TILTING AT WINDMILLS

...Can such radical change as I have been describing actually take place...

...We criticize liberalism not to destroy it but to renew it by freeing it from its myths, from its old automatic responses in favor of unions and big government and against business and the military...

...Charles Peters...

...In difficult cases they usually didn’t catch anyone...

...Well, Susan Watters of W tells of seeing “Reagan appointee Ronald Lauder, deputy assistant secretary of defense, who was hosting a luncheon for NATO defense attaches at Le Pavillon...

...Gwynne’s case, sometimes important...

...Which brings us back to what do Neoliberals agree about...

...The ambience and the look are nice...

...None tried to discover what was really happening with our programs...

...I have visited 28 countries in six months...

...These are people who could not be rehabilitated by a hundred of the country’s most brilliant psychiatrists working around the clock, and they need to be kept locked up-not as punishment but to protect the rest of us...

...And I think it means having a radical increase in the number of people who have worked in government...

...The best way to learn the reality of government and the problems it faces is to experience it first-hand...

...I suspect one reason for this is that neoliberals, in their concentration on defining their differences with conventional liberalism, neglect to give proper emphasis to areas of solidarity, of which the struggle for racial and sexual equality is surely one...

...It does help to know what you’re talking about...

...The police have arrested an innocent man and you are going to be the bright and brave young David who saves him from the Goliath prosecution...

...We reject liberal leaders who cater to the special-interest groups of the left just as we do conservatives who cater to those of the right...

...He knew what he could see in O’Brien...

...The politics of responsibility can be accused of being idealistic...

...They travel the world like itinerant brushmen, filling loan quotas, peddling financial wares, and living high on the hog...

...There are large areas in which we are in almost complete agreement with other liberals-from protection of the environment to opposition to any form of racial, religious, or sexual discrimination...

...This means that Citibank can have a very good year even though many of its loans may be in serious trouble...

...And so there was built up during the war a great feeling of comradeship and fellowship and loyalty...

...Doing our part doesn’t mean we have to be suckers...

...Or at least to have developed instincts for the story, for what smells true, based on actual experience...

...This means a lot more of the kind of reality journalism to which The Washington Monthly has been dedicated...

...I wanted to uncover what was really wrong with those institutions and try to figure out what should be done about it...

...To me this was the first suggestion of the beginnings of a movement...

...Gwynne, with his life experience of a similar lack of memory at his bank, would see that there was probably a real story here and would go after it with the zeal born out of confidence...

...But the senior bankers are fish out of water when it comes to international lending...

...By the time the borrower suspended its debt payments, all of the loan officers who had worked on it had moved on to other banks...

...And of course it is just that...

...For example, while most of us favor a military or national service draft as a means of bringing people of all classes together in service to their country, some, like Taylor Branch and Michael Kinsley, vigorously oppose the idea...

...But when I found we were tending to agree on the analysis, I knew something larger was afoot...

...I came to the experience with the image of “The Wrong Man” in my mind...

...In civilian life, they feel they have only themselves to depend on...

...This is my third extended trip, and my territory has quickly expanded...

...They miss their wartime friends, and the understanding of their wartime friendships...

...Long before I became a journalist I was one of them...

...By 1941 the cruel depression of the thirties turned into 40 years of prosperity...

...For those of you who weren’t there, here’s a revised and abbreviated-out of mercy for those who wereversion of the speech I gave at the conference: When A Neoliberal’s Manifesto [The Washington Monthly, May 19831 was published, 1 received a number of warmly congratulatory letters from prominent political figures...

...T 1 he good news about our conference on neoliberalism is that more than 300 people attended, twice the number we expected.,They were a lively mix of journalists like Ken Auletta, James Fallows, and Michael Kinsley...

...W hile semester hours of education administration and degrees in communications are likely to be meaningless, actual experience is, as we saw in S.C...

...In international lending, American banks frequently violate the oldest precepts of lending against security...

...I started The Washington Monthly because I suspected that what I saw wrong with the coverage of the Peace Corps was wrong with the coverage of public institutions generally...

...The shock seemed to hold true for those who saw the subsequent film versions of the play, the first starring Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell, the second starring Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau...

...We reject the Me Decade and the proliferation of special-interest groups that was its political manifestation...

...Their bosses are often bright but hopelessly inexperienced 29-year-old vice presidents with wardrobes from Brooks Brothers, MBAs from Wharton or Stanford, and so little credit training they would have trouble with a simple retail installment loan...

...Those very words appeared last month in a personnel advertisement by the District of Columbia Board of Education seeking applicants for the positions of “assistant to the assistant superintendent for division operations” and “assistant to the assistant superintendent for planning and special projects!’ Both jobs pay up to $46,370 a year...

...In electoral terms it means voting for a candidate not on the basis of what he has done for you or your special group but on the basis of what he has done for the community as a whole...

...At the root of this worldwide lending problem:’ Gwynne continues, “is a very simple concept called ‘securityl When you borrow money to buy a car, the bank takes title to the car as ‘securityl If you default under the terms of your loan, the bank can sell the car and recoup the rest of its money...

...When theatergoers of the 1920s were first exposed to Ben Hecht’s and Charles MacArthur’s The Front Page, they were supposed to have been shocked by the fact that the editor in the play was perfectly willing to see a man die to make a good news story...

...They include such leading hawks as Richard Perle and Fred Ikle...

...There are people at the top who make the policies and give the orders and there are some hapless souls at the bottom who actually do the work...

...What we saw as the answer to this problem was a politics of responsibility, of sharing, of doing our part...

...I think his banking experience will prove valuable to him...

...I also reject the Atari Democrat label because it implies that our only concerns are economic, when in fact we are committed to a broad program of social justice and rededication to the ideals of the Declaration of Independence...

...While others of us agree that there is a de facto industrial policy now that is bad and should be faced and changed, we do not support concentrating our bets on a high-tech future...

...That’s why I think it is important to open up roughly half of the government jobs to short-term-two- to fiveyearappointments to people from all over the country who could not only learn but bring to Washington and to their state capitals a feeling for grass-roots reality that the average civil servant lost long ago...

...Inbetween there are people who “coordinate:’ “monitol’ and ‘‘evaluate...

...I said: “We’re not neoconservative, we’re neoliberal!’ To that sophisticated audience, the term had immediate meaning...

...And, as I have recently noted, an explosion of this kind of reporting has occurred in the world of business...

...I was reminded of the person who, in a similar situation, wrote, “I have always been a secret admirer of yours-and hope to remain so...

...First, as a beginning lawyer in the late fifties, I was assigned to represent a good many defendants in criminal cases-perhaps 20 in all...

...All this doesn’t mean that neoliberals don’t disagree...

...Yet the wrong man myth continues to dominate the liberal mind...

...The way we have behaved as a people in recent ,years has made that line sound naive, even absurd...

...Now, in my first experience with the executive branch I found the civil service was not at all what I and other liberals imagined it to be...

...Literally millions...

...Then I thought it was a movement devoted to a new kind of journalism combining diligent and imaginative investigation with thoughtful analysis of possible causes and possible solutions...

...1 wonder if there will be any shock today among those who read what Maynard Parker, the editor of Newsweek, said about his magazine’s cover story on the Beirut bombing, in which over 200 Marines lost their lives: “We’re very exhilarated by this...

...But The Washington Monthly has found six top officials of the Department of Defense whose resumes show no evidence of any active duty in the military...

...There’s nothing wrong with making money or being a professional or having good taste if-and this is crucialit doesn’t divert you from doing work that counts...

...But the criminals who were guilty of cold-blooded violence were scary people...

...NOW they miss the feeling of interdependence, that sense of working together for a common cause...

...The board is also advertising for a “public relations specialist” who can earn $40,000...

...You can’t expect a politician to rise above the special interest unless you let him know you’ll support him if he does...

...We believe in a society that shares its burdens and rewards...

...And it is interest that hits the bottom line of a bank’s profit-and-loss statement...

...and people on the firing line like Bruce Babbitt, the governor of Arizona, Peggy Holliday, a principal from North Carolina, Bill Honig, California’s school superintendent, Donald Burr, the entrepreneur who heads People Express, and Walter Bish, the union leader who helped save Weirton Steel...

...They do happen, but they’re relatively rare...

...It was as an editor that I came up with the word “neoliberal!’ The occasion was The Washington Monthly’s tenth anniversary party, and I was responding to an article that had described us as neoconservative...

...Such rapid job movement is common in banking...

...The vicious antiCatholic feeling that cost John Kennedy several states in 1960 had almost entirely disappeared, thanks to his presidency and the papacy of John XXIII, by the time of Kennedy’s death in 1963...

...The latest example comes from the September issue of Harper’s, in which S.C...

...I joined that bank as a ‘credit analyst’ on the strength of an MA in English...

...The world of international banking -is now full of aggressive, bright, but hopelessly inexperienced lenders in their mid-twenties...

...Now is the time to redeem it from that sorry usage and restore its true power and nobility...

...And I can tell you that on Cabin Creek every little store and every filling station had a sign in the window saying, “We Do Our Part:’ In institutional terms doing our part means forgoing what’s good for your company or your agency when it’s not good for the country...

...Since the Peace Corps was a liberal idea, we got automatically favorable coverage from most reporters...

...My second reality experience was getting to know the federal civil service when I came to Washington in the early sixties...

...Remember what Woodrow Wilson said: “They call me an idealist...

...At the heart of the politics of responsibility is choosing work that counts...

...John Lehman, the superhawk secretary of the Navy, took his risks in the reserves...

...But as a politician in West Virginia, would I ever have gone up Cabin Creek and proclaimed, “We’re not neoconservatives, we’re neoliberals...

...Founded to protect the brave, it had attracted the cautious, too many people who wanted job security more than anything else, too many people who lacked the drive and imagination of the risk-taker, and worst of all, too many people who were not concerned with the public because they were not accountable to the public...

...If my rich Aunt Alice has to give up the Social Security she uses to go to Paris, your deadbeat brother-in-law should give up the unemployment compensation he spends in Miami Beach...

...And who could have dreamed in 1960 that just a decade later black and white football players would be hugging each other on the sidelines when Alabama scored a touchdown...

...They were all guilty...

...H ow do the top officials at the Defense Department hold up under the grim responsibilities of sending men to their death in Lebanon and Grenada...

...Let’s make it sound right again...

...Of course I wouldn’t have, because there is no reason to expect the average man to understand “neoliberal:’ and that’s why I think we’ve got to find a better word if we want this movement to grow, as I’m confident it can...

...Gwynne tells how the interaction of the human nature of a young banker with the institutional pressures of international finance contributed to the Third World debt crisis...

...I am far from alone in my youth and inexperience...

...There is another curious aspect to this: even though the banks may allow a country such as Poland to ‘reschedule’ its debtallowing it 20 years instead of ten to repay, for example-the interest payments keep coming...

...I was taught to develop a set of rationales that would make the home office feel good about the loan, even though, technically, it was ‘unsecured: ” To investigate one loan, Gwynne flew to the Philippines, where the applicant had him met ,by a Mercedes with a woman inside who informed him that she and it were at his disposal...

...I’ve found that I’m not alone in what I think, that there are people from all over the country who feel the same way...

...All this doesn’t mean that Some support an industrial Second, we are realists...

...But in the months that followed, most of these people seemed less than eager to wear the neoliberal label in public...

...A politics of responsibility would mean that we would no longer insist on this tax subsidy or that wage increase without regard to its impact on the national community, that where service or sacrifice was necessary in the common interest, we would do our part, whether that meant enlisting in the military for two years or simply reading to an old lady or giving up our claim to government benefits like Social Security when we’re well enough off anyway and there are others who need more...

...Reduced to its essence, that analysis was that this nation had become the victim of a politics of selfishness, selfishness that was both personal and institutional...

...Some support an industrial policy that would favor certain industries...

...The last thing we should want to do is separate ourselves from others by using words they don’t understand, for neoliberalism is first and foremost a movement of community...

...T he-recent stories about the 30th anniversary of the discovery of DNA reminded me of a writer to whom this magazine is indebted...

...There are real differences among us that mean there is little danger the movement will become monolithic...

...And the few who were hostile looked only for scandal...

...President, I am disturbed by the.earlier comments of my fellow colleagues, the Senator from Texas and the Senator from Idaho, concerning passenger bus axle weight limits on our nation’s highways and bridges...

...I believe radical change can happen because I’ve seen it happen...

...First of all-and most important of all-we are liberals...

...Thus many of the people who make the big international loans are not around to collect them when they go bad, and, conversely, the people who are collecting the bad loans are not the people who made them in the first place, and therefore feel only vaguely responsible!’ Gwynne has now become a journalist...

...Too many young journalists lack this sure sense of smell, because they have gone straight from school to their careers in writing...

...The restaurant specializes in desserts like terrine of bittersweet Kron chocolate mousse with a hazelnut and almond praline sauce, and strawberries over apple marmalade with a red wine sauce:" Watters describes Le Pavillon as Lauder’s favorite hangout and quotes him as saying: “It’s the best French restaurant in Washington...

...It is frightening to realize that our public schools are run by people who take such credentials seriously...

...The public relations job requires “a bachelor’s degree in a communications field such as journalism, advertising, creative writing, and/or public relations...

...what makes it more interesting in this case is that I am 25 years old, with one and a half years of banking experience...

...I spent the next few days praying that he had not learned I was living here...

...It’s one of the few places that uses real crystal and real silverware...

...He is James Watson, whose Double Helix, published a year before The Monthly’s birth, demonstrated that modern social institutions, in his case the world of science, could be better understood if they were viewed as an anthropologist with some sense of humor would look at the natives on some obscure island...

...I had just left the West Virginia legislature where, as a typical young liberal, I had drafted, sponsored, and acted as floor manager for the state’s first civil service law...

...The “assistant to the assistant” jobs require a master’s degree, including “six semester hours in educational administration and supervision...

...We believe in a policy that encourages economic growth in the form of letting a thousand flowers bloom because we are not at all sure which ones will be the biggest winners...

...You can see the entire chamber rising as one to cheer...

...My experience was that this was true of only about half-and they were almost all young, nonviolent, first offenders or people who had committed hot-blooded violent crimes during family arguments...

...As for Ronald Lauderremember, he’s the defense official who loves to eat at Le Pavillion-did he ever serve in the infantry on a submarine or in any branch of the military...

...That’s how I know I’m an American...

...In the fifties “responsibility” became a code word in the establishment to communicate that the person so described could be counted on to wear a gray flannel suit and never rock the boat...

...We do our part!’ When I was a boy that was the slogan of the NRA and it stirred something in the average man never seen before or since in this country...

...One veteran told me that when he brought one of his Army friends to his home, his wife said, ‘What can you possibly see in O’Brien?’ The veteran remembered O’Brien in Italy, walking with him from Sicily to the Po Valley, every bloody mile of the way...

...If, for example, some disgruntled government employee came to them with a story about the lack of institutional memory in our AID, CIA, military, and state department missions abroad, they would have no idea whether he was right or wrong...

...A year and a half after making this loan-and about a year before this loan went into nonaccrual:’ Gwynne continues, “I left the bank for a job with one of the big West Coast banks...

...Here are some of his observations: “International banking is an interesting business anyway, but...

...The truth is that the police seldom got the wrong man...

...E om another source we have learned a fact that illustrates what Gwynne means about how good the current figures can look while potentially serious trouble looms in the future: consider that Citicorp earned $221 million in the third quarter of this year while the amount of its total capital involved in loans to just five Latin American countries now stands at 174.5 percent...

...What must have happened is that in the course of faithfully following the instructions of his aide and of the Greyhound lobbyist, Senator Burdick accidentally sent the aide’s memo to the recording clerk’s office along with the statement to be inserted in the Record...

...T 1 t has long been my conviction that in bureaucracy as in human beings, fat tends to concentrate around the middle...

...And it ended on what for me was just the right note when Jim Wolfe, a union official from Cincinnati, got up and said, “What this weekend has meant to me is that I don’t have to think I’m a weirdo anymore...

...My third reality experience was with the way the government agency for which I worked, the Peace Corps, was covered by the press...

...Remember the Hitchcock film...

...Their bosses, sitting on the senior loan committee, are pragmatic, nuts-and-bolts bankers whose grasp of local banking is often profound, the product of 20 or 30 years of experience...

...An entire episode of a recent “60 Minutes” program was devoted to such a case...

...Another liberal myth about crime is that practically all criminals could be rehabilitated...

...They could not be fired unless their agency’s budget was cut, and it was to the avoidance of that unhappy possibility that whatever dedication they could muster was devoted...

...No, but he was executive vice president of Estee Lauder cosmetics...

...Too many people are devoting their lives to making money or to achieving the status of being professionals, or to simply proving they have good taste by going to the latest “in” place for their vacation or buying the right car or having the right books on their shelves and the right magazines on their coffee tables...

...academics like James David Barber, Amatai Etzioni, and Mancur Olson...

...I wish more young journalists would seek real-world experience before they go into writing...

...If you think community is unobtainable, John Kennedy, in 1946, when he was only 29 years old and campaigning for the first time for Congress, described how community had ‘been attained during World War 11: “Most of the courage shown in the war came from men’s understanding of their interdependence on each other...

...Well, I never had an innocent man...

...of citizens proudly marched in parades to demonstrate their determination to share the burden...

...In my own life there were three experiences where the gap between liberal myth and reality was dramatic...

...The people they did arrest had usually been apprehended as they were passing color television sets out the store window...

...Several years ago I read that one I defended back in West Virginia had broken out of jail in Washington...

...We want a leader who will challenge us to rise above our personal and group interests when they conflict with those of the community...

...Turn to page S 14575 of the October 25 Record and you will find what would appear to be a discussion on the Senate floor in which Senator Quentin Burdick of North Dakota begins his remarks, “Mr...

...A politics of responsibility is going to require a public that knows and understands what’s wrong with the government well enough to vote for candidates who can make things right...

...In the Department of Defense, for example, I would like to have, as the leaders who put our troops at risk, men who have been troops themselves and know how those risks taste and feel...

...We have, of course, tried to use this same approach to the world of politics and government...

...The market these days is so hot that, if you have done reasonably well in your job, you can not only double your salary but you can virtually pick the city in which you would like to live...

...The conference started on the right note when the first panelist to speak, Bruce Babbitt, began by declaring that the Democratic party had for too long been “held in bondage by the education establishment...

...But international banks cannot ‘tag’ a banana crop in the Philippines, or grab the copper as it comes out of the mine in Chile and sell it in Chicago...

...I understand the politicians’ problem...

...Men were saving other men’s lives at the risk of their own simply because they realized that perhaps the next day their lives would be saved in turn...

...I was fascinated by the fact that a lot of energetic and thoughtful young people were attracted to that task, so attracted that they pursued it at considerable financial sacrifice...

...Burdick then provides a detailed and thoroughly persuasive case against favorable treatment for a bus used by Trailways and ringingly concludes, “Greyhound Bus Company would like you to insert the attached floor statement in today’s Congressional Record...

...TILTING AT WINDMILLS R eports that the Congressional Record is not a totally faithful transcript of what actually occurs in our legislative chambers are widely suspected to be true, as are the rumors that lobbyists and members’ staffs have a lot of influence on the action of our legislators, but I bet you have never encountered a smoking gun that proves them all beyond doubt...

...It means radically improved instruction in history and politics in our schools...

...Because I happened to be fluent in French, I was promoted 11 months later to loan officer and assigned to the French-speaking Arab countries of North Africa, where I made my first international calls...

...The bad news is that there were too few women and too few blacks...

...Everyone wanted his tax break or his wage increase without regard to whether it was in the interest of the country as a whole...

...In foreign affairs, we should say to Japan “we’ll do our part in our mutual defense and we’ll do our part on free trade, but you’ve got to do yours too!’ At home the worker who has taken a wage cut to help his company compete-and I think this is vitally important in many of our industries-has a right to ask managers and owners to take a cut too, and if the sacrifice works, and the company prospers, he gets his fair share of the profits...