POLITICAL BOOKNOTES
POLITICAL BOOKNOTES CETA: Politics and Policy, 1973-1982. Grace A. Franklin, Randall B. Ripley. University of Tennessee Press, $24.98. Geraldine Ferraro, in her first speech after...
...Instead, the book is little more than a series of assertions buttressed by "multivariant regression analysis...
...Not as much as the author would suggest...
...Hougan notes that the press, which also rapidly embraced the politicalbugging explanation, likewise had a stakein promoting it...
...David Lodge...
...Meanwhile at the White House Henry Kissinger was spying on his own aides, and Admiral Thomas Moorer, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was in turn spying on Kissinger...
...Then, in the month preceding the June 1972 break-in, Hoover died and George Wallace was shot...
...Why did CETA fail so flamboyantly...
...After $55 billion, CETA—and the liberal dream it embodied—deserve a far better epitaph...
...Or, if CETA did not actually fail—and there's evidence to support this view—why is it remembered as one of the classic excesses of liberalism gone amok...
...These are important questions as we grope to understand the continuing popularity of the Reagan revolution...
...But the narrowness of their concerns destroys the value of this extensive research...
...Hunt with his illfitting red wig has always been played in the press as a bumbler...
...agencies don't anymore), Hoover's bizarre obsession with sex files, and the general inclination at the time toward half-baked psychological experiment, this explanation of the break-in is not as far fetched as it may seem...
...But we can't simply rule out the chance, however remote, that the CIA actually got away with something...
...At its peak in 1978-79, CETA created about 725,000 public service jobs and was spending roughly another $5 billion a year on training programs...
...It's hard to believe that another book about Watergate could be relevant, but this one is engaging and often surprisingly fresh...
...You can almost hear the scorn in Ferraro's voice—what could be more pathetically outmoded than for a Democrat to believe in federal jobs programs...
...If, instead, the burglars had been inspired by forces beyond 'Nixon's control, the president, however improbably, could have been seen as partly a victim, not a villain duped by those creepy spooks...
...Macmillan, $15.95...
...Born as a Nixon-era experiment in creative federalism, dramatically expanded under Jimmy Carter, and bluntly terminated by Ronald Reagan, CETA may well be remembered as the last gasp of the New Deal...
...J. Edgar Hoover was dying, making the FBI unstable, and the CIA was being torn apart by its internal mole-hunts, led by James Angleton, who would himself later stand accused of being the mole...
...Suppose that was part of Hunt's act...
...Hougan has an infuriating habit of implying that he has a more sensational story than he is telling but that he is just too responsible to report it without having nailed down every last detail...
...Hougan puts forth that the burglary which eventually caused Nixon to walk the plank was ordered not, as commonly believed, by the White House to eavesdrop on Democrats but by different parties for different reasons...
...Franklin and Ripley, alas, are primarily concerned with the narrow questions of federalism inherent in CETA-particularly the relationship between the federal government and the "prime" local sponsors who actually administered the program...
...An amazing number of top military officers believed that Kissinger, architect of detente and overlord of Vietnam strategy, was literally a Russian agent...
...The ring was said to be based in the Columbia Plaza apartments, a block from the Watergate, and many fun-filled calls were placed through a phone in DNC headquarters that had been set up as a private line...
...With unemployment still about 7 percent, virtually no one mourns the death of most federal jobs programs...
...It's necessary to recall just how strange that mood was...
...An otherwise calm book is marred by his attempt to overhype the notion that "our recent history is a forgery" because the true motives of the burglars are not certain...
...Michael Kinsley...
...Geraldine Ferraro, in her first speech after the election, stoutly denied that she and Walter Mondale lost because they were the apostles of free-spending liberalism...
...Gregg Easterbrook Small World...
...In the early 1970s the FBI and CIA were operating with open contempt for each other...
...Considering the extent to which intelligence services have traditionally used hookers to trap agents and politicians (supposedly, U.S...
...Then there are governmentsubsidized traveling lectureships and similar distractions to assure that the modern academics have no time for reading or writing...
...In between, there are conferences in Hawaii, in Jerusalem, at a villa in northern Italy, and elsewhere...
...But as the source was almost immediately revealed, the Plumbers had to think of other projects to justify their continued existence...
...Small World is a hilarious novel about people wasting their lives going to conferences...
...That phone, Hougan maintains—not O'Brien or McGovern—was the burglars' real target...
...This leads to such epic conclusions as, "federalism in action creates both confusion and opportunities in the implementation process...
...The officer, a former employee of the National Security Agency, had volunteered out of the blue to work the graveyard shift that fateful night even though he had already worked a full shift, and then parked his patrol car by the Watergate...
...Obviously, it was in the...
...Democrats' interest to accept at face value.the explanation of the break-in, since that painted Nixon as rotten to the core...
...When caught, the burglars were on their fourth, not first, entry into the complex...
...Grilling the president himself would have far more career-making potential than painstakingly piecing together the conflicting accounts of a bunch of third-rate burglars, which Hougan deserves considerable credit for doing...
...That Nixon knew of White House involvement and methodically lied about and tried to cover that involvement up, is still the most important issue— and would have been most important even if (assuming Hougan's right) all burglary facts had come out quickly...
...The authors are to be commended for undertaking hundreds of interviews at the local level to try to unravel the tangled mystery of CETA...
...Such is the sorry legacy of CETA, the most recent and perhaps final substantial national effort to alleviate unemployment...
...Walter Shapiro Secret Agenda...
...But such grand thematics are beyond the scope of this densely written, but nonetheless superficial survey by two political scientists...
...Capitol Hill secretaries and a female White House lawyer were being provided to congressmen and other big shots...
...Lodge, a professor of English at the University of Birmingham (England), is concerned with academic conferences...
...In such an environment Nixon employees might well have run wild...
...In 1971 the Pentagon Papers were published, leading to the creation of the Plumbers, whose job was to plug that leak...
...The only aspect genuinely hard to swallow is that the CIA got away with it: in the last decade the agency has seemed so incompetent that it couldn't spy on its own shadow, let alone keep its role in one of the most investigated events of all time disguised...
...Another event, which occurred in early June 1972, was the headline news that a D.C...
...Jim Hougan...
...We didn't call for massive new federal jobs programs...
...If Hougan's contentions are true, what does it mean...
...The modern conference resembles the pilgrimage of medieval Christendom," explains the author in a prologue, "in that it allows the participants to indulge themselves in all the pleasures and diversions of travel while appearing to be austerely bent on selfimprovement" And, "Today's conferences have an additional advantage over the pilgrims' of old in that their expenses are usually paid...
...If all signs pointed to Nixon, the story would have maximum glamor and headline appeal...
...Suspicions raised and morale lowered during the mole hunt ultimately led to the sacking of Angleton and CIA director Richard Helms, and to the mid-1970s agency purge...
...Yet the failure to nail down the burglary story keenly demonstrates an aspect of institutional Washington culture...
...In brief, he presents a substantial (though not conclusive) case that Howard Hunt was not working for Nixon at all, but was still answering to his old firm, the CIA, planted, in fact, to spy on the White House...
...In turn, Hougan suggests, information from the taps was destined primarily for the CIA, not the White House...
...The CIA had recently been showered with high-level Soviet defectors who might or might not be genuine, and was still tinkering with its most far-fetched Manchurian Candidate mind-control theories...
...Just five years later, CETA has been reduced to an epithet...
...They wanted dirt on any Democrats who might be involved, and also advance warning if anyone in the White House was going to be implicated...
...And, for television, lots of dramatic pictures...
...Small World begins with a small, rather grim conference at a British "red brick" university modeled after his own and ends with the gargantuan MLA (Modern Languages Association) extravaganza at the New York Hilton...
...Read the speeches," she insisted...
...But, Hougan points out, might not others have been running wild as well...
...police officer who actually made the Watergate arrests appears to have been tipped—possibly by someone who was intending to make the CIA, not Nixon, look foolish...
...There are no quotes, no illustrative anecdotes, and no original findings about the effects of CETA on the unemployed...
...grand jury was investigating a political call-girl ring that appeared to come as close as the real world ever has to the type of high-class hooker domes depicted in TV mini-series...
...The sheer weirdness of Nixon risking all for inside information on Democratic National Committee Chairman Larry O'Brien, considering that Nixon was nearly certain to win, has always been rationalized as a product of the paranoid mood of the times...
...Moreover, it could be reported from the White House press room—each day Ron Ziegler would have some screwball new denial to squirm through—and Senate hearing 'rooms, meaning a maximum amount of drama for a minimum amount of work...
...Hougan recites the everintriguing fact that the D.C...
...Between 1975 and 1983, the federal government spent a total of $55 billion on the diverse jobs and training programs lumped together under the unwieldy government title of the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act...
...Random House, $19.95...
Vol. 17 • February 1985 • No. 1
