POLITICAL BOOKNOTES
POLITICAL BOOKNOTES The American Economy We Need But Won't Get From The Republicans or the Democrats. John B. Anderson. Atheneum, $14.95. "To solve our problems, we must first understand them....
...Not typical self images, but the kind that are needed to stand painfully alone against the tides of history...
...Alan Barth...
...Effective government is honest government ." Like this more or less randomly chosen passage, the rest of the platitudes that comprise this book should have been spoken—they come equipped with applause lines and don't stand up to the scrutiny of a second reading...
...In 1940 France was crushed by the Wehrmacht in a matter of weeks and, rather than resist further, the country accepted defeat...
...He wants some noble presidential candidate to pick a vice president from the other party, a bipartisan cabinet, and the obligatory Council of Elder Statesmen to steer them through...
...Unlike most of them, Arsenal delivers...
...Interesting observations on the media by the press critic of the Los Angeles Times where most of these essays first appeared...
...Free Press, $16.75...
...Written by a respected physicist, the book explains the physics and the technology behind nuclear explosions, weapons, and delivery systems, as well as possible defenses against them...
...Barth doesn't appear to have made any great breakthroughs in constitutional thought, but he didn't have to...
...Here is a "Washington novel" that, unlike many in the genre, both captures the spirit (or at least a spirit) of Washington and deserves consideration as a serious novel...
...Don Cook...
...Herbert Stein...
...Michael Hiestand Arsenal: Understanding Weapons in the Nuclear Age...
...If you're interested in the plight of our public schools but don't want to get bogged down in turgid commission-ese, I recommend this book...
...The behind-thescenes story of how Pulitzer juries work is worth the price of admission by itself...
...Ronald Brownstein Press Watch...
...Stein, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under Nixon, comes up with two basic observations about the economic policies of the last 40 years...
...Charles Peters The Rights of Free Men...
...We can no longer afford to fool ourselves since we no longer fool anyone else...
...Quinith Janssen Necessary Lessons: Decline and Renewal in American Schools...
...So much has been written in the last year about our failing public schools that this book runs the considerable risk of being buried under the avalanche of reports from various blue-ribbon commissions...
...But he backs up his analysis with lively writing and good, in-the-field reporting...
...Thus, unanticipated consequences of well-intentioned actions are the rule...
...This makes it a useful sourcebook for the interested lay reader...
...Harper & Row, $11.95...
...Discussing a bill in the New York State legislature that would have empowered New York City police to indiscriminately close burlesque houses, for example, Barth writes: "It would have turned New York into the most ridiculous hicktown in the United States...
...This is a how-to book with an important idea: that, for women with small children, staying the career course doesn't have to mean commuting every day to a 9-to-5 job downtown...
...The office—he is not just railing against Reagan—is too weak to triumph over an array of looming crises, from nuclear war to the Third World banking crisis...
...and second, economists don't really understand how the economy works...
...Alan Barth wrote editorials for The Washington Post for the 30 years before he died in 1979...
...Gillis shows that with a little imagination women can adapt a career to mothering instead of having to adapt mothering to a career...
...Necessary Lessons offers a clear, compelling dissection of where the schools went wrong, focusing on the disintegration of academic standards and the power of teachers unions to put their members' interests above those of students and parents...
...Rawson Associates, $9.95...
...Simon & Schuster, $16.95...
...To de Gaulle, a matter of national honor...
...While a one-term bipartisan administration could possibly unplug the "political gridlock" Sorensen is rightly worried about, he seems most concerned with getting power back where it belongs, not with California actors and Georgia farmers, but with the Eastern establishment...
...Books on nuclear weapons and strategy have become as common as volumes on diet plans—and frequently less memorable...
...Common sense and plain dealing are still good watchwords for both public and private conduct...
...Sleazy arms dealers, eccentric think-tank denizens, mendacious hawks and discombobulated doves inside the Pentagon, vulgar Californian parvenus hustling for jobs and favors in the early months of the Reagan administration, wandering Democratic lawyer-bureaucrats suddenly thrown off the rollercoaster of power and access now searching for action and the meaning of life, the disconnecting yet addictive artificiality of Washington itself—in all of these portraits, Tyler evokes the personality types, the style of dialogue, the flavor of the settings with often uncanny precision...
...Gilbert T. Sewall...
...The presidency is not imperial, but impotent, according to Sorensen...
...First, government usually makes things worse...
...For example, he implies that the Democrats' inability to "lead the country into the hightechnology era" is apparent—or was as he wrote this book—by their failure to support Gary Hart...
...Caveat: the plot is pretty thin stuff—a problem but, given the book's atmospheric strengths, not so significant as one might suppose...
...In 1958 de Gaulle saved France by stepping back into power to avert a military coup over the Algerian crises, thus saving the country from a civil war...
...Americans have never understood de Gaulle, because he refused to accept the "American Century" and did everything in his power to undermine it while at the same time accepting the benefits of American protection and financial assistance...
...This book is a collection of Post pieces about the subject that was Barth's enduring passion...
...Tyler...
...He flew to London, went on the BBC and called on all Frenchmen to join him in continuing the fight...
...Peter Noterman A Different Kind of Presidency: A Proposal for Breaking the Political Deadlock...
...Charles Euchner The Shadow Cabinet...
...Phillip Keisling Presidential Economics: The Making of Economic Policy from Roosevelt to Reagan and Beyond...
...If you missed them then, get the book...
...Twice a hero and much the rest of the time a Don Quixote with a difficult personality, de Gaulle first drove the British crazy, then the Americans...
...Activists both left and right will find much to quarrel with in Stein's shoulder-shrugging conservative philosophy, but he makes about as good a case as can be made for the proposition that there can be boldness in caution...
...He would do well to heed his own warning that "candidacies that live by the media also die by the media, unless they establish strong constituency bases that transcend personality...
...Harper & Row, $15.50...
...Macmillan, $15.95...
...Phyllis Gillis...
...Kosta Tsipis...
...De Gaulle thought of himself variously as the personification of France, a living monument, and the reincarnation of Joan of Arc...
...Knopf, $17.95...
...William J. Lynn Charles de Gaulle...
...Richard Meyer Entrepreneurial Mothers...
...Theodore C. Sorensen...
...What could have been a frank memoir from an experienced, intelligent former politician who can ignore expediency instead concludes with an uninspiring call for a new political party based roughly on Anderson's 1980 platform—as if the book was written to ensure publicity for its author on tour rather than the other way around...
...David Shaw...
...This vagueness may be prudent given the trouble he gets into when he's specific...
...During World War II he had feuded constantly with Roosevelt and Churchill...
...Convinced that factionalism in and out of the government has stifled all creativity, boldness, and common sense in statecraft, Ted Sorenson, boy wonder of the Kennedy administration, prescribes an unprecedented medicine: coalition government...
...Sewall began his research long before last summer's explosion of interest in public education, so some of his reforms—merit pay, certification of teachers without education degrees, dismantling of tenure laws—now seem familiar...
...Putnam, $16.95...
...To us, hypocrisy...
...Simon & Schuster, $16.95...
...Since federal funding may allow him to launch another independent bid for the presidency, Anderson avoids messy specifics and proposes vague goals—a greater sense of national purpose, better leadership, curbing excessive special-interest power, more responsive political parties...
...So when he returned to power the second time, he struck back at "Anglo-Saxon hegemony" by withdrawing from NATO, vetoing British entry into the Common Market, and encouraging antiAmericanism in the Third World, which he thought it was France's destiny to lead...
...And understanding begins with truth...
...Fred Kaplan...
...De Gaulle did not...
...His consistent, even-tempered analysis was enough, and his humor and sense of irony are just what discussions of civil liberties need...
...That would be a shame...
...An example, he says, are the Reagan tax cuts that were supposed to increase government revenues...
Vol. 16 • April 1984 • No. 3
