Tilting At Windmills
Peters, Charles
TILTING AT WINDMILLS A mystery often noted in these pages is how Ronald Reagan so resolutely ignores the fat in the defense budget that is obvious to almost everyone else in town, including...
...Eringer penetrated the Register’s inner sanctum long enough to learn that she was the one other power behind the scenes-but, alas, not long enough to ascertain her first name...
...But the advantage may be lost as economy dictates a switch to smaller cars...
...Cooks out there who suddenly are going to find themselves the objects of solicitude, flattery, and invitations to dinner...
...An impressive job was probably the best way to establish yourself quickly...
...So the hideous torment the defendant endured-the only doublejeopardywas sitting through a second round ofjury selection...
...We certainly can’t let that happen again,” meaning not the error, but the revelation...
...Also, most of us like to be published or mentioned favorably in its columns, events whose probability is not necessarily heightened by comments that its writers and editors perceive to be unfair, which usually includes even the most gently phrased criticism...
...The members of the Buffalo W hat do vou do if vou want to be in [he SocialRegister...
...The rest were voting illegally...
...Thus it is extremely important to have working for a rival paper a bright critic like Diana, who has absolutely no interest in or hope for favor from the Post...
...Right...
...Not his real vacation but a junket financed by the taxpayers to such centers of HUD program activity as China, Hong Kong, and Egypt...
...The defendant had not been forced to go through two trials, if you are so innocent as to think that’s what double jeopardy means...
...That number, however, is not published in any phone book in the state, nor can it be found through local directory information...
...Bradlee is of course a legend, and Lescaze is considered one of the bright hopes of the paper’s future...
...The House Appropriations Committee found this example in the 1983 budget of the District of Columbia: The various agencies of the city had based their budgets on gasoline costs estimated at anywhere from $1.30 to $1.82a gallon...
...The skepticism he consistently applies to the civilian side of government is 1 thus never brought to bear on the military, whose appropriations continue to rise as others are reduced...
...Perhaps some retired foreign service couple could increase their income and perform an act of mercy at the same time by publishing a guide for the neophyte junketeer: spring in Greece, late autumn in South Asia, January in Kenya...
...So, whenever evaluation is attempted, he and his colleagues, allied in this case as they are in no other, turn it into a joke...
...By whom...
...Now it’s the rumor of a merger, which instead of adding to the company, subtracts from possible productive use the capital needed to make the acquisition...
...Continuing decline...
...explaining (1 am indebted to Robert Shogan’s new book, None of the Above, for reminding me): “The hard fact is that Nixon lacks taste...
...Of course it was so delicious that the Post didn’t want to find out there was a hole in it...
...If management can’t favor the most productive, what’s going to happen to us...
...H ere’s another in our series of cases where the courts have freed the truly guilty and the truly dangerous for truly frivolous reasons...
...A false impression is what the Post readers got...
...citizens...
...I f you have been worrying about PAC domination of our political process, Andrew Mollison of the Cox Newspapers has good news for you...
...Things haven’t fallen completely apart at the Post...
...Was this fastbreaking news that demanded space today...
...institution in Washington ranks slightly behind the White House and the Congres: but well ahead of the Supreme Court, and any of the cabinet departments with the possible exception of Defense...
...You may have read that such raids revealed serious lapses in security...
...The one consolation for the taxpayers is that the poor man picked the wrong time of year...
...Newspaper Guild voted in September to let the CourierExpress close down rather than give management the right to reduce the number of employees and to choose which ones would be kept...
...Before 1977 you couldn’t be recognized by the Register if you didn’t live in one of the 12 cities for which its various volumes were published...
...Although there were enough errors to make the story 17 paragraphs long, it ran on page 20...
...You had only a few seconds to engage the attention of that stunning girl and you felt you had to flash your badges pretty fast...
...I n How Washington Really Works I noted that the average civil servant “doesn’t want his performance to be evaluated because, although it might bring praise and more rapid advancement, it might also bring the discovery that his performance has been less than superb...
...cars are safer than foreign cars...
...One other tip: If you don’t happen to run into Forbes or one of his sons, be sure to put on your most gracious face whenever you meet anyone named Mrs...
...Where else would you find such a sure guide to tasteful consumption...
...Government workers are up in arms about a Federal Express commercial that shows two postal employees chatting away while customers are ignored...
...attorney’s office in California recently checked the citizenship of 168 foreign-born voters...
...It seems to remain important today...
...Their political action committees, according to The Wall Street Journal, donated $340,000 to congressional candidates in the first half of this year...
...T here is troubling news from The Washington Post, troubling because it involves acts that were unworthy of the paper and of the men responsible for them, Lee Lescaze and Ben Bradlee...
...2) The latest report from the Commerce Department shows that investment for plant expansion and modernization, the investment that could fuel a recovery, is continuing to decline...
...This crucial fact was omitted from the Post story, Lescaze says, because it couldn’t be “confirmed...
...m e New Yorker became crucial...
...The reason taste became so important in the fifties was that the college degree, which before World War I1 marked one as a member of the educated elite, was radically discounted by the postwar GI Bill...
...Well, Albright found that the team that had conducted the raids had been disbanded...
...After establishing herself as Washington’s liveliest purveyor of gossip at The Washington Star, she, upon that publication’s demise a year or so ago, was hired by The Washington Post...
...Lescaze’s reporter, however, had been told the Times was planning to replace the killed review with an equally negative one by Vincent Canby of The New York Times...
...By the officials who were responsible for the security failures that had been uncovered...
...They are Michael Kinsley, the editor of Harper’s, who was faulted for having accepted a trip to Israel paid for by the government of Israel, and the aforementioned Diana McLellan, whose alleged sin was accepting employment with The Washington Times, thereby prostituting her talent for the good of the Moonies...
...Veterans of the Congress and the foreign service know when to junket to where...
...W here do you think Samuel R. Pierce Jr., secretary of Housing and Urban Development, spent the month of August...
...For many of my readers under 40, for whom draftdodging has been a highly respected way of life, this will be hard to understand...
...Liberal intellectuals tend to deride the average American’s traditional preference for large cars as a failure of taste, as another example of the vulgarity of mass culture...
...Why not hold the story until it could be confirmed...
...For example, the growing move of employers to small-car fleets can, according to a Johns Hopkins study, “double a worker’s likelihood of being killed in a job-related crash...
...Another way mergers hurt was recently reported by Wharton Magazine, which told of a study that found that, on the average, the more products a company has the lower its rate of profit will be...
...The decade ended with Arthur Schlesinger Jr...
...Or was it the kind of story that could have held for a day or two or three to avoid giving readers a false impression...
...It seems that Forbes and two of his sons, Christopher and Robert-remember to say they’re charming too-own all the shares of the Social Register Association...
...Witness what Helen Gurley Brown told an interviewer recently: “I’m terrified not to have a big job because it’s having a big job that makes me popular...
...The latest illustration of this observation came in September when the Office of Personnel Management revealed the number of GS 13, 14, and 15 “manager/ supervisors” who had been rated “unsatisfactory” under the new merit pay program: . I percent-that’s right,just one-tenth of one percent...
...Who should you make a point of being nice to...
...A union member said, “We found that concept of allowing them to pick and choose repugnant...
...But during World War I1 there was only scorn for the evader and even considerable embarrassment in the kind of assignment Reagan had, which was making training films while living at home...
...Reagan has always thought of himself as a patriot, yet his World War I1 service could, in the words of a charitable biographer, Lou Cannon, “hardly have been cushier...
...A few weeks ago I asked someone who had recently left that staff if he had an explanation...
...Lescaze’s Style section...
...Why couldn’t the original story have done the same...
...September 22 was a great day for The Washington Monthlv’s gospel on national security...
...Another factor causing misleading gyrations in the stock market is merger mania...
...In Diana’s case, there is no question she did the right thing...
...Yet there are powerful reasons for a journalist not to criticize it...
...So I think Kinsley was mostly wrong in this case, but I think he is right in his appraisal of conflict of interest in general...
...Only 59 were U.S...
...I am convinced that most of Adlai Stevenson’s most intensely devoted supporters were at least partly motivated by the feeling that supporting Stevenson demonstrated their taste and intelligence...
...TILTING AT WINDMILLS A mystery often noted in these pages is how Ronald Reagan so resolutely ignores the fat in the defense budget that is obvious to almost everyone else in town, including the president’s own White House staff...
...The department’s deputy commissioner explained to the Charleston Gazetre that all the public had to do was use another toll-free number...
...Reality was, I think, much more accurately and chillingly reflected by these two facts: 1) By mid-September the number of business failures for 1982 already had exceeded that of any year since 1933...
...This was one of those stories that are hard to resist because it seemed to be a smoking gun-the positive proof of what so many of us suspected, that the Times would ultimately display its true Moonie colors...
...Unfortunately , however, The New Republic has not been noted for the severity of its criticism of Israel...
...So the whole episode has the smell of sour grapes...
...But it may be that Federal Express is understating the case...
...During her first month there she reported that the Carters had bugged the Reagans at Blair House...
...Furthermore, working at the Post deprived Diana of one of her best targets...
...As for the sin of using her talent to enrich the Unification Church, the Times is losing money now and is sure to do so-dare I say-for many moons...
...On Thursday, Septemer 30, 1982, n e Washington Post ran its account of the mistakes Reagan had made at his press conference on Tuesday of that week...
...To make matters worse, the Emes had just the day before scored one of its rare triumphs over the Post...
...But in this case in particular, the temptation cried to be overcome...
...Not only is it on the whole an excellent paper, but manyjournalists have a lot of friends who work there...
...Shoplifters and traffic offenders should not be placed in the same holding area as accused murderers and armed robbers...
...convicted by a jury of seconddegree murder for beating to death the mother of a small child has had his conviction reversed on the ground of double jeopardy...
...Even the selection of a political candidate was seen as a way to display one’s intellectual superiority...
...But here is what they did: Bradlee killed a story called “Pomposity in Washington...
...Ah, well, while it may be a bit of a nuisance for the socially ambitious, still it’s nice to think of all the obscure Mrs...
...If I didn’t have it no one would be interested in inviting me to lunch...
...One has the feeling that this is the tip of a very large iceberg...
...One thing the sons have done is broaden the base, acording to Robert Eringer, an English writer who became interested in the subject...
...A U.S...
...So many good stories like Mollison’s.get ignored here...
...0 ne of the cruddier examples of special interest lobbying in recent months has been the effort of the commodity futures brokers to avoid paying a fee to finance their own regulation, as do bankers and stockbrokers...
...The proposed fee would have been something less than a crushing burden, exactly 12 cents on transactions on which brokers’ commissions now average $60 to $70, according to The New York nmes...
...Your chances of getting in are a good deal better today than they used to be...
...The correction waited for four days...
...Cook...
...Only 15 percent of the funds raised by the average PAC actually finds its way into the hands of the candidates...
...Most of us in journalism have had stories at one time or another that were so good we hated to ask one more question for fear we would find out that it was wrong or that it was not quite as mouth-watering as it had appeared to be...
...Charles Peters...
...The Highway Loss Data Institute and the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety recently conducted a study that found U.S...
...Perhaps he thought he could rely on the reputation he had made as editor of The New Republic...
...Because they are larger...
...His answer: guilt...
...Even more remarkable in this city of conventional liberals-who would want to solve the problem by letting everyone out of jail immediately-was that the Post editorial department came up with the right answer to the problem: “A clearly defined and rigorously enforced policy of separating violent and nonviolent detainees must be established...
...People had to find new ways of demonstrating their superiority...
...The study found that the decline in our international competitiveness is far greater than most people realize, involving 62 percent of our industry, ranging from textiles to leather goods to metal products to musical instruments to rubber products to machinery to lumber to sporting goods...
...Her evidence turned out to be a bit short of conclusive...
...It is hard to imagine a more perfect example of the classic bureaucratic response to the It’s too bad Cox Newspapers revelation of error...
...On vacation, you guess...
...There is, however, a very good reason for that preference: safety...
...But the new congressman or the new cabinet member often finds himself, having anticipated a joy-ride, unable to see the Taj Mahal clearly through sweatfogged sunglasses...
...Martin Peretz, the owner, is largely responsible for that fact, but how was the average reader to know...
...Small-car snobbery in America began with the Volkswagen in the fifties...
...Another factor in our economic decline-one that many of us believe is centralwas the subject of another recent study prepared for the National Science Foundation by the University of Wisconsin...
...It used to be that all a dad had to do to guarantee grandchildren was to see his daughter through her wedding day, which might have cost him a bundle, but at least i t all ended there...
...I also think he will be one of the great editors in Harper’s long and distinguished history...
...This was when snobbery exploded in America...
...I like and respect them both...
...from time to time, there is considerable fat in the budget requests government agencies send to Congress...
...In the snobbery explosion of the 1950s, probably the worst place to be was a cocktail party in New York...
...For the reader, Kinsley had to be slightly suspect on Israel and the problem was compounded by his accepting the trip...
...All the rest, in the glorious tradition of American fundraising organizations, is spent on overhead...
...It used to be thatthe rumors that started a stock on the way up were about a great new invention or the discovery of extensive mineral deposits somewhere...
...Even when the Post grudgingly corrected its error, it did so not where the article had been printed, but on the editorial page under the unrevealing headline, “A Newspaper Flap...
...Here are two headlines that appeared on the same page of The Washington Post: “Senate Panel Votes Cut in GIs in Europe” and “Defense Study Urges Shift to Subs...
...Why are the brokers succeeding so far with such a terrible cause...
...It’s terribly hard to resist the temptation to not ask that question...
...I was talking the other day to a man who confided he finally was able to persuade his daughter to produce the grandchild he wanted only by paying her the equivalent of her law firm salary for the time she had to spend away from work...
...doesn’t have an outlet in Washington...
...Even Washington’s new hero, Bob Dole, took $10,000...
...Kinsley himself The Post as an important As for Michael Kinsley, the captured the complexity best when, writing in these pages several years ago, he asked, “Is it a conflict of interest for a mother to have a second child?’ I think Michael’s error in this matter was making the trip too early in his tenurewithin his first year in fact-as editor of Harper’s, before its readers had had adequate opportunity to get to know him and beconie aware of his absolute independence and integrity...
...One thing is for certain: stop calling Malcolm Forbes a goddam lunatic for flying around in those balloons and immediately begin to refer to him as a lovable and brilliant eccentric of the kind we most definitely need more of...
...It also needs criticism, as I have from time to time indicated in this space...
...But not with the modern woman...
...Indeed, I attended a party ofjournalists the night after the Post article appeared, and all were chortling about how delicious it was...
...Today a prudent Washingtonian can do several cents better than the lower figure...
...It’s as simple as that...
...T wo old friends have recently come in for a lot of criticism...
...The Winfield, West Virginia, office of the state’s department of motor vehicles has an unlisted phone number to protect its employees, according to a department spokesman, from being “inconvenienced” by calls from the public...
...first point to make is that conflict of interest is a much more complicated subject than most realize...
...His reason seems to have been that among those the article nominated for the hall of fame of pomposity-including Claiborne Pell, Joseph Califano, Jack Valenti, Rowland Evans, Hugh Sidey, Edward Bennett Williams, and George Will-were several of his close friends...
...I fear that the great surge in the stock market has failed to reflect any reality other than the need to switch investments, which was dictated by falling interest rates...
...A jury had been picked for the first trial, but nothing else had happened-no questions asked, no evidence introduced-when suddenly the prosecutor became ill and a . A Los Angeles man who was mistrial was declared...
...Another example is a story by Joseph Albright about mock-terrorist raids at nuclear weapons plants...
...I was skeptical, believing it would still be important for the public to realize that the president often didn’t know what he was talking about...
...It is my friend’s theory that this guilt transformed Reagan into the kind of super-patriot who always salutes the generals...
...In September it ran a truly remarkable series on homosexual rape in the jails of nearby Prince Georges County, As we have tried to point out Maryland...
...But it would no longer be news,” Alter replied, reminding me that editors and reporters think not in terms of what is truly significant but almost solely in terms of what is news...
...Lescaze, who recently became editor of the Post’s Style section, gave 25 inches of space to an article pointing the finger of shame at The Washington Times, the local Moonie paper, for refusing to print a critical review of Inchon, a movie bankrolled by the Reverend Moon...
...A year or so ago, when Ronald Reagan’s press conference errors were frontpage news, my colleague, Jonathan AI ter, predicted that, even if the errors continued, the story would move deeper and deeper into the back pages...
...It lured Diana McLellan (“Ear”) away from Mr...
...Now there’s a national register, and even if you’re from Tennessee or Arkansas you can make it...
...This so alarmed her new bosses that they . proceeded to suffocate her talent under a team of lawyers and editors who were dedicated enemies of the spirit of mischief that motivates all the best gossip...
...For the Post is a giant and n e Washington 7fmes is a tiny, struggling competitor...
...Kennedy, on the other hand, was a “bookish man,” “exceptionally cerebral,” and, this above all: “non-corny...
Vol. 14 • November 1982 • No. 9
