Tilting at Windmills

...Chairman Mao is still my favorite dictator...

...Well, the last time he put down his rifle and came out of the mountains, he said to take a good look at common stocks and treasury bills...

...He replied, “I thought I did just that...

...After all, the Honorary trustees include John J. McCloy, Barbara Ward (who is further identified as Lady Jackson, Baroness of Lodesworth), and H.I.M...

...Your moderators are people like Mortimer J. Adler and Brian Urquarht (God knows who he is, but doesn’t he sound just right...

...He was wrong...

...Washington is full of men who are ashamed to explain to their children exactly what they do during the day, but the champions are those who work for the tobacco lobby...

...But don’t let me poison your mind about the Aspen Institute...

...Somehow I got on their mailing list and received a brochure for their Executive Seminar Prograih...

...The latest to win our admiration are the people at Evian, the mineral water bottler...

...Browne’s advice...

...Even though the non-profits are moving fast, the good old world of commerce still has some hustlers left in it...

...Remember Marshall Petain in the June of 1940...

...Just before we went to press, we made a substantial cut from the expository material at the article’s beginning on the grounds that it was dull and would keep people from getting to the heart of the story quickly...

...The latest example is the American Enterprise Institute, which recently honored Gerald Ford at a Washington meeting...

...The sad part is that when AEI was first established, it promised to be different...

...I, of course, ignored his counsel...

...This is especially true in the case of g r a s s r o o t s movements, which our news and national security organizations seem to discover only when they are sweeping through the suburbs of the capital...

...L a s t month, in explaining the press coverage of Jonestown, we discussed the rules of missionary journalism, of which the first principle is NEVER LEAVE THE CITY WHERE THE GOOD BARS AND HOTELS ARE...

...He thought his person was enough...

...I wanted to make this part of our Platform for the Eighties, but my colleagues feel that it does not belong with such heavy subjects as income maintenance and national health insurance...

...Today, while I still don’t need the guns and the mauntain retreat, I realize I sure could have used the Swiss francs and gold...

...We call it the Khomeini Corollary...

...He warned his listeners repeatedly of coming economic catastrophe and civil disturbance, and urged them to buy guns and to prepare for a retreat to well-protected sanctuaries in the hills...

...Here’s another little piece of information that seems ripe for scholarly psychological insight: Did you know that when H.R...

...In any event, I’m against crossing at intersections, where those cars coming around the corner from your left or right can get you before you have a chance to react...

...You might not have agreed with its political stance, but you had to admit the institution had a lot more creative drive and fresh energy than its dowdy liberal think-tank competitors, like the Brookings Institution...

...Officials in Kwantung Province, according to Fox Butterfield of The New York Times, may have found a happy compromise, under which urban youth spend about two years on the farms and then return to the city or to the university...

...I expect planes to Paris, London, New York, and other media centers will now be packed with revolutionaries anxious to apply the Khomeini Corollary...

...Tilting at Windmills Insiders tell you that, while the CIA deserves part of the blame for our slowness in realizing what was going on in Iran, the main villain was Zbigniew Brzezinski, who for a long time simply refused to listen to information that cast doubt on the Shah’s future...

...Now reporters, who would never dream of going to Meshed, Tabriz, or Zahidan, could cover the main issues of the Iranian revolution from Paris...

...The cut included the part about what is good about the Post...

...There’s only one safe form of intersection-where all the traffic stops while the pedestrians have the green light...

...He offered himself-a manager who would never tell a lie...

...They’re putting five ounces of their water in an atomizer and selling it for $5.50...

...To potential investors they must say look at our profits, we’re a good investment...

...In this, as in most matters, the Chairman went a bit too far, and thousands of young people who might have been more productively used elsewhere were doomed to lives tending pigs...

...The result was world-wide media exposure for the Ayatollah, with nightly television coverage of him emerging from one building, crossing the street, entering another building, and then reversing the process, while an announcer lets the world know his latest message...

...That is exactly what Jimmy Carter did in 1976...

...Bob” Haldeman was running the White House, he had heat-sensitive urinals installed in the mens’ room in the Executive Office Building...

...On reading Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.’s persuasive picture of RFK as a lifelong Catholic radical-a sort of male Dorothy Day-one fact nags at the back of my mind: as late as 1960 there were two photographs on display on the first floor of Hickory Hill, Kennedy’s home in McLean, Virginia...

...Our “Quote of the Year”: “In the jungle, a prkss card is just another piece of paper...

...Speaking of contemptible people, what a b o u t Jimmy Stewart and the Firestone commercial...

...This principle, which is also followed religiously by the officers of the Foreign Service and the agents of the CIA, has relieved the monotony of our lives by contributing greatly to the frequent occurrence of the unexpected in the Third World...

...He may in fact be more typical in his willingness to sell out, when he doesn’t even need to, to a company that made hundreds of thousands of defective tires and then spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees to prevent the public from finding out...

...The latest of his ideas to go onto Peking’s endangered species list is his conviction that educated urban youths should spend time in the country so they can understand the peasants and their problems...

...These are the people who are paid to intone solemnly to the press that there is no connection between smoking and lung cancer, when they know they’re lying...

...If this leaves you with a q u e s t i o n in y o u r mind as t o Brzezinski’s suitability for his role as chief foreign policy advisor to the White House, there is a tidbit in Brink, David Detzer’s forthcoming book about the Cuban missile crisis, that you might also consider...

...And then we both remembered...

...Here we are able to announce an important new discovery...

...Here is a man who has become wealthy through his capacity to communicate sincerity in a version of the American character we would all like to believe is typical...

...The problem of journalism that the cut illustrates is that being fair is sometimes dull...

...He had no knowledge of the federal government, no program to restore the nation...

...In the early 1970s I was on a local radio show, plugging a book I had edited, and one of the other guests was the financial self-help author, Harry Browne, who struck me as an absolute madman...

...Charles Peters...

...They sense your body heat and flush when you move away...

...Now, AEI has made it, and its members can receive fat honoraria for sipping martinis at colloquia and staring out the Institute’s windows at the plush, modern building across the street-which belongs, incidentally, to another great example of non-profit asceticism, the National Geographic Society...

...It costs only $3,500...

...And I continue to worry that his message will be lost as the new regime takes over in China...

...But there remains a basic wisdom in the concept of trying to bridge the gap between the educated elite and the mass of mankind whose problems the educated e l i t e i s supposed to help solve...

...Repeal the jaywalking laws...

...How is he, out there in the boondocks, going to raise money, get his picture in the paper, and realize the other benefits of media coverage...

...But, I asked, along with telling the Post how we thought it could do better...

...He offered “my person” to the French people...

...and we owe it all to the Shah, who pressured Iraq, where the exiled Ayatollah Khqmeini had been a minor irritant, to throw the bearded leader out, whereupon Khomeini went to France...

...hadn’t we planned to acknowledge that it’s also a great paper...

...Charles Krause, The Washington Post...

...In the middle of the block, if you wait until all cars are at least a half a block away and then run like hell, you have a chance of surviving...

...But when the regulators come along, they have to hurriedly shove the cash into the closet and say, “What profit...

...We are not immune to selfcongratulation, so, after last month’s issue was printed, I called Joe Nocera to say how much I liked his article, “Making It at the Post...

...I wonder what the psychohistorians would make of the fact that the mothers of Douglas MacArthur, Franklin Roosevelt, and Adlai Stevenson all accompanied their sons to college, taking up residence in West P o i n t , Boston, and P r i n c e t o n , respectively, for the entire four years...

...Our other favorite non-profit is the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies...

...It seems that during the heat of the crisis Brzezinski telegrammed this cool counsel to his frieqd, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.: “Any further delay in bombing missile sites fails to exploit Soviet uncertainty...

...T h e people who work for regulated public utilities are compelled to play a shell game...

...Farah Pahlavi, the Shahbanou of Iran...

...When Evelle Younger, the recently defeated Republican gubernatorial candidate in California, was asked during the campaign about welldocumented charges that he was too friendly to the Mafia, he replied, according to Rolling Stone’s Greil Marcus, “I never said I was tough on crime...

...The truth of Tom Wolfe’s concept of the “me” generation has achieved widespread recognition, but to gain intellectual respectability it has had to be re-christened “the culture of narcissism...

...According to a sentence buried deep in The Washington Star, “The Fords arrived Monday evening from Palm Springs in a Falcon jet chartered by the Institute...

...He also advised them to buy gold and Swiss francs...

...So I now attend more carefully to Mr...

...Of course, in terms of a b i l i t y to a b s o r b embarrassing surplus f u n d s , the regulated utilities may still be lagging behind the non-profit organizations...

...We should admire the discipline of those executives in Aspen, spending night and day reading Thomas Hobbes, while ignoring the b e a u t i f u l wilderness, sun, and spectacular skiing nearby...

...There is, however, a problem for the revolutionary in all of this...

...Chartering jets is one of the things non-profit organizations do with money the rest of us would call profit...

...One was of Herbert Hoover, the .other of Pope Pius XII...

...What’s he saying these days...

...In this remarkable offering, you get 13 days of big thinking, reading Plato and Locke and Marx and Freud afld Irving Kristol...