Political Booknotes

...The idea of the atom, in fact, goes back more than 2,000 years ." Stoler decries both the knee-jerk, anti-nuke attitudes found on the left and the unquestioning adoration of nukes, no matter how expensive or impractical, found on the right...

...He chronicles the organization's entanglement with progressive causes over the past 60 years, from its support of labor's right to organize in the twenties to its support for abortion rights and affirmative action in the eighties...

...Conversely, the political ascendancy of the stockholders, upper-level management, and bankers in the late 1970s and early 1980s was reflected not only in the outcome of the Chrysler bailout, but, on a much broader scale, in the adoption of tax policies benefiting the most affluent and in wide-ranging federal spending reductions directed at the working class and the poor...

...When Stoler speaks for himself, he adds little...

...Often "straight" reporters took months or years to catch up to the undergrounders' probing of issues behind events...

...Peter Stoler...

...In his notes section, Stoler cites Cult 43 times and Barons 27 times, yet in the text the former work is mentioned only twice and the latter not at all...

...William A. Donohue...

...Is it Congress...

...A quick check of the dust jacket finds the book endorsed by Carl Walske, president of the Atomic Industrial Forum, the nuclear industry's lobbying organization (Walske, by the way, is quoted several times inside the book, in approving contexts, which gives you some idea of how the blurb business works...

...Conversely, when journalists try to expand the horizons of their craft, he's instinctively suspicious...

...Donohue's real beef is that the ACLU is liberal and not libertarian...

...As journalism becomes more influential and more like a public utility because of government regulation of broadcasters and the decline of competition among newspapers, the temptation to turn it into a profession can only grow...

...Elsewhere: " 'Nuclear power has been walking around like Dracula for the last few years,' said a young man who answered the phone at the San Francisco headquarters of the Sierra Club...

...His prose radiates approval when he reports, for instance, that CBS produced a 60-page internal report that found that ten of its "own standards" had been violated in its Vietnam documentary...

...Fred Ikle, much of the book cuts a wide swath down the middle...

...They dwell on the numbers (launchers, missiles, warheads, throw-weights) and propose policies (freeze, build-up, build-down) accordingly...

...As Peck notes, "Underground papers casually labeled tens of millions of Americans 'pigs...

...He concludes by stating, "It is sad but true that civil libertarians are more concerned about the right of a 14-year-old girl to buy a dildo from the corner drugstore than they are in the quality of her religious training ." Such hyperbole, which permeates this polemic, ultimately demonstrates the fallacy of Donohue's central thesis...

...And some of the arguments are more provocative...

...The NRC, EPA, DOE, or Supreme Court...

...Now some of those subjects are established beats...

...Paul Bass Hawks, Doves and Owls: An Agenda for Avoiding Nuclear War...

...These cancellations are the stake through its heart " Let's hope the usual factual standard at Time is a little higher than "a young man who answered the telephone...

...Liberals will find a couple of heresies adroitly, though too briefly, propounded...

...Their excesses and innovations are apparent in this entertaining new history written by an alumnus of Chicago's underground Seed and now a more sedate journalism professor...

...Blood, an extraordinarily careful book...

...But the episode left unprol2ed the messier issues of what obligations we owe each other to share the risks, costs, and rewards of economic change...

...Despite the company's stunning revival in 1984, its American workforce was still smaller by a third than it had been in 1979, Reich and Donahue point out...

...abused journalistic license," or "many of the practices and strategies taken for granted by journalists raise troubling questions...

...Joseph Ventura, who ran the Italian-American Foundation, backed by Lee Iacocca, put the arm on the 31-member House Italian-American caucus, persuading members to vote as a block for the bill...

...But it's grossly unfair—bad reporting, to use a phrase that would get Goldstein's attention...

...At its heart, it was a revolt against the journalistic canon of objectivity, of pretending that your biases have no part in determining what stories you cover, whom you quote, or which facts you emphasize...

...Nearly everything in the book is attributed to articles in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, magazines, or books...

...Not much is missing here, although if you're a journalist and not a journalism student, you may not want to read summaries of the cases of Janet Cooke, Laura Foreman, "Hymietown," the Chicago Sun Times's Mirage Bar, The New Yorker fact-checking flap, "Ear" 's Jimmy Carter bugging error, the CBS Vietnam documentary, ambush interviews, etc...

...There may indeed be a convincing book to be written advocating a revival of nuclear power...

...What's the government...

...The author didn't neglect his research: he pored over microfilms of hundreds of old papers and interviewed almost a hundred writers and editors...

...It's very important for journalists to report faithfully on the doings of high government officials, but that isn't what journalists should do all the time, even though it does create a feeling of high competence...

...Thomas B. Edsall The Politics of the American Civil Liberties Union...

...In other words, the organization is either a "left liberal" cabal with "radical proclivities" or a group of political cowards...

...The most egregious example is his treatment of New Journalism, which he calls "a new label...to an old technique: intermingling fact with fiction...

...Unmitigated bias can limit your audience, of course...

...The second and third stages—the legislative process and the tough bargaining that followed—provide the most insight...

...Hawks, doves, and reporters tend to make the same mistake in thinking about the nuclear standoff...

...In this ponderous diatribe against the ACLU, William Donohue argues that rather than serving as a nonpartisan watchdog of individual freedoms, the organization instead pursues a liberal political agenda...

...The atom itself is an innocent thing, devoid of politics, philosophy, or intent...

...Hawks, Doves and Owls argues that it is possible and important to design "firebreaks" for stopping a catastrophe before it becomes a species-extinguishing inferno...

...Their weapons were New York Post-sized headlines that screamed "Heil Columbia" and "Pigs Shoot to Kill— Bystanders Gunned Down ." But for all their blemishes, papers like The Berkeley Barb and The East Village Other thrived as energetic, irreverent experiments that provided needed insight to millions of readers—and changed American journalism for the better...

...for Republicans it was Timmons and Co...

...He is outraged because to him the ACLU's idea of liberty leads to license and ultimately libertinism...

...In the legislative process, two unlikely heroes emerge in the ReichDonahue scenario: Democratic Senator William Proxmire and Republican Senator John Heinz...

...Gregg Easterbrook Uncovering the Sixties: The Life and Times of the Underground Press...

...I hope some of the high priests of the trade start pressing in the other direction...

...The author, Peter Stoler, is with Time magazine...

...This book has been advertised as a sensational, insider's expose of media sleaze, but when you tear off the wrapping paper what you find is a journalism school ethics textbook...

...Norton, $14.95...

...Journalism has the power to explain why things are happening, to take public affairs out of the realm of boredom through the use of characterization and narrative, to show how character interacts with institutional imperatives in government— all this, and much more, and without ever resorting to mingling fact with fiction...

...Imagining that Washington is a monolithic Government with a single orchestrated Plan is naive to say the least and suggests the kind of world view that results from reading clips and bureau reports rather than seeking answers in the flesh...

...The people who took it on the chin were the automobile workers...

...Apparently Decline and Fail was written in the same fashion...

...On another, and even more interesting level, the book is an attempt by one of the leading Democratic theorists of positive government to explore the reality of a major federal intervention in the marketplace...

...Even Gloria Steinem was brought into the battle to attempt to persuade prochoice advocate Senator Bob Packwood, although her efforts proved futile...

...A look at any issue of the Utne Reader, the Reader's Digest of the alternative press, testifies to the tremendous health of probing, nonrhetorical successors to The Rat and The Berkeley Barb...

...For Jimmy Carter, the legislation offered a means to try to retain the support of the United Automobile Workers in the face of a seemingly strong 1980 presidential primary challenge from Senator Edward M. Kennedy...

...Each chapter spins out more or less plausible scenarios that fit one of the "five general paths to nuclear war" —escalation in Europe, nuclear accident, sneak attack, etc.—and then sets out to isolate factors that can be controlled...

...The authors reject a no-first-use pledge for allied nuclear forces in Europe...

...They are: the deterioration of the number three automaker...

...the drive to gain federal support...

...When the ACLU failed to assume a liberal stance— its tentative support for employer free speech, for example, or its relative quiescence in the McCarthy era—Donohue characterizes such activity as hypocritical...

...Allison, Carnesale and Nye, all of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, provide an introduction and a list of specific proposals at the end...

...In reality, the distribution of risks, costs, and rewards in a highly political process—like the Chrysler bailout—are not likely to be determined by abstract concepts such as societal "obligations," but instead by political power...

...Bill Keller...

...Reich and Donahue are very cautious in their conclusions: "Many of the participants in Chrysler's revival performed superbly...

...The central political strategy behind the Chrysler bailout was to persuade the administration and Congressmen that the legislation was in their self-interest...

...It's not just that Goldstein is being unfair to Capote, Wolfe, et al., it's that there's something automatic about his hostility to exploration of the true potential of journalism...

...Nicholas Lemann New Deals: The Chrysler Revival and the American System...

...These are precisely the groups that our economy rewards, and handsomely, for bearing risks ...What gave was jobs!' In addition, some of the innovations of the Chrysler bailout— profit-sharing and union representation on the board—have "begun to atrophy!' The workers gave up profit-sharing in return for a 75-cent-an-hour raise in 1982, and the company only reluctantly agreed to allow the board seat held by United Auto Workers President Douglas Fraser to go to his successor, Owen Bieber...

...This is a little like watching two hot rods tearing toward one another in a game of chicken and discussing the event in terms of wheelbases and horsepower...

...the negotiations with stockholders, management, creditors and unions...

...One disadvantage of professionalization is that it usually brings with it a tropism toward the bland and the safe—why put your carefully built position of self-respect at risk...

...The resolution of such deadlocks clearly hinges on one's political values...

...As might be expected of a book that boasts "advance praise" from such polar opposites as Senator Edward Kennedy and the Pentagon's senior policy hawk, Dr...

...At one level, this is an exceptionally detailed, and for the moment definitive, account of the federal rescue of the Chrysler Corporation...

...my favorite is the graph entitled, "Subjective Estimate of the Probability of a National Security Disaster in the Next Decade or So!' Still, the fact that many of the points are easy to agree with does not make them less important...

...Throughout this chapter he speaks constantly of "the government," as in, "The most important thing the government can do is be honest," or "There is only one way the government can resolve this conflict...

...dations, Stoler declares that nuclear power could become fine and dandy if federal regulation was tightened while red tape was slashed, without pausing to indicate how this miracle would be accomplished...

...For lawyers and doctors, the massive edifice of required professional school, limited entry into the field, and high pay and prestige was built on a foundation of concern about quackery...

...flower children had the drug beat...

...Buried deep within that, in turn, are memoirs of Goldstein's service as a reporter at The New York Times and as press secretary to Mayor Edward Koch of New York, which contain a couple of good morsels...

...Dodd, Mead, $16.95...

...The primary beneficiaries of the rescue [were] the company's managers, creditors, and stockholders," the authors note...

...one author suggests a similar policy for the Middle East...

...Abe Peck...

...In a more accessible and responsible fashion, they maintain the pressure on the mainstream, while keeping a vibrant dissident press alive...

...Reporters do interviews in the field and file something like diplomatic cables to writers in New York, who produce words...

...Disciples of the Time ethos may defend file-based' journalism, but the substance of several chapters of Decline and Fail—nearly half the book—appears to have been all but lifted from two earlier and far better books, The Cult Of the Atom, by Daniel Ford, and The Nuclear Barons, by Peter Pringle and James Spigelman...

...This book is among the more accessible in a glut of recent academic writing on the problem, not of reducing or abolishing nuclear arsenals, but of minimizing the risk that they will be used...

...In fact, it's as if he punched the words "media ethics" into a Nexis machine and summarized the entire product...

...It would be easy to dismiss the underground press corps of the sixties as a gang of wild-eyed journalistic guerrillas...

...Donohue's quarrel with the ACLU is not that it deviates from some dispassionate norm that he embraces...

...The meat is sandwiched in between in the form of essays by other academics...

...But he never takes us inside the minds of the various factions to explain why such unreasonable extremes have developed, nor does he provide any level of understanding beyond "the industry said this, but critics said that ." (An extraordinary view into the culture of the pro-nuclear faction can be found in Nuclear Barons, one of the most unappreciated nonfiction books of recent years...

...These voices conveyed passion, something most news stories lacked, even though in the sixties passion was a critical element of "the story...

...Occasionally, I entertain a suspicion that one little surprise the 21st century has in store is that nuclear power will turn out to be important after all...

...Decline and Fall isn't it...

...It's typical for journalistic ethicists to dismiss New Journalism in this prejudiced, don't-bother-me-with-the-details way...

...The undergrounders didn't bother with presenting divergent views, confident that they knew so much about their subject that they didn't need to investigate opposing beliefs...

...Goldstein says Koch is so cozy with Rupert Murdoch ("Rupert is more important to me than anyone else," he quotes Koch as saying) that he often calls the editorial page editor of Murdoch's New York Post and dictates the editorials about himself, which run verbatim...

...The Times's soft spot is for Irving Kaufman, a federal judge who always rules for the press and is rewarded with adoring coverage which never mentions that he presided at the Rosenberg trial...

...Robert R. Reich, John D. 'Donahue...

...Goldstein summarizes these familiar stories with impeccable clarity and evenhandedness, and then sometimes delivers a prim verdict, such as "he...

...In the few cases where it appears the author did more than simply whiz through the clip files, the results are not reassuring: "`I resent it when someone in a corporate boardroom decides what risks I should accept,' says a Pennsylvania woman who cannot look out her window without seeing the cooling towers of Three Mile Island ." Time is famed for punctuating stories with perfect quotes from conveniently anonymous sources even when there is no reason for the speaker's name to be withheld...

...To line up Democrats, Chrysler hired the lobbying firm of Patton, Boggs and Blow...

...Agent Orange and Operation Phoenix made headlines underground long before becoming "legitimate" stories, causing "concern" among some "authorities" Like the Populist party at the turn of the century, many underground papers would die while their innovations would drift into the mainstream...

...The Chrysler story—described in New Deals with a combination of analytic skill, an eye for the telling anecdote and an understanding of detail and personality—is presented in four stages...

...So did sixties underground journalism...

...Proxmire, chairman of the Banking Committee, recognized that he did not have the votes to stop the legislation, so he used his position to ensure a thorough airing of the issues and to insist on the addition of provisions limiting public liability...

...His analysis is a smokescreen for a fundamental ideological disagreement about the meaning of liberty...

...Workers' freedom to organize and bargain collectively may be rendered meaningless by management's right to speak freely in opposition...

...Despite its title, Decline and Fail argues that such a development is not only likely but desirable...

...Heinz, a politician well experienced in corporate profits, attempted to require a stock dilution system so that the bailout would not become a governmentfinanced bonanza for just those affluent shareholders whose investments are supposed to be subject to the risks of the marketplace...

...Graham T. Allison, Albert Carnesale, Joseph S. Nye Jr...

...he even called the White House...

...Pantheon, $12.95...

...The discourse on journalistic ethics isn't nearly as interesting...

...It would seem obvious that no individual or group can claim possession of an abstract standard of pure civil liberty...

...They covered the emerging use of recreational drugs, environmental pollution, rock and roll, radical politics, civil rights, and women's rights when they were considered inconsequential by most dailies...

...Eric Lewis Decline and Fail: The Ailing Nuclear Power Industry...

...Truman Capote, whom Goldstein cites as a "leading practitioner," did not mingle fact with fiction in In Cold...

...The automobile industry faced an inevitable reduction in employment, but the absorption of the most severe penalties in retrenchment by the least senior of the assembly-line workers reflects the weakness of organized labor...

...This, Donohue apparently assumes, will dismay his readers...

...On the other hand, participant journalists were freed to discover their own voices...

...Widely thought of as lightweights— Proxmire as a selfIndulgent gadfly, Heinz as a rich kid who bought himself a Senate seat—both men played significant roles...

...Transaction Books...

...Liberties are often in conflict: a defendant's right to a fair trial may threaten a reporter's right of free inquiry...

...The President...

...Nevertheless, Donohue proceeds in numbing detail to set out the ACLU's deviation from the norm of absolute disinterestedness...

...Not only do they defend the current policy of "flexible response," which declares nuclear weapons will be used in the event the allies are overrun by conventional attack...

...The pressure on journalism to turn that way, too, is going to be relentless...

...But Peck emphasizes that this is history through his eyes...

...Goldstein knows not to go whole hog with this because of the first amendment problems inherent in government licensing of journalists, but the professional mind-set tempts him...

...This curious arrangement engenders the classic newsweekly story, in which the author seems to have an astonishing depth of information at his disposal yet does not understand what he is talking about...

...Their war on "Amerika" left no time for such trivialities as fact-checking...

...Uncovering the Sixties shifts easily from third-person narrative to personal recollection...

...Heinz was, however, unsuccessful and stockholders did make out like bandits...

...For wavering members of the House and Senate, the corporation and its lobbyists put together detailed computer printouts showing, dollar by dollar, the cash flow from Chrysler to every supplier in every town in each district and state...

...neither did Tom Wolfe ever create composite characters, except in an obviously rhetorical way...

...and the aftermath of restored profitability...

...The Kerner Commission attributed the 1967 Newark and Detroit riots to institutionalized white racism and faulted the mass media for failing to report that—even though the underground did...

...Stoler recites over and again the litany of troubled nuclear generating projects—bad workmanship, arrogant unions, flawed design, incompetent inspections— without shedding any light on why this happens...

...The point is to avoid a collision neither driver can survive...

...Some of it is facile: "A verifiable agreement with the Soviet Union prohibiting production, stockpiling, and use of chemical weapons could make a useful contribution to raising the nuclear threshold," with no discussion of the dilemma embodied in the word "verifiable!' There are annoying doses of pseudoscience...

...Time and Newsweek use a system under which "reporters" and "writers" are separate breeds...

...Which is unfortunate...

...Goldstein has done some sporadic first-hand research—visited a few newsrooms, distributed a questionnaire to editors, and run with a Super Bowl press corps—but for the most part he worked from clips...

...In a brief chapter of recommen...

...My right to be treated as an individual may conflict with your right to be free of the effects of race discrimination...

...One of the toughest fights the federal government had with the management of Chrysler was to persuade Iacocca and other corporate officials to give up their company jets...

...Hiroshima and Nagasaki "[b]lasted into the minds of many scientists, as well as many ordinary people, a fear of the atom and its awesome power, a fear that remains unabated...

...Times Books, $17.95...

...The people who did unforgiveably mingle fact with fiction and thus discredited the genre, such as Gail Sheehy in her prepsychobabble days, never make the list of New Journalists...

...Answering questions like this would be central to building a case for increased future use of the atom, but Decline and Fail offers few clues...

...Iacocca, one government regulator recalled, "called congressmen...

...Demonstrators covered the demonstrations...

...Lots of complex industrial facilities get built without countless screw-ups: why is nuclear power work, by labor, management, and regulators alike, so often shoddy...

...That was the only serious pressure we ever faced!' In the end, Iacocca gave up the jets, but his sacrifice was negligible in the distribution of suffering throughout a major industrial retrenchment...

...For all his fulminating over the group's "partisan agenda," Donohue actually seems to resent the ACLU because it disagrees with his idea of civil liberty: entrepreneurism coupled with social and spiritual discipline...

...The book also argues that the United States should think hard about the notion of limited nuclear war...

...As far as can be determined from the text, Stoler did little or no reporting...

...Did Senator Kennedy read this part...

...To many liberals, this strays from the gospel of deterrence into dangerous fantasies of nuclear warfighting...

...For example, the authors are for better hotlines and more face-to-face meetings...