political book notes
political book notes Public affairs books to be published in June The American Way of Crime. Frank Browning, John Gerassi. Putnam, $14.95. Atomic Energy: A New Start. David E. Lilienthal. Harper...
...You don't know which is more remarkableLambro's reportorial skills and dedication to his task,· or Washington's inexhaustible supply of different ways to throwaway money...
...the Mexican-United States Defense Commission...
...The pages aren't exactly cluttered with evidence of this point...
...Last Stand at Rosebud Creek: Coal, Power and People...
...The numbness in me spread...
...One reason the average taxpayer never does seem to get mad as hell about Washington is that the abuses are so many and so bewilderingly flagrant, his brain goes on overload...
...Nothing, apparently...
...Doubleday, $12.95...
...Another kiss-and-tell book by a former CIA agent, but one who enjoyed the embrace...
...Basic, $18.95...
...At the same time, Egypt's Gamal Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal management company (Egypt already owned the canal itself), and the British began depicting Nasse.r as Leon Trotsky's long-lost brother...
...Random House, $12.95...
...These ideas Were the main casualties of the Suez war, Eveland says-turning most Arabs against the West and against anything but a gelded Jewish state...
...Politics in An Age of Economic Limits...
...Norton, $16.95...
...This, the first of two volumes, takes us through 1959 and is the most thorough biography of JFK to date...
...The silly-season factor persists, as anyone who followed the U.N...
...Eveland f~ndly details his involvement in an abortive 1956 coup in Syria...
...Times, $12.95...
...Business in South Africa: Economic, Political, and Moral Issues...
...A dull but convincing argument against the adversary system...
...Hard Feelings: Reporting on Pols, the Press, People, and New York...
...Our Hysterical Heritage: The American Presidimtial Election Process, Out of the Mouths of B!lbes...
...Since there were no Australians in Araby, he might as well have worn a name tag saying, "Hello, I'm with the CIA...
...Small Town America: A Narrative History 1620 to the Present...
...Human Scale...
...Jeff Greenfield...
...Almost every paragraph has its key words italicized...
...The National Student Association knows better...
...Putnam, $15...
...Rawson, Wade, $9.95...
...Harold Dunn...
...He claims that the CIA has been saying since 1948 that Israel will never be secure until the displaced Arabs have an autonomous homeland...
...The CIA couldn't find anything objectionable about the Syrian government but the British insisted it wa~ rabidly pro-communist...
...Howard H. Baker, Jr...
...Spiro Agnew proved that before, and he proves it again with Go Quietly . .. or else...
...political book notes Public affairs books to be published in June The American Way of Crime...
...and the National Board for the Promotion of Rifle Practice...
...I loved the orderliness of the law, its rote and unhurried logic...
...The CIA is trying to help the Palestinians...
...So much for secrecy," he writes...
...17.50...
...Simon & Schuster, $11.95...
...The Road to the Wbite House: The Politics of Presidential Elections...
...Elizabeth Janeway...
...In a triumph of planning, the Syrian coup was launched on the same day as the invasion...
...The coup, of course, collapsed-it was being staged by moderate Syrians who claimed that Israel wasn't expansionist and imperialism was dead...
...The Entrepreneur's Guide...
...Rodger E. Bridwell...
...My whole experience with the law had been as a lawyer a'ld teacher, not a felon...
...publication may be delayed till mid-summer...
...The CIA is trying to censor the book anyway...
...Shrinking History: On Freud and the Failure of psychohishuy...
...Among his duties was to quiz Arab leaders on which weapons they wanted...
...The Politics of Regulation...
...Hill and Wang, $9.95...
...settlements vote two-step is aware...
...the "Women's Bureau...
...Marvin Frankel...
...You Can Beat City Hall...
...How could a lifetime of work and accomplishment-that had led me to the second-highest office in a nati9n of 220 million free people-be destroyed in an afternoon...
...The malicious subtlety of this threat is indicated by the fact that Agnew never mentioned it till now...
...Laurence Bergreen...
...Agnew bases his entire case on this chilling ultimatum from Don Vito Haig: "The President has a lot of power, don't forget that...
...Charles E. Morris...
...War and Hope...
...Michael B. Stoff Yale, $i5...
...Pantheon, $10.95...
...You get a slightly airsick feeling bumping along from abuse to abuse, and the book makes it worse with a condescending format...
...U.S...
...Macmillan, $8.95...
...Half the book discusses the general categories of waste...
...Martin's, $10.95: Ropes of Sand: America's Failure in the Middle East...
...Donald Lambro...
...When he met Lebanese President Camille Chamoun, leader of what was then a tranquil country, Chamoun said he wasn't interested in weapons...
...Wilbur Eveland...
...Ken Au/ella...
...Indiana, $22.50...
...Kate Harper...
...Public Entrepreneurship: Toward A Theory of Bureaucratic Political Power...
...Westview, $24.50...
...Random House, $12.95...
...USDA grading of tobacco...
...Lambro covers the spectrum, from comic selfindulgences (my favorite: $64,000 for a film teaching Navy officers how to impress society women at dinner parties) to institutionalized inflation guarantees (like revenue-sharing, wherein the federal government sends $8 billion of money it doesn't have to states that are running surpluses...
...Partisan Justice...
...The book is dedicated to Frank Sinatra...
...Richard Lingeman...
...Carlos Franqui...
...Powers of the Weak...
...The other half is Lambro's list of 100 "nonessential programs" that should be eliminated tomorrow...
...Philip M. Stern...
...The Reserve Mining Controversy: Science, Technology, and Environmental Quality...
...Eveland's life as a spook seems to' have consisted mainly of lunching with ambassadors, reading newspapers, and conducting clandestine operations against rivals within the CIA...
...The book is being hyped as an account of how death threats from Alexander Haig forced Agnew to resign in 1973...
...It's an impressive job-although marred by a few stunning factual errors, such as the declaration that Cord Meyer had died by 1961...
...Oxford, $12.95...
...Go Quietly...
...Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, $14.95...
...Deaver Brown...
...Look Now, Pay Later: The Rise of Network Broadcasting...
...He gave up only after John Foster Dulles withdrew support for the Aswan Dam project-arid did so in a manner calculated to humiliate the Egyptian leader...
...Congress's Florist Service...
...The reasons why Washington is Fat City, not the details of where the fat is fried, is what would make people mad as hell...
...the Office of Small Pox Eradication (last case, 1963-budget, $1.2 million...
...Kirkpatrick Sa/e...
...Diary of the Cuban Revolution...
...Oil, War and American Security: The Se~rch for a National Policy on Foreign Oil, 1914- 1947...
...John F. Morley...
...How many times had I stood in courtrooms like this as a respected officer of the court...
...This isn't a book, it's a list...
...Times...
...Wandering the streets to ferret out information wasn't for him...
...Indiana...
...ApparentlY,"it took him seven years to figure out what Haig meant...
...Dutton, $14.95...
...The Childfree Alternative...
...Eveland was Allen Dulles's Middle East operative during the 1950s...
...KTA V Publishing, $20...
...Unfortunately Lambro-a veteran UPI Capitol Hill reporter, with a sophisticated political understanding that never shows in this card-file book-probably has done little to change that...
...If you want to do' us a favor, Chamoun said, buy Lebanese appies-a healthy economy means more to us than guns...
...12.95...
...Vatican Diplomacy and the Jews During the Holocaust, i939-1943...
...Herbert S. Parmet...
...Desaix Myers III...
...The incident is never mentioned again, forgotten in the CIA's hurry to pass around ttie bombs and bribes needed to insure the region's potential for self-destruction...
...Like other Middle East CIA agents, he was given a cover name drawn randomly from an Australian phone book...
...Playing to Win...
...Drylongso: A Self-Portrait of Black America...
...The British and French persuaded Israel that 1956 was an ideal time to invade Egypt because what the CIA called "the silly season" was under way-a U.S...
...Among them: all regional commissions...
...No Margin for Error: America in the Eighties...
...John Langston Gwaltney...
...Worth wading through...
...Regnery/ Gateway, $12.95...
...Stephen J. Wayne...
...David ?. Stannard...
...Washington bought it, even though Nasser had repeatedly made offers of alignment with the U.S...
...Bruce M. She/rin...
...The Battle for Financial Security: How to Invest in the Runaway 80's...
...Norton, $14.95...
...If he had devoted even a little of Fat Citv to a sympathetic understanding of why so 'many nonsense programs exist, explaining that bureaucrats and politicians want make-believe work to do and journalists want make-believe stories to cover, the book would have been even more valuable...
...Harper & Row, $8.95...
...Knopf, $13.95...
...Morrow, $10.95...
...Robert V. Bartlett...
...Stemmer House, $7.95...
...No wonder they're getting nowhere...
...Indiana, $17.50...
...Lawyers on Trial...
...Stephen Greene Press, $11.95...
...James Q. Wilson, ed...
...Gregg Easterbrook The Future of U.S...
...or else...
...After somehow escaping from Syria, he was rewarded with a big car and a chauffeur for further work in Lebanon...
...Wasn't this the type of costly program Jimmy Carter had told Califano the nation could not afford ?" Lambro even italicizes "understatement" ("in a classic case of bureaucratic understatement"), adding an entirely new dimension to what the word understatement means...
...in fact, there is none...
...He has 'a remarkable memory for the sequence of raised eyebrows' and the brands of whiskey consumed...
...The Cost of Good Intentions: New York City and the Liberal Experiment...
...Michael Parfit...
...Jack...
...Times, $11.95...
...And what did he do about it...
...W. Bertrand Richland...
...Fat City: How Washington Wastes Your Taxes...
...Eveland says he was taken aback by "this overwhelmingly sane request...
...Spiro T. Agnew...
...presidential campaign, when everybody would be afraid to do anything critical oLIsniel...
...An excerpt appears in this issue, beginning on page 34...
...For 405 pages he hits you with item after item of obvious government waste, sometimes a dozen items per page...
...His: "Perry M. Chapw6rth...
...Viking, $25...
...Donald Lambro'S got to have the tallest stack of 3-by-5 cards in Washington...
...There is nothing so low that a sleazy thug, blinded by greed, will not stoop to...
...Eugene Lewis...
...it seems almost incidental that he was in the Middle East at all...
...On page 15, there appears a paragraph which should have caused the typesetting computer at Morrow to explode, and loud klaxons to sound at the mental institution nearest Agnew's home: "What was I, Ted Agnew, doing in this courtroom, sud.denly the defendant in the criminal trial...
...GAO investigators said that all too often recommendations are ignored by higher-ups" . .. "HEW revealed that friends and relatives had obtained millions in consulting contracts...
...Dial...
...Prince Norodom Sihanouk...
Vol. 12 • June 1980 • No. 4
