POLITICAL BOOKNOTES
POLITICAL BOOKNOTES The American Presidency. Kenneth W. Thompson,ed. Univ. Press of America, $6.25. B.S.-The Bureaucratic Syndrome. Uvron L. Johnson, Robert Ewegen. Norih River Press (disi....
...Viking, $13.95...
...Until liberals realize that many of their educational “allies” are part oftheproblem,and that the real victims of bad schools are the poor and oppressed children whose cause they ostensibly champion, public schools will continue to get worse...
...Peter N. Carroll...
...Allan Cox...
...Other new allies for old Washington Monthly causes: Jane Bryant Quinn in Newsweek attacked bloated military pensions, for which our unfunded indebtedness is now $590 billion and which encourage people to spend more years on pensions than they do on active duty...
...Todd Andrew Growing Up...
...Report from Afghanistan...
...And when she’s not boasting about torturing her body by exercising the day after having a D&C or recommending Preparation H as an eye cream, she’s pouting about not being beautiful...
...Shogan’s account of the last six presidencies spots familiar troubles: the impotence of political parties, the rise of special interests and the politics of personality...
...For me, the fun of reading Cosniopoliian has always been based on the assumption that the magazine is pure fantasy-that no woman in her right mind would consider propping up her breasts with masking tape to make herself look more voluptuous...
...Yesterday’s Wings...
...Knopf, $14.95...
...Next time remember this fact: the average social security recipient is paid back his entire life’s contribution within two years after retirement...
...This ignores the tax break they get that the rest of us don’t and the fact that most of their homes are fully paid for, relieving them of what is the major financial burden for the rest of us...
...No page is without some notable inanity-from her chapter on sex (which includes such soul-searching questions as, “Are you a nymphomaniac...
...When you’re discussing social security reform with senior citizens, you often hear the “I’ve paid for it” argument...
...W e mav tell vou the bad...
...David Schellhase The Sporty Game...
...Dution, $12.95...
...Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, $12.95...
...P. Straight Talk About American Education...
...Instead, he lists a variety of proposed amendments that would make it more likely that one party controlled both the White House and Congress, and could therefore be held accountable for the actions of the government...
...The story about show the president came to the conclusion to reverse the military escalation in Vietnam is a very good example...
...Mouseburgers, she says, are “people who are not prepossessing, not pretty, don’t have a particularly high IQ, a decent education, or other noticeable assets...
...Roheri Shogun...
...f i e New York Timesis doing a lot better than the Democrats...
...When it comes to solutions, Shogan bluntly notes that without changing the basic constitutional rules, “nothing much” can be done to make the two elected branches work together under party discipline...
...My fear is that the Reagan White House is in touch with the Philip Habibs of today, the people at the top of the career service, but not with the people down below-the Philip Habibs as they were I3 years ago...
...Doolittle instead focuses on the inner workings of the U.S.embassy and its inhabitants...
...Occasionally there’s a sensible prediction that probably has never occurred to you...
...the press officer who’sgrown sodisgruntled he leaks io The Nekj York Times...
...P. Having It All: Love, Success, Sex, Money...
...Robert Sohel...
...An entire chapterexcoriates mandatory sex education classes and abortion (comparing the latter to the Holocaust...
...A rare example of liberal empathy for the struggles of corporate America-in this case the commercial aircraft industry...
...One example: percent of America had never heard of Philip Habib...
...But Washington Monthly readers had read about him over 13 years ago...
...19.95...
...poorly educated and incompetent teachers who are protected by powerful teachers’ unions...
...Upson soon realizes he, like his predecessors, is caught up in the machinations and deceits of a bureaucratic triangle that includes the CIA, the military, and the State Department...
...Even more distressing is Chaliand’s gloomy conclusion that the Soviet Union is willing to remain in Afghanistan long enough to turn the country into a vassal state like Mongolia...
...Summit...
...He also wisely rejects some of the more respectable constitutional non-solutions, like the single sixyear presidential term...
...Axel Madsen...
...William Ashworth...
...Theodore M. Black...
...Their predictions range from the obvious (a rising elderly population) to the ridiculous (longevity pills manufactured on the moon...
...all reports of the war’s devastation are second-hand, relayed in the accounts of refugees or buried in the bottomoffiledrawers...
...by Everesr House), $10.95...
...Charles Peters...
...White House assistants should be in constant touch with the George Carvers and the Phil Habibs...
...Frank Gibney...
...Harcouri Brace Jovanovich, $14.95...
...If at times he seems to be stretchingas when he claims strong parties would have prevented the Civil War as well as the Vietnam war-his overall case is persuasive...
...Even Ronald Reagan’s initial successes, Shogan argues, are but temporary exceptions to the general rule of stalemate and impotence-indeed, according to Shogan, the party system (and therefore the government) has never worked very well...
...McCraw-Hill...
...Congdonand Weed, $15...
...Everyone isaware, for instance, that robots are on the way, but what often hasn’t been considered is that oneofthe threeor four majoF human occupations of the next century will be that of robot technician...
...On August I 1 its lead editorial was entitled, “Link Social Security to Need...
...Donna Fenn It Seemed Like Nothing Happened: The Tragedyand Promiseof America in the 1970s...
...Such outbursts unfortunately serve to discredit Black’s valid insights and let those who should share much of the blame for public education’s plight-particularly teachers’ unions and colleges-off the hook...
...Rand McNalll...
...She tells her readers it’s okay to crash diet and thinks “you may have to havea tiny touch of anorexia nervosa to maintain an ideal weight...
...mission in Laos helps explain his ability to convincingly portray how even such ‘‘limited’’ wars can assume a momentum of their own, destroying those careers, lives, and countries that happen to get in the way...
...NA L, $14.95...
...Doubleday, $19.95...
...There’s the militaristic ambassador and his protocol-obsessed wife...
...She is obsessed about her looks...
...This book has a stronger ring of authenticity than many non-fictional accounts of the period...
...Open Road: Truckin’ on the Biting Edge...
...War in Space...
...Shogan and his fellow constitutional reformers (Lloyd Cutler, for one) have had the temerity to ask the right questions...
...Marvin Cetron...
...Helen Curlev Br0u.n...
...Thomas O’Toole...
...To the handful of excellent novels about the U.S...
...Alovelybook, better than Baker’s best, witha new dimension of humanity added to the grace and wit to which we’ve become so accustomed...
...Simon & Schusier, $15.95...
...Holi...
...Phil Keisling The Cox Report on the American Corporation...
...22.50...
...Robert M. Kaus Nor Any Drop to Drink...
...And they talked to three or four young men like George Carver and Phil Habib, who was an expert at the State Department on Vietnam, and the next day, when these wise men reported to the president, he said something like, ‘With whom did you talk?’ Whereupon he insisted that these same men, whom he’d not been able to spend much time with before but who had been providing a lot of the raw material for the intelligence evaluations, be brought to see him...
...12.95...
...Some - like a plan to elect 100 at-large members of the House-seem messy...
...The bombs fall on civilians, though the real reasons (Are the pilots simply incompetent...
...If we didn’t before we read her book, we do now...
...The president had the outside ‘wise men’ come in to sift through the government and talk to those who might give them some advice in terms of advising him...
...Delacorre, $21.95...
...Wrong...
...These are the people who know the facts about places like El Salvador that could turn into new Vietnams...
...Richard Nixon...
...in another, the preposterous claim that all sovereignity stems from the states is used to attack the perniciousness of federal aid to education...
...16.95...
...When Nixon became frustrated with the impediments to his power, he resorted to illegality...
...John Newhouse...
...It’s Republican...
...ITT: The Management of Opportunity...
...That Doolittle was a member of the U.S...
...Gerard Chaliand...
...Rinehari & Winston...
...But between his trenchant criticisms, the author trots out an assortment of far right canards that would send even moderate Republicans scurrying for cover...
...Joseph E. Broliw...
...but we also iell ydu the good about the career government service...
...It didn’t quite come out for our call to revive the WPA, but the Times’ heart is clearly in the right place...
...The Wall Street Journal...
...And, according to a study prepared for the American Economics Association by John B. Shoven of Stanford and Michael Hurd of SUNY-Stony Brook, the aged on a per capita basis are fiscally as well-off as or betteroff than the rest of us...
...Media Unbound: The Impact of Television Journalism on the Public...
...Siephen Lesher...
...None of the Above: Why Presidents Fail and What Can Be Done...
...Aside from a brief recounting of its history as a British colony, this tiny (90 pages) and overpriced book reveals little that’s new or interesting about Afghanistan...
...This book illustrates the sorry result...
...Appropriately, there are no battle scenes here, and only one death...
...Russell Baker...
...But her most dangerous advice is on health and appearance...
...One of the most dismaying failures of American liberalism lies in its allowing the right wing to assume the initiative in calling attention to thedeterioration ofour public schools...
...he could reasonably do to avert It...
...The authors try to cover so much ground that few of their points are fleshed out enough to be convincing...
...18.75/$8.25...
...Black, a former chancellor of the New York State Board of Regents, correctly identifies many of public education’s most serious problems: a decline in academic standards...
...What is fresh is Shogan’s willingness to trace these disastrous phenomena to their source: the basic political ground rules established in the Constitution...
...Times...
...Itsmain character is a young, career-minded foreign service officer, Fred Upson, assigned to evaluate the military’s bombing requests to prevent civilian casualties...
...Another argument often made is that elderly social security recipients are needier than the rest of the population...
...Moyers’s advice is equally important on the domestic side...
...Journalists say too much too soon, aren’t selective enough, jump at confrontation, and want to direct and save us where they should only inform and entertain, he says...
...But never mind all that-she’sa mouseburger herselfand she’s made it, andsocan you if you follow her advice...
...A very important book...
...Much of the book focuses on “60 Minutes,” which Lesher uses as a case study to illustrate the best and the worst of TV journalism...
...In her breathless, condescending tone (the reader is always “my dear,” “my poor darling,” or “my pussycat”), Gurley Brown dispenses such words of wisdom as “it’s okay to feel no real sense of responsibility in your early work life...
...Lloyd Wendi...
...Encounters with the Future: A Forecast of Life into the 2lst Century...
...What all this adds up to is that we should focus our economic help on the poor as a group, including the elderly, not on the elderly as a group, including the well-off...
...As a staff officer, 1 spent more time with the younger staff officers, my counterparts in the large departments, who were each day sifting information and intelligence that did not always get to the president...
...The Founding Fathers made the task of partiesdifficult if not impossible,” he argues, “by ordaining a permanent antagonism between the executive and the legislature which transcends party allegiance...
...Puinam, $13.95...
...are never revealed...
...After reading this book by Cosmo’s editor, I’m sure every bit of inane advice given in the magazine is, sadlyenough, meant to be followed faithfully...
...next day, the press reported, talking with these men about their views of the war...
...Unfortunately, Shogan avoids a thorough discussion ofthe prosand cons of these proposals...
...His strangest crusade is against Halloween-a night of “institutionalized extortion...
...And the Internal Revenue Service, of all people, has come out in favor of our ten-year-old proposal to call in the big bills...
...The Times also ran an excellent long article under the headline “Deteriorating Public Facilities Are Held a Threat to the Nation’s Economy...
...Houghion Mifflin, $13.95...
...Recalling $100 bills to change their color or discontinue them would enable the government to identify and catch the drugpushers, gamblers, and other tax evaders who deal almost exclusively in cash and who, if the government required an exchange, would either have to come forward or lose their illgotten gains...
...And nobody seems to know what to do with the Senate, the one constitutional institution specifically protected from amendment...
...As Congress continues to avoid the great debate that must take place on social security, the Democrats are displaying their statesmanship with a television ad featuring scissors clipping away at a social security card and a voice saying, “It isn’t fair...
...At the end she asks, “Do you not know people who, if they would give up some idiotic behavior, let in common sense and reason, would not be infinitely happier and more productive...
...it’ll show you care...
...The Bombing Officer...
...Do they deliberately disregard their orders...
...Warner, $17.50...
...P. K. Success by Design: The Real Reasons Behind Japan’s Economic Miracle...
...the refusal to remove disruptive children from class so the remainder can learn...
...debacle in Southeast Asia-such as Tim OBrien’s Going Afier Carcia10 and Robert Stone’s Dog Soldiers-add this tautly written, fast-moving account of the secret U.S...
...Gurley Brown writes as the selfappointed “mouseburger” mentor...
...the bright but obsequious deputy chief of mission, anxious to keep things running smoothly...
...air war in Laos...
...to another on love (why not ask your man for a copy of “that terrific letter he wrote to Consolidated Freightways about their new forklifts...
...The people down below usually know more about what’s going on in places like Dixon, Illinois, than the people at the top...
...Faced with the “institutional obstacle course created by the Constitution ,” John Kennedy turned to foreign adventures, while Lyndon Johnson sought a nonpartisan consensus by promising everything to everybody (“We’re fora lot of things, and we’re against mighty few,” LBJ once said...
...Now, from the president’s viewpoint, raw Just a couple of years ago 99 “For much of his data is sometimes essential information...
...Others, like eliminating primaries and letting party leaders choose presidential candidates, seem undemocratic...
...This anecdotel a d e n , i n f o r m e d l o o k a t the author’s own profession is refreshingly candid...
...She complains about being fivefootfour and I IO pounds...
...Sharon Krauss Leaders: Profiles and Reminiscences of Men Who Have Shaped the Modern World...
...Times, $16.95...
...James Canan...
...not a heavy case, just a little one...
...In our first issue, in February 1969, Bill Moyers described how Lyndon Johnson was persuaded to abandon the escalation in Vietnam : information, the president depended on his line officers, his cabinet...
...Jerome Doolittle...
...the answers, however, need some more work...
Vol. 14 • October 1982 • No. 8
