TILTING AT WINDMILLS
Peters, Charles
TILTING AT WINDMILLS Journalism awards may have gotten out of hand. The January issue of the Northwestern Alumni News points with pride to awards won by two graduates of the Northwestern...
...Once a government employee you cannot be made redundant...
...Just when you thought you had run out of reasons to oppose nuclear war, John Naisbitt, the author of Megatrends, has come up with another one...
...Mike Royko, the veteran columnist, has demonstrated that journalists can be more than mere employees, that they can refuse to be a part of an enterprise that is doing bad things...
...My wife works at a private school that has no education course requirement for its teachers but, as I have noted here before, attracts scores of high quality applicants each year...
...That way it will get its fair share of the take without driving up costs...
...Relatives are usually taken care of somewhat more indirectly...
...I endorse that challenge wholeheartedly...
...Wouldn't it be marvelous if we could take about threefourths of our lawyers, most of whom are really quite bright even though they've chosen the wrong profession, and put them into the classroom...
...However, in most cases— there are exceptions, as when one prominent columnist recently berated my wife at a party for an article we had written about him nine years ago—I know that our friendship is strong enough to endure the heat...
...While the 1983 figures do not distinguish between single and double trailers, one cannot help suspecting that the introduction of the twins was not unrelated to the fact that the number of accidents rose to 451...
...In fact, one Post reporter once turned down an assignment from The Washington Monthly solely because he feared offending people who might hire him some day...
...Surely it's better to tell them first...
...He's wrong, but since so many liberals have been guilty of the same error, it's worth explaining why he is wrong...
...Her husband was released...
...It's called "the buddy system:' and here's how it works...
...Excellence:' he said, was being used as a code word for "educational Reaganism," and, according to a report in The New York Times, Howe proceeded to attack proposals to increase discipline, toughen testing of pupils, and set up a system of merit pay for teachers as "wrong, stupid, reactionary, antihumanistic...
...What the BGA did not seem to realize is that this has been true, not just of the Secret Service, but of the civil service generally—and for a long time...
...that some seat components and on-board materials are highly inflammable and emit toxic gases...
...Jerry Knight of The Washington Post has joined that paper's Hobart Rowen in campaigning for lower prices, as has Herblock, the Post's great cartoonist, who could have more influence than all the rest of us put together...
...Law schools got into this mess for laudable reasons...
...None of them praised Noah's courage in writing the article...
...This responsibility is especially high for those whose talents are prized by management and who, individually and collectively, have the power to influence management decisions...
...Sometimes he can even tailor the job description to fit his friend's talents...
...Dershowitz may have used the tape as a substitute for class preparation and lecturing...
...That's what I call anything goes...
...Suppose, for example, that you do something that you know might create an unhappy impression if discovered...
...This encouragement found fertile response in the self-pity of faculty members who habitually and mournfully compared their own salaries to what their class members were now raking in on Wall Street, ignoring the fact that they had originally chosen to be law professors in full awareness of the differences in compensation...
...Instead of using regularly scheduled commercial flights, she used a 42-seat military jet at a cost to the government, according to UPI's Gregory Gordon, of $24,000 for each trip...
...Hire law professors only after five years of law practice, but then require them to teach full-time, with perhaps a sabbatical or two of private practice to reestablish their connection to real life...
...My friends at the Post are good and thoughtful people, but they can do better, and they should be grateful to Noah for pointing the way...
...explained, because her testimony had helped to free an innocent man...
...There is a way...
...Relatives are usually taken care of somewhat more indirectly...
...The jet costs $1,500, the shuttle $65...
...It was an attempt by the professor to expose his students to policeinterrogation tactics...
...It is understandable that he would want to wait for an appropriate moment to tell the world, but he should realize that embarrassment will result if he delays too long in finding that moment...
...They should be examples to the reporters at the Post who do not seem to understand that an employee does share in the moral responsibility for the actions of the enterprise of which he or she is part...
...I grew up rooting for the United Mine Workers against the coal barons...
...This would not only protect us and our roads, it would also mean fairer competition between trucks and railroads...
...you can look forward to a trouble-free career, an indexlinked salary, and a tidy pension...
...The authority's new head, Robert Kiley, described its problems as emanating from a "mindset that says when it comes to transit there are no minimum standards--anything goes...
...The essence of what Noah said about the Post was a challenge to its management and reporters to use the enormous profits it is making not to further enhance their already more-than-adequate incomes, but to heighten the paper's social reponsibility from ending the poisoning of the environment by its paper plant, to refusing to run any more cigarette ads that encourage people to kill themselves, to vastly improving its coverage of the city of the Washington...
...The civil service scandal, you must realize is worldwide: "The children of French government employees are twice as likely as other people to become government employees themselves...
...When his paper, the Chicago Sun-Times, was sold to Rupert Murdoch, he walked out, saying, "No selfrespecting fish would want to be wrapped in Murdoch's publications ". Several dozen other SunTimes employees followed Royko's lead...
...Another fact about the civil service of which the average citizen is unaware emerged briefly into the sunlight in a recent investigation of the Secret Service by the Better Government Association...
...So it is hardly surprising that those whose parents enjoyed such benefits should themselves be attracted to the same career...
...Excellent" does make me cringe a bit—I agree with Howe that "good" is often a better choice—but I cringe even more at what Howe went on to tell the conference...
...The civil service scandal, you must realize is worldwide: "The children of French government employees are twice as likely as other Tpotential employer...
...The other, a fashion editor for the Dallas Times-Herald, "recently won two Lulu awards for excellence in menswear reporting...
...In 1983, according to Alison Muscatine of The Washington Post, high school teachers planning teaching careers scored 81 points lower than the national average on the Scholastic Aptitude Test...
...Nancy Reagan made three trips to Phoenix last year to visit her mother...
...But the Post gained little from his triumph...
...Since the article appeared, I have heard several people from the Post question its accuracy...
...With thousands of unemployed autoworkers still waiting to be rehired, it is outrageous for the companies to overwork anyone...
...Yet there are, in fact, very few journalists who are willing to take on a major potential employer...
...Kiley says that recently, when he visited a transit repair shop, "there were people working on their private automobiles there...
...It was taken off the front page after two editions and put on an inside page, with a front-page reference box, after a highranking State Department official told a Post editor about 11 p.m...
...However, I don't think it can be emphasized strongly enough that this does not mean you have no obligation to explain that the appearance is wrong...
...I want to hear him challenge his young professional supporters to rise above their comfortable careerism to a higher ethic of service...
...They would be upset even more if they realized that most civil servants have already been routinely getting two raises a year—one the regular October pay increase, the other called a "step" increase, which has traditionally been given to 99 percent of those eligible...
...Here is its own explanation: "Ultimately, the Washington Post also reacted to accumulating official skepticism Thursday night about Doder's story...
...One, a newspaper reporter in Arkansas, received the 1983 Arkansas Press Association Award for "best promotion of tourism...
...This would revitalize American public education and still leave us with plenty of lawyers to do the legal work that really needs doing...
...This responsibility is especially high for those whose talents are prized by management and who, individually and collectively, have the power to influence management decisions...
...The civil servant can give the friend advance notice of the job...
...The word `excellence' ought to make us cringe a little:' Irving Howe told a recent conference on Excellence in the Humanities, "so thoroughly has it become assimilated to the prose styles of commission reports, letters of recommendation and hair spray commercials...
...Three friends might work, respectively, at the Commerce, Labor, and Interior Departments...
...I agree with Michael Kinsley (see page 35), that the appearance of bias that arises out of a conflict of interest may have absolutely nothing to do with a writer's integrity...
...Nancy Reagan made three trips to Phoenix last year to visit her mother...
...In New York you can devastate some public figure in your columns with little likelihood that you will ever face the embarrassment of a personal encounter with him or her...
...One Secret Service recruiter told the BGA that half the 120 people he had hired were friends or relatives of highranking officials of the Secret Service...
...If you, like me, would like to see us win a few of those trade wars with the Japanese, here's a "good news-bad news" classic from The New York Times...
...The new bill_ would restore the two raises to employees in grades 13, 14, and 15, whose right to automatic raises was somewhat diminished by Carter's civil service reforms...
...In recent years many states have outlawed twintrailer trucks...
...Friendships are formed that can survive mutual criticism, although often it takes months for the wounds to heal...
...Wouldn't you rather tell your mother and father, or your wife and children, about it before they hear the story from someone else...
...Utah has become known as the sewer of the securities industry...
...But I also think labor has to be ready to meet good management half-way and that management and labor each needs to think about the' best interests of the people just as much as it thinks about itself...
...My friends at the Post are good and thoughtful people, but they can do better, and they should be grateful to Noah for pointing the way...
...A patronage system based on politics has been changed into a patronage system based on friendship...
...What he has done may look bad, but not be bad...
...It is astonishing how few members of the regular press perceived the inadequacy of this approach...
...But the passengers aren't the only guilty parties...
...In fact, one Post reporter once turned down an assignment from The Washington Monthly solely because he feared offending people who might hire him some day...
...Irving Howe was back in The New York Times' the other day with another complaint about code words...
...In 1982 there were 296 accidents involving tractor trailers...
...For instance, in Baltimore some longshoremen are working as many as 60 hours a week and making as much as $56,000 a year...
...I've gotten into hot water with my friends at the Post once again for the really fine article on the Post that Timothy Noah wrote in our January issue...
...But that seems to be what has happened with our long struggle against the politics of special interest in the Democratic party, a politics that was epitomized by Fritz Mondale's campaign all during 1983 and at least through the first two months of 1984...
...Law professors used to be a group much too exclusively composed of people who had done nothing but teach law and had never had to persuade a jury or crossexamine a witness...
...Since the railroads got a break on land costs, let's not charge the truckers for the land use involved—often the median strip of interstates would do just fine...
...The daughter of the one at Labor might find herself working at Commerce, while the son of the one at Interior gets a job at Labor, and the nephew of the one at Commerce finds an opening at Interior...
...Not a single passenger noticed...
...The essence of what Noah said about the Post was a challenge to its management and reporters to use the enormous profits it is making not to further enhance their already more-than-adequate incomes, but to heighten the paper's social reponsibility from ending the poisoning of the environment by its paper plant, to refusing to run any more cigarette ads that encourage people to kill themselves, to vastly improving its coverage of the city of the Washington...
...Not much, according to the New York State Comptroller's office, which contends that "the productivity of workers in private industry is four times higher than that of T.A...
...One heartening trend reported by my wife is that this year her school has several applications for teaching jobs from young lawyers who realize that they would rather do something interesting and spiritually rewarding than make a lot of money in the often boring and often morally marginal world of the law...
...Walter Reuther remains one of my great heroes...
...But in 1982, as a part of a deal to get the trucking lobby to moderate its opposition to a gasoline tax, Congress prohibited any state law that restricted use of tandem rigs on interstate highways...
...There is a solution to this problem, however, and it's a simple one...
...So moral judgements about him should never be based on appearance alone...
...Now for the bad news: "Both defective parts 'were made by American companies...
...My knuckles are going to be a little whiter the next time I fly the friendly skies...
...The left, because so many of its leaders are members of professional groups— teachers, lawyers, doctors, civil servants, journalists—is in great danger of becoming more concerned with serving the interests of those groups than the interest of the public as a whole...
...Honda offers 32 possible combinations of options for the Accord...
...Dershowitz may be innocent, but the fact remains that a lot of law professors are raking in lucrative fees in private practice while neglecting the students they are supposed to be teaching...
...These giant vehicles not only terrify us as they thunder by, often overloaded and at excessive speed, but they tear up our highways in the process...
...What you can do is very simple: get rid of the education course requirement and you will attract better people to teaching...
...Says one participant in that semester's criminal law class: 'It was stale, warmed-over, and terrible...
...One reason for this was explained in a recent issue of Le Monde—yes, Le Monde...
...The result, at least on the Capital Beltway around Washington, appears to be catastrophic...
...To persuade management to lower prices, it is essential that the UAW, in its summer contract talks, press for increased compensation, not in the form of wages but in the form of profit-sharing or stock...
...What is passed on from parent to child is not only a penchant for public service, but an awareness of the security that such employment procures...
...It saddens me that Howe, who has been such a distinguished leader of the intellectual left for so many years, would abandon the cause of better education for the young in favor of protecting teachers from being judged by their ability...
...I know that labor has to be organized to protect itself against management that is hostile or indifferent...
...One reason for this was explained in a recent issue of Le Monde—yes, Le Monde...
...Want to get away with murder...
...The result has been predictable: too many teachers practicing instead of teaching...
...During the fall semester, they noted the professor was busily working an appeal for one of his paying clients, Claus Von Bulow, convicted of injecting his heiress wife, Sunny, with a dose of insulin intended to be fatal...
...Charles Peters...
...One reason these courses are so bad is the low quality of students attracted to the schools of education...
...There are, alas, not many cases in which the views of The Washington Monthly have come even close to being adopted by a majority of the people...
...A patronage system based on politics has been changed into a patronage system based on friendship...
...A report by the Authority's inspector general says that 80 to 95 percent of the system's track did not receive the required two inspections a week...
...This obligation begins to tick the minute he gets into a situation that can give rise to the wrong appearance...
...According to a report by Carol McGraw of The Los Angeles Times, Goldman and other critics at a recent symposium on aircraft cabin safety "contended that seats, liquor carts, and overhead storage bins are poorly attached, break loose and trap and injure or kill passengers...
...When, for example, we publish our periodic assaults on The Washington Post, my friends there usually respond with a good deal of heat...
...They would be upset even more if they realized that most civil servants have already been routinely getting two raises a year—one the regular October pay increase, the other called a "step" increase, which has traditionally been given to 99 percent of those eligible...
...First the good news: "The New York City Transit Authority said yesterday that its new Japanese subway cars had failed their first two performance tests...
...But it was an attempt, many students say, that failed...
...Unless this is done and a foundation for long-term recovery is thereby laid, the end of the Japanese quotas may spell the end of the good times in Detroit...
...This headline over a Washington Post column devoted to news about federal employees would upset a good many people out in the country if they knew about it: "Bill Would Give Key Workers 2 Raises a Year...
...Mondale may ultimately win the nomination, but I think it will be because of the vulnerabilities of his opponents, not because of the politics of special interests...
...The personal hazards of journalism in Washington are, in one sense at least, much greater than in New York or other larger cities...
...If it causes you pain to inflict pain on others, you do not look forward to seeing the hurt or angry look on their faces...
...When the students coming into the program are the least prepared, what do you do...
...This time he was saying that "special interests" is a code word for labor unions and that, anyway, special interests are what this country is made up of and we shouldn't worry about them...
...The wife then went to the district attorney and confessed she had committed the murder...
...The new bill_ would restore the two raises to employees in grades 13, 14, and 15, whose right to automatic raises was somewhat diminished by Carter's civil service reforms...
...I know what you're thinking—at last he's going to get through an entire column without talking about lawyers...
...The SEC estimates, according to Business Week, that 10,000 of its residents lost up to $200 million "through unregistered securities, fraud, and flagrant mismanagement ." The state's securities division has only one investigator...
...What the BGA did not seem to realize is that this has been true, not just of the Secret Service, but of the civil service generally—and for a long time...
...Sometimes he can even tailor the job description to fit his friend's talents...
...It's called "the buddy system:' and here's how it works...
...If you doubt that the poor are getting poorer, consider this report by the House Ways and Means Committee: The average welfare family has one-third less purchasing power today than it had in 1970...
...In return for such a concession, one reform the UAW should insist upon is an end to mandatory overtime...
...When his paper, the Chicago Sun-Times, was sold to Rupert Murdoch, he walked out, saying, "No selfrespecting fish would want to be wrapped in Murdoch's publications ". Several dozen other SunTimes employees followed Royko's lead...
...Patricia Goldman, the vice chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, tells a story about a stewardess who, frustrated by passenger inattentiveness during her what-to-do-in-anemergency talk at the beginning of each flight, changed the wording and said, "When the -mask drops down in front of you, place it over your navel and continue to breathe normally...
...In Church Hill, Tennessee, a group attacking public school textbooks as antireligious is criticizing "Goldilocks and the Three Bears" because Goldilocks is not punished for breaking into the bears' house...
...Rowen recently pointed out that Detroit could cut from $800 to $1,200 from its prices simply by reducing the options it offers of color, body style, interior, engine, etc...
...The report found that there were 512 danger spots, of which management knew about only 33...
...And this is so even though the school pays considerably less than the District of Columbia public schools...
...Almost...
...Say a civil servant hears about a job opening that might be filled by a friend...
...The wife killed her stepmother, but the husband was convicted of the crime...
...She was given immunity, the D.A...
...Why wasn't she prosecuted...
...This headline over a Washington Post column devoted to news about federal employees would upset a good many people out in the country if they knew about it: "Bill Would Give Key Workers 2 Raises a Year...
...The daughter of the one at Labor might find herself working at Commerce, while the son of the one at Interior gets a job at Labor, and the nephew of the one at Commerce finds an opening at Interior...
...Another fact about the civil service of which the average citizen is unaware emerged briefly into the sunlight in a recent investigation of the Secret Service by the Better Government Association...
...I have a solution to the problem...
...Let the truckers build their own highways, just as the railroads laid their own tracks...
...A more recent cause of ours is getting the American auto industry to take advantage of its present prosperity by lowering prices so that it will increase its share of the world market...
...The airlines have not given nearly enough attention to making their planes safer in a crash...
...one dean asked...
...to me he belongs with John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King in the rank just behind FDR...
...Of course, in some industries union work rules produce the same kind of outrage...
...A writer who appreciates the importance of maintaining the trust of his readers has a similar obligation...
...What do transit employees do all day...
...Instead of using regularly scheduled commercial flights, she used a 42-seat military jet at a cost to the government, according to UPI's Gregory Gordon, of $24,000 for each trip...
...Detroit, with its passion for sun roofs and power locks, offers 23,040 possible combinations on the Plymouth Reliant, according to a study by Booz Allen & Hamilton, and 69,120 on the Ford Thunderbird...
...I also protest Howe's assumption that those of us who attack special interests are attacking labor...
...They have 20 years' seniority and their union contract gives them first choice on jobs, even when that means some young longshoremen average only two days of work a week...
...employees for similar functions...
...The civil servant can give the friend advance notice of the job...
...In Washington, the person you criticize today may be sitting next to you at lunch or dinner tomorrow or be encountered while shopping at the Safeway or just walking down the street...
...It begins: "Last fall, Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz played an hourlong tape recording of a police interview for his class of criminal-law students...
...One reason for this, according to the inspector, was that it took up to three and a half months for the trackwalker's report to reach management...
...If this country is nothing more than the sum of its groups, then each group has every right to pursue,- for example, the tax break it wants...
...But if every group got the tax break it wanted, the country would obviously have an incredible deficit, which is just what the politics of special interest on the right as well on the left has given us...
...But they could point out only one fact that Noah got wrong in the entire article...
...and that the quality of seat cushions used as flotation devices for emergency water landings is so poor that many lose their buoyancy in less than ten minutes...
...But I can't resist telling you about an article by James B. Stewart in The Wall Street Journal...
...Its head, John B. Hiatt, says, "We have no auditor—no one capable of reading a financial statement r...
...In 1983, there were 19 subway derailments.compared to 12 in 1982...
...One Secret Service recruiter told the BGA that half the 120 people he had hired were friends or relatives of highranking officials of the Secret Service...
...Dusko Doder, The Washington Post's Moscow correspondent, beat the CIA and the State Department on the story of Andropov's death, simply because his daily routine involves listening to the local radio stations and walking around Moscow, which of course is shockingly unconventional behavior in our foreign services...
...They should be examples to the reporters at the Post who do not seem to understand that an employee does share in the moral responsibility for the actions of the enterprise of which he or she is part...
...I fear that this may turn out to be the Achilles heel of Gary Hart's campaign...
...It has been discovered by a couple in New York...
...According to the Sacramento Bee, he told a conference of businessmen in Calfornia: "I sense a growing acknowledgment that nuclear war would be very bad for business...
...There's nothing to it " How many times is the Post going to have to find out that high-ranking officials are usually the last to know ? Another example of what high-ranking officials don't know was provided by Kenneth Dam, the deputy undersecretary of state, who, as recently as January 11, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the Lebanese army "is an encouraging example of a truly national Lebanese institution that works...
...Says one: 'Ten minutes would have been more than enough: "Student critics say further that Mr...
...So the schools began to encourage their faculty to get involved in actual legal practice...
...Mike Royko, the veteran columnist, has demonstrated that journalists can be more than mere employees, that they can refuse to be a part of an enterprise that is doing bad things...
...at the Rusk dinner that Doder's report was 'bull...
...Say a civil servant hears about a job opening that might be filled by a friend...
...Three friends might work, respectively, at the Commerce, Labor, and Interior Departments...
...I endorse that challenge wholeheartedly...
...Much of the tape was inaudible or garbled, they complain...
...Goldman tells the story because a lot of crashes that could be survivable aren't survived because the passengers don't know what to do when the plane goes down...
...The Transit Authority is having other problems...
...Gordon also reports that such administration figures as Jeane Kirkpatrick, William Clark, Richard Allen, and David Stockman have used Air Force jets to go from Washington to New York...
...The jet costs $1,500, the shuttle $65...
...There is a compensation for these unhappy experiences if you live here long enough...
...The January issue of the Northwestern Alumni News points with pride to awards won by two graduates of the Northwestern journalism school...
...If you are appalled by Susan Ohanian's account of her experience with the teacher certification system (page 40), make sure you support the efforts of Governors Bruce Babbitt (Arizona) and Thomas Kean (New Jersey) and other reformers to end the requirement for education courses...
...I was disturbed when he prostituted himself before the NEA last year...
...Gordon also reports that such administration figures as Jeane Kirkpatrick, William Clark, Richard Allen, and David Stockman have used Air Force jets to go from Washington to New York...
Vol. 16 • April 1984 • No. 3
