reich deserved...
...yet from the beginning, Morris makes himself too large a part of his portrait of Jones-the photographer’s shadow obscures the picture...
...Leo Heaps...
...Fortunately, it is not the only deterrent...
...Anticipatory Democracy: People in the Politics of the Future...
...His account of the Army lecturer who, concerned with the high incidence of VD in Vietnam, demonstrated on his middle finger the use of a condom only to find later that many GIs had followed his instruction literally, is a recycled chestnut from World War 11...
...Private Physicians and Pubiic Programs...
...Samuel S. Epstein, M.D...
...Societal Change and Politics id America...
...Stephen H. Sosnick...
...Bakke, DeFunis, and Minority Admissions: The Quest for Equal Opportunity...
...He was living to finish Whistle, the last of th army trilogy (From Here to Eternity, T?ie Thin Red Line), where he hoped to say it all...
...Nurse...
...Its combined portrait of Milton, the New Deal administrator, and Dwight, the Republican general, does much to explain the consensus that governed America from the late thirties until the mid-sixties...
...An absorbing account of the American intervention in Russia at the end of World War 1, one of the least-known disasters of American foreign policy...
...However, he also makes the shakier claim that by investing less energy in their work than people in most industrial societies-and by spending more time on leisure pursuits, family, social r e l a t i o n s h i p s , and c u l t u r a l activities-the British are a model for the rest of the world...
...Lexington, $18...
...But Jones was a lucky man...
...After chapter three, though, be prepared for pages upon pages of the random thoughts of Ed Diamond, slapped down on paper with no particular order or shape...
...Morrow, $10.95...
...Harvard, $12.50...
...Norman C. Dahl, Jerome B. Wiesner...
...The Literacy Hoax: The Decline of Reading, Writing and Learning in the Public Schools and What We Can Do About It...
...JeanBaptiste Duroselle...
...He is also rather shameless about patting himself on the back (“I respect both Bernstein and Greenfield, but I told them they were wrong and put my own views about anchormen into an article...
...Morris seems to have a lot of problems coming to terms with his own reputation and work...
...Viking, $12.50...
...John LeBoutellier is a super-earnest young man who was finance chairman for a Republican senatorial campaign while still a student at Harvard, and who has used the two years since his graduation to develop a new philosophy for his chosen party...
...Taxes are higher in France, Sweden, Denmark, and Norway than in Britain...
...Senate, newspapermen are the world’s most incestuously selfidolatrous clan, Bearings deserves praise for the perspective it keeps...
...That is the decisive electoral fact of our day...
...Willie Morris...
...Choices and Echoes in Presidential Elections: Rational Man and Electoral Democracy...
...political book notes Public affairs books to be published in October, Almost Everyone’s Guide to Economics...
...Allan P. Sindler...
...a series of pointless, meandering essays touching on every imaginable facet of the press: campaign reporting, television anchormen, the ratings, the newsmagazines, the rise of Rupert Murdoch, investigative reporting, and so on...
...Then there’s the problem with the narrator...
...What we’re left with instead is mostly bad news...
...McGraw-Hill, $12.95...
...Lexington, $16...
...Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers...
...Indiana University, $25/$8.95...
...Deadly Magic...
...The British economy has been growing, not stagnating, since World War 11...
...Doubleday, $10.95...
...Richard Goldhurst...
...Edward Van Der Rhoer...
...Far from crippling the economy with excessive wage demands, the British unions have agreed to a “Social Contract” that limits pay increases in return for dubious promises of controls upon inflation and maintenance of social services...
...Island China...
...Lexington, $16.95...
...To recognize this truth, one need not be a conservative ideologue, on either side of the Atlantic...
...About the abysmal wages the wire services used to pay: a correspondent/ trainee in Reuters’ New York bureau collapsed on the street and was taken to Bellevue Hospital...
...In principle, the United States has accepted the second of these conditions but has linked any such withdrawal to the prospect for a peaceful settlement of the T a i w a n q u e s t i o n by the Chinese themselves...
...George Orwell, Beatrice and Sydney Webb, Keir Hardie, and other prophets of the British welfare state all agreed that economic growth was essential for their dreams of a more equitable society...
...William Manchester...
...McNally & Loftin West, $20/$14.95...
...The next day he was unconscious, and in another, dead...
...The Last Half-Century...
...Ken Auletta America’s Dilemma: Jobs vs...
...Its problem is whether it can survive without diplomatic relations with the United States...
...But in the last analysis, they managed to stand in the way of electoral chaos...
...The Midnight War...
...Frank A. Sloan, Jerry Cromwell, Janet B. Mitchell...
...University of Chicago, $18...
...Delacorte, $9.95...
...Clement Bezold, ed...
...Implicit would be the postponement, perhaps for several years, of the question of Taiwan’s ultimate reunification with the mainland...
...Benjamin I. Page...
...He married a would-be novelist and actress primarily remembered as a stand-in for Marilyn Monroe-beautiful, strong-minded, foul-mouthed, enchanting Gloria, yhto turned out to be the Right Girl, givingi him good times, understanding, childrln, and, what every writer needs even more than money-an absolute fan...
...The Carter a d m i n i s t r a t i o n c o u l d a c c e p t t h e s e conditions if satisfied that the security and economic well-being of Taiwan were protected-that is, if Peking acquiesced on the continuation of the substance of U.S...
...As unemployment continues to rise in Britain and living standards decline further, the most recent export has been punk rock, with its overtones of sadism and violence...
...Ralph N. Clough...
...Clough believes that a productive relationship with China on that basis is possible...
...Taiwan is on the way to becoming a medium-sized, affluent, industrial society capable of exporting high technology items...
...Bearings: A Foreign Correspondent’s Life Behind the Lines...
...That first chapter has virtually nothing to do with the rest of the book-but, then, neither does the title, raising suspicions that this is the price LeBoutellier paid to get his more worthy passages into print...
...Sierra Club, $12.50...
...Art Buchwald...
...Operation Morning Light: Terror in Our Skies-The True Stoiy of Cosmos 954...
...Jonathan Kozol...
...In all his justification for Jones then, part of Morris’ game is justifying himself...
...So this is how a writer dies...
...The author doesn’t excel either as a writer or an analyst, but still his book is important...
...Edward Behr...
...Muddling To ward Fr iigali t y . Wa r ren Johnson...
...Indiana University, $12.95...
...Lawrence W. Sherman...
...Joel Havemann...
...Columbia, $14.95...
...Wallace E. Tyner, Robert J. Kalter...
...Martin’s, $10.95, A remarkable account of what life is like for a nurse-thoughts, feelings, daily routines, life-and-death experiences, are all here...
...Here, then, is the future which we confront-an increasingly partyless politics that fragments and disorients, and which thereby mocks our effort at mature self-government...
...He was insufferably vain-his wife called him “Sir”-he was imperious, patriotic, the darling of the Daughters of the American Revolution and the lunatic Right...
...Damn,”said the bureau chief, “I thought he had friends here...
...Its archetypal foreign correspondent is not so much Gregory Peck in a trenchcoat as Woody Allen in a swivet...
...Strategic Planning in a Rapidly Changing Environment...
...Jones was not one of those writers who despaired over whether there was really anything to say...
...In Clough’s view, although Peking cannot back down on its conditions, the impasse is not hopeless...
...This becomes explicit toward the end of the book, where Morris again feels compelled to go on for pages about a bad review, only this time a bad review of something Morris himself had written...
...Frederick Downs...
...Lexington, $17...
...Ladd, who as co-author with Charles P. Haley of Transformations of the American Political Sistem was one of the first to perceive the decline of the political party in the United States, has written another good book about the phenomenon...
...Today they are a diminished presence...
Vol. 10 • October 1978 • No. 7
