political book notes
political book notes Public Affairs books to be published in July and August Assassination on Embassy Row. John Dinges, Saul Landau. Pantheon. $11.95. Atomic Soldiers: American Victims of...
...They worked against the public good-not out of malice, but because this was an event outside their experience and budgets...
...He says, for example, that any non-nuclear nation contemplating acquisition of nuclear weapons "must expect to be disgraced in the eyes of men of prudence...
...They'll sit there, smooth and heartless, waiting patiently for the final command...
...Yes, but this one isn't...
...One of the two countries has consistently failed to exploit the opportunities for constructive change...
...The New Righters are fixated on simple slogans designed to attract urban Catholics, born-again Protestants, Willlaceites, Jews resentful of blacks, and anyone else who suspects that society'S elites are controlling his life...
...Evans, $15...
...The PBBs were mixed with feed...
...The more Democratic votes Reagan gets in November, the more Crawford's...
...Egginton documents month after endless month of delay and indecision on the part of state and federal agencies...
...It could make generals much less eager to find out, the hard way, if the missiles need repairs...
...Merle Miller...
...Instead of limiting tests of nuclear warheads, Calder proposes limiting tests of the missiles that carry them...
...Egginton does a strong, if workmanlike, job of reporting this inadvertent assault on Michigan's health...
...Crawford worries about Richard Viguerie's ability to reach ten percent of the total p()pulation with his carefully targeted direct-mail drives...
...People who think single-issue politics is a creature of our own times will find this book instructive...
...Alan Crawford thinks the New Right is the mob, howling for Proposition 13-style referenda and anti-gay-rights ordinances...
...The Nine Nations of North America...
...Loose in the environment, they can no more be recalled than snowflakes can be returned to a cloud...
...Nikolai N. Yakovlev...
...Even after working his way through the burgeoning prospects for an accidental war, Calder doesn't flatly abandon hope...
...He worries about the New Right's "Old West" image (created in the suburbs of Washington) which casts New Righters as stand-ins for Clint Eastwood, symbolically guarding our frontiers (Panama) from subversives and fighting for macho legislation to help the Pentagon and hurt the advocates of gun control...
...One typed, the other counted...
...The PBBs climbed up the food chain into anyone who ate Michigan farm products...
...They prefer to change the subject...
...of Chicago, $5.95...
...Thomas Kennedy...
...Nikolai V. Sivachev...
...Kirkpatrick Sale...
...A political platform becomes a menace when it exploits fear and anger, and the danger increases exponentially with the availability of organization and financing...
...Calder points out that U.S...
...Joel Garreau...
...Charles Peters The Poisoning of Michigan...
...Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, $14.95...
...Too 'bad the same restraints don't apply to publishing...
...Furthermore, Carter held the advantage in each debate: in the first, 41 to 32...
...Twice in the past five years Kirkpatrick Sale has come up with profound ideas for books, only to muff the execution...
...But their book, however flawed, has significance because it represents a comprehensive and apparently sincere expression of the Soviet view...
...Energy Policy and Public Administration...
...George K. Lagassa, Gregory A. Daneke, eds...
...In fact, the mislabeled sacks contained polybrominated biphenyls, a fire retardant...
...A traditional conservative (Burke to Buckley) would seek to preserve institutions of government, filter public opinion through the political hierarchy, and protect the thoughtful minority from the howling mob...
...Basic...
...Lyndon...
...Warren Hinckle, William Turner...
...Doubleday, $14.95...
...Maybe he should be an idea man for a publishing house, where he could assign others to develop the fine notions he comes up with...
...Lexington, $22.95...
...The Sweetest Little Club in the World: The U.S...
...Energy is the moral equivalent of a gold mine for the pu blish-or-perish set, offering endless opportunities for case studies, statistical regurgitations, mUltiple regression analyses, and other cerebral calisthenics...
...Atomic Soldiers: American Victims of Nuclear Experiments...
...An excerpt appears on page 46 of this issue...
...could blast away at each other's military targets while sparing civilians...
...The source for this claim is a 1976 speech by an AFL-CIO vice president, a species of labor leader not known for keeping close tabs on rank-and-file thinking...
...Nigel Calder...
...Anthony's lawyer ignored her instructions and b<\iled her out of jail on the premise that prison was no place for a lady to spend the night...
...Wisconsin, $27.50...
...Frank Bowman European Labor Relations...
...Nearly a century ago, RepUblicans used Civil War veterans' pensions to build a potent political machine (28 years after Appomattox, veterans' pensions accounted for 42 percent of the federal budget...
...nuclear-alert plans call for dispersing bombers to municipal airports...
...Univ...
...Friendly Fascism: The New Face of Power in America...
...Senate...
...17.50...
...Leslie Gel...
...He points out that as late as May 1975 only ten of the 66 top members of the White House staff were men who had previously been associated with Ford...
...Louis Hurst, Frances Spatz Leighton...
...The 1976 "debates" were merely modified press conferences, not much more than the raw footage for TV commercials...
...Carter vs...
...Putnam, $17.95...
...The author, Britain's version of Carl Sagan, sets out to describe (in common-sense terms rather than Pentagon megababble) how nuclear war might happen...
...Guess which one...
...Lloyd Bitzer, Theodore Rueter...
...There are a couple of catches to this thesis...
...Lexington...
...But h~ thinks Reagan would disappoint the New Righters almost immediately, because they're impossibly inflexible and "never retrieve their wounded...
...That'll stop 'em cold in Johannesburg...
...Alan Crawford: Pantheon, $12.95...
...12.95...
...Joyce Egginton...
...Jo Ann Spanbauer Russia From the Inside...
...The Russians, Calder points out, could accept that-after all, they don't want to live in Bonn or Paris, they just want the threat eliminated...
...Thunder on the Riglit: The "New Right" and the Politics of Resentment...
...Barry S. Rundquist...
...In this they have the import~nt support of the electronic church, whose fundamentalist ministers now reach 100 million Americans every week with messages more political than religious...
...Lexington, $29.95...
...After Susan B. Anthony defiantly cast a ballot in an election open only to males, it was discovered that the judge at her trial wrote his opinion before the case ever came to court...
...26.95...
...The format-a panel of journalists asking the candidates questions-precluded real debate, and Carter and Ford never faced each other headon...
...A ringside announcer who tried this technique on a boxing match would lose his microphone privileges...
...The raw material is the stuff of excitement, but the author has reduced it to academic mush...
...For Bitzer and Rueter, the advantages of double authorship are obvious...
...Donna Fenn...
...Power Shift was one of the first sustained discussions of the economic and political shift from Snowbelt to Sunbelt, but he often trailed off into wise-guy remarks about Bebe Rebozo...
...and in the third, 44 to 29...
...The New Senate: Liberal Influence on a Conservative Institution...
...13.95...
...Bertram Gross...
...In 1973, a handful of bags containing milky chemicals lay in a cattle-feed mixing plant in central Michigan...
...The feedmixers thought it was magnesium oxide, a harmless digestive aid f(H cows...
...What you'll find are desiccated essays wrapped in marginally useful statistics and carefully hedged conclusions, some of which are already out of date...
...Garry Wills...
...James Fallows Looking at Schools: Good, Bad, and Indifferent...
...Houghton Mifflin, $12.95...
...dragged in immediately, to carry the nuclear exchange beyond Europe...
...What will rot is brains...
...Robert Jacobi Radical Principles: Reflections of an Unreconstructed Democrat...
...To hit them, the Russians would have to take out places like O'Hare...
...But the damange didn't stop there...
...g summarily shipped off to oblivion...
...Test-launch limits would impede development of new missiles like our MX and their SS-20...
...Russia and the United States: U.S.-Soviet Relations from the Soviet Point of View...
...Straus & Giroux...
...The two Soviet historians who wrote this book should have no fear of bei...
...Human Scale...
...You won't find here any hint that European workers are human beings burdened by frustrations and agitated by expectations...
...The missiles won't rot...
...Sooner or later, in other words, the best-laid plans for containment have a way of rupturing...
...Looking at places where Armagedd'on might begin, Calder fears especially for Europe...
...Based on Harvard Business School course material, this book has the scent of formaldehyde...
...Their final toll will not be known fordecades, since no one knows what a cancer-causing dose of PBBs is...
...The first of his nightmares is the notion of "limited" nuclear war-the Pentagon's claim that the U.S...
...America's preoccupation with human rights led to a deplorable change in American-Soviet relations...
...Edward A. Wynne...
...Nuclear generals can advance mad schemes because so few of us will enter their world and challenge them on their own terms...
...Roosevelt was complex and not to be trusted...
...Harris Wofford...
...But far more frightening than the PBBs and the oafs who released them is the response of government...
...For those who know they must learn about it now, Calder's book is an excellent place to start...
...Michael Walzer...
...The author's thesis is that Ford was destroyed by Nixon holdovers...
...14.95...
...He wants to lower the risk of war but, sadly, many of his recommendations have been tried before in other situations with glum results...
...in the second, 44 to 28...
...Dutton, $17.95...
...Palace Politics: The Presidency of Gerald R. Ford...
...Although there are some interesting essays here, the book is ultimately only a reflection of the current inconclusive state of the energy debate...
...Thus, during any European ground war, NATO would want the U.S...
...Sunlight, acidic rain, digestive juices, cellular enzymes, and all of nature's other defenses against chemical intruders do not affect this synthetic compound...
...Michael Foley...
...Chivalry and chauvinism have been tripping over each other ever since...
...The bombs could stop Russian invaders, but the plan has a built-in fallacy: to stop an invasion, Europe would have to destroy itself...
...The weapons of the New Right are drawn from modern armories-mass media and inass marketing-but those weapons are .to be used for something ageless and fearsome: class warfare -Pat Martin Women's Orgimizations' Use of the Courts...
...Ford: The Counterfeit Debates of 1976...
...Beacon, $11.95...
...Aside from its style, the book's key flaw is the absence of any study of the bureaucracy's influence on the "political benefits" of government programs...
...The book attempts to tackle some of the problems posed by trying to achieve an energy "mix"-such as tying backyard producers of electricity into regional power grids-but it lacks any strategy for propelling public officials into making the hard choices necessary for a coherent policy...
...Times, $12.95...
...All the relevant institutions of democracy failed," she says...
...it is believed that, before the poisoning was finally diagnosed and 35,000 cattle were slaughtered and buried, the chemicals infested nine million people...
...We are treated to long discourses on various litigation strategies, but the book never really addresses the question of whether litigation is the most productive way to advance the cause of women's rights...
...While the men are...
...Kennedy says, for example, that American workers, unlike Europeans, have no interest in being represented on the boards of the companies they work for...
...Howard Rosenberg...
...The final war can't be studied afterward...
...Prentice-Hall, $12.95...
...Gregg Easterbrook Of Kennedys and Kings...
...Farrar...
...Political Benefits...
...This time, his subject is at least as important-the pathology of bigness in government, business, education, the use of resources-and his handling is as disappointing...
...in a few months, farm animals all over the state were dying...
...Thus: "Inspection of the argumentative units in all speeches indicates that Carter was responsible for 129 units and Ford for 89 units...
...Lexington, $29.95...
...LRxington, $18.95...
...Bryant) protect the hearth from permissive textbooks, aboitiori, ERA, and marauding bands of homosexuals...
...Robert G. Kaiser, Hannah Jopling Kaiser...
...Although this was' probably deliberate, the authors make a case that future presidential debates should omit the third party...
...They have transformed the presidential debates into a numbers game...
...He explained that this was his first criminal trial and he didn't want to be caught unprepared...
...And the blackest villain of them all in Hartmann's book, Richard Cheney (Hartmann's kindest words for him are "Iowkeyed nonentity") was not a Nixon man but a protege of Donald Rumsfeld...
...But their presence in the environment can nevcr be revoked...
...He also instructed the jury to find her guilty...
...and U.S.S.R...
...Nuclear Nightmares...
...NATO countries find it easier to defend themselves with H-bombs than with troops...
...out on the ramparts, their women (Schlafly...
...Karen O'Connor...
...It's a good idea, one that should be pursued, but it won't lead us out of the valley of shadows...
...Thomas N. Bethell Explaining America...
...Salient points 'like this can be found in this dry, dull collection of essays, but it's hard work...
...analysis will be worth studying...
...These could be easily monitored, since the firing of a missile is a wholly public act...
...The Fish is Red: The Story of the Secret War Against Castro...
...Robert T. Hartmann...
...Can a book so clumsily titled be interesting...
...One of Hartmann's main villains, David Gergen, could hardly be called a Nixon loyalist, since Hartmann joins John Dean in identifying him as Deep Throat...
...So much for civilians...
...Similarly, the book coughs up the standard line on such things as the remarkable peacefulness of German labor relations without noting one of the principal reasons: that so many "German" workers are migrant Yugoslavs, Italians, Turks and others who can't afford to be feisty...
...Striving to be warmhearted, too many educated Americans still refuse to think about the inevitability of nuclear defense and its specific flaws...
...Viking, $10.95...
...PBBs, which cause cancer, belong to a family of chemicals that are almost indestructible...
...political book notes Public Affairs books to be published in July and August Assassination on Embassy Row...
...Yale, $17.95...
...McGraw-Hill...
...When they sat in sacks on the feed-lot floor, they were harmless and easily managed...
...Norton...
...There are a few welcome anecdotes-too few, unfortunately-about situations in which litigation went awry...
...One of change in American-Soviet relations...
Vol. 12 • July 1980 • No. 5
