POLITICAL BOOKNOTES
POLITICAL BOOKNOTES Justice: The Memoirs of Attorney General Richard Kleindienst. Richard G. Kleindienst. Jameson Books, $16.95. If George Babbitt were alive today, he would no doubt come to...
...Vojta, a career executive at some of the nation’s largest banks, also chose not to relate any of his doubtlessly impressive first-hand experience...
...Perhaps it is because the Great Commoner stood in the face of modernity and claimed that evolution had no truck with right thinking...
...After all, she did quit her TV job, and she did recently get married...
...It’s almost as if Mailer has deliberately created himself to .be the source not only of shimmering autobiographical work, as in Armies of the Night and Advertisements for Myself, but also of biography...
...But it does provide in the end an optimistic portrait of the present Mailer, a bold and singular writer ready to work to the end of his days...
...One supposes that Manso would like to believe his book “evokes an era...
...There is increasing necessity,” Bryan wrote, “for legislation which will protect the God-made man from injustice at the hands of the law-created person, known as a corporation .” If a corporation “can avoid punishment here,” Bryan reasoned, “it need not worry about the hereafter...
...The fatherhood of God had particular influence on Bryan’s commitment to self-government...
...The tie that binds each human being to every other human being is one that cannot be severed .” Each citizen should “exert himself to the utmost to improve conditions for all and to raise the level upon which all stand...
...Still, the fact that most large corporations turn a profit perpetuates the myth that they are paradigms of efficiency, even as foreign competitors and small domestic firms eat away at their profit margins...
...Did you hear about the time when Norman tipped over the...
...Unlike so much business reporting-there has been an explosion in that area latelySinger has a knack for tying the facts of the case to a sense of their importance...
...Bryan’s belief that all men were brothers reinforced and became inseparable from his belief that all men were equal,” writes the author...
...Deborah Fallows Intimate Strangers...
...In any case, his style of quick-shot criticism fits in well with the culture he describes...
...Is Norman’s bigger than...
...Mark Singer...
...Ginzberg and Vojta do a credible job puncturing this myth by concentrating on the growing dissatisfaction of management personnel...
...His life is as evocative and evolving as an endless Oriental scroll painting: early fame, early despair, political and public excursions, triumph and error...
...It’s no longer a question of is one the champ...
...Senior managers have kept budget authority and control centralized at the executive level, while an expanding and diversifying stable of semiautonomous divisions have had to compete with each other for scarce corporate resources, such as R & D and marketing support...
...Peter Manso...
...Perhaps Schickel assumes he cannot hold a reader’s attention long enough to provide a thorough discussion...
...And how do I want to lead that life in the time remaining to me...
...If they want to survive and prosper, large corporations must revamp, among other things, their performance-appraisal and compensation systems to reward managers for productive endeavor rather than infighting and paper shuffling...
...The reaction to Southern Baptist Jimmy Carter is a case in point...
...Then, after a college degree, an M.A...
...Prohibiting monopolies and guaranteeing the rights of the individual were the alternatives, and Bryan worked much of his life to achieve them...
...Little, Brown, $15.95...
...The most important fact about the women’s movement, of course, is that it has done women a lot of good by qffering them opportunities in the professional world they never before dared strive for...
...After all, we live in an era in which college students plan to make mega-bucks and presidential candidates deride public servants...
...Yet she backs off exploring her own decisions or finding a message for women in general...
...who can remember the last time that Bryan’s name was mentioned approvingly among liberal activists or at a Democratic convention...
...Richard Kleindienst was the famous also-ran of the Watergate scandal...
...Of course, this is assuming that Schickel indeed has a message...
...From one full-time mother: “I don’t believe that being a mother, a nonworking mother, has to be a position of powerlessness and victimization and unimportance...
...Charles Peters The Righteous Cause: The Life of William Jennings Bryan...
...Not bad sentiments, really...
...Certainly this must have had a large impact on her life...
...Bryan’s religious orientation towards equality also reinforced his Midwestern instinct to distrust corporate power...
...Even the superwomen with both families and careers are really “stuporwomen,” argues Cosell...
...In other words, no more stunts I’ -D...
...The story of one, Mark Price, a 15-year-old who died of cystic fibrosis toward the end of the second month, I found especially gripping from its tautly told beginning when he survives a dangerous emergency to his shattering death six weeks later...
...Abstract Expressionists like Jackson Pollack are easy to project at a glance, to understand in 30-second splices...
...What if first the Penn Square Bank folded, followed closely by the largest banks in the Pacific Northwest and the Midwest, and what if those failures were followed by the failures of the industrial economies of, say, Mexico and Argentina...
...But these are boring labels that only give us a caricature...
...Paul Glastris Funny Money...
...And if things turned out badly for George, he would write a book like this one...
...Singer grew up outside of Tulsa, and he evokes the particulars of the place through legwork, memory, and a talent for knowing what to include and what to throw away...
...He followed Mitchell both as attorney general and as criminal defendant...
...Relying heavily on the theories of Jacques EM, a French professor of law and social history, Schickel argues that superficially, our political system consists of “impotent rhetorical posturing by political personalities mostly concerned with fostering agreeable images of themselves .” “But beneath the surface,” Schickel says, “the real work of government-often quite at odds with what its public figures are saying-proceeds under the guidance of a faceless and generally unaccountable bureaucracy...
...The older generation, on the other hand-and the authors admit this-got on board the management escalator during the 50s and a s , the “Golden Age” of corporate expansion...
...What if global economic apocalypse started in an air conditioned mall in Oklahoma City-out there in the company of the Stout Shoppe and the Peanut Shack and the video arcade and the gift store where for $12.95 you got a room freshener disguised as a porcelain duck...
...and by putting the whole thing into historical perspective...
...To him that also meant a responsibility to his country!’ Kleindienst’s commitment to being a good soldier got him into a great deal of trouble...
...At a minimum, Cosell could have more honestly guided us through the decisive moments of her own life...
...They’re frazzled, wrung out, and unable to enjoy the fruits of either kind of labor...
...in journalism, and five years under her belt as a television producer, Cosell became confused...
...Singer has also found himself a cast of characters worthy of a great movie comedy: bank executives, such as Bill “Beep” Jennings and Bill “Monkeybrains” Patterson, and borrowers who are as eccentric as J.R...
...Peggy Anderson has been my friend for 20 years...
...G.f...
...So, too, was the reaction to a deeply religious man of another era-William Jennings Bryan...
...Cosell teases us along into figuring out whose daughter she is (we can all guess Howard must be her dad), but she won’t talk about it...
...Bryan felt strongly “the obligation to contribute in helpfulness,” serving his adopted home of Lincoln, Nebraska for two terms in Congress...
...In fact, yuppies seem eager enough to claw and fight their way into other rigid, generally meaningless careers, such as corporate law, as long as they’re promised prestige and high salaries...
...We read that she was a comfortable middle class liberal, an Easterner, a feminist, a journalist, a New Yorker at heart...
...It means that, once again, women have allowed themselves to be told who they are and who they must be...
...This has blurred lines of responsibility and accountability, slowed decision making to a crawl and forced middle-managers to spend more and more time writing reports and battling for turf rather than concentrating on concrete business tasks...
...Ewing and twice as foolish...
...Anecdote and reputation: that is the stuff, the stuffing really, of Peter Manso’s relentless compilation of 150 interviews on the subject of Norman Mailer...
...And she writes as if she’s just wallowing in the confusion, rather than thinking through the alternatives and offering the reader a new way to think about life...
...He exited the administration on the same day as Haldeman and Ehrlichman...
...Rather, he organizes the book around the great men and women whom he has known...
...That, too, had a distinctly religious flavor...
...he also ran for the presidency three times and served as secretary of state for two years during Woodrow Wilson’s first administration...
...Suffused with “can-do” confidence, George would remain loyal to his political patrons, look people in the eye, attend church regularly, and try to be a man of his word...
...If George Babbitt were alive today, he would no doubt come to Washington to save the country for the Republicans...
...Schickel’s theory about modern art is much the same as his theory about politics...
...Having lied to Congress about Nixon’s ham-handed attempt to have the Justice Department drop the ITT case, he left office in disgrace and pleaded guilty to a crime...
...Or because he employed metaphors like “cross of gold .” Or because he wore baggy pants and wide-brimmed hats and sweated profusely when Clarence Darrow grilled him during the Scopes trial...
...Cherny argues that the central elements of Bryan’s faith included the fatherhood of God, the atonement of Christ, and the brotherhood of man (a concept which Cherny says “unquestionably” included women...
...As a public figure, he found Christian love more compelling than logic...
...The result is a stream-ofconsciousness essay whose title was probably something like Ruminations About Popular Culture until a savvy editor realized Intimate Strangers would sell a lot more copies...
...All of these events figure rather peripherally in Kleindienst’s memoir...
...Here is Singer generously providing what old newspaper folk refer to as “the big picture graph”: “Bad fantasies loomed within easy traveling distance...
...How-tos are not my forte,” she rambles cutely...
...Four story derricks straddle the wells on the grounds of the state capitol and the governor’s mansion, and it matters very little that so many wells are barely oozing crude-that the derricks’ main function is to provide a remembrance of things past...
...But the movement has also done women a lot of bad by endorsing the traditional male idea that work alone means success and that life outside work barely counts...
...Transport today’s disgruntled corporate yuppie back 25 years, and he’d be happy as a clam...
...Like a case study from Betty Friedan’s The Second Stage, Cosell found that it was not enough to be professionally successful...
...Pushing 30, Cosell wanted a husband, probably children, and the stability and commitment that a family brings...
...All the head-butting, establishment-baiting, dope smoking, marital battling, and honest literary toil ends in a Norman Mailer who is self-aware and generous, in his own words, “concerned with how many books I have left to write...
...But in the meantime I have a life to work at...
...And, according to Cherny, these beliefs were as rooted in his evangelical Protestantism as they were in the writings of Jefferson and the political rhetoric of Jacksonian Democrats...
...Richard Cherny...
...During the Peace Corps experience I shared with the author, I admired the nurses more than any other group of volunteers...
...What if Western capitalism took a dive...
...What historian Richard Cherny brings to our attention, however, is that the Illinois native also possessed a passionate commitment to liberal values...
...He flips the dial so frequently that it’s hard to figure out exactly what he’s getting at...
...Mark Singer’s story of the rise and collapse of the Penn Square Bank is at once witty, meticulously reported, and a hell of a story...
...Mythology counts .” -David Remnick Mailer: His Life and Times...
...by analyzing the similarities between corporations and other large organizations (the military, the Catholic church, universities, academic hospitals...
...In large part, Cosell correctly blames feminism for leaving women in these binds...
...Unfortunately, the ethic of service Bryan possessed might seem foreign today...
...Eli Ginzberg and George Vojta...
...They could help dash the assumption that Christian duty, service, and love are the sole preserve of the religious right...
...What is it like...
...Simon and Schuster...
...Perhaps he realizes, however, that there will always be Babbitts in high places, like the late Judge George Hart, who told Kleindienst at his sentencing that his acts reflected “a heart that is too loyal and considerate of the feelings of others” and that even in the dock, he was “still...
...The gnomic poetry of, say, a Wallace Stevens-like the byzantine workings of the bureaucracy-is simply too intellectually taxing...
...Doubleday, $16.95...
...Appearances count...
...It does not...
...This is an immensely moving true account of two months in the lives of six children in a hospital in Philadelphia...
...However disconnected, the book contains some ideas worth pondering...
...Cosell may have started out with a good idea-to explore how the imbalance between work and families in women’s lives causes joy and anguish, fulfillment and emptiness...
...I’m a writer like other writers, either better or less good than 1 think 1 am...
...There is no fat in his prose: “In the Oklahoma suburbs, where there are two taco joints for every tree, you see wellheads surrounded by high fences in undeveloped residential zones, you see pumping units in strip shoppingcenter parking lots...
...Women’s lot, as she describes it, sounds quite depressing: single working women are afraid of getting married (for the compromises it will demand in time or energy) and of not getting married (for the “completion” they’ll never have...
...Richard Schickel...
...This is not exactly a revelation popular writers like Robert Townsend and Thomas J. Peters have helped turn this view of corporate structure into a kind of conventional wisdom...
...These notions are provocative but unsubstantiated...
...19.95...
...A Goldwater political operative, he entered the Nixon administration as deputy to John Mitchell at the Department of Justice...
...Hilary Cosell...
...Cosell’s thesis is that women have somehow been caught seesawing between the professional and personal ends of their lives-it’s all of one or all of the other-and are unable to balance in the middle...
...Richard Schickel’s message seems to be that in today’s world, dominated by mass communications technology, there is only one tie that binds: the culture of celebrity...
...Peggy Anderson...
...What has it meant to her...
...Cosell tells us the least interesting things about herself...
...The book’s few thoughtful moments come from Cosell’s interviewees...
...Harper and Row, $18.9S...
...your guess is as good as mine...
...As an evangelical Protestant, his concepts of Christian duty and service and his belief in perfection led him to seek to rescue people from industrial oppression and from immorality...
...Here come the gibberings and the I dunnos...
...R. Childrens’ Hospital...
...Among some liberals there exists a sentiment that religious-minded individuals, particularly evangelical Protestants, are politically suspect and culturally unfit...
...strong adherence to political principles, whatever the substantive content of those principles...
...Despite their new “lean and mean” image, major corporations in America, claim the authors, increasingly suffer from the same bureaucratic sclerosis that afflicts other large organizations, such as the federal government...
...Knop J $15.95...
...But it’s a good idea with poor execution: Cosell admits she is confused about life’s many paths...
...Directly related to Bryan’s belief in service was his sense of community...
...What’s more, he says, we allpoliticians, journalists, ordinary citizens-have a vested interest in maintaining this illusion: “To abandon it, and to embrace the chaos implicit in our political reality, is to ask too much I’ Unfortunately, Schickel doesn’t explain the point with any examples, real or hypothetical...
...When he died shortly after his appearance in the famed Scopes monkey trial, Bryan was remembered this way by H. L. Mencken: “[He] lived too long, and descended too deeply into the mud, to be taken seriously hereafter by fully literate men, even of the kind that write schoolbooks .” Mencken’s wish seems to have been realized...
...One assertion that’s hard to buy is what might be called the yuppie’s revenge: corporations are “at risk” partly because young, well-educated middle-managers are dissatisfied with corporate life, want “meaningful” careers, and are less willing than their apparatchik elders to “claw and fight their way up the corporate hierarchy...
...Not only did he run for president against conservatives William McKinley and William Howard rift, he also worked for a progressive income tax, women’s suffrage, and self-determination for American colonies...
...The problems, they believe, stem from the way corporations have adapted to their own phenomenal growth since World War 11...
...Mailer’s life calls out for a biographer of brilliance, one able to do a bit more than collect tape recordings...
...CEO’s, in turn, tend to exhaust themselves “keeping the peace” among competing divisions, with little energy left over for the more important work of analyzing1 markets and planning strategy...
...But I can also assure you that aside from occasional flashes of sentimentality and a tendency to ignore the darker side of modern medicine, where greed, incompetence, and indifference do appear now and then, her book is a practically flawless read...
...Celebrities are what we can all identify with-they are our new community...
...Applying these values, Kleindienst creates a bizarre moral landscape, where felons, zealots, and segregationists emerge as fine fellows and ethical exemplars...
...Cherny’s closing paragraph might say it best for still skeptical liberals: “The key to understanding Bryan is to approach him on his own terms...
...Bryan once quoted Henry Clay in saying, “It would be a reflection on the Almighty to say he created people incapable of self-government...
...The collage interview form here is one of intellectual laziness and provides, at best, an archive for a future biography...
...and the keeping of one’s word...
...Unfortunately, the thinking she has done is neither stimulating nor enlightening...
...No one lives unto himself or dies unto himself,” he said...
...Putnam’s Sons, $14.95...
...Hilary Cosell grew up thinking she had her life all figured out...
...Hilary Cosell’s book is about ideas that many women and men are thinking about...
...She subscribed to the simple feminist position that success in the workplace equals success in life...
...The book’s message is not as strong as it might have been because the authors offer little evidence and few illustrations to support it-you either buy it or you don’t...
...Teresa Riordan...
...We worked together, first at the Peace Corps, then at The Washington Monthly, so I know some will think I’m prejudiced in her favor, which I am...
...Childrens’ Hospital offers compelling evidence that they remain a clear cut above the rest of us...
...He pled guilty only to a misdemeanor and was given a suspended $100 fine and a one-month prison sentence by a sympathetic rightwing judge...
...Organized like George Plimpton’s and Jean Stein’s book on the femme fatale Warhol socialite, Edie Sedgwick, Mailer begins with little Norman in short pants and ends with him writing Tough Guys Don’t Dance to pay the bills...
...Singer, a staff writer for The New Yorker, found what a journalist dreams of: a controllable subject sitting in the middle of a far-reaching conflict, a small bank that operated during the oil boom as a middle man between the speculators in Oklahoma and major banks all over the country...
...Singer’s prose is direct, clear, and at times, wild...
...universally respected and admired .” -Eric Lewis Beyond Human Scale: The Large Corporation at Risk...
...William I? McKenzie Woman on a Seesaw: The Ups and Downs of Making It...
...His appraisals of these people provide insight into the mindset of this modern-day Babbitt and his predictable downfall...
...Basic Books, $16.95...
...Corporate bureaucracy was less extensive, and promotions, raises, power and prestige came more quickly and predictably...
...For Kleindienst, political values are far less important than the superficial personal values of the Republican mandarins: unswerving devotion to administration goals and, ipso facto, to the country...
...She could be any one of a thousand faces...
...Mothers without jobs are secretly envied for enjoying the richness of family, but at the same time are sneered at for having dropped out of the big-time world of professions, presumably because they couldn’t cut it there...
...Thus, John Mitchell, the first attorney general in American history to go to prison, “did what he did out of loyalty to the president and to his presidency...
...If it becomes that, then I think that women are at fault in some way...
...search me...
Vol. 17 • July 1985 • No. 6
