POLITICAL BOOKNOTES
POLITICAL BOOKNOTES Pepper: Eyewitness to a Century. Claude Pepper, Hays Gorey. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, $17.95. A month after Black Monday, while congressional and White House leaders held...
...As Doris Kearns Goodwin's The Kennedys and the Fitzgeralds so brilliantly demonstrated last spring, there is abundant grist for the trover's craft in the stories of Boston politics...
...Forest Service...
...In the case of Nancy Hanks, the lobbies she created on behalf of the National Endowment for the Arts eventually became so strong and so demanding that Hanks found her credibility with Congress undermined by their voracious appetites .) That the care and feeding of these interest groups may contribute to the fragmentation of America is not the concern of the contributors of this book...
...Jacobo Timerman...
...Their checklist for effectiveness includes the extent to which the executives identified new programs for their agencies, and developed both external and internal constituencies to support their goal...
...No one else has...
...His unbending opposition to means testing or even taxing Social Security benefits is the New Deal's worst legacy: mindless support for expensive government programs without concern that benefits be targeted to those in need...
...Frank Levy...
...Timerman will horrify those who are romantics about Chile and are still waiting for General Pinochet to be swept out of office by a tide of protest...
...The middle is still by far the fattest part of the income distribution...
...and he helped Franklin D. Roosevelt kill tax breaks for the "economic royalists...
...When he returned in 1963, it was to the House, not the Senate...
...Aside from the occasional Rickover figure, who does it by sheer and often obnoxious determination, the two essential ingredients of success for a government entrepreneur seem to be the wholehearted support of the president and the fostering of outside interest groups that stand to benefit from the desired programs...
...He has used fear, with surgical precision, to quiet the poor and those who couldn't be bought...
...As it is, Levy is probably doomed to see his carefully explained numbers distorted by speechwriters and editorialists for years to come...
...Quinlan Press...
...What do the customers of prostitutes think of their illegal practices...
...Yet liberals who recite these depressing economic trends, as if they automatically reflect discrimination, might note that three-quarters of black husband and wife families now have incomes that put them in the top three quintiles, a major success story...
...But if they graduate, the pampered prodigies are granted lifetime job security and a guaranteed market as well as a comfortable social position among the state elite, drawing a white-collar salary and attending luxurious retreats...
...But without growth and upward mobility, people suddenly feel locked in at their level...
...But in his battles at the TVA, he had the crucial support of Franklin D. Roosevelt...
...Dollars and Dreams deserves a larger audience than books about statistics generally get...
...Maledominated law has been anything but consistent...
...James Forrestal's career abounded in irony: as a forceful secretary of the navy, he opposed unification of the armed forces...
...Haraszti argues that the experience of the Hungarian intelligentsia suggests an overt loosening of state control may 132 the harbinger of subtler, more manipulative constraints...
...John Updike writes a good deal about the Pennsylvania of his youth, and lives on the North Shore today, but John Updike is from Boston as surely as Carlton Fisk, of Claremont, New Hampshire and the White Sox of Chicago, is a true Bostonian...
...Although Social Security was one program that could stand to be cut because it fails to distinguish between rich and poor recipients, the summit left it alone...
...the flaw in the seer's question was its neglect of the manifest fact that Boston, a state of mind that exists geographically east of Worcester, south of Lowell, and north of Plymouth, is a character in almost every book— admittedly fictional or insistently factual—that is written about the people who consider themselves to be "from Boston" It is the strangest damned place...
...After hearing about the recent Moscow International Book Fair, where dissident Soviet writers were invited to mingle with prominent Soviet censors, I can't help but wonder if Gorbachev is borrowing more than just agricultural reform from Hungary...
...Today the government kills about 55 people a year...
...lb be fair, Pepper has supported senior citizens throughout his career: the first bill he sponsored as a young Florida state legislator exempted the elderly from a fishing license fee, and Pepper championed the fledgling Social Security program in the late 1930s, before it became a sacred cow...
...Looking at these figures, you wonder not why there has been so much political "malaise" (to coin a phrase) since 1973, but why there hasn't been a revolution...
...Timothy Noah The Velvet Prison: Artists Under State Socialism...
...The figure whose life and career makes the strongest case for how an iron will can prevail over institutional inertia is Hyman Rickover...
...Pepper's defeat had not sapped his energy...
...And so is Francis Russell, whose reputation was deservedly made by his painstaking and unsparing research into the Sacco-Vanzetti case (he entered the lists convinced that the two were innocent, and emerged from them convinced that they did commit the robbery, and did murder the guard—for which declarations he took considerable abuse...
...But as a senator from 1937 to 1950, Pepper showed what was noblest in the New Deal: passionate commitment to the downandout...
...The state encourages its artists to borrow not only from their prerevolutionary heritage but also from the West...
...Imagine not being able to leave your office to go to the local drug store...
...In the four desert counties where prostitution is legal, prostitutes are more prisoners than working women...
...The Navy backed down and Rickover got his promotion...
...He tells his story calmly and clearly, with a minimum of jargon...
...There is active opposition, but on a very small scale...
...Edwin O'Connor was from Boston, notwithstanding the fact that he was born in Woonsocket, Rhode Island (and died far too soon—in Boston of course...
...Pepper sponsored the first minimum-wage, maximum-hours bill...
...Ten years later, at age 50, he was making only $24,132...
...The oral tradition has roughly—very roughly— preserved the legends of Boston's rogues, scoundrels, and scapegraces, but the people who know the wonderful stories are dying off these days...
...One Nevada town makes it illegal for prostitutes to leave their brothels on Sunday, and it also limits where they can shop and when...
...Basic Books, $14.95...
...Robert B. Parker grew up in the Fall River-New Bedford area, and he lives in effete Cambridge now, hard by Camelot High (as we call the John F. Kennedy Institute of Politics at Harvard), but Robert B. Parker is from Boston...
...When the whole train is moving forward, people don't worry so much whether they are in the first or last car...
...Gifford Pinchot was the founding director of the U.S...
...George V. Higgins...
...The passage of time tends to add nuance to such pilferings...
...then, as the first secretary of defense, he was unable to control the interservice rivalries that he had helped to create because of the weakness he had succeeded in having written into the secretary of defense's role...
...They've spent a lot of time infighting...
...Pepper threatened to use his power as Rules Committee chairman to force a separate vote on the issue...
...The book's most serious flaw is that its prescriptions, based in compromise, are jarring and unconvincing...
...Doig and Hargrove take the cautious view that under optimally favorable circumstances, individuals with entrepreneurial moxie can greatly influence the course of events...
...In 1973 it called for the decriminalization ,of prostitution, but has declined to make a "judgement that prostitution is morally good ." Hobson never says whether working girls follow these debates...
...The reason is that the decline in individual earnings was masked by the well-known entry of second earners into the work force, so that family income didn't decline as rapidly...
...It was 3.8 percent...
...In Lyon County, the Red Light district is a bunch of trailers in the desert five miles away from "any city, town, or mobile home park...
...Levy is not a polemicist, though sometimes you wish he were...
...A month after Black Monday, while congressional and White House leaders held an "economic summit" to reduce the deficit, 87-year-old Rep...
...Alfred A. Knopf, $15.95...
...He has bought the support, or at least the silence, of the middle and upper classes with cheap consumer goods...
...But when William Howard Taft became president, conflicts developed and Pinchot was fired...
...This may suggest a more subliminal explanation for Pepper's devotion to Social Security at any cost...
...But Congress had been impressed by Rickover's concern for cost and safety in building nuclear submarines...
...The place is even sleazier than you might think...
...Then the Forest Service took off...
...Scattered throughout Levy's book are surprising, and sometimes profoundly distressing statistics...
...Well, he's probably mistaken...
...He criticizes the opposition parties' unwillingness to compromise and the hard left's tolerance for violence, which drives moderate Chileans into Pinochet's camp...
...Russell Sage...
...Years ago an interviewer induced momentary speechlessness (not my usual affliction) by suggesting that Boston itself is a character in my books, an insight so commanding that of course I stole it at once, using it to great effect on subsequent book tours (without, of course, crediting the source—this was before we were all joebidened into prim footnoting of others' better lines...
...For its part, NOW has come down in the middle...
...Francis Russell, like Goodwin, has set down the hard facts as he found them and done it in his own hand: stories of James Michael Curley and John F. Fitzgerald (with Toodles, of course...
...it's another to have inequality based rigorously on skills or credentials...
...Even worse, a loosening may indicate that the intellectuals have been so thoroughly co-opted as to make censorship obsolete...
...It's all right to be wrong in Boston, so long as you're having some fun...
...Michael Willrich Chile: Death in the South...
...to this day, he is a forceful and shrewd legislator...
...Pepper's career in politics reflects the best and worst of the New Deal...
...At a time when soviet citizens and Western observers alike are trying to figure out just what Mikhail Gorbachev means by "glasnost," the new English translation of Velvet Prison is not reassuring...
...Francis Russell...
...State teachers condemn any work that is ambiguous or demands individual interpretation...
...Such positions were risky for a southerner, but Pepper was committed to helping the afflicted and opposing privilege...
...Timerman says little about the limits of their existence: the constant danger and the lack of access to television or elections...
...Their concern is demonstrating that an unusual individual can have an impact and they make an interesting but not very compelling case...
...Even so, the proportion of husband-wife families making over $30,000, when corrected for inflation, declined from 51 percent in 1973 to 45 percent in 1984...
...Americans had a reason for suspecting that, despite Walkmen and microwave ovens, they weren't living as well as their parents had lived in the sixties...
...I'm a fighter," he said...
...Inequality of prospects" rises more rapidly than actual money inequality...
...the latter says it leaves them subservient to men...
...To make their point, they present biographies of 13 government leaders who have had such an impact...
...David Lilienthal successfully made the Tennessee Valley Authority a reality...
...Timerman, himself a victim of torture in Argentina, quotes an opposition leader expressing his shock at the torturers who have emerged from the entrails of Chile, but when Timerman uses the quote he is not talking just about the government, but about Chileans...
...The former believes prostitution ought to be legal and that it grants economic independence to women...
...Inevitably, he alienated the naval bureaucracy: he was passed over for promotion in 1951 and again in 1952—which ordinarily would have meant forced retirement...
...Marquand was at home in Boston, though he lived in the city chiefly when he was seeing his lawyers about one of his divorces...
...It's hard to imagine any conclusions being drawn without taking the opinions of these experts into account...
...Pepper fervently denies that his role as broker for the elderly reflects his Florida district's gray constituency (He also takes exception to accusations that his support 'for Nicaraguan "freedom fighters" reflects the growing number of Cubans in his district...
...Unfortunately, most black children are not being born Into such husband-wife families...
...This chilling book, which first appeared as a New Yorker series, is a textbook on dictatorship and how people learn to live with it...
...It all came crashing down at the height of McCarthyism in 1950, when Pepper was labeled "Red Pepper" for meeting with Josef Stalin and allowing himself to be photographed with Paul Robeson and Henry Wallace...
...conflict is about the only thing that really produces creativity...
...In 1973, the average 40-year-old man earned $28,118 (in constant 1984 dollars...
...What do they think is the legal and social solution today and how do they think society can accommodate both...
...Regardless of whether you think prostitution should be legalized, Hobson's history of America's oldest profession will convince you that the life of a prostitute is not only difficult but very often absurd...
...Meanwhile, the 40-yearolds of 1984 were earning even less—about 17 percent less than the 40-year-olds of 1973...
...For him, the anti-Pinochet theater, magazines, and coffeehouses that nourish the opposition are an escape valve created by the regime to let off pressure...
...It's when the train stops that it becomes very important to get away from the caboose...
...Most of the book is about the opposition politicians and why they have been unable to enlist Chileans-85 percent of whom oppose Pinochet—in the struggle...
...Eugene Lewis, who wrote the book's Rickover biography, makes this distinction between entrepreneurs and managers: "Entrepreneurs tend to see opportunity in structural confusion, while managers tend to want to rationalize things so that contradiction and overlap are disposed of by organizational design ." Rickover was "task-oriented" —he scorned hierarchical prerogatives in favor of project management in which knowledge, not rank, provided the leadership...
...One of the latter is the black male adult unemployment rate in 1968-69...
...Hell, Henry James spent most of his life "across the water," as my grandfather used to say, but he was always from Boston, and it showed in what he wrote...
...And whether there's more inequality or less, Levy notes, there is good reason to lament the loss, of industrial jobs that pay high wages without demanding the technical training of a software-programmer or the smooth interpersonal skills of a marketing rep...
...He knew the importance of cultivating Congress...
...I enjoyed the controversy...
...Claude Pepper swore his opposition to including Social Security cuts in the package...
...It's one thing to have inequality of income...
...For instance, COYOTE (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics) has been at loggerheads with WHISPER (Women Hurt in Systems of Prostitution Engaged in Revolt...
...Lenin once said that he was afraid to listen to Beethoven because the music made him feel like caressing the people's heads when he needed to beat them...
...He remembers what a drag it was keeping the old folks in the spare room...
...No one doubts Pinochet would kill more if he needed to, but he doesn't need to...
...The author points out that in a directed culture real meaning must be read "between the lines," and he has created a brilliantly artistic book that makes the reader do the same...
...The reality Timerman presents is this: Pinochet has maintained himself for 14 years as dictator of what was once the most democratic country in Latin America...
...It was truly "Rickover's Navy" because he insisted on choosing the men who manned the nuclear ships...
...Mickey Kaus Leadership and Innovation: A Biographical Perspective on Entrepreneurs in Government...
...Although she has written a thoughtprovoking book, Hobson is so busy plowing through ninteenth-century issues of the Boston Surgical and Medical Journal and researching at the Swedish Center for Working Life that she never finds out what prostitutes themselves think...
...Does it make any difference who heads government agencies...
...Incomes have always been unequal...
...Tina Rosenberg Dollars and Dreams: The Changing American Income Distribution...
...He created a power base there and in the press— and on that base he built a nuclear Navy...
...Leonard Reed Uneasy Virtue: The Politics of Prostitution and the American Reform liadition...
...What he has done here is to collect 12 magazine pieces about Bostonians that variously appeared in such publications as American Heritage and Horizon...
...Even Rambo, Haraszti muses, may someday have a place in Hungarian culture...
...When World War II approached, Pepper showed he was also eager to fight Nazis: he bucked Senate isolationism by sponsoring the first Lend-1 Pa ge bill...
...Calvin Coolidge and John Boyle O'Reilly (whose reach as a poet exceeded his grasp), and Mattapan Macky, an Italian gypsy with blonde hair, carrying the Mayflower name of Tilly...
...And if you're a prostitute, don't look to feminists for help...
...Later, as head of the Atomic Energy Commission, Lilienthal was generally regarded as ineffective...
...He focuses on what the limits have produced: a romantic cocoon of nostalgia that has rendered the opposition irrelevant...
...he sponsored bills to expand government research to fight disease through the National Institutes of Health...
...But because everyone slipped backwards, "being in the middle of the distribution" no longer guarantees that you could buy the things you once thought "middle class" people could buy...
...They weren't...
...The paltry $30 billion in budget cuts that the summit finally produced can be blamed largely on Pepper's unfortunate influence...
...The special art schools, where most Hungarian mothers would love to send their children, use a small stick and a big carrot...
...There has been a small increase in inequality to go with the overall stagnation of earnings...
...The professional ways of Sydney Biddle Barrows are not as common as media coverage implies...
...Boston," he writes at the end of this book, "the city of all American cities that is a state of mind, is the cement that holds them together...
...James W. Doig, Erwin C. Hargrove, eds...
...Barbara Meil Hobson...
...J.P...
...The answers are somewhat blurred by the biographies...
...He roused the people of the valley with soapbox speeches while fighting off lawsuits brought by private utilities...
...But it was the stagnation, Levy argues, that made the inequality seem ominous...
...If you think that somehow prostitution can be cleaned up by some neat ordinance creating a legalized Red Light district, take a look at Nevada...
...First there's the inherent sexism of the territory...
...Johns Hopkins University Press, $39.50...
...In an unusually ugly campaign year (Richard Nixon used similar tactics against Helen Gahagan Douglas), Pepper was sent into humiliating exile...
...The plight of the artist under totalitarianism is a familiar subject, but Haraszti shows just how artists have been co-opted...
...The state tests prospective artists at an early age for ability and docility...
...The only condition: be it cubism, literary minimalism, or rock and roll, a style borrowed from the West must be sufficiently banal to be useful...
...In his chilling exploration of state-directed culture under socialism, Miklos Haraszti, a leading Hungarian dissident, shows that post-Stalinist Eastern European leaders have developed a new and uniquely effective method of cultural control: they beat heads with a caress...
...Opponent George Smathers told audiences that Pepper had learned the law under the "crimson of Harvard" Pepper also was made to suffer for his advocacy of socialized medicine and his failure to oppose civil-rights legislation...
...the likelihood is that none exists...
...Haraszti admits that Velvet Prison is a pessimistic little book...
...Throughout history, male prostitutes have been ignored by urban courts while female prostitutes have been singled out as criminals, evil seductresses, and carriers of disease...
...Or, at least, the individual has to be so unusual as to be a phenomenon on the American landscape...
...And it's not as though there's an easy way to move up from the streets into management...
...How can we keep young children from working on the streets...
...But it was tough going until his old friend and fellow conservationist, Theodore Roosevelt, became president...
...All you have to do is grow up in it, and for the rest of your life, everywhere in the world (that I have been, at least), all you have to do is ask for "Marlboro in the hard pack," and no one needs to see your passport...
...Politics, thuggery, sex and religion, ethics, and fixing the cases: Russell gathered most of the ruling passions of Boston in these pieces, and hes right to be proud of them...
...But then most of us think the Red Sox will win the World Series next year...
...But why should Timerman have found a way to defeat Pinochet...
...Not if you define "middle class" as whoever is in the middle...
...Today, it is 10.2 percent...
...Does this mean the middle class is disappearing...
...Blair Palese The Knave of Boston and Other Ambiguous Massachusetts Characters...
...It would have been built in time even without Rickover, but there is no question that his forcefulness, his emphasis on technical innovation and detail, made it happen sooner...
...In order to capture the mind-set of this "soft" censorship, Haraszti has done some co-opting of his own...
...That gives the whole income distribution a nasty meritocratic bite—smart people in the upper quintiles, dummies down below...
...In this once passionately political country, the latest strikes have been broken and the opposition daily newspapers are in danger of closing for want of readers...
...He too knew the value of publicity: he cultivated magazine editors and tirelessly made speeches to any group that would have him...
...Not only that, she doesn't talk to prostitutes themselves...
...Miklos Haraszti...
...The book's most intriguing revelation is that, Pepper used to argue with his wife about "my continuing closeness with the family" (that is his mother and father), who lived with the young Peppers...
...27.50...
...Was Ralph Waldo Emerson just whistlin' Dixie when he said, "An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man...
...At one time, a prostitute could aspire to being a "madame," but today the streets are so violent that male pimps have become a necessity...
...Basic Books, $20.95...
...Frank Levy has immersed himself in Census data and emerged with a depressing but significant story to tell: America has indeed been quietly slipping backwards for over a decade...
...The book is written in the language of the state artist and is structured like a manual/manifesto of "socially committed art ." But through the dull ideological polish shines Haraszti's biting sarcasm...
...As is by no means always the case when ephemeral journalism is captured in hard bindings, the gleanings gain critical mass, melting down into a coherent story about the city— really a collection of villages—that glows with its own energy...
...But it's possible he lost some of his nerve...
...13 emphasize that, neither he nor the military officers he worked with wore uniforms, with their proclamations of where one stood in the pecking order...
Vol. 19 • January 1988 • No. 12
