POLITICAL BOOKNOTES
POLITICAL BOOKNOTES People's Army of Vietnam. Douglas Pike. Presido, $22.50. It is the enduring question of the Vietnam war: How did a poor, undeveloped nation of peasants manage to defeat the...
...They found it amusing, as if the joke were on Washington" Turner ordered that some agents who had profited from transactions with the traitor be fired...
...Senators Strom Thurmond and John Stennis, Rep...
...perhaps next time another tactic would work...
...there was only setback...
...What follows is not so much a biography as a 250-page indictment, drawing upon every charge that any critic has ever leveled against Jackson...
...And his research after the Tet Offensive of 1968, although challenged by some radical historians, uncovered the communist atrocities in Hue...
...The book is reasonable, rational, unhectoring...
...Cable television's growing intrusion has cut the network share of viewing time from 90 percent in 1970 to 68 percent in 1985...
...and that of the thoi co, or opportune moment...
...CIA officials weren't the only ones who had the evidence of Wilson's crimes repeatedly waved in their faces...
...Thomas Landess and Richard Quinn choose this sickening story to begin their account, since it embodies for them the central themes of Jackson's ensuing career: opportunism, demagoguery, and prevarication...
...Thomas Landess, Richard Quinn...
...Manhunt, though not always news, is a fine work against which readers will have only minor complaints...
...The level of resistance against the government within Vietnam is far less than he implies, if my own experience there recently is any guide...
...Ho and Giap abolished the idea of a civilian entirely...
...One day in the mid-1970s Wilson and his partners were shipping Qaddafi 42,000 pounds of plastic explosives-[Wilson crony Jerry] Brower was about to command almost every pound of C4 that was commercially available in the United Staes, and nobody had noticed it Then they sent 500,000 miniature detonators for letter...
...Also, Pike says that the propaganda blitz about the Vietnamese troops coming home from Cambodia in 1983 convinced the country that the war there was winding down...
...The Vietnamese are being taught the lessons they taught us: that foreign troops cannot build a nation and, as Pike says, "It is nearly impossible to force guerrillas to stand and fight when they do not want to...
...And two, he ends the book by explaining that what makes us human is our need to be good, and that this is a gift from God...
...The good news is that Douglas Pike knows the answer, and the bad news is that in large part the answer was the bureaucracy...
...Instead of coming from a deep need to share his insights, this book feels as if it comes from a deep need for the author to again appear on the best seller list (a need which has been fulfilled...
...The new buzz term is EDI, for electronic data interchange...
...If, and it looks increasingly likely, two-way cable becomes a big factor in marketing, the market research will take on a whole new look...
...The latest meaning-made-easy manual is Harold Kushner's When All You've Ever Wanted Isn't Enough, the follow-up to his When Bad Things Happen to Good People...
...Then handguns and M16 rifles for the next day...
...All the while Wilson was living in a multimillion-dollar estate at the center of Virginia's fashionable horse country, ostensibly on his civil servant's salary...
...Eventually `Darner found the guilty parties and his "purge" of suspicious CIA operatives, a subject of so many tirades by conservative intellectuals, began...
...Ongoing "conversations" with consumers to assess potential new products will be standard fare...
...This book would have been vastly more engaging had it given examples of people who examined their lives, found them wanting and changed them for the better...
...Ray is a lonely voice in this thick volume...
...The pharmacist-customer typically reduces the ratio of inventory to sales, thus radically reducing McKesson's inventory and the attendant carrying charges...
...Washington is a city of denied realities, and reality-denying mechanisms kept the CIA from moving against Wilson and also helped the FBI and the Justice Department bungle the case, until a determined prosecutor named Larry Barcella finally seized on a technicality to start Wilson's downfall...
...Our souls are hungry for meaning ." Unfortunately, Kushner's book suffers from the same syndrome as the outwardly successful, inwardly empty lives he is addressing...
...Fragmentation" and "de-massification" of media is the fast-arriving wave of the future...
...Foreign firms increasingly are making use of sophisticated technologies to tap the U.S...
...Haavind may have sounded the alarm too late...
...Changes in distribution are occurring at an extraordinary pace, altering the traditional way of doing business in every industry...
...It's a shame, because Jesse Jackson's career deserves closer scrutiny as he...
...Robert Buzzell, ed...
...Pike calls it a "50-year strategy...
...It has been able to reduce the number of its distribution centers from 92 to 56, with no service deterioration...
...The communist victory was a triumph of organization: "The essence of PAVN's success in South Vietnam was organization, in the face of a sort of nonorganization on the part of the South Vietnamese government and society?' The irony is that the revolutionary PAVN is today transformed in Cambodia into a static, orthodox army using mobility and firepower against a stubborn insurgency...
...Summit Books, $16.95...
...And Pike's suggestion that the long tension between the military and the Communist Party might lead to a military coup seems farfetched...
...Gray repeatedly denied to Maas that he and Wilson were anything other than "elevator buddies," who bumped into each other now and then because they worked in the same building...
...Jesse Jackson was standing in the courtyard of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee at the moment Martin Luther King Jr...
...Against the Vietnamese strategy, Pike writes, "there is no proven counterstrategy?' Having spent considerable time in Vietnam recently, I find myself wondering not how the communists won the war, but how they fought at all...
...Even product design will be affected profoundly...
...The story of Edwin P. Wilson, the CIA agent who grew rich selling arms to Libya, is fast becoming a much-told tale, in part because he is one of the few real life people who conform to Hollywood notions of the "typical" CIA operative...
...Peter Maas, author of Serpico and The Malachi Papers, takes up the subject Seymour Hersh, Bob Woodward, Steve Kurkjian and Ben Bradlee Jr...
...The next day Jackson stood before television cameras in Chicago, invoking King's name and wearing a shirt that he said was stained by the martyr's blood...
...Tailors take key measurements from customers and plug them into a terminal...
...Every possible foot was dragged...
...Farrakahn, they tell us, is "the figure standing at the end of a dark alley, waiting to see if white America makes a wrong turn...
...begins his second stab at the presidency...
...EDI provides, say authors Louis Stern and Patrick Kaufmann: "(1) reduced order lead time...
...Wilson, Maas shows, had among his friends in high places none other than Robert Keith Gray, the allegedly "Republican" PR whiz...
...Eventually these slime helped Libyan military men arrange for the murders of anti-Qaddafi dissidents...
...Jacob Weisberg Manhunt...
...Local U.S...
...It cut back telephone clerks by 250 (most customers, even small enterprises, have a direct order entry terminal) and reduced the number of buyers, who now use electronic links with suppliers, from 160 to 13...
...One of Buzzell's experts, Michael Ray of Stanford University, predicts greater "consumer sovereignty...
...In their vision of protracted war, there was no such thing as defeat...
...Long-time Harvard Business School marketing professor Robert Buzzell provides a useful guide to the coming—or arrived—revolution in this collection of articles stemming from a Harvard Business School seventyfifth anniversary symposium...
...What does it mean...
...Doesn't striving mightily to master something that engages one's imagination—and being rewarded for it—give meaning to life...
...Confronted with evidence that he and Wilson had taken a two-week trip to Taiwan together in 1969, Gray suddenly remembered he was late for another appointment...
...Pike's subject is the remarkable army of Vietnam, but what he tells us about the use of force in politics, the nature of organizations, and the limits of both technology and ideology is of far wider importance...
...But, Maas writes, Wilson clearly understood his real targets...
...Why does success necessarily mean diminution of the soul, a disregard for loved ones...
...Service has not deteriorated as a result of a much lower inventory...
...In their attempt to prove Jackson's absolute depredation, Landess and Quinn betray their own racial insensitivity...
...Kushner says he was influenced to write this book after reading the work of Jung...
...Only on rare occasions does he seem to lose his touch...
...Jungian therapist Peter O'Connor has written that today interest in Carl Jung is outstripping interest in Sigmund Freud because the sexual revolution, in which Freud was the central figure, .has passed...
...Companies and their advertisers will be able to—and will be forced to—target their product appeals in a much more selective fashion...
...Witnesses say that the bloody shirt must have been a fraud...
...The book should be of interest to two disparate audiences...
...Kushner writes...
...After this superficial character analysis, which they spend only a few paragraphs on, it's back to the compendium of crimes—from Jackson's antisemitism to the corruption at Operation PUSH...
...Maas says he found papers showing Gray expressing "unlimited trust" in Wilson for a 1963 security background check, and again in 1975, recommending Wilson for a "position of trust ." In places Maas indulges in journalesestyle hype—he refers, for example, to the "chic Georgetown Club," which sounds chic, but Washingtonians will recognize as low rent...
...Yes, it's worth it to be reminded to give and receive love, to help bring along someone younger, to •enjoy sunsets, good meals, the changing seasons—but isn't that why Hallmark cards were invented...
...It is the enduring question of the Vietnam war: How did a poor, undeveloped nation of peasants manage to defeat the state-of-theart armed forces of the most powerful country in the world...
...The linkage has resulted in a revolutionary array of advantages for both parties...
...Orwell's footfall, only a couple of years later than he projected, is getting louder daily...
...None seemed to suspect a thing, the same way Washington Mayor Marion Barry had a deputy mayor, a wife, and several other prominent members of his administration driving Mercedes Benzes and otherwise living lives far beyond their means without his ever suspecting the teeniest, tiniest little thing before they were hauled into court...
...Harvard Business School Press, $32.95...
...Hubert Humphrey was an occasional guest at Mount Airy, the Wilson mansion...
...These irritations, however, are minor in a book of such insight and impressive research...
...Peter Maas...
...But according to most independent accounts, Jackson was nowhere nearby when King died in the arms of his colleague, Ralph Abernathy...
...Every night the data are sent to a central computer in New York and beamed via satellite to France...
...In addition, McKesson offers its customers a number of so-called "value-added services"--software programs such as "Econoprice," which provide the retail pharmacist with instantly updated pricing labels, and "Econoclaim," which speeds third-party health insurance claim processing...
...markets...
...retailers such as Saks Fifth Avenue, it said, have been given "terminals made for the French national Videotex system...
...In their dau tranh everyone would fight: men, women, children, with sticks, slogans, knives, propaganda, whatever worked...
...Most of the allegations are well-supported, but the authors fail to transcend their laundry-list approach by placing Jackson in historical context or offering a convincing interpretation of his character...
...John Dingell, and others came, too...
...Far from concealing his luxury, Wilson advertised it, frequently inviting high-ranking CIA officials to his estate...
...Pike today is the editor of the invaluable Indochina Chronology at Berkeley...
...The rest of the book reads like a primer on increased opportunities for consumer manipulation...
...Marketing in an Electronic Age...
...Already, a firm's product development team can instantaneously amass finely tuned data at an unheard of pace and then adjust test markets and ad campaigns virtually overnight...
...That is simply false...
...It has been replaced by the search for meaning—Jung's central preoccupation...
...Two last quibbles...
...There's not a touch of futurism here...
...American firms, he said, are throwing away their major advantage, that of being domestic enterprises, closer than any foreign firm to the customer and the $4 trillion economy...
...was felled by an assassin's bullet on the balcony upstairs...
...All selling, including media selling, he says, will become personal, tailored selling...
...As an example of the depth of our desire to be good he writes: "Even Hitler's SS troops needed periodic 'sermons' to make sure their instinct for compassion didn't interfere with their work" It's bad enough when Ronald Reagan delivers speeches on the theme "Nazis were nice guys, too...
...I suppose one can be grateful Kushner did not write How to Have a Meaningful Life in 30 Days...
...William Broyles Jr...
...Halfway through the book Landess and Quinn tell us that Jackson is half the son of Martin Luther King Jr...
...Kushner also takes a high moral tone regarding success, as if success is synonymous with a consuming pursuit of money...
...Although Jesse Jackson and the Politics of Race is full of damning tales, it's a sloppy expose that can't command enough authority to make its judgment of Jackson stick...
...It meant that for the Americans in Vietnam to lose militarily was to lose the war, but to win militarily was not to win it...
...High Technology editor Bob Haavind delivered a scathing editorial blast earlier this year...
...Emily Yoffe Jesse...
...It's not working, of course, precisely because the Cambodian resistance is using dau tranh against the army that invented it...
...The people Wilson most wanted to charm and seduce were Capitol Hill aides, anonymous generals and admirals, civil service employees at the highest government grades, GS-17s and GS-18s...
...Harold Kushner...
...Gregg Easterbrook...
...As in many similar books, Maas's main source, Barcella, comes off sounding like a cross between Sir Galahad and Spiderman...
...6) better accuracy in ordering, shipping, and receiving...
...thoi co meant that the end would be gained by whatever means were appropriate at a given moment...
...An article in a recent Business Week chronicled the approach of Custom Vetement Associates, the New York subsidiary of the French clothing maker, Vestra...
...McKesson itself has experienced even greater benefits...
...2) higher service levels...
...On the other hand, the non-business reader is provided a rare opportunity to peek at the businessperson's perspective on the long-predicted, finally arriving, thoroughly linked-up electronic age...
...Our souls are not hungry for fame, comfort, wealth or power...
...But it never conveys any passion about how life should be lived, never goes beyond the superficial...
...3) fewer out-of-stock situations...
...The staff of tailors does the finishing touches, and the suit is shipped within four days...
...The Viet Cong was formed the month I arrived," he writes, "and we grew up together:" He left the country for only a few months at a time over the next 15 years...
...News has always traveled in Vietnam by word of mouth, and wherever I went in Vietnam in 1984, from the cities to the remotest mountain villages, Cambodia was on everyone's mind...
...The firm is linked electronically to both its suppliers and customers...
...The army itself, their movement's most valuable possession, would be engaged sparingly, and only when it would almost surely win...
...Nothing works, nothing ever gets done, no one ever knows anything, no one is ever responsible...
...Why does 'he define success so narrowly...
...His earlier book, Viet Cong, was the standard work on the subject...
...He encountered "a solid wall of opposition, from his top deputy...
...Topics range from an examination of pioneering distribution companies such as American Hospital Supply and McKesson Drug to an assessment of media fragmentation and its effect on advertising and marketing decision-making...
...moreover, consumer choice will dramatically increase...
...And the Vietnam war was won by an extraordinary creation, the People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN...
...A more backward, bureaucratic, and inefficient society is difficult to imagine...
...Besides spinning a clear and readable narrative of the case, Maas contributes new evidence that the CIA knew exactly what Wilson was up to all along and did nothing...
...And one can't expect in this 190 pages all the answers to why we were born...
...No one was more important to him than a GS-18 ." When Stansfield Thrner became head of the CIA, he got wind of Wilson's activities through a Bob Woodward story...
...In the morning, after nine inspectors look at different pieces of data, a computercontrolled laser cutter selects the appropriate material and cuts the garment...
...On the one hand, business people who have been slow to exploit the new technology and associated linkups in their marketing and distribution programs and are (1) slipping hopelessly behind aggressive domestic competitors and (2) losing their primary domestic, home-court advantage vis-a-vis foreign competitors...
...But when it comes time to provide guidance, platitudes are all he offers...
...He will try the doors of our houses to see if we have forgotten to turn the key in the lock ." In another purple passage they remind us that "young black America walks the streets with ears pressed against a jambox so big and heavy most whites couldn't even lift it ." Their racial stereotyping is both offensive and completely irrelevant to their topic...
...Rather than having contempt for the American tactics they defeated, they have rushed to employ those tactics themselves...
...He arrived in Vietnam in 1960...
...But Kushner seems almost perversely set on not offering inspiration...
...Dau tranh meant a total commitment to a single, transcendent end—the liberation and unification of Vietnam...
...Pike lists its achievements in what one hopes he considers a descending order of importance: "It frustrated three of the most powerful nations on earth, confused the world press, and confounded academia ." At the core of the communist army's victory was "a messianic leadership of extraordinary insight acting as a catalyst on a singular, centuries-old, martial spirit ?' According to Pike, Ho Chi Minh and his military aide, Vo Nguyen Giap, created their army in 1944 with 34 men and women and "the theoretical base for a new kind of warfare conducted by a new kind of revolutionary force?' There were two key concepts: that of the dau tranh, or struggle...
...The CIA also decided it was better to let Wilson keep going than to damage the careers of those officers who had failed to stop him earlier...
...McKesson Drug is a prime case in point...
...These were the people who made the Washington world turn...
...But Harold Kushner is a rabbi...
...But judging from the account of CIA behavior in Manhunt, the only mistake Turner made was not firing even more of these flatheads...
...4) improved communications about deals, promotions, price changes, and product availability...
...of the Boston Globe, and many other reporters have taken up before...
...it has improved...
...These link retailers with the main manufacturing operation in Strasbourg...
...Thomas J. Peters When All You've Ever Wanted Isn't Enough...
...Maas notes, "The Libyans didn't apppear to be disturbed at all by Woodward's disclosure about Wilson's agency background...
...and (7) a reduction in labor costs ." Quite a list...
...to] the chief of clandestine operations...
...The book chronicles two other effects of the new technology...
...Such seemingly Buck Rogers electronics and telecommunications links have arrived...
...There is even a highly publicized policy of "Khmerization," of turning the war over to their Cambodian allies...
...The thoi co would come again...
...When All You've Ever Wanted Isn't Enough covers all the right ground: Ecclesiastes to Buber, Jean Piaget to Gail Sheehy...
...5) lower inventory costs...
...to} the CIA inspector general...
...Kushner rightly believes there is no simple formula for finding meaning...
...How did they do it...
...Jackson and the Politics of Race...
...The effects of the technology revolution on marketing, selling, distribution, and servicing may be more profound than the highly touted changes in the factory...
...Now comes Douglas Pike to remind us that wars are not only lost, they are won...
...With the same political solipsism that got us into Vietnam in the first place, we Americans have sought the answer in our own mistakes and failures, from which we attempt to draw "lessons" so that we avoid such embarrassment again...
...and half the son of Elijah Muhammed, which makes him a "blood brother" to Louis Farrakhan...
...World War II had brought civilians into warfare...
...bombs---"even Wilson was stunned by the number...
...In this case, adoration of a source should be forgiven, however, as Barcella truly does sound deserving of high praise—the one person in official Washington who just couldn't stand the thought of letting Wilson go free...
...Jameson, $17.95...
...In Kushner's world, with few exceptions, males are businessmen (therefore unfulfilled), and women are housewives (therefore unfulfilled...
...Random House, $18.95...
Vol. 18 • June 1986 • No. 5
