Political Booknotes

...By contrast, laws passed by legislatures, while often unpopular, are nevertheless more likely to be shaped by public opinion and thus more widely accepted...

...has put major abortion decisions in the hands of the judiciary, European countries have left them to their legislatures...

...Rising membership and New Deal legislation created a period of unprecedented prosperity for workers after World War II...

...After a huge public outcry, the ban was repealed in less than a month...

...Up until his fortieth birthday, Bush concedes, he viewed money "as the ultimate measure of achievement...

...eastern) press, but this outbreak seemed to confirm that L.A .'s car culture had gone mad...

...The fifties were a tough decade for the left in America...

...Far from encouraging use of the automobile, the city's planners spent the early part of the century promoting mass transit and trying to build up Los Angeles's urban core...

...Americans tend to think of abortion as a blackandwhite issue...

...Bottles fails to explore the deeper issues raised by Los Angeles's inexorable sprawl, the most serious being the isolation of social classes...

...David Montgomery...

...Angelenos would not be denied their cars...

...But as Glendon shows in this short but enlightening book, the issue is not nearly so divisive in Europe, where most nations have no idea why we're still shouting...

...How did it happen...

...What then are we to make of George Bush on the cusp of achieving that final line of the resume...

...The city even went so far as to ban downtown parking in 1920...

...Sure, plenty of American papers are dull and boring, but Pravda takes it one step further by combining its somnolent story topics with obsolete words and convoluted Russian grammar...

...There are moments when one fears that "Doonesbury" has Bush pegged perfectly as the Invisible Man...

...Timothy Noah Abortion and Divorce in Western Law...

...Glendon acknowledges that the U.S...

...Then there is Bush's bold prediction in the book's last chapter (an ersatz question and answer session) that the dominant issue in the 1988 campaign will be "leadership itself and how the various candidates perceive it ." Connoisseurs of banal understatement might appreciate Bush's reflections on the loss of two crewmen when his plane was shot down during World War II ("I still don't understand the `logic' of war—why some survive and others are lost in their prime...

...Take Bush's reaction when he was asked to become the first outsider in history to head the CIA...

...In 1983, for example, when the shooting down of KAL 007 elicited a virtually unified condemnation from the west, the Soviets managed to piece together enough selections of western coverage that they convincingly corroborated their version of the incident...

...A former machinist himself, Montgomery, now a history professor at Yale, has amazing agility in moving from a shop-level focus to a panorama of the entire American system...

...Isserman, a professor at Smith, is best known for Which Side Were You On?, a history of the Communist party during World War II...

...The Death of the Old Left and the Birth of the New Left...

...Perhaps the best thing that can be said for George Bush after reading Looking Forward is that the guy does know how to hire decent help...

...Cambridge University Press, $27.95...

...At the same time, the increasing use of machinery and technology accelerated the loss of control...

...Today, some of his former disciples support Ronald Reagan...

...Scott L. Bottles...

...For George Bush, however, the strategy has always been to get ahead and figure out what to do once he got there...

...Scott Bottles provides convincing evidence that Los Angeles became a caroriented city not because of bad planning but in spite of good planning...

...But Los Angeles has led the way in urban decentralization...

...Does he reflect on the role of good intelligence in the East-West struggle...

...As Maurice Isserman shows in this scholarly and lucid study, the recent history of American radicalism is "less spasmodic" than is generally supposed...

...And "turning it back to the states" is no panacea...

...court rulings helped codify the notion that management could exclude labor from key decisions...

...Taylorism," pioneered by Frederick Winslow Taylor, author of Principles of Scientific Management, involved breaking down jobs into minute parts...

...Their crime...

...Mass transit buffs who like to criticize Los Angeles's "love affair with the automobile" usually overlook the fact that it was trolleys and commuter trains, not automobiles, that initially created the city's urban sprawl...

...Charles Euchner If I Had a Hammer...

...The idea that an owner should enjoy total control over labor seemed downright odd...

...Here I was primed for mining some easy humor and cheap invective out of the droll notion of George Bush writing his autobiography just in time for the Iowa caucuses...

...For Glendon, a Harvard law professor, the key difference is how abortion laws are formed...

...Across the country, "streetcar suburbs" were attracting families eager to escape the city...

...After foreign news, readers most enjoy the crime reports...

...George Braziller, $19.95...

...In a sense, Montgomery's lament about labor's fall is ironic...

...It is, alas, pretty thin gruel...

...Blair Palese Pravda: Inside the Soviet News Machine...

...Enough was enough," he writes...

...But my favorite is the historical ignorance that prompted free-market, conservative oilman George Bush to name his company after a Mexican revolutionary, because he and his partner had just seen Marlon Brando in Viva Zapata...

...Jim Miller...

...tradition of privacy and individualism is probably too strong for a simple consensus to develop here the way it did in, say, Sweden...

...Little in the book helps us unravel the central mystery of George Bush and his Amazing Resume: how one could have done so much, accomplished so little, and remain so unaffected by the experience...

...Still, the fact is that a radical American sub-culture did survive the big chill of the fifties to influence the young activists of the sixties...

...Angus Roxburgh...

...In the late fifties, he began to drift slowly to the right, eventually harnessing his Marxist faith in the working class and his Trotskyite hatred of "bureaucratic collectivism" to the Cold War anticommunism of the AFLCIO...

...The laws the Europeans have come up with are designed to navigate a middle ground...

...Being at the service of the president was one thing, but catering to partisan demands to be confirmed was asking too much ." That incident could be read another way: the only cause that ever prompted Bush to rise above ambition (to be CIA director) was greater ambition (to be Ford's vice president...

...Jonathan Frankel The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865-1925...

...By contrast, Los Angeles's city center lacked the housing that provided a counterweight to the suburban urge in other cities...

...As other metropolitan areas follow Los Angeles's lead, class barriers around the country seem certain to harden...

...Muste participated in the first modest act of collective disobedience in the fifties, he and his comrades were promptly arrested...

...By filling the section with these clippings, Pravda tries to give its propaganda a "stamp of approval" from the western media...

...That notion has driven many men into public service...

...Even if Berkeley and Birmingham were allowed to have abortion laws reflecting their different community standards, it's hard to believe that content to see thousands of abortions performed anywhere in the country...

...But the roots of these attitudes lie in long-standing Russian traditions and patriotism, which the propaganda merely reinforces...

...University of California Press, $25...

...But most of them have had a much clearer vision of what they wanted to accomplish...

...A full 85 percent of its readership, according to a "secret survey," doesn't understand Pravda at all...

...The internal affairs and "Party Life" departments are so overwhelmingly dull only the active party members and, ironically, American Kremlinologists read them...

...Bottles lays most of the blame on the inefficiency of the trains and trolleys...

...Of course not...

...has a profit-making abortion industry that advertises in newspapers and at bus stops...

...Besides, as Isserman points out, the arid scholasticism of the Old Left sectarians left most young activists cold...

...When courts create upheaval, she argues, citizens are more likely to become angry, feeling that the law is imposed on them and that major decisions have been taken out of their hands...

...There is a sincerity about this admission that rings true...

...Another small but telling difference is that in Europe, abortions are discreetly administered in stateowned hospitals...

...This account is not entirely satisfactory, largely because his emphasis on the Old Left leads Isserman to downplay the importance of the black civilrights movement, of an increasingly rebellious youth culture, and of maverick liberals and iconoclastic intellectuals like C. Wright Mills...

...Montgomery's study of labor is social history at its best...

...This past summer, motorists on the carclogged freeways of Los Angeles took to shooting each other, wounding and occasionally killing fellow commuters...

...Told by GOP supporters that he would have to publicly reject the possibility of serving as Jerry Ford's 1976 running mate to win Senate approval, Bush petulantly refused...

...Shachtman recruited Irving Howe and Michael Harrington, among others, into the socialist movement (both eventually broke with him...

...Walter Shapiro Los Angeles and the Automobile: The Making of a Modern City...

...He also, at different times, struck up alliances with Norman Thomas and George Meany...

...An 1891 convention of the Amalgamated Association in the steel industry, for example, ordered locals to ban overtime when people were out of work, cut out workers who were negotiating separate deals with management, and reduce the amount of iron that could be produced per person...

...Soon Los Angeles had the largest electric railway system in the world...

...At their trial, the judge called these self-styled pacifists "murderers," on the grounds that their disdain for civil defense would mean the death of millions of New Yorkers in the event of a genuine nuclear attack...

...But the cities continued to grow, too, drawing immigrants and farmers...

...While the U.S...

...It is also useful reading for all would-be activists, if only as a collection of the kind of cautionary tales that, to judge by the perennially self-destructive behavior of the beleaguered American left, cannot be told too frequently...

...My guess from reading this memoir is that Bush once knew precisely who he was and what he wanted...

...One report explained that an offender was sentenced to time "in places with an unfavorable climate...

...Why did this mass transit system disappear...

...Harvard University Press, $25...

...While the U.S...

...Prosperity, as usual, turned out to be fragile, and the workers had lost control over their own destiny...

...What's more, they spend much more on family planning, to prevent unwanted pregnancies in the first place, and generously support child care programs to make raising children an attractive alternative to terminating pregnancies...

...Cunning, narrow-minded, and ferociously anti-Stalinist, Shachtman turned out several generations of seasoned political cadres with a militantly Manichean view of the world...

...Nationwide, the postwar suburban boom and the more recent growth beyond the suburbs suggest that, for good or ill, most Americans prefer to live in places that can be reached only by car...

...Southern California's fixation on the automobile has always drawn criticism from the national (i.e...

...Does he wonder whether he knows enough to oversee covert operations...

...Written like two-minute mysteries, they detail the exploits of Soviet antiheroes who take on the system and, of course, lose...

...Basic, $18.95...

...The loss of these values, "the fall of labor," came as management began using sophisticated systems of shop-floor control that ended the workers' monopoly on knowledge of the production process...

...On a more prosaic level, Bottles does make a persuasive case that Metro Rail, a multi-billion dollar subway currently being dug beneath the city, will fail, and not just because it will serve too few people...

...As one chapter title suggests, the workplace was dominated by the "manager's brain under the workman's cap...

...Southern Californians are hardly alone in their passion for the automobile...

...In a characteristically arid passage, Bush reflects, "After 13 months of duty in China, I liked the idea of administering a worldwide organization, a job that would require 110 percent effort from early morning to late night ." But it is unfair to ridicule the vice-president as totally devoid of principles and beliefs...

...Roxburgh, however, does not interpret the public's interest in the foreign news page as approval but as evidence of its thirst for information about the West...

...I envisioned a political version of Vanna Speaks replete with helpful hints on how to choose the proper color watchband for a state funeral...

...There is, for example, the gloriously obtuse footnote in which Bush purports to be puzzled by unshakable charges of "preppyism" without mentioning that he did indeed prep at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts...

...But Montgomery shows that workers' high wages ended up being part of a Faustian bargain...

...Whether or not the Rehnquist court, as influenced by Reagan appointments, overturns Roe v. Wade, there will be no easy compromise...

...Certain attitudes, such as anti-Israeli sentiment and distrust of the West, may have been built up by the newspaper...

...Gathering in a park outside New York's City Hall and refusing to take shelter when the air-raid sirens sounded...

...Riders complained of overcrowding but at the same time demanded that fares be kept down...

...In 1952, the treasurer of perhaps the most important group of pacifist activists in America reported that the organization had $12.84 in its bank account...

...That was one reason the New Left chose from the start to ignore the long-standing sectarian debates over the meaning of the Russian Revolution...

...Ironically, in the late sixties, students inadvertantly mimicked the old sectarian struggles with their own competing chants of "Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh" and "Mao, Mao, Mao Tse-Thng ." Despite its limitations, Isserman's book is an invaluable historical resource...

...Still, with a little digging we can find some inadvertent humor in this up-from-Andover saga of Bush's life through 1981, with a nervous eight pages thrown in on the Irancontra scandal...

...Even this brief profile in courage was marred when the would-be CIA director agreed to a face-saving compromise in which Ford announced that Bush would not be on the 1976 Republican ticket...

...Mass transit just couldn't compete with the pleasure of driving your own automobile...

...As Bush reveals in this memoir, he made a courageous stand when he ran into confirmation problems over his nomination as CIA director...

...But what I was not prepared for was the competence of former Spiro Agnew speechwriter Vic Gold, who has managed to make Bush's life story half-way interesting without providing much ammunition for either cynical reporters or curious rivals...

...The paper's problems start with its prose...

...He talks vaguely about "having passed the age of 40, I'd concluded that there were other important ways to contribute to our children's future...

...By the 1940s, city planners were ready to throw in the towel...

...To be a radical was to know penury...

...In the popular mind, socialism and communism were two words for the same evil...

...The city was a backwater community until the Southern Pacific railroad linked it to the rest of the country in the 1880s...

...But Bush never says precisely what replaced avarice...

...Although his new book begins with a chapter on the collapse of the American Communist party, its chief interest lies in the detailed accounts he gives of three more obscure groups: the activists who swore allegiance to Max Shachtman, the intellectuals associated with Irving Howe and his small journal, Dissent, and the radical pacifists linked to A.J...

...It will take more than snipers to break the habit...

...has the least restrictive abortion laws in the West, most European countries require a brief waiting period before granting approval and put a limit on abortions after ten weeks...

...Mary Ann Glendon...

...What sections of Pravda do Russians like...

...and the hostile policies of Presidents Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover, along with fluctuations in the business cycle, weakened labor's bargaining position...

...The strangest story in many respects is that of Shachtman...

...Muste...

...Streetcar companies took advantage of this situation by purchasing tracts of land far removed from downtown, building houses, and then extending their railway lines to the new developments...

...Protest groups, like Right to Life and NOW, fight over whether it should be legal or illegal...

...In her analysis of the American difference, however, she fails to acknowledge an even more significant factor hindering an abortion compromise...

...it was to be hated and despised...

...Three years later, when its leader A.J...

...Streetcar companies made one last attempt to boost their fortunes in the 1920s with a plan to build elevated tracks, but the Los Angeles Times crusaded against them, decrying "their darkening shadows and their depressive gloom," and the proposal was defeated at the polls...

...Finally the unions became divided over whether to push comfort or control of the process...

...Religiously, ethnically, and culturally, we're just too diverse to easily reconcile this issue...

...A Jewish immigrant born in Warsaw in 1904, Shachtman was a communist in the twenties, a follower of Trotsky in the thirties, and—after he broke with his mentor in 1939—the leader of an independent and increasingly esoteric Marxist sect that has left a surprisingly large mark on American political life...

...Workers felt they were running their own enterprises...

...Similarly, it's hard to imagine feminist groups ever being content to see women—in any part of the country—jailed for obtaining an abortion...

...They started building freeways...

...In fact, the electric train tracks got in the way...

...Most interesting is his explanation of what we today would call "workplace democracy?' Before the depression of the 1880s and the Homestead strike of 1892, workers usually exerted tremendous control over the production process, often imposing strict work rules on themselves...

...Only the U.S...

...Rather than develop into a traditional "walking city" like Chicago, which grew up just a few decades earlier, Los Angeles used the new rail technology to evolve into a large, decentralized metropolitan area linked by inter-urban train to Long Beach, Pasadena, and other Southern California cities...

...Indeed, rail transportation put Los Angeles on the map...

...It is an odd and scary reason to seek the presidency...

...Southern Californians have become hooked on the freedom and convenience of the automobile...

...Foreign news, even though it extensively borrows and twists clippings from Western newspapers, is the unqualified favorite...

...Or better yet, a political memoir filled with telling omissions and Freudian undertones...

...Even deadly serious punishments are treated lightly...

...In the final chapter of his book, Isserman offers a brief account of how the New Left arose from the ashes of the Old Left...

...Roxburgh does not, however, completely dismiss Pravda as harmless...

...Maurice Isserman...

...POLITICAL BOOKNOTES Looking Forward...

...In this scholarly study, Roxburgh puts aside Western rhetoric and portrays Pravda not as a masterful manipulator of information and disinformation, but as sometimes pathetic, and often comic...