THE STANDARD READER
The Standard Reader Books in Brief Put a Lid on It by donald E. Westlake (Mysterious, 247 pp., $23.95). Westlake has entered new territory— presidential politics—with typically Westlakeian...
...Adam Wolfson...
...As one black community activist tells Tim-merman, "Jesse Jackson is a poverty pimp...
...The book is star-studded with insightful essays by the likes of Richard Hofstadter, David Riesman, Nathan Glazer, Peter Viereck, Seymour Martin Lipset, Tal-cott Parsons, and Daniel Bell, who has also written a new afterword...
...Jackson's anti-Semitism is well documented here, as is his callous disregard for the grass roots of the civil rights movement for which he still claims to fight...
...Westlake has entered new territory— presidential politics—with typically Westlakeian results...
...Said Bell: "What is new . . . is the ideology of this movement—its readiness to jettison constitutional processes and to suspend liberties, to condone Communist methods in the fighting of Communism...
...Subsequent examination of his finances established that the much-vaunted civil rights leader was little more than a race-baiting extortionist...
...His characters are less malevolent than befuddled and bewildered...
...So the novel opens with an operative's attempt to recruit Francis Meehan, a talented thief who by the malice of the gods has ended up in a federal penitentiary...
...The authors were consumed by fear of a radical right, but within several years of when many of these essays were penned a radical left would explode on the scene in a paroxysm of anger and protest...
...Ideologues, spies, political henchmen...
...If there was a single theme that connected the essays, it was that the radical right posed a mortal threat to America...
...Noah Oppenheim The Radical Right by Daniel Bell (Transaction, 526 pp., $29.95...
...His collapse can be traced back to the revelation, a year ago, that he had fathered a child out of wedlock...
...And whatever affection remained for Jackson should now be demolished by Shakedown, Kenneth Timmerman's definitive account of his career...
...A judicious mix of satire and Westlake's trademark comedy of criminals, Put a Lid on It tells what happens when an incumbent's campaign learns about a compromising videotape...
...These very critical essays were written in the heat of battle, and thus should be read in conjunction with more objective accounts of the development of modern American conservatism...
...And then the fun begins, for us, if not necessarily for Meehan...
...Not a professional thief in the crowd...
...died in his arms, down to his involvement with street gangs, terrorists, and dictators, Timmerman describes how Jackson combined radical politics with old-fashioned profiteering...
...By treating them as a source for amusement rather than indignation, Westlake has performed a valuable public service...
...Political satirists typically have partisan axes to grind...
...The campaign has no choice but to retrieve the tape...
...Steve Lenzner Shakedown: Exposing the Real Jesse Jackson by Kenneth R. Timmerman (Reg-nery, 512 pp., $29.95...
...The indefatigable Transaction Publishers has done a great service by issuing a new edition of The Radical Right, the 1963 classic on McCarthyism, the John Birch Society, Coughlinism, and other right-wing movements in America...
...But Westlake is an equal-opportunity mocker...
...The methodological approach favored by the authors was sociological and psychoanalytic...
...An observation by Hofstadter is fairly representative: "Pseudo-conservatism is among other things a disorder in relation to authority, characterized by an inability to find other modes for human relationship than those of more or less complete domination or submission...
...In addition to being a wonderfully amusing novel, Put a Lid on It is a lesson in civility...
...The essays also serve as a stark reminder of the limits of social analysis and political prognostication...
...Yet they have learned from past mistakes: "We told each other that what went wrong with the Watergate burglary years ago was that it was performed by amateurs...
...From Jackson's false claim that Martin Luther King Jr...
...Jesse Jackson has fallen to no more than a sad sideshow in American public life...
...The only question Shakedown can't answer is how Jackson got away with his charade for so long...
Vol. 7 • April 2002 • No. 32
