POLITICAL BOOKNOTES
POLITICAL BOOKNOTES Eisenhower. Stephen Ambrose. Simon & Schuster; $22.95. This solid and thoughtful biography follows the general’s life from birth through his election as president in 1952....
...William J. Lynn...
...For those of us who would like to leave NATO to the Europeans, Ambrose has an interesting quote from Eisenhower in 1951: “If, in ten years, all American troops based in Europe for national defense purposes have not been returned to the United States, then this whole project will have failed...
...When Richard Nixon took office in 1969, oil was selling for $1 a barrel, a glut was in prospect, and the Arab oil producers were in disarray...
...This book tells us how our own government made it happen...
...The letter took Cripps 16 days to compose, and upon delivery was probably filed by some Russian desk officer, for all the good it did...
...However, it offers little new information on its promised topic-our current and past plans for nuclear war...
...Jack Anderson with James Boyd...
...Finally, I just put my face against a tree and cried for about 20 minutes!’ A few days later, when Representative Tom Downey approached Moffett to apologize for his defection, Moffett put it to him straight: “The fact is, you are a weak son of a bitch...
...And you will have to live with that!’ It’s a vivid moment in this informed but twodimensional tract that rails against just about every bad thing an oil company-or a sympathetic politician-has done in the past decade...
...Sherrill doesn’t give Downey’s side...
...I just couldn’t believe it:’ Moffett recalled...
...Martin Gilbert...
...The authors don’t always resist the temptation to take whatever position will make Nkon look bad...
...Only 8 percent of the public defender’s felony cases in Washington go to trial...
...I like Wimpy too...
...The Making of a Criminal Lawyer...
...Sherrill’s preoccupation gives him blind spots...
...Ronnie Dugger...
...P. “How Can You Defend Those People...
...Here is Nixon putting off Anwar Sadat’s peace overtures until after the ’72 election, for fear of offending Jewish voters...
...Cripps, whose opinion of himself was a good deal higher than anyone else’s, decided the message would have more impact as part of a long letter from him to Vyshinsky, the Soviet foreign minister...
...But if buying votes with campaign funds is bad when your enemies do it, it at least deserves a frown when your friends do the same...
...An angry and sharply-worded book, this is a relentless indictment-with example tripping over example-of how the president’s policies benefit the privileged few and screw the many...
...WW Norton, $16.95...
...After he failed by one vote to derail the deregulation of natural gas, then-representative Toby Moffett confided his feelings to Sherrill...
...Random House, $15.95...
...Nixon in the culprits list, for example, is Ambassador to Iran Douglas MacArthur 11, who seemed to identify more with the Shah than with the American public at a time when OPEC was first challenging the balance of power in the Middle East...
...Unfortunately Kimball’s life, seemingly unaffected by his security ratings, turns out to be a lot less interesting than what the files themselves reveal about the earnest ineptitude of the State Department officials and FBI agents who suspected him of being a bad security risk because he drank beer with communists and was “an apologist of Marshall Tito...
...Doubleday, $19.95...
...By that time, however, it was too late, and the Yom Kippur War, and OPEC’s discovery of its strength, were at least in part the result...
...The main culprit, the authors say, is Mr...
...When William Winpisinger, head of the Machinists Union, does the same to Democrats who vote to deregulate natural gas, St...
...Here is Nixon leaving us vulnerable to OPEC by failing to push for either more drilling or more conservation, either of which would ruffle feathers...
...Joining Mr...
...Times Books, $17.50...
...contingency plans for waging nuclear war suffers a more serious flaw-inadequate research...
...Federal spooks tracked Kimball, a professor at Columbia University, for most of his adult life, and almost everything in his 269-page file is found in this autobiography...
...Francis couldn’t have been more pure...
...Plan for Nuclear War...
...It makes you wonder whether they’d know an honest-to-goodness communist if they saw one...
...The definitive book on the S.I.O.P...
...This sixth volume of the great man’s authorized biography is far less readable than Churchill’s own enthralling account of the same years but it’s far more thorough and thus a valuable contribution...
...Nixon himself, who at every turn tried to distance himself from trouble, less concerned with what happened than who got the credit or blame...
...Charles Peters Fiasco...
...13.95...
...Robert Sherrill...
...that’s bad...
...Is the man really to be faulted, for example, for stopping offshore development after the huge Santa Barbara oil spill...
...They do, however, tell a rich and engaging tale...
...James S. Kunen...
...McGraw-Hi14 817.95...
...As the president doggedly works to moderate his image-casting overboard the likes of Anne Burford and James Watt and trying to bury his record on issues like hunger and education beneath new commissions and rhetorical flourishes-it is good, albeit unsettling, to be reminded that the current occupant of the Oval Office once said, “We have received [the] progressive income tax direct from Karl Marx, who designed it!’ -Ronald Bro wnstein S.I.O.P.: The Secret U.S...
...Houghton Mifflin, $40...
...has yet to be written...
...Anne E. Depue The Oil Follies: 1970 to 1980...
...But it leaves the reader wondering whether it’s too much to ask that a larger portion of the guilty get what they deserve...
...When old Republican boss Mark Hanna threatens to withhold campaign contributions if Ohio’s attorney general keeps pressing antitrust action against Standard Oil...
...Even more disturbing than the obvious violation of Kimball’s privacy is that our intelligence branches spent so long collecting so little information of real import...
...For those of you still wondering why Churchill habitually referred to Sir Stafford Cripps as Sir Stifford Crapps, the explanation is here...
...The author, a former public defender in Washington, D.C., spent most of his time manipulating the legal system for his indigent (and almost always guilty) clients by plea bargaining or moving for mistrial...
...Ben Holmes Finest Hour...
...The staccato rhythm can get a bit wearying, and there is not much here that careful Reagan-watchers don’t already know-with one noticeable exception: Dugger has mined gold from the radio broadcasts that Reagan made between 1975 and 1979, a resource heretofore largely overlooked by journalists...
...I walked across the driveway [of Congress] and started shaking...
...This is a lively and entertaining account, distinguished by Kunen’s keen eye for bureaucratic absurdity and a saving sense of humor...
...When Nixon left office in 1974, oil was at $12 a barrel, shortages loomed, and the major oil companies had joined with a united OPEC to squeeze us for all they could...
...While ambassador to Moscow, Cripps, in the spring of 1941, was instructed to deliver immediately an urgent personal message from Churchill to Stalin that British intelligence had “sure information” the Germans were planning to invade Russia...
...Jonathan Rowe On Reagan: The Man and His Presidency...
...Kunen came to play the game so well that he even convinced a client who insisted on his sanity to plead insanity, and, in another case, to help a client “get away with murder...
...Penn Kimball...
...Aside from annoying factual errors (such as the misspelling of Robert McNamara’s name), this book on the U.S...
...Jonathan Rowe The File...
...Peter Pringle and William Arkin...
...Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich...
...The book dwells at length on such secondary matters as military communications and early warning networks, release and launch procedures for nuclear weapons, and the number of potential Soviet targets...
Vol. 15 • December 1983 • No. 9
