POLITICAL BOOKNOTES
POLITICAL BOOKNOTES America's Hidden Success. John E. Schwarz. W. W. Norton, $12.95. This provocative book convincingly punctures much of the conventional wisdom that has emerged in recent...
...Sympathetic intellectuals like Edmund Wilson and John Dos Passos were called, among other things, "journalistic cooties...
...Perhaps Lernoux, the talented reporter on Latin America for the Nation, should have stuck to the relationship between big banks and Latin America, because this section of the book is the most compelling...
...administration used to be frontpage news to The Washington Post...
...With Murdoch's purchase of the Chicago Sun-Times, the Chicago Tribune is now that city's liberal paper...
...By ignoring practical solutions and following the Moscow party line, the party alienated potential supporters...
...In deciding to devalue the dollar, Nixon overruled Paul Volcker, then a high-ranking Treasury Department official...
...Membership rose initially, but the mud-slinging and subservience to Moscow ensured only a short-lived success...
...Evans moves easily from playing Chamberlain to Churchill without ever really admitting he was duped when he accepted the editorship under Murdoch, allowing only that his mistake had been "I put the paper first and [didn't] protect my back...
...This provocative book convincingly punctures much of the conventional wisdom that has emerged in recent years about the performance of the American economy...
...Along came Lee Harvey Oswald, a Castro fanatic, resident of New Orleans, and avid reader of the Times-Picayune...
...Cornell University Press, $12.95...
...Basic Books, $26.50...
...Buried under a mountain of turgid prose and academic jargon is the fascinating saga of President Nixon's 1971 decision to devalue the dollar...
...Today the U.S...
...Harold Evans...
...Schwarz also shows that the share of national income consumed by government remained virtually constant during this period, but that government expenditures were used to great effect in reducing poverty and cleaning up the environment...
...In the author's opinion, Volcker's conservative approach to both domestic and international finance is typical of the banker syndrome: a penchant "to foresee disaster but prefer inaction...
...Oswald appointed himself Castro's protector and preeempted the assassination of the Cuban leader by killing Kennedy...
...He concludes, "There can be no reconstruction of patriotism without a system of national service' Familiar as the themes may be to some Monthly readers, this is an important book...
...lone assassin—together into a loose, yet fairly plausible, weave: The CIA was plotting to kill Castro, who knew it, and said so in an interview that appeared in the New Orleans Times-Picayune...
...in 1979 in the Frank Snepp case, and are being tightened further under Reagan...
...The trouble is, nobody notices anymore whether the stories are true or not...
...Nixon worried, and to make sure that unemployment would continue to decline—especially in the months before the 1972 election— he devalued the dollar, thereby boosting U.S...
...But central to his prescription is the revival of the concept of the citizen soldier, whose importance since preRevolutionary War days Janowitz discusses at length...
...Jonathan Alter The Heyday of American Communism: The Depression Decade...
...Lernoux finds banker perfidy everywhere—from Australia to Southeast Asia to the Vatican...
...What she doesn't find is a clear focus for her unsettling tales of drug traffickers, CIA agents, right-wing mercenaries, and con men in three-piece suits...
...Then the CIA and Castro confused the bungling Warren Commission by covering up their activities leading up to— and denying foreknowledge of— the assassination...
...Ronald Reagan's Reign of Error...
...is also facing a balance of payments deficit plus 8 percent unemployment, and once again Volcker is arguing against devaluing the dollar...
...There's a lesson for rigid ideologues on both sides of the political spectrum in Klehr's exhaustive survey of the American Communist party in the 1930s...
...From 1960 to 1980 the American economy produced 30 million new jobs, an unprecedented achievement that addressed a challenge other industrialized nations avoided: how to provide for the large number of "baby boom" children who began entering the job market in the early 1960s...
...Once, Reagan even claimed that any criminal found with a gun in England was tried for first-degree murder and hanged if found guilty...
...Second, it suggests that Americans not only need to stop feeling sorry for themselves, but should look to government as a major player in restoring the economy's health...
...Alfred .1...
...I highly recommend it...
...Charles Peters Good Times, Bad Times...
...Poor Colonel McCormack...
...Still, in restoring some badly needed perspective, the book performs two important functions...
...Watkins Dark Horse...
...Gallup gave him a rating of exactly 3 percent...
...Harvey Klehr...
...exports and slowing the flood of imports...
...The second part is a more directly cautionary tale...
...Real (after inflation) income per individual rose twice as much in the seventies as in the decade the Republicans so often portray as some kind of Golden Era: Eisenhower's 1950s...
...Today they're relegated to the bottom of Lou Cannon's onceaweek column, if they're printed at all...
...Emily Lazar...
...Schwarz doesn't mean to apologize for the economy's shortcomings or belittle such economic disasters as two OPEC oil shocks, though he is too sanguine about the innocuousness of such things as large federal budget deficits...
...Mark Green, Gail MacColl, eds...
...Among Janowitz's remedies are a total revamping of social studies curricula in our schools and a redirection of most efforts at bilingual education...
...This brilliant book will probably be overlooked by most people, not just for its rather old-fashioned title but for the author's dense writing style...
...Steve Neal...
...Janowitz, a sociologist at the University of Chicago who is well-known for his works on military culture, addresses a seminal issue: how to restore the sense of shared civic responsibilty that has fallen victim in recent years to our growing preoccupation with individual rights and the rise of special-interest groups...
...Kurt Eichenwald Oswald's Game...
...It's a pity...
...the second explains what happened after Rupert Murdoch bought The Sunday Times and the daily Times (two entirely separate papers) in 1981, appointed Evans editor of the latter, and fired him a year later...
...Richard Crossman, a Labor cabinet member in the 1960s, had chronicled the day-to-day inner workings of the British government, a major conclusion being that unaccountable civil servants, not cabinet officials, controlled power...
...But his indictment is persuasive nonetheless...
...James Gibney In Banks We Trust: Bankers and Their Close Associates: the CIA, the Mafia, Drug-traders, Dictators, Politicians, and the Vatican...
...First, it reveals as fallacious the underlying premise of Reaganomics: that government is responsible for strangling economic growth...
...In the first part, Evans includes a fascinating account of The Sunday Times's 1975 struggle with the government over publication of the Crossman diaries...
...The imagery Evans uses to depict Murdoch in London evokes that of Hitler in the Sudetenland: appeasement, a "putsch," brutal henchmen, broken promises, the big lie, and pledges of editorial independence that are—in Murdoch's own words—"not worth the paper they're written on...
...P.K...
...University of Chicago Press, $22.50...
...Jean Davison...
...Morris Janowitz...
...Doubleday, $17.95...
...Ironically, as Britain, in the wake of that case, moves toward greater rights of disclosure for former government officials, this country is moving in the opposite direction...
...and Roosevelt's New Deal was nothing more than "developed fascism...
...Davison knits the two predominant JFK assassination theories—conspiracy vs...
...The absorbing centerpiece of this biography of Wendell Willkie is the story of the 1940 election, in which Willkie dramatically emerged from political nowhere to overtake his rivals for the Republican nomination and ended up giving FDR the scare of his electoral life...
...He wanted the diaries published after his death, and Evans was lucky enough to have a libel lawyer who, unlike many, was interested in telling his client what conceivably could be published, instead of what could not...
...While Murdoch doesn't put cheesecake and "Headless Body" and "Topless Bar" headlines in all his papers, he also won't keep his mitts off...
...Joanne Gowa...
...Atheneum, $17.95...
...Phillip Keisling Closing the Gold Window: Domestic Politics and the End of Bretton Woods...
...This book provides a needed reminder of how bad—and how frequent—those misstatements and distortions can be...
...This time, however, Volcker will probably prevail, with the all-too-predictable consequence that employment and exports will continue to stagnate...
...His argument also would have been even stronger if he'd been willing to debunk a few more liberal b•igaboos...
...This engagingly sardonic, if often selfserving work is really two books: the first is an account of Evans's 14 successful years editing The Sunday Times of London, where he published pathbreaking stories on Kim Philby and the thalidomide cases...
...By 1938, membership had dropped in half to 50,000...
...Not true, but, as Larry Speakes said, "It's a good story, though...
...Penny Lernoux...
...The author has heartening news for those Democratic candidates who are not doing very well in the polls: six weeks before Willkie was nominated by the Republican convention, Dr...
...Ronald Brownstein The Reconstruction of Patriotism...
...Relying on statistical information usually overlooked by both Reagan and his critics, Schwarz, a professor of political science at the University of Arizona, demonstrates how the 1970s were actually a decade of extraordinary achievements...
...The paper won...
...This rings about as true as the assurances of selflessness in another set of memoirs, which Evans edited—Henry Kissinger's...
...Norton, $17.95...
...In the world according to Reagan, Italian fascism inspired the New Deal, Karl Marx designed the progressive tax system, and Trident missiles can be recalled after they are launched...
...The same "confidence" requirements waived by the British court in the Crossman case were strengthened in the U.S...
...Anchor Press, $16.95...
...Blunders that Reagan made during the early days of his...
...Pantheon, $4.95...
...members of the American Federation of Labor were branded "social-fascists...
...This is an uneven book that draws too frequently from magazine and newspaper clips...
...Nixon, whose best-known comment about international finance is, "I don't give a [expletive deleted] about the lira," also once complained to his economic advisers, "I hear all about the balance of payments and nobody worries about 8 percent unemployment...
Vol. 16 • February 1984 • No. 1
