Tilting at windmills

...Whenever you become impatient with the Doctorows and their view of America, consider J. Edgar Hoover, and you have to admit that sometimes they’re right...

...L a s t month’s article on campaign consultants reminded me of my favorite story about one of the men it discussed, Matt Reese...

...The catch is that in most cases an audit is the only way to determine if there is reason to suspect wrong-doing...

...This year the signs are back, and beside the two life boats are six life rafts, each of which also carries 25 people...

...To younger people who ask how those of my generation could ever have been fooled by J. Edgar Hoover, I have often pointed to the time the FBI almost instantly apprehended eight saboteurs that the Nazis had sent here by submarine early in World War 11...

...Still, if you know the town, you can hardly blame him for wanting to think it’s a revolution...

...Warning: Explicit sex...

...as soon as the fleeting “crackdown” was announced, they all patriotically imposed annual fees of $15 to $20...

...This couldn’t have been done without the help of the phony credit crisis...

...Then reporters will no longer say a “bankruptcy” or a “proceeding under the bankruptcy act” when they’re describing an arrangement with one’s creditors under Chapter XI...

...For all its problems , the patronage system at least allowed governors to place their own people in sensitive jobs-and who says that a governor has to hire incompetents...

...In 1978 it performed none...

...The advance publicity for a new book called Partners indicates that I have been unfair to the new breed of women lawyers when I characterize them as spending all their time worrying about torts and contracts...

...The people we elect no longer have a chance to change the government because they can’t change its personnel...

...Field-stripping and cleaning the Kalashnikov’s major rival, the American M-16, takes about one hour...

...Now we’re stuck with them-permanently...

...But having done that, Governor Thornburgh has found that Civil Service, which immunizes state workers to political dismissal, may be a greater personnel problem...

...The solu- “Under former Governor tion was to abolish the patronage system...

...Its cardholders rebelled and started canceling cards...

...I was going on at considerable length about the need to get Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Jr...

...Would the enterprises along the way that benefit from Amtrak-like Kings Dominion, Busch Gardens, Colonial Williamsburg, and the many businesses centered around thempay the 20 percent...

...Bobby immediately went to the phone and called FDR, Jr., who came to West Virginia and turned the tide...

...I could see I was failing to explain why the Roosevelts meant so much to West Virginians, and Bobby, eyes glazing over, finally interrupted me and turned to Matt, who said: “Last week I was walking down the street in Logan with a friend and he suddenly stopped and said, ‘Mrs...

...Until a reasonable number of people from the upper classes demonstrate their esteem by joining up themselves, the average man is going to continue to refuse to risk his life for those who would look down on him for doing so, no matter how much he is paid...

...One of the last states to be turned over to the civil service was Pennsylvania, and some of its citizens are beginning to have second thoughts...

...Why is it that the Soviet military produces simple weapons that work and we can’t...

...But there is also clear evidence that controls can’t work over long periods...

...Lois Hughes chose the most eligible husband and best law firm in Houston but wishes she hadn’t chosen to represent T.J...

...Doctorow finds thls the beginning of Reagan’s “peculiar affinity for simulated life...

...Yet, during the seven years I spent evaluating Peace Corps programs, the general rule was that-with an occasional, sometimes even spectacular, exceptionolder people didn’t do as well as the other volunteers...

...Which is how I didn’t make history, and Matt Reese did...

...It wanted a straight handout, something for nothing, in the good old conservative tradition...

...Matt and I and several other Kennedy campaign workers from West Virginia had been summoned to Robert Kennedy’s house to discuss how to overcome Hubert Humphrey’s 60 to 40 lead over John Kennedy in the polls...

...He told them that for his administration, “I want people who don’t want a job in government...

...The lives of each of these women merge in a stunning climax to an unforgettable novel...

...The income tax, paid by those who can afford to pay, is a better way to finance social security in any event...

...bother with a tax deduction-they can simply charge their trip directly to the government...

...If you are saying 200 places are better than 50, instead of why not 700, you should immediately apply for a government job...

...Elsewhere in the article, Doctorow discusses “the soul-murdering complacency of our provinces” and describes Reagan’s undergraduate years as “a third-rate student a t a fifth-rate college...

...In the same article, Doctorow seems to find something sinister in the fact that in the 1930s, Reagan, in broadcasting play-by-by accounts of Chicago baseball games on the basis of Western Union messages, “made an art of describing the game as if he were sitting in the stands, faking the scene in all its drama with only a him...

...There is a lot of evidence, repeatedly cited in this column, that price controls can work over short terms like 1942-1945 and 1971-1972...

...The Literary Guild’s description of Partners suggests a richer inner life: “Partners is a searing look at three strong and complex women and how they cope with sex, money and power in the courtrooms and bedrooms of contemporary Texas...

...Remember the March consumer-credit cutbacks ordered by the Federal Reserve...

...So now the 700 people can charge up narrow stairways of the vessel-which the United States Coast Guard continues to certify-and compete for a total of 200 places in the boats and rafts...

...Instead, why not roll back the scheduled increase in the social security tax...

...The reason soon became obvious...

...If the intellectuals of the left ever wonder why the average man harbors a certain resentment against them, they ought to read Doctorow’s article very carefully...

...to come to our support, expounding on the significance that such a blessing from God’s son would have in freeing people to vote for a Catholic...

...It’s there so your friendly doctor can deduct the cost of the cruise from his income tax...

...Ronald Reagan recently held a private meeting with the reporters and editors of The Washington Post...

...And this seemed to begin to be true, not as late in the person’s life as the sixties, but somewhere in the thirties and forties, when people begin to get less flexible in their ability to adjust to hardship or a different culture...

...It is the tax that falls most heavily on the working poor andbecause it is a tax a company must pay regardless of whether it is making money-on the struggling business...

...It’s ironic that the press, by its misreporting, discourages timely resort to Chapter XI and thus probably encourages ultimate bankruptcy...

...T h e main reason we can’t have intelligent discussions about price controls is that both sides are blind to the reasonable points of the other...

...I n my first annual report on the Lewes-Cape May ferry that crosses the mouth of Delaware Bay, I complained that the sign reading “Life Boats This Way” pointed the 700 passengers to two boats with a capacity of 25 each, In my next report, I noted an improvement: the “Life Boats This Way” sign had been painted over...

...Why, then, do Peace Corps officials repeatedly deny this fact of human nature...

...Code far removed from the bankruptcy laws...

...Who indeed...

...Because of the importance of West Virginia to the Kennedys and because I was a lawyer and thus somewhat easier to hire without regard to ordinary civil service rules, I came to Washington and had a chance to participate in the administration that I had helped elect...

...They once charged no annual fee...

...T h e reality of life in the foreign service has never been captured better than in this anecdote from Stanley Meisler’s forthcoming book on his experiences as a correspondent for n e Los Angeles Times: “In Cameroun, the American Charge d’Affairs, whom I had never met before, once asked me to sit down and read his “chron file”-all the messages and reports, both classified and unclassified, that he had sent to the State Department during the year...

...He went on to say he would not choose people to pay off campaign debts...

...While your physician is lounging beside the pool or dancing in the bar, he is fulfilling a requirement that now exists in more than 20 states that he subject himself to some kind of continuing medical education each year...

...In my own life, I realize that, while I had been able to live happily in a New York tenement in my early twenties-even to think it was a lark-by the time I was 50 I no longer felt that it was romantic to stay in the cheapest flea-bag in Naples...

...If so, it was an affinity Reagan shared with almost every other sports broadcaster of his era, because the description of almost all “away” baseball games was based on the same combination of Western Union and imagination...

...Maybe the campaign should be postponed until after the election so that it too could be above politics...

...The reasons are many, but the main one, I think, is that the Boss Tweed and other political scandals of the post-Civil War era convinced America that politics was bad...

...But after enormous effort, he has made only modest improvements (see Leonard Reed’s article in this issue...

...They had seminars every day of the week and they were excellent.’ But besides the seminars, the convention package included optional golf, tennis, and deep-sea fishing tournaments, an all day scenic tour of Oahu’s north shore, a ‘Pearl Harbor Cruise with lunch,’ and an evening show that promised ’you’ll dine to beautiful surroundings and see a show by one of Hawaii’s top male entertainers...

...But even then my case was very unusual...

...I was a politician because I enjoyed it and because I hoped it would lead to a chance to function in government...

...And because I was a political appointee, I had a stake in helping it to perform well so that it would be reelected and I would be reappointed...

...But this year, Carter’s phony credit crisis suspended the market’s effect-we were panicking and being told we were lucky to have cards a t all, so we were afraid to object to the new fees...

...A report on the latest maneuvers of the Cameroun President, for example, began, ‘Ahidjo,’ the old fox, is at it again.’ I had found nothing useful in the chron file for my own reporting, but I still complimented him on his depth of analysis and clever turns of phrase, and he seemed pleased...

...And if you are the sort who said why not 700, and you went to work for the government anyway, it wouldn’t be long before you would be congratulating yourself on having reached 200...

...The answer -Charles Peters...

...Now it’s the liberals’ turn to laugh, for that great triumph of conservatism, California’s Proposition 13, has turned out to have a very unanticipated consequence...

...1 was recently fascinated to see another article quoting a director of the Peace Corps as singling out its senior citizen volunteers for praise...

...I n 1979 the Federal Election Commission performed 106 audits of congressional campaigns...

...The impression is that he turned his Governor’s persona on and off with a ventriloquial indifference...

...I reluctantly read through endless pages of boring analyses of the boring politics of Cameroun, pondering all the while the question of just why the author had granted me this unsought privilege...

...The catch is that, by abandoning politics, we have abandoned democracy...

...Fieldstripping a Kalashnikov takes a matter of minutes, from opening a cover plate over the chamber to taking out the firing spring, sliding open the bolt groups and shaking free one bolt piece-four steps in all...

...Like all today’s good, solid American businessmen, they, too, want a handout...

...So pervasive is the Civil Service system in Harrisburg today that many crucial policymaking positions are sheltered by it, and it is impossible for the administration to put its mark on many tentacles of the bureaucracy...

...wrong...

...The one aspect of liberal legislation that delights conservatives is what they call its “unanticipated consequences...

...The NAACP claimed that Maryland officials set their bail too high, and their lawyers argued that the police should have believed the contractors because, when whites are involved, officers defer to the claims of the rich over the poor...

...Smart people realize this...

...In fact, the Washington air was already so full of Merit is Good, Politics is Bad, that I was embarrassed by the reason for my job and did not hang my autographed picture of John Kennedy on my office wall until November 23, 1963...

...This scarcely enhances the reputation of the company involved, and is therefore a substantial deterrent to the use of Chapter XI by companies that need just the sort of help it offers...

...Several years ago, Citicorp tried to impose a $6-a-year credit card fee...

...Take the case of 40 Virginia nursing home operators and employees who recently flew to Honolulu for a convention at a cost of $1,350 each...

...Today you hear John Anderson piously refer to “the political process,” when the word politics would do just as well if it didn’t sound dirty...

...The date was April 5 , 1960...

...But most of the country remains brainwashed by the idea that politics has to be bad...

...Everyone seems to be proposing an income tax cut for 1981...

...They replaced politicians with civil servants, so that today we have a federal government that is 99 percent civil service, and state and local governments that are rapidly approaching that figure...

...Another example: E.L...

...There were a lot of business-section articles about how this proved that free competition was in perfect working order because the market had controlled a corporate excess on its own...

...Such embarrassment seems pathetic to me now...

...Why shouldn’t I have been proud to have worked in politics...

...Doctorow, in a recent issue of The Nation, a publication that has long been a dedicated defender of the right of privacy, criticizes Reagan because “he did not act like a Governor, he went home at five o’clock in the afternoon and forgot the job until the next morning...

...Or the President’s Commission for a National Agenda for the Eighties, which has postponed its report until after the November election in order to be “above partisan politics...

...Because, I think, of another fact of human nature, that people want to read such stories and therefore journalists want to write them-so if you want to get publicity for your organization, you will give journalists stories they want to write...

...The state refused...

...What happened was that Americans began to equate politics with crooked politics...

...The solution may be simple: Put Chapter XI in some part of the U.S...

...Witness Anderson and Reagan...

...P e o p l e who can afford to go oncruises tell me there is always some seminar on “Hematology Today” or “Fractures of the Lumbar Region” being held below deck, always sparsely attended, but always there...

...In covering the football games of the University of Iowa’s Hawkeyes, he described running plays as, “It’s a hippety-hop to the left” or “It’s a hippety-hop to the right...

...Or take a recent study of the FAA that concluded that FAA administrators must be “competent, nonpolitical people...

...There were only a handful of people in any federal agency whose appointments had anything to do with politics...

...The main result, now that interest rates are back down to eleven percent and consumer credit is flowing freely, is fees for Mastercharge and Visa...

...When creditors are pressing a company beyond its ability to pay, Chapter XI provides a way for the courts to intervene to enforce a plan of payment the company can live with, assuming a simple majority of the creditors agree...

...The most maddening antidraft argument is that all we need to attract able people to the armed forces is higher pay...

...Of course not...

...Y o u would expect a conservative state like Virginia with a conservative governor like John Dalton to believe in self-reliance on the part of its business and government...

...Of course it was fun, but it was also very educational,’ said Vivian V. Hewett, administrator of the Woodbine Nursing and Convalescent Center in Alexandria...

...They had probably never even noticed his attempt to break from bureaucratic jargon...

...As Dr...

...William Ecenbarger, the Harrisburg correspondent of f i e Philadelphia Inquirer, is one: Milton J. Shapp, the patronage payroll system was abused egregiously...

...R e a g a n , it must be acknowledged, had a unique approach to sports reporting...

...Beginning with Sargeant Shriver, every Peace Corps director has said the same thing...

...in a sensational trial...

...He scrupulously kept his private life private-very odd in the American political tradition, where one’s spouse, children, parents, sisters and brothers, medical problems and psychological difficulties are all grist for the mill...

...Brookover worked her way through college as a topless waitress, established a controversial law practice and is now on trial for murder...

...Their rifle, the Kalashnikov, has a similar edge over our M-16, because, according to Reuters’ Bernd Debusmann, of “its dependability in harsh conditions and its easy maintenance...

...And why I think he is dead shouldn’t I have expected that if I worked effectively in that campaign and displayed the kind of judgment and dedication needed in government that I would be rewarded by a chance to serve in government...

...Rene St...

...I was a politician...

...More pay will solve some practical problems for some service families, but it will not solve the number one deterrent to recruitmentthe nation’s lack of respect for those in the services...

...Well, now even that excuse has been stripped away by Seth Kantor of The Atlanta Constitution, who has revealed that the case wasn’t cracked by the skill of the FBI but by an informer among the saboteurs-a fact that Hoover, with characteristic manliness and generosity, spent the rest of his life trying to hide...

...That’s why so few of them run for office or bother to vote...

...Norma Jean Spencer is a judge who will do anything to further her career...

...I want people who will have to take a step down to take a position in government...

...Citicorp retreated and refunded to those who had paid the fees...

...Louis, Illinois, told 7he Wall Street Journal: “I always wanted to go to Rio, so why not...

...According to The Some may not have to Washington Post’s Glenn Frankel: “. . . under federal health care guidelines adopted by Virginia and most other states, the nursing home group could bill most expenses of the trip to federal health insurance programs for the poor and elderly as ‘costs related to patient care.’ The reason: sandwiched in the fiveday Honolulu conference were 18 hours of education sessions on topics such as antitrust law, labor relations and drug reaction...

...Why didn’t Chrysler use Chapter XI of the Federal Bankruptcy Act instead of asking the government to bail it out...

...Congress has passed a law forbidding audits in the absence of suspected wrong-doing...

...Tiltiing at windmills T h e r e is a weird new logic loose in liberal-land...

...Their tanks may lack the marvelously computerized firing systems ours possess, but they also lack that exquisite sensitivity to dust that seems to disable America’s newest tank, the XM1, after it leaves the paved proving ground...

...The killers pleaded selfdefense...

...There is no better example of this than Alan Campbell, the head of the Office of Personnel Management...

...No one in Washington had ever read his reports carefully and admired the kind of work he put into them...

...Chrysler’s government- financed plan, on the other hand, was jeopardized by a mere handful of holdoutssomething that could not happen under Chapter XI...

...It seems that even when local governments have a surplus and can reduce taxes, they are afraid to act because if they found themselves needing more revenue in the future, they would be faced with Proposition 13’s requirement that new local tax increases be supported by a two-thirds vote of the people...

...Why shouldn’t I have assumed that if I wanted a chance to work in a government, I had an obligation to help elect that government...

...Leger of East St...

...The specific problem was how to dispel suspicions about Kennedy’s Catholicism that were widespread among West Virginia’s Protestants, who constituted 95 percent of the state’s electorate...

...Well, Virginia applied for extra funds from Amtrak for the Washington-Newport News corridor and Amtrak countered with an offer to pick up 80 percent of the additional cost if the state would pay the rest...

...The experience of cities like London and New York with long-term rent controls has been tragic, and here in Washington controls are resulting in the disappearance of rental housing...

...Or Reagan’s daughter, Patti, who told one interviewer that nuclear power is an issue “beyond” and “more important” than politics...

...You think the way Washington thinks...

...Scotty,” as he is called, is a wise man who came to Washington with some good ideas about the reforms needed in the civil service...

...Roosevelt stood right here.’ I said, ‘I didn’t know she had been here recently,’ and he replied, ‘Oh, she hasn’t, I’m talking about when she was here in 1934...

...The catch is that the press invariably uses the word bankruptcy in any report of a Chapter XI proceeding...

...to crooked politics is not an unaccountable civil service but clean politics...

...I came to Washington to work in the government, in large part because of the work I had’ done in John F. Kennedy’s campaign in West Virginia...