POLITICAL BOOKNOTES
POLITICAL BOOKNOTES The Quality of Mercy: Cambodia, Holocaust and Modern Conscience. William Shawcross. Simon & Schuster, $19.95. Even if it did nothing more than pose the questions outlined...
...Of course, with flaws like this last one Cuomo almost doesn't need virtues, and the Democrats are awfully lucky to have at least one politician who can be discussed in these terms...
...The contrast between Mondale's debut in the Senate and Humphrey's is telling...
...Shawcross has, nevertheless, made an important start merely by charting the territory...
...Jonathan Lash...
...Anthony's quotation goes on for 16 lines, lines that fit conveniently the logical flow of the chapter...
...Sizer...
...People find it hard to comprehend that kind of wanton killing and destruction, and in Indochina in particular many Americans didn't want to hear about the aftermath of our involvement...
...Hailed by such groups as the National Audubon Society and the Environmental Policy Center, this book provides ample fuel for those who wish to attack one of the administration's most glaring weak spots...
...If that happens, he'll be the first really accomplished writer to reach the highest office since Wilson...
...Shawcross himself, and most of his readers, take that moral impulse for granted...
...For example, Mondale never studied in the classroom under Humphrey, as Solberg says he did...
...It is true, of course, that both Humphrey and Mondale supported the war during the Johnson years...
...Arthur, 34, is an architect...
...Hardly anything said is controversial or selfincriminating...
...Shawcross is clearly appalled by the cynical politicking he discovered in Cambodia, but he makes sadly little effort to think through the issues it raises—to think how relief officials and concerned policy makers might navigate the political minefields he describes...
...Accounts of forced labor and village massacres began to trickle out of the country in early 1977, but they did not gain what Shawcross calls "critical mass"—significant worldwide attention—until the Vietnamese invasion some two years later...
...As Cuomo notes in his book, Mondale failed to endorse him for governor against Koch, despite Cuomo's loyalty, and Koch's disloyalty, to the Carter-Mondale ticket...
...Not using names makes sense when there is some reason, clear to the reader, why identities must be withheld: usually when the source has placed himself in jeopardy by talking...
...once there is no named individual who might complain, Hey, that's not what I said or That's not how it happened, the temptation to embroider, and especially to tinker with quotes, can become irresistible...
...He writes nearly as much about his parents, his wife, and his children as about politics...
...Happily for readers of books, Cuomo's diary seems to have been his confidante...
...This is merely the backdrop—in effect, the prologue—to Shawcross's depressing tale, but this quiet, telling account of his travels is one of the most effective parts of the book...
...Peppered with banalities—"Adolescents are complicated ....They come in all shapes and sizes"—it rambles and has no discernable structure...
...Random House, $19.95...
...He wants to replace the typical six 55-minute periods a day with fewer, longer blocks of time that stress the acquisition of cognitive skills rather than facts...
...His future does not look bright...
...But the aid organizations also come in for a fair share of criticism—for their often dilatory and bureaucratic operations, their petty rivalries, their failure to understand the Cambodians' needs and their inability to recognize their own mistakes...
...Outside, both in Thailand and on the ThaiCambodian border, the Thai military government bears the brunt of Shawcross's criticism— mainly for its forced repatriation of Cambodian refugees and for the way it allowed food to be diverted to Khmer Rouge fighters, thus encouraging them to regroup as an exile army on the Cambodian border...
...Students, Sizer observes, are generally sophisticated but largely unschooled...
...He limits his account to what happened to Cambodians, hardly touching on the Vietnamese boat people, who enjoyed considerably more international attention at the time, and much of the book is given over to descriptions of organizational infighting and logistical detail...
...On the other hand, Mondale has skillfully avoided the pitfalls of the vice-presidency that proved so destructive to Humphrey's career...
...Mondale remained loyal to Carter, but not blindly so—witness the alacrity with which he confessed to having privately opposed the Carter grain embargo...
...In their skepticism of Washington's claims that our pullout would lead to a bloodbath, many discounted the evidence coming out of Cambodia as so much anticommunist propaganda...
...Many liberals distrust democracy...
...Reading his book did nothing to shake my conviction, formed when I first met him in Albany eight years ago, that this man will eventually be president...
...His account of the endless squabbling and jockeying and selfserving "generosity" that went into the Cambodian aid program is often confusing, overrun with faceless aid officials and mired in detail...
...The charm, clarity of vision, moral self-confidence, and eloquence of the keynote speech are here, too...
...Why did Cuomo go all-out for Mondale after Mondale had lost in New Hampshire, a moment when other politicians were busily backing away...
...Not very likely...
...Public address systems," Sizer quips, "are the most malevolent intruder into the thinking taking place in public school classrooms since the invention of the flickering fluorescent light ." Sizer calls for giving teachers more authority, while subjecting them to greater performance evaluation...
...What, for example, would he have done if he were in charge of the operation on the Thai border...
...Shawcross tends to be slightly more sympathetic toward the international relief workers caught in the middle—wrangling with the Vietnamese and the Thai military even as their counterparts at home were cajoling western countries to contribute more and trying desperately to convince them that the aid was being put to good use...
...For example, Cuomo is probably more responsible than any single person (apart from Jimmy Carter) for the fact that Walter Mondale won the Democratic nomination...
...He begins quite simply with an account of his own first trip back to Cambodia after the Vietnamese invasion that ousted the Khmer Rouge...
...Why did it take so long...
...Shawcross calls the whole seamy story a "diplomatic dance macabre"—and indeed the grim burden of his book is that politics will always play a part in international relief efforts, usually for the worse...
...As a result, Barber concludes, American politics has become selfish, adversarial, and increasingly irrelevant to the common man...
...As for the United States, our embassy in Thailand is given some credit for encouraging the aid effort, but Washington too is heavily faulted for allowing the reconstruction of the Khmer Rouge...
...And yet, in the end, there is something disappointingly vague about the quality of its moral judgments...
...As for the good teachers, Sizer notes their authority is constantly being undercut by meddlesome administrators and petty intrusions...
...There is no such thing ." —Jamie Merisotis...
...One waits in vain his relative ethical judgments—the beginning, at least, of a practical moral calculus to help guide other humanitarians caught between the grim imperatives of their inescapably political calling...
...The fake names and details might be understandable if Turkle were discussing the results of a formal sociological study, but she's not— rather she calls the book an "investigation" involving "thousands of hours of interviews and observations all over the United States," her technique being more like journalism than sociology and her interview subjects being no less than "informants...
...Andrew Morayscik A Season of Spoils...
...Norton, $19.95...
...This biography of the other Minnesota Democrat who became senator and vice-president and then sought the presidency arrives at a propitious moment...
...Not enough people are permitted meaningful participation in politics...
...Steve's classmate Paul had a very different reaction...
...Truth in The Second Self gets jumbled up and lost among composites, and that is a shame for what might have been a fine book...
...Tamar Jacoby Humphrey...
...The story itself begins several years earlier with the West's painful failure to take account of what was happening inside Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge...
...In building consensus he rarely caused loud public echoes...
...Just beneath the surface, however, lies a much bigger story—a deeply troubling picture of the moral and political paradoxes that threaten to undermine a foreign policy based on human rights and humanitarian concern...
...What do we do, for example, when the government of a country refuses or obstructs our aid...
...They even suffer composite doubts...
...Given the opportunity, they fear, ignorant masses would destroy liberal institutions...
...Houghton Mifflin, $16.95...
...There is no great distance between the private and public man...
...Hendrik Hertzberg Horace's Compromise: The Dilemma of the American High School...
...Better to restrict participation lest a tyrannical majority repeal civil rights laws, reintroduce creationism to the classroom, or universalize California's Proposition 13...
...The last chapter should be read first...
...their actual identities replaced with "change[d] details" and phony names...
...And in the process, we have destroyed our sense of community and common purpose...
...He tells the story of the international relief organizations that sought to restore some kind of normality to Cambodia after the fall of Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge government in January 1979...
...Wayne bought his computer on an impulse, but soon it became a compulsion...
...Mondale indeed often shied away from battles that Humphrey arguably would have joined...
...once students demonstrate a mastery of these areas, they should be free to leave school...
...Specialties proliferate as jobs get balkanized...
...The book's main flaw is that it's distracting to read...
...Humphrey was systematically humiliated by his peers in those years, but, over time, both the man and the institution bent...
...He may have been tardy, but it still was a step Humphrey never could quite bring himself to take...
...What he discovers, by the end of his book, is just how new, and how frail, it is...
...The people are better than the structure," Sizer observes...
...But both of these measures seem highly implausible under the circumstances, and here as elsewhere Shawcross never quite seems to come to grips with the dilemma he outlines...
...is a three-time loser as a candidate on his own...
...Why didn't we protest what the Khmer Rouge were doing to disrupt Cambodia's economy and devastate its people when there was still time to stop it...
...Phillip Keisling Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age...
...As with all large bureaucracies, the emphasis is on the quantifiable and the classifiable...
...But if his lack- of close peers during the period covered by the diaries signals an inability to forge such relationships, then there is trouble ahead...
...and has just spent a harrowing, thankless year managing the Carter reelection campaign in New York...
...If a writer is possessed of truth, the most powerful form he can employ is the simple statement: to write this is true, if it is true, is a thousand times more effective than to present a set of evidence that, even if veritable (something the reader cannot possibly know when false names are employed), could easily be contradicted by another set of evidence...
...The ans*er is largely political...
...Diaries of Mario M Cuomo: The White House Years is a book to look forward to...
...The flip side of Cuomo's moral seriousness is a kind of moral vanity—an attachment to his own virtue that risks becoming excessive...
...was bound to lose and did not hesitate to put distance between himself and the war...
...He also favors a "mastery" approach...
...Shelley is a graduate student in computer sciences...
...Benjamin Barber...
...Inside Cambodia, the blame falls heavily on the Vietnamese occupiers: they initially requested Western aid for Cambodia, but delayed the program for several months and then insisted on distributing the rice themselves, often using it to consolidate their own political power...
...There is plenty of anecdotal evidence that Mondale was personally outraged by his findings...
...Reassuringly Turkle notes that "I use real names when I cite published material .") No doubt the author did interview computer owners, and doubtless Shelley, Wayne, and the rest are similar to the real people they represent...
...The typical modern high school is large—at least 1,500 students—and organized in a hierarchical, top-down fashion...
...By contrast, Mondale's arrival in the Senate in 1965 caused nary a ripple—and his departure a dozen years later hardly more so...
...But because the migrants were powerless (and the growers a part of the all-powerful farm lobby), there was no feasible legislative remedy short of a high-risk crusade to raise the public consciousness...
...Gregg Easterbrook Diaries of Mario M. Cuomo: The Campaign for Governor.Mario M. Cuomo...
...But by 1968, Mondale saw the U.S...
...Considering the sound and fury of his own career, it is no wonder that Humphrey looked with cheerful amazement on his friend's charmed life...
...This book is filled with insightful observations about America's high schools...
...William Shawcross doesn't answer all of these questions...
...The Senate that passed the 1964 Civil Rights Law—perhaps the most glittering of Humphrey's many legislative achievements—was a far suppler legislative body than the one that greeted Humphrey as a pariah 16 years earlier...
...The Quality of Mercy is a distressing book...
...Not since Senator Alben Barkley talked his way into the national ticket in 1948 has anyone made such a politically potent convention keynote address as Mario Cuomo did in San Francisco on July 16, 1984...
...We turn important disputes over to judges or bureaucrats when we should be encouraging citizen involvement in fashioning political compromises...
...Liberal institutions, he claims, are undermining democracy...
...Perhaps if their strengths could be combined to form a composite—Humphrey's compelling visionary activism and Mondale's disciplined mastery of constituency politics—we would at last have the perfect liberal politician...
...In this provocative book, political scientist Benjamin Barber turns this fear on its head...
...The subtlety of his mind, reinforced by a Jesuit education, has not prevented him from acquiring a Reagan-like talent for cutting through the "policy" fog and making direct conections between human realities and first principles...
...At the end of the book, in January 1983, having defeated an overwhelmingly popular, conservative Democrat (Koch) and a fabulously rich conservative, he is inaugurated as governor...
...The recent torrent of composites and "restructured" conversations is beginning to take on the tone of a bad horror movie...
...With this, he opens the way for others to think about finding a realistic place for it in the world of power politics...
...But even for the most dedicated author, use of simulated reality holds a greater danger...
...Decent, average people are captured by sinister literary agents from beyond the stars: the actual facts of their Lives stolen from them, they are forced to live out a hellish, semi-accurate existence, reinforcing preconceived notions and making short, pithy remarks...
...China is criticized for supporting the Thai policy, while the Soviet Union and its third world allies are blamed for obstructing United Nations' relief efforts...
...Humphrey, on the other hand, may have lost the White House because he insisted on staying mum about a far more consequential issue: his early opposition within the National Security Council to LBJ's initial bombing raids over North Vietnam...
...Mondale's Senate career does not lack accomplishments—the 1968 Open Housing Law, a landmark reform of the Senate filibuster rule, campaign finance reform, a gutsy and effective defense of school busing are among them...
...Competing interests develop— administrators vs...
...Almost immediately after "Anthony," a computer hacker, appears in a chapter about losing oneself in the machine, he declares, "Hacking is safe and easy and secure...
...the family metaphor is firmly rooted in his life...
...The book is also marred by some needless inaccuracies...
...But those achievements were wrought by Mondale's application of his political brokering skills within the Senate...
...the unions—and government, regulators step in to dictate esoteric standards such as how many reading credits a special education teacher needs...
...One example: When former EPA Deputy Administrator John Hernandez was asked about acid rain, for example, his response was a scalding, "Never use those words with me...
...What you see is what you get: a politician of extraordinary intelligence, ability, and deep liberal conviction...
...In November 1980, when the book opens, Cuomo is the lieutenant governor of New York, traditionally a dead-end job...
...Shawcross admits that he was among those who overestimated the threat of famine facing Cambodia in 1979, and he wonders pointedly why no aid officials have publicly admitted their miscalculation—despite the question such a mistake raises about their credibility and susceptibility to political manipulation...
...In 1949 Humphrey barged in aflame with passion and indignation at an institution arrogantly impervious to social injustice and seemingly responsive only to the tribal loyalties of its own old-boy network...
...They lurk like zombies at the beginning of paragraph after paragraph...
...What is the moral obligation of the international community in the face of these and lesser human rights violations...
...How can the civilized world respond to large-scale international disasters on the order of the holocaust and the threatened devastation of the Cambodian people...
...And a good thing, too, for Cuomo's is a much better book and an unusually revealing one—revealing because its author really is the man whose name is on the cover, not some harried ghostwriter armed with tape recorder and clip file...
...The humanitarian impulse he describes— the concern for other peoples' human rights and the sense of international responsibility— is a relatively new force in world politics, a product of modern communications and the horror of World War II...
...He was among the first foreign journalists to visit the country after the Khmer Rouge took over in 1975—among the first to bring back stories of the unnerving, empty streets, the emaciated children, the "hospitals" without medicine, and the mass graves with their heaps of gaping skulls...
...guaranteed that...
...It's hard to avoid the suspicion that Cuomo's devotion to Mondale had more to do with a desire to give Mondale and the world a demonstration of real loyalty, of true Cuomo grit, than with any particular conviction that Mondale would really be the best candidate...
...Cuomo's diary tells an irresistible political rags-to-riches story...
...Listen, for example, to Cambodian Foreign Minister Hun Sen, who told an aid official that "our people would rather eat grass and die than to share aid with Pol Poe"this, Shawcross reports, at a time when many children taking part in one feeding program were still too weak to hold their mugs and bowls...
...It is also at times—because of the scope of the questions it raises—exhilarating...
...While this book contains many insights into the emotional role computers are beginning to play in society, at times it smells so fake, I had difficulty taking it seriously...
...Mondale chose not to make that effort and dropped the matter with a half-hearted attempt to pass a few tepid reforms...
...He too came to ask whether free will was illusory...
...Theodore Sizer...
...Finlay Lewis The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit...
...Leftist journalists and others from the antiwar movement bear a special responsibility—and critical as he was of the war, Shawcross does not hesitate to point this out...
...they have learned that passivity in the classroom is rewarded, that one needn't expend much energy to get by...
...Many of the qualities the national television audience discovered in Cuomo on July 16 are on display here...
...Where he led, accumulating enough wounds to qualify as the Scarface of American politics, Mondale followed, with apparent effortlessness...
...Carl Solberg...
...I used to get into relationships that usually led to me getting burned in some way...
...How can we even begin to understand these tragedies—let alone do something to alleviate them...
...Yet the story itself has a kind of stark clarity—the weight and resonance of a simple moral tale...
...Because he was convinced that the republic would be in peril if Gary Hart rather than Mondale were the nominee...
...How would he have handled the inevitable political pressures from Bangkok and Washington, from the Khmer Rouge warlords in the border camps and the Thai generals determined to help them...
...University of California Press, $18.50...
...Still, Solberg provides us with an opportunity to assess this year's presidential nominee in comparison to his predecessor...
...By the time the tale is done, however, neither right nor left— neither the West nor the Soviet bloc, neither communist Vietnam nor our ally Thailand—come out looking very good...
...His campaign manager was his son, Andrew, 25 years old...
...Sherry 'Furkle...
...Shawcross notes the "quandaries" and "paradoxes"that surround such decisions, and he mentions in passing the possibility of interning the Khmer Rouge fighters or taking their weapons away...
...Even if it did nothing more than pose the questions outlined in its first short chapters, The Quality of Mercy would be one of this year's most important and challenging political books...
...A theater critic once wrote of a play so unconvincing that "not even the phone rang true...
...former headmaster at Andover and chairman of yet another national commission that's studying public education, visited dozens of American high schools and made a special (and welcome) effort to understand the students...
...When Turkle speaks in her own voice--a real voice—the book is thought-provoking and often original, and much of what she has to say struck me as true...
...Unfortunately, despite much original research, Solberg does little more than round out what we already know about Hubert Humphrey...
...But there's no reason I can see why Turkle's interviewees had to be anonymous...
...Pantheon, $9.95...
...Politicians without peers too often find themselves surrounded by worshipful young people Whose concept of loyalty stops short of delivering bad news...
...Turkic, an MIT psychologist, sends readers on a voyage to the Planet of Composite People...
...Many teachers acquiesce in this docility, either because they are overburdened by too many students, or because they're trying desperately to be liked, or because they can't teach, period...
...He might have been referring to The Second Self...
...Memories of their early battles with Popular Front radicals for control of the Minnesota DFI...
...During the campaign, the book shows, he had no peer—no truly close friend or associate his age in whom he could confide and to whom he could delegate responsibility...
...At first blush, William Shawcross's subject seems narrowly bureaucratic, a mere footnote to the history of Indochina in the second half of the 20th century...
...Cuomo does not go out of his way to show off his flaws, but they, too, are at least suggested in this diary and the speeches appended to it...
...its point—that our schools' woes can be traced directly to bureaucratic imperatives—is so good that one wishes Sizer had explored it further...
...And should we be willing to provide humanitarian assistance even when it strengthens governments we don't like...
...Simon & Schuster, $17.95...
...Surely he would not have discontinued the feeding program, even if much of the rice were diverted to the Khmer Rouge...
...For example, as Robert Kennedy's successor to the chairmanship of the Senate Migratory Labor Subcommittee, Mondale compiled a devastating documentation of the systematic exploitation and dehumanization of migratory work by large growers...
...no radical reinterpretations here...
...One of the ancillary effects of that speech was to stimulate the rather sluggish sales of this book, which had been suffering by comparison with its flashier, trashier rival, Ed Koch's kick-and-tell memoir, Mayor...
Vol. 16 • August 1984 • No. 8
