POLITICAL BOOKNOTES
POLITICAL BOOKNOTES The Double Man. Senators Gary Hart and William S. Cohen. Morrow, $16.95. In the history of the republic, only three sitting senators have been elected president:...
...Faulk proves it with a moving account of his efforts to save from the Sunday dinner table a hen who wanted to set when she should have been laying...
...If there is anything to learn about our politicians from the book besides the hint that their flat, postured public personalities are more deeply ingrained than we might like to think, it's their attitude toward the press...
...Brother Culpepper said it "was the biggest funeral he had ever preached...
...He moves earnestly from wheat field to rice paddy finding his facts in gluey clumps...
...As an official of the National Student Association in the mid-1960s, I worked with Lowenstein...
...North is no detached journalist, and he makes that clear...
...Unlike many similar victims of the era, Faulk fought back with a libel suit...
...It may be because senators speak Senatese, a sub-dialect of Bureaucratese...
...David Butler...
...The author argues that Lowenstein was a Central Intelligence Agency operative in Spain and Africa in the early 1960s and a collaborator with intelligence officials throughout his adult life...
...Houghton Mifflin, $14.95...
...Further disclosure: he is also an old colleague of mine...
...He is at the pass office with two black friends going through the demeaning process of having their passes renewed...
...What suffices in most Washington novels is a juvenile preoccupation with Power and Glamour, which tends to drain the characters of life...
...James North...
...Characters are developed in brief paragraphs aides could well have written to honor a constituent at a Rotary awards dinner...
...He served for two years in Congress and tried unsuccessfully to return three times...
...I am envious of any writer who can thank Cactus Pryor for anything...
...In fact, much of the Democratic party seems to have forgotten how to talk American...
...This spy book by William Cohen and Gary Hart is living testimony to how a senate career can atrophy ordinary faculties of communication...
...This is Washington, as the early Evelyn Waugh might have portrayed it, which means it's both funny and nasty, a delightful combination...
...Cummings has attempted to make his own reputation by destroying that of an admirable American...
...Garrett Epps, whose previous novel, The Shad Treatment, was a more conventional political melodrama about a race for the governorship of Virginia, spent several years in Washington as a writer for the Post and as the part-time fiction editor of The Washington Monthly...
...Despite these disadvantages, he has written a laughing-out-loud book about the wars between civil servants and political appointees, the machinations of Capital Hill aides, the deviousness of local television reporters , and a city divided just about equally be tween the ruthlessly ambitious and the clinically insane...
...As the computer industry's technology raced along, Goodman and Weissman were left behind with colossal debts and heaps of useless hardware...
...There are a great many references and footnotes here meant to convey an impression of voluminous research to support these controversial assertions...
...In the end, Baker's long-suffering wife stands by her man as they ship out west for a new life...
...They have an especially hard time communicating to normal people...
...Now he's produced a book so strangely encyclopedic that it may have overwhelmed even Ross...
...Back in the 1950s, folk humorist John Henry Faulk was fired from his job at CBS after a group of paranoids suggested his loyalty was suspect...
...Reporters are either stooges, who unwittingly pass information for the CIA, or vultures who get the story wrong while violating privacies...
...Totsie was killed by the Katy Flyer while he was sitting on the tracks...
...What Faulk does best, and very well, is tell stories...
...Faulk's book reminds us not only how vicious those times were, but how silly...
...Kahn tells us in a preface that he decided to write this series of pieces while touring the Third World with his wife in various chauffeured automobiles...
...No more facts...
...he seems to be saying that without an appreciation of fierce, even eccentric, individualism, we can't hope for a decent unity...
...But nothing adheres...
...The rice chapter somehow balloons into a bizarre set-piece on coconuts, and the prose shifts from the flatness of The World Book Encyclopedia to the strangeness of Naked Lunch...
...Only occasionally is he disappointed: "Just how rice got into Guam is uncertain, but...
...And besides, Faulk's writing is almost pathologically American...
...Even as the list of people arrested for demonstrating in front of the South African embassy begins to read like a sampling of Who's Who in America and the South African government slowly but visibly reacts to such pressure, there are few current books on the country...
...Apparently unscarred and certainly unrepentant, he has gathered here a collection of columns, scripts, sermons, essays, tall tales, and the transcript of a one-man show he took on the road...
...He fails altogether to empathize with this real-life version of Bialystock and Bloom...
...But the author would rather pass smug remarks about false piety than draw any conclusions from this fascinating point...
...To save themselves from ruin, they financed the same computers more than once, forged invoices and leases to obtain financing on computers that did not exist, and even made fake phone calls to Rockwell impersonating bank officers...
...Kahn climbs up a tree and find this unlikely nut: "The juice, before it hardens into meat, is a delicious thirst quencher, as thousands of American servicemen hitherto unacquainted with coconuts in their own milieu were happy to discover during the Second World War...
...Faulk has the senses of a folklorist, and he sees and hears things others would miss in their rush to the Dallas-Fort Worth airport...
...The Staffs of Life, with its rambling chapters on corn, potatoes, wheat, rice, and soybeans, is bland feed...
...Unfortunately, Fenichell never addresses such questions or derives any larger meaning from his subject...
...Instead of examining such a detail with sensitivity, Fenichell cracks, "That Myron is dying at age 34 usually goes without saying...
...He listens to a "colored" couple and their friends feverishly discussing how to defy an eviction notice ordering the couple to vacate their apartment in an illegally integrated pocket of Johannesburg...
...Richard Meyer The Uncensored John Henry Faulk...
...This restraint, part of the storyteller's art, imprints the incident on the mind the way no amount of moralizing would have...
...Ross was not terribly interested in fluff or fiction...
...Worse, it's a portrait of blue-collar workers that simply perpetuates old class prejudices...
...In Washington, the writer is surrounded by the unsatisfying irony Of dull people in interesting jobs...
...What North does best is describe the people he met...
...You must approach this book the way you would the store in which you buy it, passing quickly over the junk to discover the items of real value...
...The only deception that Cummings proves is his own...
...Prose for the Congressional Record...
...I suspect Faulk would tell Hart he won't get to be president talking like that...
...he speaks American, a variation of English which, at its best, values meaning over elegance, and imagery over structure...
...His remains were so scattered that the family leased four acres for the funeral, just to be safe...
...Tivo of these sermons are included in Faulk's book In his one-man show, Faulk brought together a collection of characters ranging from the misbegotten Totsie Taylor to the eloquent Reverend Tanner Franklin (who tells the story of David and Goliath about as well as it can be told) to the mealy-mouthed Congressman John Guffaw...
...This enables it to get at the central truth other Washington novels miss, that Washington is a perfectly ridiculous place...
...This book could not have appeared at a better time...
...His 1940 master's thesis at the University of Texas was titled "Ten Negro Sermons...
...Near the beginning of the book, he tells about the time the sheriff deputized the white males in the town to search for a black man accused of stabbing a deputy sheriff...
...Indeed, the CIA's "good wing" was Lowenstein's primary affiliation, according to Cummings...
...There is more desperation and heart in this scene of middle-aged men trying to recapture the hope they once had than anywhere else in the book...
...But the show is a camp success, and as in any good morality tale, Mostel and Wilder see their scheme unravel, and they hoof it off to the hoosegow...
...Eric Lewis Freedom Rising...
...Philip A. Frayne...
...Ed Schwartz The Floating Island: A Tale of Washington...
...It becomes clear that Cummings' purpose goes beyond smearing Lowenstein...
...Dial, $14.95...
...James North went to South Africa, he writes, "to see for myself...
...Myron Goodman and Mordecai Weissman were two cocky kids from Brooklyn when, in 1970, they founded OPM, a computer leasing firm...
...The other characters are similarly unimpressive as personages...
...in Texas, even feeding the chickens becomes high drama, full of villains and heroes...
...Of course, being a Texan makes it easier...
...John Henry Faulk...
...He "good-winged it" in Mississippi for civil rights (Cummings charges Lowenstein provide disinformation to the FBI on left-wing activities...
...But victims of the hype for this celebrity book will be disappointed...
...The best passage in the book is a wonderfully uproarious football game between a group of laid-off fathers and their sons...
...Robert Ward...
...In the end, Mel Brooks tells us far more about frauds such as Other People's Money than Stephen Fenichell does...
...In Mel Brooks' film, The Producers, Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder, as Bialystock and Bloom, try to buy an early retirement in Rio de Janeiro by selling endless amounts of stock in Springtime for Hitler, a Broadway musical they think is sure to flop...
...What motivated Goodman and Weissman to engage in a scheme so poorly disguised that its detection was a certainty...
...In Other People's Money, Stephen Fenichell spins out a real-life version of The Producers...
...Here at last is a Washington novel that doesn't feature the president of the United States, or a senator or congressman, or even a prominent journalist...
...Macmillian, $19.95...
...As for the descriptive minutia that give spy novels their grip, forget it...
...Garrett Epps...
...But North's tone is never self-righteous...
...In the history of the republic, only three sitting senators have been elected president: Benjamin Harrison, Warren Harding, and John Kennedy...
...An NBC radio stringer in 1974 and 1975, Butler depicts the withdrawal from the perspective of the most senior American and Vietnamese officials, as well as confused Saigon residents and fleeing Westerners...
...Grove Presg $19.95...
...Goodman suffered from a horrible, debilitating disease, a detail which seemed to bear heavily upon his erratic, frenzied behavior...
...Unfortunately, the uncensored John Henry Faulk seems unedited as well...
...The witch-hunters should have realized that real communists don't have a sense of humor...
...Simon and Schuster, $18.95...
...Butler tries to follow too many characters through too many adventures...
...Some of the party used the situation as an excuse to terrorize the black community...
...A dignified black South African maid tells him: "I can say that my life has been terrible...
...David Butler provides a dramatic reminiscence of the chaotic last months of American forces in South Vietnam...
...The affidavits include an especially revealing internal CIA memorandum describing Lowenstein as a "troublemaker" who "represents no one but himself...
...is one of the presiding figures at The New Yorker who grew up under the wrath and genius of Ross...
...his greatest bias is one of hope about the country's future—the result of his encounters with undaunted white and black resisters...
...It must be better in other countries...
...Forty years later, a new generation had the same refreshing initiation in Grenada...
...He has published fact-stuffed studies of Micronesia, Harvard University, the State of Georgia, John Hay "Jock" Whitney, and, of course, The New Yorker...
...Kahn's work has appeared in the magazine for decades...
...Certainly it's admirable that two busy politicians could find time for the humanist task of writing a novel that does become mildly engrossing toward the finish...
...Richard Cummings...
...Red Baker abuses his wife, his son, and the woman of his fantasies...
...These white people are rock-hard—they will never change...
...Faulk's characters, the good and the bad, are all Americans...
...Faulk not only speaks of Americans...
...the author also wishes to discredit the liberal ideology Lowenstein stood for...
...Thus the second distinguishing feature of Floating Island is that it's a slapstick farce...
...Robert Ward may have grown up in a Baltimore neighborhood of steel and railroad workers, but in this novel he chooses his characters from the script of a television movie...
...The author, who used the pen name North to protect his real identity while reporting, spent four-and-a-half years traveling through South Africa, Namibia, Rhodesia...
...Then, maybe, they could—in the words of Congressman Guffaw, "discuss these issues in plain English, the language my mother spoke, the language the Holy Bible was wrote in" —Sam Smith The Staffs of Life...
...Somewhere along the way, Kahn misinterpreted the Credo of Ross...
...Little, Brown, $19.95...
...Of course, John Faulk isn't just having fun...
...Faulk tells the story through the nonjudgmental eyes of himself as a child...
...Lowenstein, says Cummings, saw himself as a representative of the CIA's "good wing" of liberal Democrats, who used the agency to fight communism by backing anticommunist neutralist regimes around the world...
...Devising a scheme that involved major banks, Rockwell International, American Express, Lehman Brothers and IBM, Goodman and Weissman constructed an elaborate financial daisy chain that defrauded investors of a total of $250 million...
...The central figure of Floating Island is a minor political hanger-on and petty bureaucrat (special assistant to the assistant secretary for Evaluation, Training, and Morale...
...Stephen Fenichell...
...If I touch you, you don't turn brown, do you...
...Cummings' allegation that Lowenstein defended covert CIA funding of NSA activities is false...
...Texas Monthly Press, $16.95...
...Richard Cummings portrays a different person, contending that deceit was "inherent in Lowenstein's career...
...He has little insight into his protagonists, and his prose falls into a pattern of moralistic wisecracking, delivered in borscht-belt cadences...
...For 30 years beginning in 1950, he fought fiercely against South African apartheid...
...He misrepresented himself as a Lowenstein admirer to the man's family and friends, only to twist the information they gave him into a hatchet with which to attack his subject...
...Instead, they are real people...
...Acreage-wise...
...A herd of writers from that state have risen to prominence in no small part by remembering what their relatives and neighbors said and did...
...and he "good-winged it...
...Yet since the book's publication, innumerable inaccuracies and distortions have been found in Cummings' work...
...He is compelled to write by a genuine sense of the importance of crops...
...Anchor Books, $16.95...
...It's a skill he picked up early...
...Faulk has another message: love your language...
...This is dank melodrama, not literature...
...They eventually had to leave...
...We thought we knew Allard Lowenstein...
...David Remnick The Pied Piper: Allard Lowenstein and the Liberal Dream...
...In the margins of galley sheets and in the halls of The New Yorker's famously barren offices, Harold Ross, the magazine's founding editor and gruff guru, would yelp his journalistic passion: "Facts...
...One imagines poor Ross drowning in the deep silo of Kahn's grain, shrieking, "Facts...
...He led the 1967 "Dump Johnson" campaign against the Vietnam war...
...The OPM scandal raises a number of interesting questions: how could various Fortune 500 companies, major banks, and law firms fall prey to a couple of incompetent schleps from Brooklyn...
...In the former category, the various newspaper columns, with their heavy-handed jus' folks style, can be skipped without loss...
...Later, in a broad gesture worthy of Brooksian comedy, Goodman and Weissman used the Yiddish version of "other people's money"—Andere Menschens Gelt—as the name for a subsidiary, AMG Leasing...
...E. J. Kahn...
...Lowenstein was a thoroughly public man...
...Another common defect in Washington novels, even ostensibly comic ones, is that they take the city seriously as the capital of the free world...
...Even his acknowledgements suggest more tales where these came from...
...OPM rented hundreds of computers at rock bottom rates and allowed leaseholders such as Rockwell the option of canceling their leases and dumping obsolescent machinery back on OPM...
...against Lyndon Johnson (where Lowenstein's position against the war, it turns out, was identical to the CIA's...
...After a dizzying run of hundreds of fraudulent transactions, Goodman and Weissman were foiled in 1981 and sentenced to long terms at Allenwood...
...More facts...
...E. J. Kahn Jr...
...And, of course, in despairing-prole fashion, he turns to crime...
...Kitry Krause The Fall of Saigon...
...The bibliography consisted of one book: the Bible...
...The reader closes the book on these facts, facts, facts, and he is aching, not thinking...
...He fails on both accounts...
...The result of his journey is an extraordinary collage of South Africans—whites, blacks, Indians, so-called "coloreds," nonchalant racists, and underground resisters of apartheid policies...
...As I was reading this book, news came that Gary Hart had suggested in a speech that we should deal with our economic problems by replacing laissez faire with aidez faire...
...His hero is a violent drunk, unable to cope with being laid off from the local steel mill...
...For those who regard the Washington novel as a genre whose promise has never been realized, this is an important qualification...
...Carla Hall Red Baker...
...The book reads too often like a padded term paper with hardly a jot of political or imaginative thought...
...Hart or anyone else with similar aspirations could do far worse than hire Faulk as a speechwriter...
...Ironically, the flattery on the book's dust-jacket comes from Dan Rather and Bob Woodward...
...This one is a welcome and intriguing guide to a troubled and complicated land...
...North confronts apartheid personally...
...The book suffers, however, from the same sense of desperation it describes...
...Lowenstein's former associates have assembled no fewer than 400 affidavits in rebuttal, many from people Cummings interviewed, who now claim their words and meanings were mangled...
...He won, but only after half a decade on the broadcasting blacklist...
...No new insights into America's longest war emerge from this book...
...In this book, Faulk has the last laugh...
...In 1964 he helped organize the landmark "Mississippi Summer" civil rights drive...
...Why is there the separation here...
...A prime example is the description of the hero's office: "In furnishings as in politics, Chandler favored a blend of the traditional and the contemporary...
...In the first chapter, he describes meeting an underground activist in Johannesburg and carrying messages from him to his organization outside the country...
...Cummings writes that "the whole issue of `authenticity' which was so hotly debated in the sixties arose because many suspected that things were not what they appeared to be, that liberalism was an illusion masking a reality of manipulation and self-interest ." Lowenstein, he insists, embodied these bankrupt politics...
...Michael Kinsley Other People's Money: The Rise and Fall of OPM Leasing Services...
...The book stresses what observant Jews Goodman and Weissman were, how they would cease defrauding their clients on the Sabbath and resume on Saturday night...
...Nothing will ever get better here...
Vol. 17 • June 1985 • No. 5
