Richard Reeves on Political Books
Richard Reeves on Political Books Haynes Johnson of The Washington Post has written a book on the first three years of the Carter administration and it's enough to make you give up political...
...And Walter Lippmann, everyone's wise man, is pontificating thus: 'What we are now saying to the Russians and they are saying to us about...
...These were two of several excerpts I loved: "In the flowering of the New Deal, Congress passed a law...
...The hell with Jimmy Carter—the town doesn't change...
...It's called In The Absence of Power, to be published by Viking in April...
...The dangers of the trade, of course, are such that the president may be moribund again by the time these words see print...
...An internal memo from one Washington trade association (the Carpet & Rug Institute) representative to his individual corporate clients three months after Carter took office was revealing: 'Every aspect of government affects the carpet industry...
...A book about Washington, how it is, how it works...
...Richard Reeves on Political Books Haynes Johnson of The Washington Post has written a book on the first three years of the Carter administration and it's enough to make you give up political writing...
...Some of those pages made me homesick (I moved out in September, 1978) about missing the meetings at the White House, the casual access to senators and sources while wandering through the Capitol or along Connecticut Avenue, living in a town, the town, where government and journalism exist to serve each other...
...Whether Carter wins renomination and reelection becomes insignificant beside those larger concerns...
...Visiting, even frequently, is not the same...
...And, finally, there is virtually not a committee of Congress that does not directly or indirectly pass legislation which affects us.— So it goes...
...Which he was when the reporting was finished in the fall of 1979...
...You have to live there to know, and someone should write a book about that...
...Truckers were prohibited from- driving more than ten hours a day...
...Every fifteen minutes, every working day, truckers were required to jot down their activities...
...Very thorough, often perceptive, it leaves Jimmy Carter for dead...
...All that is not to say that the book is not valuable...
...And it will keep going long after Jimmy Carter is gone...
...He concludes that Carter failed: "Three years after his election I see a capital more cynical, a country more disaffected, a political system more incapable of responding even to day-to-day crises, to say nothing of long-range planning...
...The trucker's daily log was created...
...That book, a better book, I think, shows through when Johnson is writing in the first person about how he has spent his days, or in chapters entitled "The Government" and "The City...
...a federal form was prepared to help them fill out their logs...
...Johnson does more than record presidential poll ratings...
...Fdr his Presidency to create such disillusionment after so much effort—and promise—is dismaying...
...There is no agency of government, whether the Federal Trade Commission, the Consumer Protection Agency, the Justice Department, the White House Office of Consumer Affairs or the Federal Housing Authority, that does not have an impact on our business...
...His column is a regalarkatureqThe Washington Monthly...
...tired drivers are more likely to make mistakes that increase the risks for all citizens using the highways...
...Solution: regulate the hours they operate...
...Maybe we should all go into something real, like cabdriving...
...If attitudes about public service have improved, in or out of government, I can't detect them, and obviously anger with Washington has risen...
...To reread the newspapers," he writes, ". . is to find an eerie similarity in the news: the House is delaying for one year a bill on natural-gas regulation, senators are looking into a bribery story, Congress is debating 'small' and 'relatively clean' nuclear weapons, the President is worrying about spending pressures on his budget, a Congressional committee is voting higher postal rates, the Post Office is promising a scheme to speed the mails, Bob Hope is opening a five-day engagement, scientists are testing a cancer-detection machine, the news organizations are talking about prospects of opening bureaus in Mainland China...
...In The Absence of Power also reveals the absence of memory most of us have...
...Or Carter, talking with Haynes Johnson in September 1978, saying, in paraphrase, "He had been disturbed when he sat in his White House office and listened to Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko lie outright: Soviet generals were not operating in Ethiopia, East German forces were not Richard Reeves is the author of Convention...
...His indictment of Carter—and that's what the book is—is more substantial than anything Gallup does...
...fomenting trouble in Angola, Gromyko had said to his face—although Carter knew, ftom unquestionably accurate intelligence, that those statements were false...
...It really doesn't, as Johnson found when he looked at The Washington Post for the week he arrived in August of 1957...
...The book must have gone into galleys the day before American diplomats were seized in Iran and Carter became, for a time at least, the hero of the West...
...The lessons of the Lance affair...
...A team of federal inspectors was created, charged with keeping watch over the truckers' daily logs...
...The people you never meet— no one, to my knowledge, has ever met bureaucrats and lobbyists able, or willing, to explain precisely what they do for a living—who handle paper and interests...
...But within the book about Carter and his men there is another book fighting to get out...
...By the time Jimmy Carter came to Washington, 1 billion 200 million pieces of paper were being filled out each year for the truckers' daily logs...
...There are also glimpses of the invisible Washington...
...At least five of the President's new energy proposals will directly alter how we are currently doing business...
...China, the Middle East and disarmament is said without any expectation that it might lead to an agreement.' " And the Redskins, the Redskins, the Redskins...
...I read that on the day—in December 1979—when Carter was telling ABC that his perception of the Soviets had been drastically altered because he realized that Leonid Brezhnev had lied to him about Afghanistan...
...I wish Haynes Johnson had forgotten about the interloper from Georgia and written a book called In The Presence of Washington...
Vol. 11 • February 1980 • No. 12
