Political Booknotes
Political Booknotes The Best Defense. Alan M. Dershowitz. Random House, $15.95. Books by lawyers on their greatest wins often take on a stultifying sameness—reminding one of the party guest...
...He keeps the requisite egotism within tolerable and often ingratiating bounds...
...Oil and Turmoil...
...Witnesses to the Origins of the Cold War...
...Most readers will be familiar with much of the material about Long—so much has been written about him—but the Coughlin material was largely new to me and will, I imagine, be so for you...
...Russian Roulette: The Superpower Game...
...The Once and Future Democrats: Strategies for Change...
...Lepage, a French journalist of libertarian bent, trots out not just Friedman, but a host of other conservative practitioners of the dismal science, some of them obscure, and quite deservedly so...
...Will Rogers did it with humor, Drew Pearson with large side-helpings of juicy political scandal, and FDR, like Coughlin, with a radio voice that was very nearly irresistible...
...The Modern American Vice-Presidency...
...Government intervention in the marketplace often is inefficient if not counterproductive...
...The real world works a lot differently, Indeed, Lepage's book was written in 1978 and was just recently translated...
...19.95...
...in which wealth was equitably (if not necessarily equally) shared...
...Unfortunately the book contains no advice on how to get the system out of its legal mess...
...It is hard to explain to people today—people who live in a media world largely dominated by a kind of respectable liberalism— how very hard it was to break conservative dominance of the media in the thirties...
...He also shows the price of that momentous change—not just military insecurity, but triple-digit inflation and a chaotic bureaucracy...
...All policemen lie...
...Univ...
...His prose is lively...
...of Washington, $22.50...
...It is also profound in its understanding of those events...
...The problem with this entire school of thought is that its adherents seem as 'wrapped up in arcane academic theories as the Marxists they so gleefully deride...
...Charles Peters The Politics of Uranium...
...Univ...
...since then many of the free market and monetarist policies he celebrates have been enacted...
...Knopf, $18.50...
...Delacorte, $16.95...
...Judges who call the shots as Dershowitz wants are rare, and risk ostracism...
...P. K. The Truth About Energy...
...The Turbulent Teens: Understanding, Helping, Surviving...
...The Right Place at the Right Time...
...Paul Hoffman...
...Thomas Hammond, ed...
...Jeff Greenfield...
...Roy Wilkins...
...Books by lawyers on their greatest wins often take on a stultifying sameness—reminding one of the party guest who can't shut up...
...Robert Pisor...
...Norton, $14.95...
...Tomorrow, Capitalism...
...Doubleday, $17.95...
...Norman Moss...
...William L. Rivers...
...Dershowitz—a Harvard law professor, civil liberties advocate, and criminal defense lawyer—does better...
...Lawrence Meyer...
...Lepage and company do have an important insight...
...Urban renewal efforts benefited wealthy real estate speculators at the expense of the poor and many of the government's .subsidies are little more than transfer payments from one.group of well-off taxpayers to another...
...Dershowitz has made money defending unsavory clients like nursing home operator Bernard Bergman, but he also writes of his quixotic efforts on behalf of Soviet dissidents...
...Meyer traces the way Israel developed from pioneers' dreams into a world power...
...This account of the CIAdirected coup against Guatemalan president Jacobo Arbenz in 1954 suffers from a historian's penchant for too much detail...
...Princeton Univ...
...Much of this is familiar—the traditions of the Holy Land, the structure of the kibbutz—but Meyer pulls it all together in a highly readable account...
...McGraw-Hill, $15.95...
...Hearts and Minds: The Anatomy of Racism from Roosevelt to Reagan...
...Univ...
...Robert MacNeil...
...This is a detailed dissection of the events that led to the crucial error of the American experience in Vietnam— the decision to escalate that was made in 1965 and that took American troop strength from less than 50,000 to 500,000...
...And his stories, like his battles, have pizzazz...
...Summit, $14.95...
...I share the author's belief that most of their followers were neither irrational nor antidemocratic but sought "a society in which the individual retained control of his own life and livelihood— in which power resided in visible, accessible institutions...
...Arbenz's toleration of a few communists in his leftist government fueled the paranoid visions of John Foster Dulles and President Eisenhower, both of whom were intimately involved in planning the covert operation...
...Herbert Schmertz, Larry Woods...
...Who Runs Washington...
...At the height of his poweras a radio priest, he was reaching ten million people a week and had much greater national influence than Long...
...Universe, $12.95...
...Erik P. Eckholm...
...Michael Killian, Arnold Sawislak...
...Martin's, $14.95...
...It might have looked great on paper, but the unemployment lines are longer than ever...
...Universe, $13.95...
...Oswald H. Ganley, Gladys D. Ganley...
...The Guatemalan coup also shows how small successes can breed much larger failures...
...This thoughtful and well-writtten book is the story of Huey Long and Father Charles Coughlin and the role they played as leaders—albeit never formally allied—of a remarkable political movement...
...Ernest Volkman...
...Simon & Schuster, $17.95...
...Phil Keisling Down to Earth: Environment & Human Needs...
...Larry Berman...
...Mark Yudof...
...Simon & Schuster, $14.95...
...The Real World of Liberalism...
...Israel Now: A Portrait of a Troubled Land...
...Times Books, $14.95...
...P. To Inform or to Control: The Communications Networks...
...David Jonathan Cohen Black Leaders of the Twentieth Century...
...Paul Simon...
...The Real Campaign: The Media and the Battle for the White House...
...the rest, in his view, are weak-kneed, dumb, or dishonest...
...The Other Government: Power and the Washington Media...
...John Hope Franklin, August Meier, eds...
...Alan Brinkley...
...The End of the Line: A Narrative History of the Siege of Khe Sanh...
...C. P. When Government Speaks: Politics, Law and Government Expression in America...
...The decision was necessary, wrote one participant, "if we are to succeed in not losing the war...
...Essays in Economics: Theory and Policy...
...MIT Press, $45...
...Harry S. Ashmore...
...Richard Immerman...
...James Tobin...
...Norton, $14.95...
...Henri Lepage...
...Princeton Univ., $28...
...Arthur Macy Cox, George Arbatov...
...Univ...
...McGraw-Hill, $15.95...
...Open Court, $14.95...
...of Chicago, $20...
...The CIA in Guatemala...
...Lions of the Eighties: New Powerhouses of the Corporate Bar...
...He got away with expressing his radical ideas at a time when the press and radio were 95-percent Republicancontrolled because he was a powerful orator who could attract large audiences...
...Franklin Watts, $16.95...
...Little Brown, $13.95...
...Norton, $14.95...
...Prosecutors are power-hungry and unscrupulous...
...James E. Gardner...
...Voices of Protest...
...Dankart Rustow...
...Still, it's a valuable study of what Immerman correctly portrays as a seminal event, not just in the annals of the Cold War, but in U.S.-Latin American relations...
...Planning a Tragedy...
...Joel K. Goldstein...
...A fascinating examination of man's tendency to move from involvement in society to involvement in self, from concern with the public good to concern with private happiness...
...A Man's Life: An Autobiography...
...of California...
...Shifting Involvements...
...Oak Tree, $12.95...
...Gene Sittenfeld A Legacy of Hate: Anti-Semitism in America...
...Norton, $14.95...
...My favorite purports to solve the problem of overfishing by giving fishermen their own "plot" of ocean and letting them keep track of things with that modern cure-all: electronic sensors...
...This rather breathless survey of the "free market" school of economics associated with Milton Friedman is unabashedly admiring...
...Continuum, $12.95...
...Albert 0. Hirschman...
...E. Howard Hunt, Allen Dulles, and Richard Bissell, all of whom played key roles in the Guatemala coup, later used its success to justify an even more ambitious CIA operation in Latin America: the Bay of Pigs...
...The villains of the story, Bundy and McNamara, were not motivated by thirst for victory but by fear of defeat...
...Indeed, I continue to think those aspirations could fuel a powerful political movement...
...There are some genuinely silly theories here that Lepage presents with a perfectly straight face...
...David Spitz...
...of Texas, $24.50...
...Some of his stock characterizations stretch credulity...
Vol. 14 • June 1982 • No. 4
