POLITICAL BOOKNOTES
POLITICAL BOOKNOTES Channels of Power: The Impact of Television on American Politics. Austin Ranney. Basic Books, $14.95. Finally, a sensible book about how television has changed politics....
...Ronald Radosh and Joyce Milton...
...Seymour Melman...
...Steinem’s treatment of lesbianism, for example, reassures us that it is but one verse of feminism rather than the whole song-an attitude unlike that of many feminists who have alienated middle America by making women’s rights and lesbianism one and the same issue...
...She looked available-and she-was...
...Television makes life difficult for politicians, says Ranney, a political scientist, but not because news executives have joined any creepy conspiracies on the left or right...
...Phillip Longman...
...Best of all is “I Was a Playboy Bunn$’ the first piece of the collection...
...Steinem lied her way into a Playboy bunny job in 1963 to write this story...
...I didn’t...
...Although Steinem’s matter-offact essays prick the conscience, her reportorial pieces-where she comments on feminism through the vehicle of a Linda Lovelace or a Pat Nixon-are the most convincing...
...The insidious cost-plus contracts, he maintains, have inclined a whole generation of managers to pass along costs rather than minimize them, and this has disrupted the dynamic which, not too long ago, enabled us to pay the world’s highest wages and at the same time turn out the best, and lowestpriced, products...
...Holt, Rinehart, $22.50...
...Gloria Steinem...
...Barbara Matusow...
...He is especially strong on showing how burgeoning defense spending has warped the thinking of managers in critical industries such as machine tools...
...Emily Lazar Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions...
...My public position is that the Rosenbergs were innocent!’ A “well-known left-wing lawyer” who also believes the Rosenbergs were guilty went so far as to threaten to sue Radash and Milton if they attributed that statement to him...
...Instead, it’s because of the way TV news works...
...Cooper elevates the long-standing political and intellectual rivalry of these two presidents to a plane of significance more customarily reserved for that of Jefferson and Hamilton...
...Timothy Noah The Evening Stars: The Making of the Network News Anchor...
...But you can’t quote me...
...TN...
...Jonathan Rowe The Rosenberg File: A Search for the Ruth...
...And there’s the stinging injustice that while the Rosenbergs wen1 to the chair, Klaus Fuchs, who passed along far more important secrets, got only 14 years when he was tried in Britain...
...But when the book was published “without any of her revelations,” the first lady showed her “quiet gratitude” by listing it in a national magazine as one of her “favorite books that yea?’ Martin’s new book reveals more-for instance, that JFK spent most of his private moments on crutches because of back pain-but maintains an obsequious tone about what Martin calls the Kennedy “magic” that should help the book make it to the top of Jackie Onassis’s list this year...
...The first day on the job she-like all the other bunniesshoved her body into a two-sizestoosmall electric-blue French-cut bunny suit, stuffed her bosom with a dry cleaner’s bag, and tottered out to the club in four-inch heels...
...Cooper believes that during the postwar era Americans have tended to exaggerate the ideological significance of the New Deal...
...The oddest thing about the book is that in focusing on Kennedy’s personal life rather than his political accomplishments, Martin seems to almost deliberately avoid answering Garry Wills’s criticisms of JFK’s presidency in The Kennedy Imprisonment, while at the same time doing everything he can to resurrect the Kennedy image indirectly...
...Of the two of us, she seemed the more honest!’ -Teresa Riordan Profits Without Production...
...In the process, the question of their guilt has become bound up with the question of whether they deserved to die...
...Bringing the insights of industrial engineering to the problem of declining productivity, Melman shows how management powertripping, and not efficiency nor the demands of changing technologies, gave rise to the mind-numbing assembly-line production modes which have become an albatross to American industry...
...The book is filled with similar gossipy vignettes, but there’s at least one useful insight about the industry: the men and women who appear on the evening news are surprisingly uncredentialed (only a handful ever finished college...
...But it is possible to believe that the Rosenbergs were guilty and at the same time recognize that justice was not served in their death...
...Wilson, in this analysis, is found “enunciating the basic tenets of the broker-state and welfare-state views that later held sway among Democrats and reformist circles!’ He also comes to stand for the selfconsciously antagonistic attitude toward big business that has marked some strains of postwar liberalism...
...Macmillan, $19.95 In explaining why he wrote this long, ramblingly anecdotal and ultimately fawning biography of John F. Kennedy, Martin recalls a cozy afternoon he spent back in 1959 being charmed by Jackie Kennedy in the course of researching a book on presidential campaigns...
...Radosh and Milton untangle the two issues, and conclude that Julius was definitely guilty, Ethel was probably guilty, and that neither of them ought to have been put to death...
...Holt, Rinehart, $14.95...
...Do we really need to hear, for example, that a visit to our local hi-fi store reveals that “only a minor part of the sophisticated products offered for sale are made in the U.S...
...Radosh and Milton make a persuasive case that the real reason for Ethel’s prosecution was to make Julius confess...
...Walking home from work that night, Steinem passed a woman “smoking a cigarette and watching the street...
...Ever since Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were electrocuted as “atom spies” back in 1953, they have been regarded by the left almost exclusively as symbols of cold war hysteria...
...She must have had ‘morning after’ concerns about things she had told me that could have been sensationalized so easily,” Martin writes...
...John Milton Cooper Jr...
...But then TV sabotages these same politicians by judging them too soon and encouraging public duels instead of private compromises...
...the polarities of political debate in our own time owe not so much to FDR and his oppositon, he argues, as to Wilson and the earlier Roosevelt...
...I smiled back...
...Is it any wonder we keep throwing them out...
...Houghton Mvflin, $14.95...
...Tina Rosenberg A Hero For Our Time: An Intimate Story of the Kennedy Years...
...Her hair was bright blond and her coat bright red...
...KnopJ $18.95...
...This book is, among other things, a sign of the times...
...E n years ago, not many would have predicted that we would now be reading avidly about industrial design in the machine-tool industry...
...Melman, thank goodness, moves quickly past such yawners into original and, I think, intriguing terrain...
...Harvard University Press, $20...
...Did you know that in 1899 there were ten managers for every 100 production workers, while today there are 43 for every loo...
...Ralph G. Martin...
...This collection of essays and articles from the past two decades echoes the same sensible tone...
...The Warrior and the Priest: Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt...
...Such dishonesty is regarded as expedient by these ideologues because of the larger question of whether the witch hunts of the fifties were justified...
...Yet here we are...
...And while I’ve sworn off stories of Japanese management, I can’t help pointing out that in Japan’s machine-tool industry, the engineers actually go to work on the shop floor so they can understand the tools and processes they are inflicting upon others...
...In places, there’s a Rip Van Winkle quality, as though the author doesn’t realize we’ve been told some of this before...
...There is a generous sprinkling of statistical gems...
...Although the argument that Julius really was a spy will be new to most of us who were brought up to believe the prevailing liberal mythology about the case, the odd thing is that at least one Communist party lawyer the authors spoke with openly admitted, “Of course they were guilty...
...Gloria Steinem’s feminist voice has always sounded soothingly rational amidst the chorus of outraged cries from her more strident sisters...
...In this anecdotal analysis of television news anchors, Barbara Matusow reveals that back in his newspaper days Walter Cronkite once burgled a private home to get his story’s necessary goods...
...Roosevelt, by contrast, stands in opposition to “the degeneration of interest-group politics into narrow conflicts that strain national cohesion and debase politics into a scramble for favors!’ His legacy has faded since the sixties as northeastern Republican liberals lost influence in the party and at last became extinct...
...To fill each evening’s broadcast with minidramas, reporters seek out conflict and inflated promises, raising our expectations of what government can do...
...She looked at me and smiled...
...The strategy proves ineffective because Wills’s criticisms of Kennedy the man were far more devastating than his criticisms of Kennedy the politician...
Vol. 15 • October 1983 • No. 7
