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 Air Force provides a fleet of Presidential planes, ranging from Jet Stars to large transports, to Air Force One, to jumbo jet commando planes...
...Charles Peters Herbert Hoover: The Public Life...
...But that’s hard to believe...
...Kill him.’ But neither moved...
...Sheila Rabb Weidenfield...
...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...
...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...
...Norton, $9.95...
...his religious affiliation more than commonly noted, he is celebrated for his humanitarianism...
...1 have 75 agents outside with machine guns...
...Richard M. Pious...
...Detente or Debacle: Common Sense in U.S.-Soviet Relations...
...There are no new facts here, especially if you’ve read Stephen Brill in Harper’s, nor much insightful reasoning...
...James Earl Carter: The Man and the Myth...
...The American Presidency...
...The duPont Family...
...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...
...Make Up Your Mind...
...Economics, Mental Health and the Law...
...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...
...Sheed, Andrews and McMeel, $9.95...
...Rather than being an industrial center, it is becoming a managerial and cultural center, a place of learning and research...
...The book is weaker when it falls into general speculation about the Future of the Republican Party...
...Many Reasons Why: The American Involvement in Vietnam...
...New Republic, $10...
...Stein & Day, $15.95...
...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...
...If you forget the facts and stick to the story, Prince Of’lhe Cil.i* is a good read...
...he is a selfmade, successful businessman...
...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...
...Mary Kaldor...
...The Seven Building Blocks to Better Decisions...
...Looking for America: A Writer’s Odyssey...
...The names and places in Leuci’s undercover probe of the corruption in New York City’s judicial system are real...
...International, $12/ $3.95...
...Anything...
...Norton, $1 1.95...
...Christopher Lasch...
...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...
...For a guy who says he is “no stranger to the bureaucratic maze,” Jansen offers very little that is original...
...Peter Meyer...
...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...
...Basic, $16...
...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...
...Hill and Wang, $10...
...He looks to the business community to set its own house in order and, failing that, to Congress for modest, affordable programs of assistance...
...Knopf, $1 5.95...
...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...
...Crown, $14.95...
...Jewish Responses to Nazi Persecution...
...Coyne is genuinely entertaining and insightful when writing about his adventures in the government...
...The Army offers a fleet of chauffeured limousines, and the ability to construct anything anytime to help out...
...The Disintegrating West...
...And it’ll make a wonderful TV docudrama-something Daley must have had in mind when he wrote it...
...Houghton Mifflin, $10.95...
...Paul Sann...
...The Powers That Be: Processes of Ruling Class Domination in America...
...Oxford, $10/$2.95...
...Knopf, $8.95...
...Weidenfield explains: “As Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, the President has at his disposal the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines...
...Lexington, $16.50...
...Lexington, $16.95...
...Apparently he sits around reading and talking to his friends the rest of the time...
...What do you mean, kill him?’ cried Leuci angrily...
...Daley’s “reconstruction” of the early 1970s investigation is dramatized almost beyond recognition...
...Doubleday, $1 1.95...
...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...
...it only ensures that the attack is more precisely aimed...
...Michael Charlton, Anthony Moncrieff...
...Norton, $10.95...
...Sara Evans...
...Wolf Von Eckardt...
...You guys are in a lot of trouble.’ “DeStefano turned to Lamatina and said, ‘Whack him...
...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...
...John D. Arnold...
...Bruce R. Bartlett...
...Robert Daley...
...The city is merely changing functions,” he notes with approval...
...But if Bill Gully has departed, another of Weidenfeld’s characters, Dr...
...The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations...
...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...
...Arlington House, $8.95...
...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...
...David Burner...
...With the factories gone from the cities, “it is time that the people who need jobs...
...The Angry Decades: The Sixties...
...The Marines offer a fleet of choppers...
...John R. Coyne, Jr...
...Charles Vert Willie...
...John D. Gates...
...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...
...The man in the White House comes from humble, farm origins...
...Weidenfeld suggests that reporters may have nailed the wrong man when they got Peter Bourne...
...Two Rothschilds and the Land of Israel...
...IQ, Heritability and Racism...
...William E. Perry...
...Thus, everything from mess privileges to the ability to hail a helicopter comes from the Military Affairs Office...
...Amacom, $12...
...Von Eckardt is particularly enthusiastic about the “new mood” symbolized by the return of the rich to city living...
...The reminiscences and political philosophy of a one-time speechwriter for Richard Nixon, Spiro Agnew, and Gerald Ford...
...Dialogues on American Politics...
...Prince of the City: The True Story of a Cop Who Knew Too Much...
...Vanguard, $12.50...
...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...
...A clip-file attempt to derholish Jimmy Carter, with heavy emphasis on Bert Lance and t h e Trilateralists...
...The Navy runs the White House Mess, for example, and the Presidential yacht, Sequoia...
...That means military protection for the nation, and military perquisites for the White House...
...Knopf, $15.95...
...Isaiah Trunk...
...Patricia Nosher How to Manage Management...
...But by late 1930, the consensus is that the budget be balanced at almost any cost...
...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...
...But what could be called The Political Education of an Engineer, as against the rather dully rendered biographical detail, makes for eerie comparison...
...No problem...
...Personal Politics...
...Leonard Dinnerstein, Roger L. Nichols, David M. Reimers...
...Jeffrey Rubin...
...be given the opportunity to follow them...
...Putnam’s, $10.95...
...Irving Louis Horowitz, Seymour Martin Lipset...
...political book notes Public affairs books to be published in January The ABC’s of Bureaucracy...
...First Lady’s Lady: With the Fords at the White House...
...and he is an engineer, with an engineer’s stolid faith in organization and technical competence, abhorring the wastefulness of a bloated bureaucracy...
...What pills were being popped by Richard Nixon and Betty Ford, and who prescribed them...
...A bitchy-lively account of life inside the White House by Betty Ford’s former press secretary...
...Richard Rhodes...
...Committee on East-West Accord, eds...
...Oxford, $13.95...
...Simon Schama...
...Lukash may be the only physician in business who practices medicine once every two or three weeks...
...Fall In and Cheer...
...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...
...But maybe that’s because he worked there...
...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...
...Doubleday, $10.95...
...James Lawler...
...Random House, $10/$3.95...
...Allowing for their complexity need not dilute the strength of the analytical attack...
...We find it paralyzingly dull...
...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...
...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...
...And what of the poor and middle class who are displaced in this “urban renaissance...
...Cover-up: The Politics of Pearl Harbor, 1941-46...
...Natives and Strangers: Ethnic Groups and the Building of America...
...Hill and Wang, $10...
...Lukash, personal physician to the President and his family, is still there...
...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...
...Juliu Rose The Sociology of Urban Education: Desegregation and Integration...
...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...
...Don Biggs...
...Doubleday, $8.95...
...James Fallows Pressure Cooker...
...Back to the Drawing Board: Planning Livable Cities...
...G. William Domhoff...
...That kind of understanding requires, in turn, something more than searching through sociology journals and saving back columns by Jack Anderson...
Vol. 10 • January 1979 • No. 10
