POLITICAL BOOKNOTES
POLITICAL BOOKNOTES Deadly Gambits. Strobe Talbott. Knopf $17.95. This is the book Walter Mondale mentioned not once but twice in the second presidential debate. It's easy to see why he felt...
...Another fallout: enough ammunition to make fallacious analyses like those of ' Reagan ("SAT scores declined while federal spending for education increased") seem superficially plausible...
...The president doesn't really participate...
...Conservatives are eager to insinuate that less money is somehow better, while liberals rush to embrace more money as the best, if not the only, solution...
...The result...
...For example, Phillips describes the "Atari" Democrats as "upper-middle-class politicians, educated at Ivy League colleges, representing affluent districts with a substantial high-tech presence...
...Random House, $15.95...
...In Tsongas's decision not to run again is the implicit assumption that this is the way things have to be...
...In this book, Ronald Reagan, the satirist's dream, is passed over as "more committed to a body of principles than any American president in 50 years...
...The book's economic proposals are largely self-serving nonsense, but hidden in the fog of 161 wellpadded pages are some useful political points...
...Phillip Keisling The World According to Jimmy Breslin...
...Tyrrell considers feminists, homosexuals, civil rights activists, environmentalists, consumerists, and peace advocates foolish...
...But there is little of the meat of Menckenhis solid reportage and perceptive observations...
...Higgins's ideas on these subjects are at times invigorating (he is excellent at dissecting public and private hypocrisy) but are marred by his scorn for every aspect of modern life in the city of Boston (save sailing and skiing)—especially that of the poor sods who live there, whom he trashes with vigor regardless of race, sex, creed, or sexual preference...
...They just represent smaller parts of the population...
...The situation sadly resembled the long-standing defense debate between conservatives and liberals, only with the roles reversed...
...No one should expect a president to know all technical details, but he might be expected to know, for instance, that the names attached to Soviet missiles (SS-18, SS-19, etc...
...Art Levine...
...Richard Perle reports to Fred lkle, who reports to Caspar Weinberger, who reports to the president, yet Talbott shows that it's Perle who calls the tune...
...This is the story of Massachusetts Senator Paul Tsongas's discovery that he has cancer and of his decision not to run for an assured second term but to return to his hometown of Lowell with his family...
...A presidential task force composed of outside experts and key government officials delivers a ringing denunciation of a serious problem...
...Louis D. Brandeis—the selfproclaimed "people's lawyer" who played a major role in the formation of the FTC...
...It's clear from this book that until he leaves government there can be no arms control—period...
...James C Rosapepe Style Versus Substance: Boston, Kevin White, and the Politics of Illusion...
...What kind of a book George V. Higgins has written can be deduced simply by studying the paragraph lengths...
...Talbott proves that Nitze's "walk in the woods" agreement—a genuine breakthrough—was sabotaged in Washington as well as Moscow, Reagan's debate denials notwithstanding...
...Again and again, one gets the feeling that McCraw thinks regulation is a question of just getting the "right" people who really understand economics...
...When he does sit in on critical meetings, he doodles...
...Graham's book, which ought to be read by all serious students of government, confirms this harsh judgment...
...McCraw focuses on four figures who loom large in the annals of regulation: Charles Francis Adams—scion of the Adams family, creator and commissioner of the nation's first regulatory body (the Massachusetts railroad commission...
...Yet to attract broad congressional support, the White House made eligibility standards so loose that 95 percent of the nation's 30,000 school districts qualified for some Title I aid...
...Congressmen, responding to constituent pressures and more personal calculations (like reelection), counter with a flurry of amendments...
...Because he is so poorly informed—and probably knows it—he is a sucker for the rejectionist view...
...With reporting that is superbly detailed, especially considering that many of the principals still hold office, Talbott shows how arms control policy is formulated at the third echelon of government...
...If the pages sport two- or three-line paragraphs, the book is likely one of the bracing Boston cops-androbbers yarns that have given Higgins a lasting spot in the history of the crime novel...
...Phillips set out to take the wish lists of business groups, such as the Committee for Economic Development, the Aerospace Industries Association, and the National Association of Manufacturers, and hammer them into a politically, if not intellectually, coherent program...
...Doesn't anyone realize how silly all this is...
...He considers anyone he doesn't like foolish, loutish, or doltish...
...The emphasis on these four individuals gives a human dimension to the subject that most regulatory discussions lack...
...Tyrrell has obviously read Mencken closely...
...The substance, Phillips's 15-point program for "U.S.-industrial competitiveness," is even worse...
...He uses those words a lot because they sound good, and, since he has so many groups and individuals to attack, they save space, argument, and thought...
...But whether he's covering a black kid murdered on a basketball court for a pair of red sneakers or Irish Protestants reacting to a Pope's visit, Breslin also brings to his work passion that makes most other columnists look bland, timid, and lazy...
...If most pages contain only two paragraphs, however, the result is often like this one: an overwritten, extended essay (Dr...
...Deadly Gambits is terrifying...
...The result was "the worst of both worlds," Graham writes, a "weak and vaguely defined categorical program" that "represented a frail instrument for achieving the inflated hopes of the Great Society to educate the children of the poor...
...One example explored by Graham is Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, which provided federal aid for certain poor (and disproportionately minority) children and was the cornerstone of LBJ's education program...
...Simon & Schuster, $16.95...
...Superstar Landis becomes an alcoholic, a Kennedy family liege, a negligent tax evader...
...Harvard University Press $20...
...leaders of the latter keep a keen eye posted for employment opportunities...
...Once enacted, the law becomes the focus of bureaucrats and constituent groups with a special stake in its implementation...
...The prototypical Breslin story of the 1960s, for instance, involved his spending the early morning hours with the grave-digger on the day of John F. Kennedy's burial...
...The complexity, sweep, and contradictions of the personality are lost in the flow of one-liners, epigrams, and portentous quotations...
...Above all, Breslin does something few other columnists bother to do: he actually gets out of his chair and goes out into the streets to talk to people involved in a news event...
...This thesis is valid, buf Higgins can't stop there...
...McCraw's attention to the "prophets" suggests as well the unspoken elitism that informs his account...
...Blessedly, he sticks to the personal story, mentioning only in passing the more "important" events that are being dealt with in the Senate...
...Yet Graham's account also sheds a great deal of light on today's nondebate, for it helps explain why serious federal action is held in generally low repute...
...For all its good intentions, the federal government's initiatives of the 1960s (especially under Lyndon Johnson) often fell victim to a formidable combination: cautious federal bureaucrats, selfish congressmen, powerful special-interest groups, and the vagaries of presidential leadership...
...Anxious to have a bill to show for his efforts, the president compromises on numerous fronts...
...are names given by the United States...
...An omnibus bill is proposed, accompanied by grandiloquent promises of efficacy...
...Programs that accomplished something, but that must be viewed as failures next to their original, overblown claims...
...Ticknor and Fields, $15.95...
...He ranges high and wide, if not deep, through such subjects as the ethnic makeup of Boston, why public schools have gone to hell, the death of the afternoon newspaper, the worth of urban renewal, the nature of the Red Sox, and other digressions too numerous to mention...
...Paul Tsongas...
...Once implemented, the complexity of the guidelines often worked to the disadvantage of the poor districts...
...Emily Yoffe The Liberal Crack-Up...
...Perhaps the endless series of speeches and appearances really serves to convince a few more people of his views...
...And triumphant deregulator Kahn proves utterly unable to continue his success when he moves to the Council on Wage and Price Stability...
...This book reads like a badly edited, five-part newspaper series written by a reporter who was unable to extricate himself from the clip files, let alone pick up the phone and actually interview someone...
...R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr...
...More affluent ones could better afford the program directors and grant-writers who could take full advantage of the act...
...Hugh Davis Graham...
...and Alfred Kahn—the Groucho Marx of the Carter administration who led the deregulation movement as head of the CAB...
...George V. Higgins...
...But don't be put off merely by the style...
...But he does give a schedule of a typical 15-hour day on a trip back home...
...Moreover, his prose style, heavily influenced by Hemingway and Damon Runyon, occasionally becomes heavy-handed...
...By now, since this approach has often been adopted by younger journalists influenced by Breslin, it may seem like a tired cliche, and even in Breslin's hands it sometimes borders on selfparody...
...The Office of Education largely deferred to state and local officials, who generally had little enthusiasm for aiding the poor...
...Tyrrell has learned from Mencken the rhetoric of nastiness and ridicule but displays none of Mencken's redeeming passion for life...
...If you're a senator, home is the place where, when you're asked to make a speech, you have to go...
...There's virtually no attention in the book to the people at lower levels, who don't come swooping into government from places like Harvard and Cornell...
...Unlike the recent parade of self-righteous politicians each promising they are more reborn than thou, Tsongas's description of his spiritual renewal is both dignified and somehow, in spite of his putting it between hard covers, ultimately private...
...People's champion Brandeis advances policies that in McCraw's rendering are actually anticonsumer...
...But the dominance of these four personalities also reflects the mistaken idea that the people at the top are omnipotent players in regulation...
...Mondale, in thrall to the teachers' unions, proposed an $11 billion federal program, which consisted largely of across-theboard salary hikes for all teachers—the good, the bad, and the awful...
...For all of this, though, McCraw offers some interesting observations: regulation should be less concerned with legal due process and more concerned with economic efficiency and growth, and it should involve creative efforts to use the regulated industry's self-interest in advancing policy goals...
...Nonconservatives read Tyrrell because he writes the way they think Mencken wrote...
...It's easy to see why he felt moved enough by what he read to try to share it...
...Even people with technical understanding plus hawk credentials that go back 40 years run into a brick wall...
...One wonders if our politicians wouldn't be more effective if instead of measuring accomplishment as a function of motion or of the number of substitute amendments introduced, their lives allowed them time for reflection, thought, and family...
...Jimmy Breslin...
...Johnson with two gouty feet) propounding Higgins's occasionally interesting and invariably dour opinions on a wide variety of topics—in this case, given the book's length (212 pages), far too wide a variety...
...You know things are serious when Paul Nitze is portrayed as a dove...
...Railroad regulator Adams ultimately heads one of the largest railroads...
...Sam Smith Prophets of Regulation...
...The sterility and irrelevance of the "education debate"—what little there was— between Ronald Reagan and Walter Mondale should be painfully apparent by now...
...This book is depressing and essential...
...and of the despair he felt when he wondered if he would live long enough for his twoyearold daughter to have memories of him...
...Even if Mencken, were he alive today, had voted for Reagan as the lesser fool, he would have never let him get off so easily in print...
...Tsongas's dispassionate style, which made him less than compelling as a political figure, serves him well in this straightforward and often moving book...
...Many of these amendments propose additional spending or tack on entirely new programs...
...The president may be a strong leader in the country and the world, but he is apparently a horribly weak leader within his own administration...
...But he's a onegag comedian, and the joke is getting old...
...He writes with little self-pity of the terrifying wait, after he finds a lump in his groin, for the dreaded diagnosis...
...The former prefer what is most familiar...
...Given the normal desire of most businesses for government to lower their costs and discourage their competitors, Phillips's task was not difficult...
...education...
...The president proposed tuition tax credits, school prayer, and less federal aid to education (though his latest budget request actually puts the lie to his latter wish...
...For around 20 years, Jimmy Breslin has been showing New Yorkers how good daily journalism can be...
...Kevin Phillips...
...Higgins's central thought is that White's public personality—both the liberal savior of his first term and the corrupt megalomaniac of his last—were products of public illusion more than the man's own deeds...
...Among its other virtues, this detailed account of federal education policy is a reminder that the education debate at the federal level was once vastly more intelligent than it is today...
...Thus we find Tyrrell adopting the glissandi of colorful adjectives and obscure nouns and even some of Mencken's favorite targets, such as the Anti-Saloon League...
...Tyrrell has the reputation—and not just in conservative circles—of being a funny writer...
...The book ends with some optimism...
...Higgins's ostensible subject is the 16-year reign of Kevin White as mayor of Boston, or, more specifically, the difference between what White actually accomplished in his tenure and what he was perceived to have done by (alas...
...Where money did reach the poor, it was still not enough to provide much leverage...
...The combination of Reagan's stupefying ignorance of important details and the total opposition to any arms control by major figures within the administration make the prospect of an agreement look grim...
...If Reagan makes a big point of stressing arms control, won't his people fall into line...
...Breslin, along with Gay Talese and Tom Wolfe, is generally acknowledged as one of the pioneers of the 1960s New Journalism, and the qualities that brought so much attention to his work then are still very much in evidence...
...However, this routine day in a senator's life seems more an exercise in proving how many places a warm body can be trotted out in a 24-hour period...
...But what if Nixon had thought Chou En-lai was a Chinese appetizer and Kissinger's staff had been made up of ardent Sinophobes...
...rigid free-market adherence in global economics!' In fact, Phillips argues, because flagwaving, Sun Belt conservatives now control the Republican party, "nationalism will outweigh adherence to strict free-market ideology among much of the conservative electorate...
...Few can quarrel with the impetus behind Title I: Given the long and sorry history of state and local neglect of poor children, some federal role was justified...
...James Landis— the New Deal wunderkind and Harvard law dean who served as an early SEC commissioner and CAB chief...
...Things being as they are, however, Tsongas makes a strong case that a senator can't run for reelection (even when it's an almost sure thing) and also take seriously his role as a father, and that his decision to retire was the right one...
...Perhaps most important, contrary to Reagan's portrait of heavy-handed federal bureaucrats, the money came with too few strings attached...
...But the result is like those lowbudget one-character plays cribbed from the writings of some famous politician or writer, which tend to caricature more than they characterize...
...Mencken, too, displayed far more ecumenicalism in his rampages than does Tyrrell, who has all the flexibility of a party hack...
...Jonathan Alter Heading Home...
...Michael Gee The Uncertain Triumph: Federal Education Policy in the Kennedy and Johnson Years...
...As usual within a bureaucracy, Perle's power is mostly negative— to kill some policy initiative or try to screw his adversary at State, Richard Burt (who plays his own set of games...
...Additionally, he accomplishes a rare thing for a politician: he draws a portrait of his wife as an interesting person in whom he is interested—even though she doesn't have a paying job...
...Because Perle's superiors often don't have his technical understanding they have a hard time arguing with Perle that yes, it really is "safe" to make concessions in this area or that...
...But there's still an undeniable power when he shows us, on the day the Iranian hostages came home, the widow of an Air Force sergeant who died during the botched rescue mission, or when he visits with paraplegic Israeli soldiers at the same time the Israeli cabinet signs the Camp David accords...
...His greatest strength is his eagerness to seek out the "little guy" or bit players who are part of larger dramas, and then tell their story...
...If these ideas sound a little familiar, that is intentional...
...It seems to shatter the best hope of a second Reagan administration—that Reagan's toughness could allow him to win domestic approval for an arms control agreement, in the same way that only Nixon could get away with opening the door to China...
...Tsongas concludes by writing of the sense of rebirth his diagnosis has given him...
...By doing so, he also offers an ironic or poignant commentary on the news of the day...
...Now the best of his Daily News columns have been collected in a book, and, unlike most daily reporting, his pieces hold up remarkably well...
...The reason the bureaucratic squabbles outlined in the book are so fierce—and so important—is that they are where the whole ballgame is played...
...Thomas K. McCraw...
...of the agonizing tests a cancer patient must endure—one required him to be conscious while doctors drilled into the bone marrow of his hip...
...While there is no cure for the form of cancer Tsongas has, it is fairly mild and potentially controllable...
...The $13 billion in Title I funds spent in the act's first decade, Graham notes, represented only 8 percent of all expenditures for public elementary and secondary...
...Not necessarily...
...Knopf, $14.95...
...There's his marvelous eye for the telling human detail, his ear for dialogue, his newsman's unerring sense of the "angle" in every story...
...The pattern repeated itself many times...
...His business version of an industrial policy ranges from deep thoughts like creating a Department of Trade and boosting federal spending on "technological research " to more tax breaks and antitrust exemptions for multinationals...
...In his view, these liberals are just as "self-interested, electorally and economically," as other politicians...
...Cliff Sloan Staying on Top...
...Macmillan, $15.95...
...Turning to his own party, he believes there is "little support for...
...University of North Carolina Press, $22...
...the Boston media"--a group the author invests with almost superhuman powers despite the fact that he's worked for almost every news outlet in town and should know better...
Vol. 16 • December 1984 • No. 11
