Political Booknotes
POLITICAL BOOKNOTES The Real Coke, The Real Story, Thomas Oliver, Random House, $16.95. Weird book. Though it's short and sketchy (only the huge spaces between the lines allow it to stretch...
...In Drury's story, the Soviets clandestinely take over a small South Pacific island and kill its inhabitants with a neutron bomb...
...But then, Castro has never been open to ideas, except those that ensured and preserved his power...
...Pornography exists, and a lot of people don't like it for good reason...
...The Soviets think aggressively, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff remarks, while we think defensively...
...It would be hard to find any circumstance in which tolerance of lying by the bureaucracy has done anything but erode the fabric of democracy...
...These people—fundamentalists, feminists, housewives, and doctors—have long been clamoring for a uniting force...
...There are weaknesses in this otherwise immensely valuable book...
...Rather, Coke erred in refusing to admit from the start that its product was losing favor with its customers...
...Eliot Wigginton...
...Unfortunately, my conviction rests on past faith rather than on any new revelation in this book...
...When your rule is that you won't "allow students to throw $250 cameras out the classroom window at passing delivery trucks," then chances are pretty good that you won't have too much trouble enforcing it...
...Wigginton pats himself on the back for returning student themes, rigorously corrected, the next day...
...They do...
...Old communists like Fabrizio Grobart, Alfredo Guevara, and Carlos Rafael Rodriguez, talked for the first time—freely—about what really happened that crucial first year...
...I was his English teacher, and along with spelling and reading, I had to teach him how to survive...
...One school of thought, which included Woodrow Wilson among others, holds that bureaucracy functions best on a tight leash— when it rigidly follows the procedures laid down from on high, ineluding strict adherence to the chain of command...
...Wigginton has 24...
...She doesn't make a case for or against the ERA and she doesn't discuss the conflict it stirred within the movement...
...he has a responsibility to react to the failure of those higher in the bureaucracy, and even to the failure of political leaders, as, for example, when legislation is too vague or sets conflicting objectives for the bureaucracy to perform...
...In fact, Pentagon is less a novel than a polemic disguised as fiction for people who don't read nonfiction like the recent crop of defense reform books...
...I believe him...
...Szulc lived in Cuba during 1959...
...Their classroom supplies and motivating devices are pretty much limited to what they can carry on their backs...
...by the time they've learned their jobs, it's time to move on...
...History shows us, once again, that men who simply seek total power, and who then find an ideology to justify it, are not very mysterious...
...But I do begrudge him his arrogance, his barely tempered sneering that if other teachers cared about doing the job right, they'd do it his way...
...Indiana University Press, $17.95...
...Diane D. Henderson Fidel Castro: A Critical Portrait, Tad Szulc, Morrow, $19.95 Ever since 1959, when a young and bearded Fidel Castro marched on Havana—and, symbolically, much of the world—one of the quintessential liberal vs...
...He proudly attests that this careful system successfully eliminates "alot" from student writing...
...They told him that even before Castro marched on Havana, the revolutionaries were operating on two levels...
...No one admitted there was truth in what they said...
...Interservice rivalries, conflicting civilian and military purposes, and ugly little human jealousies make a mockery of sincere efforts to get things done...
...Coke's haughty slogan was: "The best has just gotten better!' Corporate hubris made the company look both foolish and high-handed, and created a backlash that might have been avoided...
...Having said all that, his central thesis is compelling...
...Four years after the last ERA deadline was missed, Mary Frances Berry, a feminist, professor of history and law, and member of the U.S...
...As an example of justifiable lying, Burke cites President Eisenhower's denial to the Russians that the famous U-2 was a spy plane and contends that the lie had "minimal effects on the democratic process...
...The Navy airman who discovers this is shot down by a lurking Soviet sub, though not before he notifies the U.S...
...Military personnel and high level DOD civil servants serve, on average, only two or three years...
...The same Wigginton who dared to be creative and innovative, the teacher who 20 years ago scorned petty rules, now has a system for correcting student themes...
...As a thinker and governor, he has lost acuity of thinking...
...The United States of America vs...
...Their intent was to make a mockery of the proceedings...
...It is presented as what it most probably was: the CIA covering its bases by backing, minimally, the bearded incognito in the mountains at the same time the U.S...
...But then I'd remind myself that I might be this 14-year-old's last chance...
...There is very little forward thinking or strategic planning...
...Removed...
...Szulc inexplicably claims that "it took hours for Castro to be located and brought to the hospital" when most of Cuba knew precisely where he was...
...Fidel heard the news but, in his customary megalomania, refused to get off television and go to the hospital...
...The explanation for all this offered by one character, Helen Clark, the beautiful and smart assistant secretary of defense for aquisition and logistics, is on target: too much money and too many constituents to satisfy in the Pentagon, in the White House, and in industry...
...Civil Rights Commission, examines these and other factors that led to the defeat of the ERA...
...Some of the most talented people on Madison Avenue have spent the better part of their lives creating an image for Coke that makes drinking it seem practically a patriotic act...
...So how come I can't like him more...
...The get-tough principles Education Secretary William Bennett so admires sound like creampuffs in comparison with Wigginton...
...A school newer to the scene, though its roots go back to Jefferson, stands for a more informal and decentralized approach where the bureaucracy interacts with activist citizen groups...
...He meticulously labels each error, subtracting 15 points for every sentence fragment or comma splice, three points for each misused apostrophe, and so on...
...Intriguingly, three out of the four female members of the commission fought particularly hard to give pornography a fair trial...
...Yet it's difficult to define...
...But, in any case, Eisenhower was not a bureaucrat but an elected official subject to the judgment of the electorate...
...Burke, who teaches political science at the University of Vermont, is not the first person to noodle this one around...
...He pronounces, "Students who obviously do not belong in [the school] setting because they are determined to be antisocial and destructive, and are beyond selfdiscipline and the capacity to reason, must be swiftly and surgically removed to another type of educational environment, not coddled or fretted over...
...Child molesting, prostitution, and sexual assault are legal concerns, but whether a couple's right to watch smut on its own VCR is a danger to society is an emotional issue that has found its way into the political arena...
...I kept telling myself that Wigginton must be on the side of the angels: he dislikes standardized tests and textbooks and the whole malarkey of master teachers...
...conservative arguments of our time has been over this question: Did the United States "push" Castro towards communism...
...None of us can afford to have our attention and our energy completely dominated by some...
...Certainly there have been tired moments when I'd agree with Wigginton—get rid of this troublemaker and let me do my job in peace...
...Yes, Castro deliberately turned to communism— Szulc makes that clear—but, why...
...Bureaucratic organization, designed for order and stability, contains, by its nature, an element of self-aggrandizement, an appetite for independent power, and a stubborn resistance to external—that is, political— control...
...Press conference Q's and A's are printed verbatim, and at least two chapters have nothing at all to do with what the book is ostensibly about: Coca-Cola's momentous and ill-fated decision to change its formula...
...Most public school English teachers have a student load upwards of 125 students...
...Most high school teachers share space with other teachers, often teaching in two or three different rooms during the day...
...It's too damn easy for teachers and principals to wash their hands of the cantaloupes, to get them officially declared incorrigible or loony or learning disabled...
...John P. Burke...
...Having tackled the question of a bureaucrat's responsibility to his superiors versus his obligations to the public, Burke cannot avoid the troublesome matters of leaks and lies...
...Johns Hopkins University Press, $23.50...
...We didn't respect their reservations about the ERA and didn't want to address their fears about losing traditional roles...
...Perhaps...
...In the spring of 1981, when the Equal Rights Amendment had a little over a year of life left, I attended a meeting at which a psychologist reported on interviews she had conducted in several states where the amendment had not been ratified...
...Because Pepsi's product tastes better...
...What leaker of information does not maintain—indeed believe— that his object is to get the facts to the public, thereby enhancing the democratic process...
...We teachers may fall far short of our goals much of the time, but we must never give up on the attempt to educate in and for a democracy...
...There are odd errors...
...To wit: the product matters, even when it is as inconsequential as carbonated soda...
...There is no room for individual bureaucrats to make their own interpretation of how to carry out the intent of the lawmakers, and any independent actions they take are usurpations of authority...
...Susan Ohanian...
...There is little on the motivation and psychology of the Third World man who created power out of powerlessness...
...What we heard was disturbing...
...I have difficulty understanding how a man of such intelligence and of such a sense of history and culture has allowed himself to become ossified politically," Szulc said...
...The commission was grappling with a tough issue, because First Amendment rights are basic to any discussion of regulating pornography...
...Ed Meese and company beg to differ...
...How's that, again...
...There have long been murmurs about this aid—apparently money and armaments— but no proof...
...But Wigginton is long on self-congratulation and short on both practical and inspirational insights for teachers who are not, like him, freed from the rules and rituals of public school teaching...
...Doubleday, $18.95...
...when he returned in 1985, he received an unusual amount of cooperation from Fidel's folks because they assumed he was doing an authorized biography...
...In no way do I begrudge him his comfortable position: he earned it, starting out with just a tape recorder, a dream, and faith in kids...
...But in the process they expose a deeper, more important point: that even conservatives are not agreed about how pornography should be limited...
...Leonard Reed Sometimes a Shining Moment: The Foxfire Experience...
...There's another scoop in Szulc's revelation that the CIA sent aid to Castro in 1957 and 1958...
...If one can ignore the good guy-bad guy tone of the book, one stands to learn quite a bit about the issues—on both sides...
...Sex, serves up, blow by blow, the popular farce known as the Meese Commission...
...Why were these women saying such nasty things about nice feminists who were trying to save them...
...jerk with the I.Q...
...He makes the usual claim to exhaustive interviews with all the principals, but you get the strong sense that this book is largely a rehash of his reporting for the paper...
...He has killed or removed anyone who dared to offer resistance...
...Roughly a third of Sometimes a Shining Moment focuses on how Wigginton started Faxfire, an alternative school, and how the widelyread books on local crafts and lore were "put together by high school students, the majority of whom had hated English ." As an English teacher myself, I applaud the accomplishment...
...But if the human cost of producing a fine product like Foxfire comes at the cost of eliminating the "cantaloupes," then I say the cost is too great...
...Wigginton, prone to absolutes, announces that his classroom rules are so natural and so obviously • right that he never has to enforce them...
...I think he suffers from the total isolation of the outside world...
...The ERA, which was referred to the states just before a conservative era, met none of these requirements...
...But with its multiple stories only loosely connected by The Building, it never quite achieves coherence or focus...
...None of those interviewed identified with those they called "women's libbers" who were "trying to shove the ERA down their throats...
...A firm allegiance to democratic politics," he writes, "is a necessary part of a properly defined understanding of bureaucratic responsibility, but so, too, is recognition of the active contributions to the policy process an individual official can make...
...She believes that constitutional amendments have been successful only when they were introduced during periods of progressive reform, when years of groundwork preceded their referral to the states for ratification, and when a broad consensus on a state-by-state and even region-byregion basis existed for passage...
...Berry makes a good case for her theory, though her view of the ERA campaign is a narrow one...
...The feminist reaction ranged from bewilderment to poundingthetable anger...
...The rest of the tale is devoted to the months of bumbling, subversion, and bureaucratic infighting that follow as the Department of Defense, the joint chiefs, the president, Congress, and the press debate what to do...
...Drury's new novel is a big, sprawling work, somewhat like the building it describes...
...He is lost in his court like an aging king...
...Mary Frances Berry...
...Linda Catling Bureaucratic Responsibility...
...Freud would have had a field day explaining why the same picture can elicit five responses—ranging from pleasure to pain—from as many people...
...Why...
...He wisely does not make too much of this...
...Not that I'm biased or anything...
...Allen Drury...
...Georgie Anne Geyer Why the ERA Failed: Politics, Women's Rights, and the Amending Process of the Constitution...
...With such controversial material, one needs the greatest possible documentation...
...of a cantaloupe...
...Minotaur Press, $3.95...
...The foes of pornography come from all corners...
...They agreed with feminists on issues like equal pay for equal work but felt the ERA proponents denigrated their regard for family life and their work as homemakers...
...He points with pride to the beautiful Appalachian artifacts that decorate his classroom, artifacts he uses to motivate students...
...A great many students of social decency concur...
...the reader almost never knows what should be attributed to whom...
...Democracy calls for responsiveness to the public will through elected officials...
...In Denmark, they say a little perversion is part of human nature, but with enough vicarious release the average pervert remains safely within the bounds of social decency...
...Wigginton's solution for problem students chills me to the bone...
...One of the classic stories about Castro describes the night he was on television when his son was nearly killed in an auto accident...
...He is a man who wishes new technology but rejects new thought...
...Sex...
...Joseph Nocera Pentagon...
...it runs the gamut from Venuses reclining on bearskins to images so sick it's hard to imagine anyone could look at, let alone produce, them...
...Szulc names names, citing the American consul general in Cuba as the CIA agent who made the contact...
...Philip Nobile, Eric Nadler...
...Coke's "image ads" were great, and yet they couldn't stop the relentless encroachment of Pepsi...
...In the absence of such recognition, public policy suffers...
...Though it's short and sketchy (only the huge spaces between the lines allow it to stretch to 192 pages), it still feels padded...
...Pacific fleet...
...Anchor Press/Doubleday, $19.95...
...Burke suggests that the bureaucrat has a responsibility not only to his own chain of command but to the larger political enterprise...
...Proponents had made no real plans for ratification in the states, and they underestimated the work needed to create a national consensus...
...In 1985 the attorney general's Commission took up their fight...
...Now Coke has retreated, and Pepsi continues to steal market share...
...The sourcing is horrible...
...Drury draws all the right conclusions about what's wrong with the DOD...
...I remain convinced that he has done great things with his students, has encouraged them to stretch and grow...
...Why is it that he becomes so incensed when his own people come to him with new ideas...
...In Cuba today, I see decay: decay of ideas and of revolutionary process, a stagnation, not because of the last two years, but because the revolution and the nation have been so totally mismanaged ." These words constitute the worst possible indictment of Castro and his revolution...
...But, as this book shows, some of its members tried very hard to remain objective...
...POLITICAL BOOKNOTES The Real Coke, The Real Story, Thomas Oliver, Random House, $16.95...
...At a recent session at the Wilson Center at the Smithsonian, Szulc mused about his book and about the fascinating, remarkable, and in many ways repellent historic figure he had sought out...
...Coke's own market research verified the stark reality of the Pepsi challenge, which is that people preferred Pepsi...
...No one suspected that we were going to lose the ERA in part because of our inability to understand and appreciate these feelings...
...Tell a student you're going to penalize him 15 points, or whatever, for every misspelled word, and pretty soon he'll only use simple words he's sure of spelling correctly...
...Wigginton calls himself a public school teacher but the astounding financial success of the Foxfire books enabled him to set up a corporation which now hires him to teach the Foxfire course...
...Or was he always a Marxist...
...Burke winds his way between the two schools...
...After all, if we don't fret over the antisocial, destructive, undisciplined kids, then who will...
...Kathleen Currie The United States of America vs...
...These two concepts are in frequent conflict so the problem is how to make bureaucracy the servant of democracy...
...Nobile and Nadler followed the commission's hearings around the country, financed by Penthouse...
...this view of "participatory" democracy extends to the bureaucrat or administrator a degree of political latitude in accommodating the interests of competing groups...
...Wigginton gives us too many empty platitudes, too many dusty lesson plans and checklists...
...She compacts 200 years of constitutional history into a terse 120 pages, with few anecdotes and little of the passion of the campaign...
...Period...
...After wrestling with the question of whether a bureaucrat is justified when, in defiance of superiors, he leaks to the press stories that may embarrass his agency, Burke concludes that he is justified if by so doing he enhances the democratic process...
...Oliver makes a good case that Coke's mistake was not so much changing the formula...
...military was beginning just barely to phase out its aid to the increasingly hated dictator Fulgencio Batista...
...There is almost nothing about Castro's tumultuous and brief marriage, or on his personality...
...It's good to be rigorous about grammar and punctuation, but using Wigginton's system in English class limits one's self—and one's students—to trivialities...
...To those of us who insisted on drinking Pepsi even as our mothers told us there was no difference between the two, there is sweet yindication here...
...Oliver is an Atlanta Constitution reporter who has covered Coke for years—Coke's corporate headquarters is in Atlanta...
...In this biography, Tad Szulc, the talented former Latin American correspondent for The New York Times, has provided a clincher that is going to be hard to challenge...
...The "respectable" Democrats of the Old Order were put forward by Fidel as the ostensible leaders of the country, while Fidel, Raul Castro, and Ernesto "Che" Guevara were holding allnight meetings in secret beach houses with the communists, planning a step-by-step restructuring of Cuba into a communist state...
Vol. 18 • December 1986 • No. 11
