POLITICAL BOOKNOTES
POLITICAL BOOKNOTES Marked to Die. Michael Brown. Simon & Schuster, $16.95. This depressing story about a New Jersey thug-turned-squealer named Jerry Festa illustrates many of the reasons why...
...On the other hand, "60 Minutes" has done more than a thousand shows...
...They have never felt rain before...
...Unfortunately, the author does not examine any of them...
...This depressing story about a New Jersey thug-turned-squealer named Jerry Festa illustrates many of the reasons why the Justice Department's Witness Protection Program is an ongoing governmental morass...
...If government and business screwed up only 12 times out of a thousand, journalists would be looking for other work...
...The book still says American played dirty tricks on Braniff (a plausible allegation), and there is still that delicious phone call in which the president of American is making what sounds suspiciously like collusive noises to the president of Braniff...
...This book is a long complaint about the science policy that is emerging...
...Robert A. Hayes, Steven C. Wheelright...
...The reporters on "60 Minutes" are rich...
...The Willowbrook Wars took place in the 1970s, when public exposure and court decree forced New York to shift the warehoused retarded to small group homes...
...In fact, the bulk of the reports detailed in the book turned out just fine: many revealed corruption, righted wrongs, forced action...
...and the most obvious at that...
...Dodd, Mead, $16.95...
...Cases in which one party is clearly right and the other clearly wrong are the essence of drama...
...Yes, this is the book American Airlines paid $25,000 to recall and then reissue because the author agreed to tinker with one of his footnotes...
...But between the lines of Festa's saga is the more important tale of why New Jersey is still as racket-ridden as before, and why Festa ended up isolated and bitter, suing the Justice Department (unsuccessfully) for allegedly reneging on its promises to create a new life for him and his family...
...Braniff applied for 626...
...Joseph Nocera...
...But the Reaganites smiled on science once they realized how useful it could be in building corporate profits and military hardware...
...But he buries a lot of his best stuff in impenetrable footnotes...
...This is no small nut to crack...
...It's a tedious compendium of anticapitalist rhetoric, policy-paper jargon, and vague cud-chewing about an "alternative science policy" based on "community-controlled decisionmaking ." Instead of showing how research actually gets done today, Dickson prefers to report the president's science advisor's testimony to Congress...
...But Jerry Festa's story is a good yarn about the slimy side of life, and if the reader wishes to ponder how a government program could possibly succeed in taking responsibility for the lives of people like these, that could be time well spent...
...The book makes clear that gangsterism thrives in Newark because of police corruption and ineffective justice...
...People could choose to fly other airlines and they did...
...From the standpoint of society, however, they are not America's biggest problems: the cases in which reform is required but hard to specify with certainty are more numerous and generally far more lasting in significance...
...reports blathered forth by one official committee or another...
...The law firm representing Braniff Airlines was sixth in line...
...the view had been, at best, "minimize negative impact") and (2) "management is the issue: our position is that productivity decline in the U.S...
...When the doors finally swung open, most airlines applied for ten routes, or maybe 20...
...The Willowbrook Wars were a qualified victory, but in large measure because of the outstanding leaders (e.g...
...It should...
...It is easy to understand why Jerry Festa, like so many turncoat thugs who have joined it, later denounced the Witness Protection Program as a fraud...
...Braniff's long fall from grace began when it applied for those routes...
...There is no question that Nance knows just about everything that happened to Braniff along its road to destruction...
...John Tierney Splash of Colors: The SelfDestruction of Braniff International...
...They discuss economies of scale, and then devote substantial effort to the long-neglected diseconomies of bureaucracy and confusion...
...A new elite is hoarding scientific knowledge at the expense of the American people and the rest of the world, Dickson argues, and researchers have happily gone along with the arrangement because it pays well and shields them from the pestering public...
...For most of the intervening time, messengers from law firms all over town had stood in line outside the CAB, shivering in the cold and looking for all the world as though they were lined up for World Series tickets...
...They knew how true conservatives felt about letting private enterprise pay for research...
...He was a soft touch when it came to his own employees, particularly middle managers, many of whom, says Nance, were deadwood...
...After fighting off activists in the sixties and seventies, scientists are safe once more in their ivory towers...
...Marked to Die is the story of only one of some four thousand witnesses who have been relocated by the Justice Department...
...And, further, it must seek stories that can be filmed, especially those with the kind of face-to-face human confrontations that make for compelling, easily followed story lines...
...that the criminality represented by Jerry Festa was essentially a local matter (despite some narcotics offenses), so that the Justice Department's intervention with its Witness Protection Program was fleeting and out of place...
...They attribute German success to an attitude of "Grundlichkeit" ("getting everything just right"), extensive and widespread apprenticeship programs, an abiding focus on quality, appreciation of low-level contributions, and valuing incremental (shop-floor driven) improvements...
...Falling in line with the same journalistic imperative that bedevils "60 Minutes" (and newspapers, and radio, and magazines, and all journalism), Madsen treats the successes as inevitable, the failures as symptomatic...
...Corporate disintegrations usually begin in subtle ways...
...It begins raining, and they instinctively take off their clothes because they think they are in the shower...
...In recent years it has become fashionable for "print" journalists to flail "60 Minutes...
...The author shows us roughly a dozen incidents in which the news judgment or techniques of "60 Minutes" have been questionable...
...But such is not the case with Braniff...
...They fly around the world accepting honors, often for staging film versions of stories that poor, unknown, nevermentioned print reporters actually dug up...
...People are absent from their equation for achieving manufacturing distinction...
...David J. Rothman, Sheila M. Rothman...
...Their reports reach millions and get results—which even the best print stories, even in the best papers and magazines, often do not...
...What's worse is that because Nance worked for Braniff, he is quick to trot out the bad apple excuse—as in Braniff's reputation for rudeness was the result of a few bad apples...
...Its pilots and most of its staff were paid well beyond what the market would have borne...
...These structural requirements dictate certain types of stories—one wronged man systematically abused under weird circumstances is a perennial—that are valid and important in their own ways but pale before the large conceptual stories in which there isn't a simply filmable narrative, but where the destinies of many more people might be affected...
...Thomas J. Peters The New...
...Beautiful...
...Is this the best we can do in the richest nation in human history...
...Braniff's attempt to swallow more than it could chew was only one of its mistakes...
...Axel Madsen...
...Their one deficiency is, however, monumental...
...Barbara Blum, Bill Bronston, and Bruce Ennis) on the side of good...
...How can such larger issues be filmed in a way that average viewers will watch...
...All the recall did was give the book gobs of publicity it would not have received otherwise...
...For a fictionalized account of how such decisions are made, see "Perfect...
...So harsh was he, so unrelenting, that the day came when they simply stopped telling him what he didn't want to hear...
...They're famous...
...The question posed by the book is whether reform of human services can be effected by litigation...
...Harper and Row, $25...
...Japanese success, they suggest, starts with an appreciation of "cleanliness and order," care for equipment, "quality consciousness" and "supplier-partner" relations...
...Fuller Torrey Restoring Our Competitive Edge: Competition Through Manufacturing...
...The show asked for it by suddenly making, just as it hit number one, a regular event of fluff personality pieces...
...has been more a management problem than a government problem ." .The book is unabashedly a text, and suffers from too many charts, graphs, and tables...
...Department of Justice...
...It's often impossible to put a finger on the precise moment when things start going wrong...
...Not a bad batting average...
...On the other hand, he was a tyrant in meetings with his top staff...
...But the book doesn't offer many new insights into the problem or the solution...
...But it didn't matter then because most of its routes were monopolies...
...A footnote of my own...
...More than a week earlier, the CAB had announced that, thanks to deregulation, it would be parceling out over 1,300 routes on a first-come, firstserve basis...
...Pantheon, $22.95...
...But it might be great...
...According to John J. Nance, a former Braniff pilot who has written this exhaustive account of the airline's troubles, Braniff president Harding Lawrence did have a strategy of sorts...
...This is a very good book, another indignant indictment of how bureaucracies (in this case the State of New York) fail to provide basic, humane care for the mentally disabled (in this case the retarded...
...But you can't help thinking some of the reaction was plain jealousy...
...Work that used to be published openly is now kept secret to please colonels and sales managers...
...David Dickson...
...William Morrow, $16.95...
...Instead of giving examples of how the Reaganites have affected real people in and out of the laboratory—the great public for which Dickson expresses concern— the book quotes stacks of "Whither Science...
...Television's dilemma is that, even more than print, it must simplify...
...Now Zoom in Tight on the Blind Woman's Face:' page 28...
...Before deregulation, Braniff had a reputation as a surly, unhelpful airline whose ontime percentage was low and whose penchant for losing baggage was high...
...Braniff, which had been successful as long as the government shielded it from serious competition, simply was not equipped to cope once that shield was removed...
...The authors, an historian and a social worker, have an outsider's eye and ear for the bureaucrat's response to criticism: one hand instinctively covers the gluteus maximus while the other passes out the press release saying yes, there have been problems but they are all taken care of now...
...Manufacturing has for too long been regarded with indifference by the academic, the executive, and the bright young man or woman on the make...
...But Festa has never worked at an honest job...
...Dickson spent four years ably covering Washington for the British science journal, Nature, but he doesn't seem to have realized that there's a big difference between what policymakers here say and what the rest of the country does—and what people want to read...
...Dickson traces the Pentagon's increasing control over basic science and the way private corporations are being encouraged (through exclusive patents and sweetheart deals) to profit from publicly funded research...
...In other words, the German and Japanese successes stem almost entirely from factors ignored in the technique sections of the book...
...The cobwebs were cleared away, but one senses that if dusting does not take place every two weeks they will rapidly reappear...
...Politics of Science...
...Hayes and Wheelright take the view that (I) "manufacturing.can be a positive part of a company's arsenal" (where previously...
...He assumed that after a year or so the government would come to its senses, reimpose regulation, and all of Braniff's new routes would instantly be profitable...
...The book itself is much worse than it has any right to be...
...He complains about sloppy government documentation, uncaring Justice Department bureaucrats, and the problem of constantly hiding out...
...Scientists ,braced for the worst when Ronald Reagan took office...
...An act of corporate lunacy if you ask me...
...In the most poignant passage in the book, a group of blind and deaf retarded children are taken out for a walk for the first time...
...and that despite the string of convictions that Festa produced, the organized crime apparatus in Newark remained feloniously in operation...
...Researchers have positively prospered from the Reagan budgets (except in a few fields, notably the social sciences...
...That's where we actually see Lawrence's legendary temper tantrums, and where we also find such nuggets as the role of the Teamsters in refusing to take a pay cut that might have saved the company...
...John Wiley, $19.95...
...Gregg Easterbrook The Willowbrook Wars...
...You can blame the staff for cowardice, especially as things got bad and Lawrence wasn't given information he desperately needed, but you also have to blame Lawrence for fostering that cowardice...
...Lawrence was both a soft touch and a tyrant, but each trait surfaced at exactly the wrong time...
...The lean years under Nixon had been bad enough—and now critics like Milton Friedman were seriously proposing the abolition of that sacred dispensary, The National Science Foundation...
...Problems with vertical integration are likewise dealt with at length and thoughtfully...
...John J. Nance...
...On October 25, 1978 at 8:30 a.m., the Civil Aeronautics Board opened its doors to a horde of waiting lawyers and, in so doing, ushered in the era of airline deregulation...
...Fred Graham 60 Minutes: The Power and the Politics...
...Early on Hayes and Wheelright acknowledge that they are dealing with "issues of structure" (facilities, location, technology, sourcing arrangements) and ignoring issues of "infrastructure" (organizational policies and attitudes) because, they say, changes in the former can be effected more rapidly than changes in the latter...
...But it never happened, and Lawrence, who wanted so badly for Braniff—his Braniff—to become a major player in the industry, could never bring himself to give up all those routes until they had drained the company of its cash...
...He is unlikely ever to be successfully "relocated" as a productive citizen, and if the officials of the Justice Department have been unenthusiastic in their efforts to try, that is possible to understand...
...The irony of their oversight is most apparent in their commanding chapter on learning from German and Japanese manufacturing successes...
...However, many a point is- worth the dig...
...After deregulation, Braniff still had the same reputation, only now it did matter...
...The book does not purport to draw generalizations from Festa's experiences to explain the shortcomings of the program as a whole...
...But watching "60 Minutes" you can't help feeling they have stopped looking: that they are willing to accept the constrictions of conventional "good television," and the accolades and profits attendant thereto...
...This book is attracting serious and positive attention...
...That's okay—it's still a fine show...
...You can't argue with Dickson's call to action: make scientists accountable to the taxpayers footing the bill...
...He simply tells the squalid tale of a Newark lowlife who burgled, swindled, strongarmed, and eventually murdered, until he got caught by the police, testified against a murderers' row of thugs and gangsters, and ended up hiding out under an assumed name, courtesy of the U.S...
...He quotes Lawrence as saying he could never bring himself to fire these people even though he knew they were incompetent...
Vol. 16 • October 1984 • No. 9
