Political Booknotes
POLITICAL BOOKNOTES Trading Secrets: Seduction and Scandal at The Wall Street Journal. R. Foster Winans. St. Martin's Press, $17.95. Wyja do it, Foster? To your eternal credit you did...
...John D. Leshy The Juror and the General...
...Unflattering generalizations about judicial character litter the book...
...The realist description of judges' ability to manipulate statute and precedent to serve personal agendas still makes many people uncomfortable...
...Every person may have his price, but do judges really come as cheaply as Neely implies...
...Two thousand people reportedly worked on the survey, their work overseen by a 161-person executive committee, mostly chief executive officers...
...When she gives up kiwi fruit, she considers it a sacrifice...
...But you know that's no excuse, and you admit as much...
...Adler convincingly demonstrates that CBS never came close to proving that Westmoreland had conspired to keep the truth from Lyndon Johnson—which was the issue on which .the judge told the jury the case should'turn— but Roth makes it clear that there was a conspiracy to hide the truth from the American public...
...it's simply that in this world of ostentation, you feel like a chump pulling down 22 grand...
...Braiker tells how the "Type E" woman, by taking on too much, becomes vulnerable to a constellation of mental and physical problems, as well as internalized, unresolvable emotional conflicts...
...They note that more than 60 of the corporations contributing to the report were themselves below the median in performance (measured by a five-year return on equity) in their own industries, and ask by what logic managers of the Continental Illinois Corporation— recipient of a $4.5 billion federal bailout to avert bankruptcy caused by disastrous management practices—think they are in a position to advise the U.S...
...Water project reform advocates are now making headway in government...
...He recommends that companies lobby judges exactly as they do legislators: invite them to pseudo-academic conferences which appear evenhanded but inevitably lead to the conclusions the corporate sponsors desire...
...Neely urges business to capitalize on the realist insight by feeding judges more sophisticated policy arguments: forget the abstract rigamarole, just explain how many jobs will be lost and families uprooted if the company loses money and closes plants...
...Many fewer people will read the devastating—and well-justifiedcritique of the Grace Commission's report in this book...
...There are myriad reforms that can help reduce inefficiency in the bureaucracy, but before they can be seriously undertaken, we must rid ourselves of the notion that business has the solution that, like some wonderful antibiotic, can cure the ills of government...
...We have successfully built a civilization in an arid region...
...Braiker has developed pop quizzes for the working woman who wants to learn if she qualifies as a "Type E," such as whether she resents the demands that so many people make on her, or whether she can afford to spend 15 minutes just doing nothing...
...Reisner is also not afraid to draw fresh judgments, even among revisionists...
...That's what is so sad about your story, and also so instructive...
...Beginning with the Hoover Dam in the early 1930s, projects were authorized and built at an ever-increasing pace by methods that paid more attention to politics than economics and engineering...
...I have a suggestion for law school curriculum committees—construct a new course devoted to comparing this book with the one Renata Adler is doing based on her articles in the New Yorker on the Westmoreland trial...
...The judge doesn't say the boys in the boardroom are always right, but in this book anyone who opposes them looks dishonest or villainous...
...In the 1930s, academic critics known as legal realists first unmasked the fiction that judges could scientifically deduce the law and passively apply it...
...Reisner's 500 pages never bog down, for his writing is entertaining without being superficial...
...The Bureau and the Corps of Engineers, for instance, squared off over who would control the Missouri River and the rivers of California's Central Valley...
...one that • quotes with equal reverence the words of Yogi Berra, George Burns, Mary Poppins, and Calvin Coolidge...
...The stock market is not the engine of capitalism to them (or to you), but a game, like the race track...
...Yet this generally worthy approach does have one crucial drawback: one finishes Trading Secrets scratching one's head over your ultimate motivation...
...Leonard Reed...
...People want to get rich simply for the sake of getting rich...
...Yet the political coalitions behind federal water projects have proved very difficult to dislodge, as nearly every chief federal budget officer in the last 40 years has discovered...
...Neely's one-sided anecdotes about corporate litigants would make a Chamber of Commerce propagandist blush...
...So far two courts have disagreed...
...Harriet Braiker and Carol Orsborn are two feminists who have worn themselves out trying to make it in a man's world the man's way...
...Treasury Department...
...Insider trading—on a far worse scale than anything you ever did—goes on all the time, so what's the big deal...
...That's why Trading Secrets is a morality play for the investment banking age...
...You mention that you didn't think what you were doing was strictly illegal...
...as a result, what could have been a whiney apologia turns out to be a surprisingly good read, with genuine insight into the world of both The Wall Street Journal and Wall Street itself...
...Orsborn, founder of Superwomen Anonymous, tells how being everything to everybody brought her to write what she says is the smart woman's theme song of the Eighties: Enough is Enough...
...For every one of the seemingly countless number of executives profiled in the pages of Business Week, Fortune, and Forbes who save a corporation by `hard-driving,' `far-sighted,' `fat-trimming,' management," they observe, "there was a corporation that needed saving ." But their particular bete noir is the report of the Grace Commission— "the archetype of the ineffectual, uninformed reform initiative that would bring business methods to government ." The.commission's report, which stands 10 feet high (47 unindexed volumes), contains 2,478 "cost-cutting" or "revenue-enhancing" recommendations to save $424 billion-in three years...
...The Wall Street Journal's chief market writer didn't realize that the stock exchanges would quickly spot what was going on...
...Political and economic hunches—or worse, petty prejudices—shape important decisions...
...Floyd Dominy, for example, has usually been regarded as a leading contributor to the Bureau's golden age, but Cadillac Desert effectively demonstrates that his obstinate refusal to take seriously the growing challenge of environmentalists did much to bring that age to an end...
...Suzanne Fields Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water...
...Besides, selling out never made you more than peanuts...
...She feels expressing needs that smack even remotely of dependency will result in painful rejection or reproach...
...Adler's book is a testimony to the virtue of carefully reading a court record in the quiet of the study, Roth's to the human nuances you miss if you aren't there in person...
...Viking, $22.95...
...If the Commission hadn't worked from the assumption that the bureaucracy is managed by fools, some of Downs's and Larkey's thrusts might seem a bit harsh...
...The most discomforting thing about being a critic of the bureacracy is the company in which one finds oneself, notably the businessman who, convinced that the government machinery is operated by people whose IQ is just above dribbling, comes to Washington armed with some hackneyed maxims to set things straight...
...Dodd, Mead $16.95...
...She naively envisions an evolving society for men and women which will be a "greenhouse for creativity, compassion, and the kind of vulnerability that reflects an understanding of what it means to be truly powerful...
...Marc Reisner...
...There's some violence, loss of life, and even a hint of sex to remind us that these projects were fashioned by men, not machines...
...Judge Richard Neely confirms the corporate general counsel's worst nightmare: in courtrooms across the land, bullies in black robes eagerly slam big business with costly suits brought by whining consumers and malingering workers...
...Braiker has a catchy idea, suggesting that the "Type E" woman runs risks similar to those of the "Type A" man...
...Anyone familiar with the workings of the federal government has seen these highly publicized imports from the private sector—the Planning-ProgrammingBudgeting System (PPBS) in the Kennedy and Johnson years, Management By Objective (MBO) under Nixon, Zero-Based Budgeting (ZBB) in the Carter administration—come in with great fanfare and quietly wither away...
...Type E" women are bombarded by stress, she says, and have begun to suffer from an increasing number of ailments that busy, successful, overworked men have long endured: ulcers, drug and alcohol abuse, depression, sexual dysfunction, headaches, allergies, and recurrent viral infections...
...She also suggests "refoxing" exercises such as buying new clothes or getting a new hair cut, which most "Type E" women would know from reading Vogue...
...Enough is Enough...
...William Morrow, $17.95...
...These two women don't have the answer, but they surely know the problem...
...But most women can identify themselves without having to answer silly questions...
...Paul M. Barrett The Type E Woman...
...The "Type E" woman emerges from the author's informal research as she draws on her own personal experiences and those of other women she has interviewed...
...Such a comparison is clever but unsubstantiated...
...Carol Orsborn...
...Few trial attorneys in history have blown one so completely...
...Cynics might note that Lamm's turnabout came only at the end of twelve years in office...
...Joseph Nocera Judicial Jeopardy: Where Business Collides with the Courts...
...The point is not that government is efficient—it is not—but that the cure for its inefficiency does not lie in hyped-up nostrums from the business world...
...You say that you didn't think you would get caught, but that's just plain dumb...
...The "Type A' man emerged from a formal study of healthy men who revealed behavioral traits that showed them to be prone to heart disease...
...Judges can bring their spouses and enjoy "two lavish meals a day" for only $20 extra...
...Richard Neely...
...Like Braiker, Orsborn has touched a nerve...
...Most sophisticated executives would probably think not and will look elsewhere for advice on how to maneuver more effectively in court...
...Harriet B. Braiker, Ph.D...
...George W. Downs, Patrick D. Larkey...
...Cadillac Desert is the latest and unquestionably the best of a recent outpouring of works that offer a sharply revisionist perspective...
...He must have envisioned a battle plan for readers with little interest in balance or complicated analysis...
...My own sense is that you did it because your values were gradually eroded in the amoral investment banking culture that now dominates Wall Street...
...Charles Peters The Search for Government Efficiency...
...But that doesn't cut it either: "I knew," you are quick to add, "that what I was doing was technically unethical for a journalist...
...judges, meanwhile, manufacture elaborate theories of good "public policy" to justify decisions...
...Cadillac Desert is for the most part the story of the chief purveyor of these projects, the Bureau of Reclamation, which was created during Teddy Roosevelt's administration to "reclaim" and settle the arid lands of the West with family farmers...
...Putnam, $15.95...
...Where Adler devastatingly describes the errors of CBS, Roth sees who is lying on the general's side and sympathizes with the military men who are reluctantly testifying against him...
...Being rich means I don't have to ride in cars with other people," you don't flinch...
...Neely goes to the ludicrous extreme of plugging a favorite resort for such shmoozing...
...The judge never explains why he addresses his subject in such a narrow-minded fashion...
...Patricia...
...Braiker prescribes exercises to teach a woman how to say "No," in a context not usually taught by Mother...
...You're not alone, of course...
...Robins Co., for example, probably could have limited its own damage from the Dalkon Shield contraceptive fiasco if it had responded responsibly to early complaints from consumers, compensated women who had suffered, and eliminated the product...
...lots of middle class people spend their lives around the rich without succumbing to temptation...
...The A.H...
...She treats her boyfriend, lover, or husband like her job, and is especially vulnerable to the kind of man who will tell her "how `refreshing' it is to find a woman who can really take care of herself...
...Most of the book's tips range from vague to obvious...
...Neely doesn't even deliver on his basic promise...
...The law provides little protection because judges consider statutes and precedents old hat...
...Other advice gets clouded by contradiction...
...The problem with Orsborn's book, however, is that it is laced with psychological jargon (she "journals" and "shares" with cloying regularity) and glitters with Marin County optimism...
...Over the years, the agency, with Capitol Hill committees and local constituent groups, together built one of the sturdiest iron triangles ever seen...
...You even claim that the man who persuaded you to leak the column—so he could trade the stock you were about to praise or damn—had a magnetic personality...
...One example: "To a practicing businessperson the crucial point is that individual judges and their young clerks have a tremendous effect on the decisions they write...
...Until the last few years, the settlement of the arid western United States has characteristically been expressed in language usually reserved for heroic myths...
...Addison-Wesley, $19.95...
...Afterwards, pointyheaded law clerks fresh from Ivy League campuses are unleashed to "cut and paste the appropriate legal principles necessary to justify the result ." Neely, a respected member of the West Virginia Supreme Court, calls Judicial Jeopardy a "practical strategy" for how business can fight back...
...On the issue of settling rather than slugging it out in the courts, one criterion a product liability defendant might use is whether the company had hurt innocent people...
...J. Peter Grace, chairman of W.R...
...By scrupulously avoiding ethical questions, Neely overlooks the possibility that by doing good, business might also do well...
...Yet more than 2,000 women have joined Superwomen Anonymous...
...The Type E Woman is pop psychology, but it rings distant bells of intuitive truth...
...POLITICAL BOOKNOTES Trading Secrets: Seduction and Scandal at The Wall Street Journal...
...Neely repeatedly urges business to save money and prevent adverse precedents by settling cases out of court...
...But the price is proving to be much higher than we thought—and we are just beginning to pay it...
...But that doesn't wash either...
...If the case had come to judgment, I think the general should have won, but have been given only a dollar in damages...
...In her love life she is trapped by an inability to exhibit any kind of dependency on anyone else...
...What an executive would do with this kind of revelation is a mystery...
...Why did you think the possibility of ruining your career was a risk worth taking...
...But he recommends "fighting frivolous litigation as long and as hard as possible...
...But there's a Catch-22 here: the man who finds her so "refreshing" is likely to leave her eventually for a less refreshing woman who needs him more...
...Braiker draws a disturbing portrait of a woman who imitates the "Type A" male behavior, and who makes double trouble for herself when she adds to that agenda all the traditional female attitudes about what makes a good daughter, wife, and mother...
...The gradual clouding of a bureaucracy's once-noble vision by a concern for selfperpetuation led ultimately to senseless competition among government agencies for the opportunity to build projects...
...Roth...
...From Hubris to Helplessness...
...To your eternal credit you did not spend much time in your recently published mea culpa making excuses...
...You almost have to be a "Type E" to want to endure her 21-day "mental workout ." If a woman really wants to change her behavior, Carol Orsborn has tougher advice...
...Politicians like Dick Lamm are calling for a more economically and environmentally sensitive policy...
...Why were you willing to sell your soul as a journalist by leaking advance word of the subjects of your daily column...
...Others, however, have written with more clarity about this transformation and how its early stages have already benefited litigants who learn the new language...
...According to the new generation of analysts, western water development, promoted largely by federal subsidy, has been an almost unmitigated disaster from nearly every standpoint...
...You mention that you felt underpaid as one of the two authors of the Journal's influential "Heard on the Street" column—particularly in comparison to your stock broker sources...
...Grace Company, has since made a second career of promoting the report by making speeches and television appearances, and providing boilerplate copy for newspaper editorials...
...When your stock broker friend pulls up in his limo and says to you, "This is part of what making and having money means to me...
...Unfortunately, in his zeal to prove that traditional legal arguments frequently don't satisfy courts, Neely equates convincing briefs with extra-legal junkets...
...She and her husband sold their big house with the big mortgage and stopped buying expensive clothes, cars, and food...
...He also fails to acknowledge that he only covers problems involving business being attacked by hostile outsiders, such as personal injury plaintiffs...
...Though water project porkbarreling is found throughout the United States, in the West, maintaining the flow of federal dollars for water projects overshadows more weighty concerns and obliterates conventional political differences...
...Neely doesn't develop the idea much further than that, but he alludes to the creation of a more candid legal vocabulary for dealing with economic issues...
...Every once in a while it's a good idea to put into perspective the notion that the private- sector operates on a rational basis and ask, for example, how come the chief executive of International Harvester was reaping $600,000 a year while steering the corporation down the road to bankruptcy...
...He ignores the huge majority of commercial litigation in which companies use the courts to clobber each other...
...But realism has seeped deep into the legal establishment...
...Writers whose lot it is to review books on government bureaucracy get awfully damned tired of political science professors and their jargonized, quantified, and rarified cures for what ails government...
...She got to know her children more intimately with quantity time as well as that celebrated "quality time...
...He doesn't so much as hint as to when to surrender and when to circle the wagons...
...She reduced the size of her public relations office staff and cut sharply the number of hours she spent there...
...one can't read your book without getting the feeling that you were always uncomfortable in his presence, as if your better self was trying to tell you something...
...what's most pathetic about all those 28-year-old millionaires running around Wall Street is that so few of them have any values...
...A few years before, you might have...
...Oh sure, you trot out half a dozen rationales...
...It is a joy, therefore, to report on a book written by that breed with wit, clarity, and insight...
...Incidentally, we all agree that Dan Burt, Westmoreland's main attorney, should be studied by every young lawyer as an example of what not to do when trying a case...
...Braiker, a social and clinical psychologist, analyzes the "Type E" woman who needs to learn how to stop being Everything to Everybody...
...It's not so much that you have all these things you want to buy...
...Temple.University Press, $27.95...
...Despite the mounds of unsupported hype, however, the foundation for a cogent argument actually begins to emerge here...
...Downs and Larkey note that the decisions of some of our industrial leaders make the Defense Department's $600 toilet seats look like the buy of the century...
...Neely describes an intellectually undistinguished profession which cynically disguises political choices as legal principle...
...But the Bureau and its allies still have life and, as Reisner points out, some still dream of reviving plans for the biggest project of all— diverting the Yukon to the desert Southwest through a mind-boggling array of engineering works...
...Lawyers routinely ask courts to ignore legal technicalities in favor of social concerns...
Vol. 18 • November 1986 • No. 10
