POLITICAL BOOK NOTES
political book notes Public affairs books to be published in June. American Higher Education: 1945-1970. Nathan M. Pusey. Harvard, $10. Anarchism: Nomos XIX. J. Roland Pennock, John W....
...But on the other, their extreme caution often seems an excuse for not acting, and they tend to let outside events determine the outcome of the inquiry...
...Scribner’s, $10.95...
...Installing his own family and friends throughout the Dominican military, bureaucracy, and business world, Trujillo stashed away at least $8.4 million, acquired 60 per cent of the nation’s land, and sent his agents to track down exiled dissidents in Mexico City, Havana, and even New York City...
...The Golden Dream...
...Washington’s Hidden Tragedy: The Failure to Make Government Work...
...Venezuela’s social democratic government reluctantly urged the assassination of Trujillo after his secret police almost killed President Romulo Betancourt, the grand old man of Venezuelan democracy whose very existence affronted Trujillo...
...The plots and counterplots both before and after his death were so byzantine that both a chronology and a cast of characters appear in front of the book...
...Chen Jo-hsi’s work is evidence that imagination has been suppressed and discouraged but not eliminated...
...Carol C. Could...
...The (Guilty) Conscience of a Conservative...
...The Great American Newspaper: The Rise and Fall of The Village Voice...
...Norton, $12.95...
...Stephen Birmingham...
...She must always have been a marginal person, an outsider...
...Bernard Diederich...
...Irving H. Bartlett...
...The tale of Trujillo’s assassination is interesting reading...
...In one story, the narrator asks: “If Chairman Mao is the only one left in the entire country who reads and collects books, then what sort of future is there for Chinese culture...
...Phillip J. Baram...
...Random House, $10...
...In Washington 3 Hidden Tragedy, Malek, now a Marriott Corporation executive, offers these insights into why the federal government doesn’t work: .Top government officials are inadequately prepared for managerial responsibilities...
...After he fell from favor with the U.S...
...Arlington House, $8.95...
...There is no “system of management” within government which clearly defines what each agency is supposed to be doing and measures how well it is doing that...
...Scribner’s, $14.95...
...Trujillo ruled the Dominican Republic for 31 years...
...Baker’s memoirs are extremely frank and entertaining, but unconvincing as to his basic goodness...
...These two men become models of compromise and conciliation, and restraint bordering on indecisiveness...
...Barkas relates the usual prescriptions for the victim’s plight-legal aid, counseling services, community-based anti-crime programs, and possibly some form of compensation from the state...
...14.95...
...See Richard Reeves’ column in this issue...
...Arriving as an enthusiastic believer in the Maoist imperative to “serve the people,” Chen Jo-hsi survived the “cultural revolution,” and then emigrated, settling first in Hong Kong and later in Canada...
...Ethics in the Practice of Law...
...government until his final years, Trujillo was not so much the fascist masquerading as anticommunist as he was the gangster masquerading as fascist...
...Palisades, $9.95...
...Wallace...
...George C.S...
...Basic, $12.50...
...Dodd, Mead, $1 1.95...
...Born in Taiwan (“into a proletarian family,” Simon Leys notes in the introduction), educated in the United States, she lived for seven years in mainland China...
...And John Doar-the plodding, meticulous, almost obsessive gatherer of facts, habitually hunched over his desk, transcribing every last shred of evidence onto individual 3x5 index cards to be filed in chronological order according to his own six-category system...
...Relationship...
...If this book leaves you with anything, it’s with the images of these two men: Rodino-the soft-spoken mediator of opposing forces, looking rather dwarfed by the size of his chairand, whether behind the closed doors of his office assiduously wooing the swing votes or before millions of Americans on TV, managing to keep one eye fixed on a bipartisan vote for impeachment and the other on his personal historical legacy...
...The answer isn’t forthcoming, and maybe there is no answer...
...Free Press, $10.95...
...They have their ‘three excesses’-an excess of running around, an excess of questions, and an excess of picture taking...
...It wasn’t quite that simple...
...The story of Balaguer’s survival would be fascinating and instructive...
...A. J. Langguth...
...Bowker, $19.95...
...Intergovernmental Perspectives on the Canada-U.S...
...Chen Jo-hsi portrays a nation whose life is entirely pervaded by politics...
...In his essay, “The Prevention of Literature,” George Orwell warned that a totalitarian society can extinguish the creative imagination...
...Yet the ironies of Dominican politics did not end in 196 1. Joaquin Balaguer appears in this book as a shadowy figure, a cunning politician who served as Trujillo’s nominal president but survived to deliver a carefully ambiguous funeral oration for the fallen dictator...
...Trujillo recast Dominican society in his own paranoid image, and the events surrounding his death conformed to his view of life...
...The conspirators who killed Trujillo imagined that after his assassination a military coup would ensue and his entire state apparatus would crumble...
...Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence...
...University of Kentucky, $9.50...
...Zero Based Budgeting is now getting the same “acceptance...
...Norton, $10.95...
...High Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Untold and Dramatic Story of the Rodino Committee...
...Then, just after several other conspirators were themselves killed, the Dominican people took to the streets...
...The short-term focus of the political process in the United States militates against intelligent planning in government...
...Knopf, $17.50...
...by and large, it has been drowned in an avalanche of paper by bureaucrats accustomed to taking new “systems” in stride...
...The Wheel of Servitude: Black Forced Labor After Slavery...
...And what is said here has already been said better by others...
...Malek is more the plodder than the pogo stick jumper...
...Sure, we know that Trujillo was assassinated (on May 30, 1961...
...But here we come full circle...
...Howard Fields...
...Judge Frank M. Johnson, Jr.: A Biography...
...To nobody’s great astonishment, however, Rodino and special counsel John Doar emerge as the sober stars of the inquiry-instrumental to the success of the proceedings, but by no means perfect...
...Although relatively few resignations were accepted, Malek now concedes the move to have been a great blunder...
...Soviet-American Rivalry...
...New York University, $17.50...
...Dusko Doder...
...J. L. Barkas...
...Written by the reporter who covered it for United Press International, this is a recitation in full chronological sequence of the activities of the House Judiciary Committee’s impeachment inquiry...
...MIT Press, $15...
...Don’t read this book for the suspense...
...Daniel A. Novak...
...Political Corruption in America...
...Jude Wanniski...
...Political leaders are more interested in government appearing to run well than in its running well...
...In one story a young child is thoroughly interrogated for allegedly calling Chairman Mao “a rotten egg...
...In “Nixon’s Press Corps,” Chinese officials prepare the city of Nanking for a visit by the American president...
...In charge of the Republican administration’s recruitment effort and its unofficial personnel chief, Malek had ample opportunity, which he exploited well, to antagonize people...
...J. L. Barkas writes with the rage of one whose own brother was stabbed to death for a. dime...
...Senator Norris Cotton...
...In another story, an intellectual is prevented from marrying twice because of political pressures from his “peer committee...
...Edith Stokey, Richard Zeckhauser...
...the average highlevel political appointee stays only twentytwo months...
...Manias, Panics and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises...
...In the final analysis, this book doesn’t live up to the promises of either the title or the introduction...
...Light Water: How the Nuclear Dream Dissolved...
...Tom Gervasi...
...Arsenal of Democracy...
...New York University, $17.50...
...Government Documents Roundtable, ed...
...Jerry Brown: In A Plain Brown Wrapper...
...A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr...
...The chief conspirator, who served as armed forces secretary under Trujillo, experienced a failure of nerve after Trujillo was killed...
...Indiana University Press, $8.95...
...Pantheon, $10...
...Craig Schiller...
...government, Trujillo ineptly tried to win the friendship of Communists in his own country and abroad, but they rejected his overtures...
...Norton, $13.95...
...Wheeling and Dealing: Confessions of a Capitol Hill Operator...
...A favorite of the U.S...
...J. Roland Pennock, John W. Chapman, eds...
...Discovered as a conspirator nonetheless, Pup0 died at the hands of Trujillo’s secret police...
...In The Senate: Amidst the Turmoil and Confusion...
...Multiple Exposure: An American Ambassador’s Unique Perspective on East-West Issues...
...Victims includes other stories of people whose lives were suddenly struck by senseless violence...
...Doubleday, $10.95...
...Grove, $19.50/$7.95...
...Trujillo: The Death of the Goat...
...Anthony F.C...
...Municipal Government Reference Sources...
...Norton, $10.95...
...The Yugoslavs...
...China remains a mystery to most Americans...
...Oxford, $15...
...Harper & Row, $10.95...
...In the introduction, Fields hints that some of our most cherished notidns about the “heroes” and the “fumblers” of the entire affair may be destroyed in the pages ahead...
...Introduced experimentally into government by Malek, it has not fared as well as he would like to believe...
...Yet other stories depict characters who read and collect books...
...Instead of leading the planned military coup, “Pupo” Roman denied any role in the assassination and-incredibly-remained a leading figure in the old regime...
...There are no startling insights or revelations here...
...Chen Jo-hsi is presented as the first literary dissident from the People’s Republic of China...
...Frederic V. Malek...
...Norton, $14.95...
...Hidden Terrors...
...There was the time, for example, that he arbitrarily moved 180 people from the elite Office of Management and Budget to the uglyduckling General Services Administration to make room for his own recruits...
...Bobby Baker with Larry King...
...Irvin 13...
...He sees better management of the government and a bureaucracy more responsive to the political leadership coming not through flashy reorganizations, however headline-producing, but through an administration committed to planning and persistence, which will set up and stick to precise objectives...
...Malek’s own pet system is called Management by Objectives, a product of the graduate business schools, which has been tried with varying degrees of success in the business world...
...The Execution of Mayor Yin and Other Stories from the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution...
...Yale, $10...
...The Peace Ship: Henry Ford’s Pacifist Adventure in the First World War...
...Roger Frank Swanson...
...Random House, $10...
...To many, Frederick Malek was Nixon’s hatchet man...
...A fascinating story, not as well told as it might have been...
...In the Matter of Color: Race and the American Legal Process-The Colonial Period...
...Lexington, $20.00...
...Geoffrey C. Hazard, Jr...
...political book notes Public affairs books to be published in June...
...Charles P. Kindleberger...
...John Christian, William Turner...
...The drama of the recitation doesn’t quite match the drama of the events...
...Generalis was even worse than we remember...
...Following the outbreak of street riots, the Trujillo family fled the country, leaving power temporarily in the hands of a rival military faction and what had been a tame, middle class opposition to Trujillo...
...Little, Brown, $9.95...
...Rockdale: The Growth of An American Village in the Early Industrial Revolution...
...The leader of a military coup in 1930, Trujillo commanded the Dominican armed forces and a secret police (SIM) that mimicked the Gestapo and the KGB...
...Robert Francis Kennedy, Jr...
...Malek doesn’t know any better than the rest of us how we are going to get political leaders to put substance above political sex appeal...
...A dictator can build an absolute and brutal dictatorship and not be safe from violent death-but he is safe from simple death...
...Lao Tiao, “Chairman Mao’s good worker from the Publicity Corps,” reminds the people of Nanking: “It is of the utmost importance for us to grasp the characteristics of these reporters...
...Bupp, Jean-Claude Derian...
...Kevin Michael McAuliffe...
...Bernard Diederich, the Mexico bureau chief for Time, has compiled a history of a year in Dominican politics that is rich in detail and irony...
...Marx’s Social Ontology...
...Basic, $12.95...
...Long-range policies that will bear fruit only in someone else’s administration are for the birds...
...Norton, $10.95...
...Goodbye to Good-Time Charlie: The American Governor Transformed, 19501975...
...Carry Wills...
...read it for the ironies...
...Yet this is also a nation whose people are depicted as eating relatively well and living in modest comfort...
...Putnam’s, $10.95...
...Fields, like many others, feels a certain ambivalence towards his two heroes...
...Chen Jo-hsi...
...The reader soon asks-what can we do about this...
...John C. Bollens, G. Robert Williams...
...These stories depict the era of upheaval during the “cultural revolution’’-a period whose excesses are now officially denounced within China and blamed upon the “gang of four...
...Beyond these ideas, the only solution is more effective law enforcementso that there will be fewer victims...
...Basic, $10...
...Macmillan...
...Government is more complex than business, and it takes about two years in government before an appointee can make any real contribution...
...Seventeen years after Trujillo’s assassination, Balaguer is again president of the Dominican Republic-this time, as no man’s front man...
...Mayor Yin, a harmless small town official, is executed by youngsters from the Red Guard for purported political crimes decades earlier...
...But considering the magnitude of the task Malek faced-trying to reshape a bureaucracy nourished on Oreat Society programs to the goals of an administration with a completely different outlook-what is surprising is not that he made enemies but that he earned the respect of so many top-level career servants...
...Janet Marinelli “ ‘IT IS INTERESTING,’ writes Garry Wills, reflecting on the fact that the neutron bomb was tested on rodents, ‘that right-wingers who make fun of the effect of saccharin on mice are awed by the power of radiation to zap a mouse.’ 150 East 35th Street, New York, New York 10016...
...Benson with Steven Maaranen, Alan Heslop...
...A Primer for Policy Analysis...
...The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy...
...On the one hand he concedes that only they could have refrained from acting precipitously in the battle of nerves with both the White House and the various factions of the committee itself...
...There is no gulag in these stories-society as a whole imposes conformity upon the individual...
...Barbara Kraft...
...We learn that in 1959 Dominican exiles returned to their homeland from Cuba in an invasion whose futility-including a lack of air coverforesaw the ineptitude of the Bay of Pigs...
...The Department of State in the Middle East...
...But all stories of random violence are essentially the same...
...Career executives, on the other hand, stay too 4ong with one agency, become too narrow in their view and too identified with the special-interest clients of the agency...
...Jacob D. Beam...
...Thomas P. Larson...
...University of Pennsylvania, $12.50...
...Daniel Webster...
...The pay-off is in moves that make attractive splashes-solving “crises,” announcing bold new programs...
...Leonard Reed The Way the World Works...
...Larry Sabato...
...Even with both the scorecard and the play-by-play account, it’s still difficult to keep the players and the plays straight...
...But Chen Jo-hsi presents a Chinese officialdom with a certain sophistication about at least one American institution-the press...
...He flabbergasted loyal Republican officeholders by persuading Nixon, upon his reelection, to demand the written resignations of all first-term appointees to the federal service...
...Lexington, $21.95...
...David Kusnet Victims...
Vol. 10 • June 1978 • No. 4
