Political Booknotes
POLITICAL BOOKNOTES Alchemists of Revolution: Terrorism in the Modern World. Richard E. Rubenstein. Basic Books, $17.95. Just when the entire country seemed to have agreed on the wisdom of...
...They are remembered long after their demise both by those who produced them and those who read them...
...Dean Acheson's high standards attracted a number of superior men to the State Department, and made him able to see and revere the excellent qualities of his non-Grotonian, non-Yalie boss, Harry Truman...
...The real source of power is an individual senator's ability to work the levers of power within the Senate, which are more informal and complex than in the more hierarchical lower chamber...
...The public relations fiasco over the bomb helped lead Carter to cancel it...
...Our grandchildren will want to know most of all two things about Reagan: why he was so popular, and how he could have followed that patently irrational course of tax and spending policies in 1981 that will cause the country problems for decades to come...
...in the case of Reagan, he builds his portrait around his subject's skills as a performer and mythologizer...
...Kissinger's books, for example, are like great lumps of Wheatena...
...He subsequently failed to stop MacArthur's progression to the Yalu that triggered the Chinese entry into the war and the terrible casualties American forces endured as a result...
...I think my friend's at least partly wrong, but it can be hard to prove...
...Terrorism is evil, whether it is Menachem Begin blowing up the King David Hotel or Yasser Arafat attacking an Israeli kibbutz...
...No, the Times was the best, by far...
...Bohlen and Kennan, who were for the most part hard-liners, remained in federal service, their eyes fixed on Russia even when they represented us elsewhere...
...When Eisenhower was elected in 1952, the alliance crumbled: the southern Democrats were less alarmed by any initiatives a Republican president might take on civil rights, while the Republicans could count on Ike to veto big-spending bills on their behalf...
...The Cubans, for example, have "little need to export their revolution [since] there were so many willing imitators...
...The trick was to help Johnson achieve liberal legislative triumphs without seeming to cast a liberal vote...
...Martin Linsky and a team from Harvard Kennedy School of Government have interviewed important policy makers (plus a few reporters) and produced an informative study of the way press coverage frames issues at the federal level...
...The other cases mentionb:i—the Reagan administration's tax credits for segregated schools like Bob Jones University, the review of Social Security disability rolls that led to horror stories about people losing benefits in 1982, the Carter administration's relocation of residents of Love Canal—are also viewed mostly as screw-ups by officials who let the stories spin out of control...
...Another misconception Reedy attacks is the notion that the key to Senate power is a committee chairmanship...
...These are reasonable questions, especially in a time like this, when the nation is suffering a mild case of hysteria about the terrorism problem...
...Robert Lovett, cabinet secretary...
...Judging from the dreary title, Reedy (or perhaps his publisher) apparently intended this book to be a contemporary, politicalsciencey tract that makes a case for a slow-moving Senate...
...Love the sinner, but hate the sin...
...Kennan, upon learning in 1945 that Secretary of War Henry Stimson wished to share control of atomic power with the Soviets as a means of reassuring them, fired off a message from his post in Moscow: "There is nothing—I repeat nothing—in the history of the Soviet regime which would justify us in assuming that [Russian leaders] would hesitate for a moment to apply this power against us if by doing so they thought that they might materially improve their own power position ?' The bestknown expression of Kennan's views, of course, is his famous "X" article, written in 1947 for Foreign Affairs, in which he spelled out his remedy for Soviet expansionism: containment...
...Except for workers who lost their jobs, I don't know many people who mourned the loss of New York's Mirror, Journal American, or even the World Telegram...
...Television . does offer the person home from work the news, sports, weather, even comics ("Comer Pyle" re-runs...
...The result is a lively and penetrating memoir whose unconvincing main point is obscured by a multitude of much more compelling, smaller insights into the legislative process...
...Wills has done a certain amount of first-hand research, especially around the midwestern towns where Reagan spent his early years, and a great deal of library work...
...In fact, Reedy argues, senators do their crucial work neither on the floor nor in committee but in casual conversations conducted while walking through the Capitol corridors, attending parties, enjoying a cup of coffee, or working the Senate cloakrooms...
...But the southern Democrats voted against the amendment, handing Johnson a prestigious victory...
...For all Rubenstein's sympathy for the oppressed, I wonder if he has really considered what it is like to live in a place where terrorism—and the random violence it spawns—have become commonplace...
...head for the senators in control...
...In fact, argues Reedy, the most "presidential" Senate leaders in the fifties (Estes Kefauver, John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon) made their names through splashy investigations, not careful mastery of Senate politics, while those who did lead in the Senate (Richard Russell, Robert Taft) never got close to a shot at the presidency...
...Neither was the paper done in by millionaire John Hay Whitney, who owned it from 1959 until its death...
...After spending three years there listening to fanatics on all sides explain why their particular cause justified the mayhem they were inflicting on their country, I developed an abiding dislike for terrorists and freedom fighters alike...
...It was an honor...
...The problem with this argument, apart from its inherent fuddy-duddiness, is that Reedy has spent the greater portion of his book telling the inspiring story of how LBJ whipped a sluggish Senate into action...
...A reporter can only be truly powerful if his power is exercised directly...
...The New York Times was the better newspaper...
...In Washington, he says, there are simply too many individuals and institutions clashing at too many levels for any single reporter to really claim much credit for anything beyond simply contributing information...
...But if we try to conceal from our own people or from our allies the full measure of our misfortune, or permit ourselves to seek relief in any reactions of bluster or petulance or hysteria, we can easily find this crisis resolving itself into an irreparable deterioration of our world positon—and of our confidence in ourselves...
...This book will be a good place to direct them for the answers...
...Each party has a "presidential" branch and a "legislative" branch, and the two have little to do with each other...
...The rich and indulgent do that all the time...
...The most widely held misconception Reedy attacks is the notion that strong leadership in the Senate leads to the presidency—an idea that Senate minority leader Robert Dole is putting to the test...
...That character, which drove him through four decades of public service, ultimately determined the positions America took in dealing with the Russians...
...The southern Democrats, writes Reedy, "could not continue their opposition to consideration of civil rights legislation without accelerating the isolation process...
...They simply believed they should employ their power in the resolution of issues worthy of a serious man's attention...
...Of course we have it, most will argue...
...It is a complicated story because the rise and fall of the Thib is connected to all the changes that have swept so rapidly over the nation during the past half century, changes that carried the paper, most often like a bobbing cork, along with them...
...He goes one on one...
...Reedy argues that the Senate must move slowly in order to perform the painstaking process of creating consensus...
...Douglas Kiker The U.S...
...The Binghams just self-destructed in Louisville, didn't they...
...As in, "You're a terrorist...
...No, the key players in this tragedy were the paper's previous owners, the Reid family...
...And he seems almost enthusiastic at the prospect that born-again New Leftists may someday soon launch a wave of terrorism in the United States...
...Again, Reedy argues, this is far less true in the Senate than in the House...
...thousands of letters poured into Congress opposing it...
...True enough in the House, Reedy concedes...
...The solution to the dilemma, arrived at by Senator Richard Russell, leader of the southern Democrats, was to help put Senate Democrat leader Lyndon Johnson, a southerner of sorts and a liberal of sorts, in the White House...
...Indeed, Rubenstein comes close to an "Officer Krupke" argument ("I'm depraved on account of I'm deprived"): it's really the fault of society if people become terrorists...
...This book's is much sweeter...
...You're the terrorist...
...At the same time, they could not openly toss in the sponge on civil rights without facing certain defeat at home...
...The Wise Men being very much about character does have some fine insights...
...It includes a telling note from Kennan to Acheson, whose failure to define South Korea as in the U.S...
...When reporters get together to drink and complain, the subject occasionally turns to the issue of power—our power...
...It was an excruciating dilemma...
...sphere of protection helped trigger its invasion...
...I suspect that Rubenstein would, too...
...This dodge was obvious even to Byrd, who "had resigned himself to his ineffectiveness...
...What kidnapping operation can match the disappearances engineered since the mid-seventies by government-sponsored death squads in Guatemala, El Salvador, or Argentina...
...I was its last White House correspondent...
...But in the Senate, with the exception of Appropriations, all committees require a special dispensation to meet during a session...
...If we accept it with candor, with dignity, and with resolve to absorb its lessons and to make it good by redoubled and determined effort—starting all over again, if necessary, along the pattern of Pearl Harbor—we need lose neither our self-confidence nor our allies nor our power for bargaining, eventually, with the Russians...
...As it turned out, of course, positive press coverage didn't help convince the public that the pay raise was deserved...
...We have a responsibility to keep young intellectuals from becoming too frustrated, he says, lest they take up the gun...
...Although Reedy's defense of legislative paralysis remains the perverse and not terribly persuasive thesis of the book, somewhere in the process of writing, Reedy seems to have been overcome by the desire to tell old war stories...
...George E. Reedy...
...There will never be another major daily newspaper quite like it...
...this book is really a series of riffs on various aspects of Ronald Reagan's life...
...But the Pincus formulation stuck...
...The result was that reporters felt some bond to the federal employees and their coverage of the pay increase was remarkably sympathetic...
...Perhaps because they now make pretty good incomes themselves—more than the lunch money they like to claim...
...To them "The Wise Men" were famous and reputable figures, most of them retired from public service, who bore no responsibility for either prosecuting the war or ending it...
...The stories from the small town metro desk are precisely the point, he says...
...Isolated...
...Even though Wills has minimal respect for Reagan as president, he can't help liking him for having leapt to life out of the pages of Mark Twain...
...But the journalists themselves get off pretty easy, which is unfortunate, because their motives, conscious and unconscious, are at least as worthy of scrutiny...
...But at least I now have a few more examples of reporters who changed the world...
...Under Truman, southern Democrats in the Senate were less interested in supporting their party's president than in blocking civil rights legislation...
...Reedy's book bogs down in the final chapters, when he remembers that his thesis is supposed to be that paralysis in the Senate is good for the country...
...Garry Wills...
...At about this juncture in the cony er sat ion, when the selfcongratulation over keeping score this way reaches its peak, a friend of mine usually pipes up with a theory depressing enough to send everyone directly to business school...
...To cite just one of many possible examples, Wills is hilarious in recounting Reagan's heartrending sentiments about the pain of being away at war when he was only just on the other side of Mulholland Drive, making training films...
...Unfortunately, Alchemists of Revolution isn't much of a book...
...In this case, the "oh yeah" side involves America's support for "terrorism" by our own military and allies...
...Somebody had to write a book about it all, and, lucky Trib, the man who did it is Richard Kluger, the paper's last literary editor...
...Proponents pointed out that it would stop the advance of Soviet tanks without blowing up European cities that might otherwise be caught in the crossfire...
...Walter Isaacson's and Evan Thomas's book is a largely admiring account of these six extraordinary statesmen who came together to advise President Truman: Dean Acheson, secretary of State...
...The exception to this rule, Lyndon Johnson, got to the White House through a complicated set of circumstances that help demonstrate this split...
...One has the feeling that Wills would be world champion at the kind of conversation that takes place after the dishes have been cleared away and the empty bottles have started to pile up...
...Crown, $16.95...
...Just when the entire country seemed to have agreed on the wisdom of bashing terrorists— and of never, ever negotiating with them—along comes a lefty professor from Antioch Law School named Richard Rubenstein to spoil the fun...
...22.95...
...For when hope does rise—and with it rage against the persistence of inequality, injustice, and war—what will prevent educated and ambitious young people from taking the terrorist road...
...So did TV accounts...
...When Reedy had to do business with Finance, he would pay a courtesy call on Byrd—and then, "as soon as I could do so decently...
...The lobbyist...
...Compare that to the attitude of Stuart Eizenstat, Jimmy Carter's chief domestic policy adviser, who viewed the press as a "litmus test"—if the press couldn't be convinced, he says, then neither could the public...
...When presidents needed someone to manage Germany, deal with the Arab oil states, or organize the production of warplanes, they called McCloy at his Wall Street law firm, or Lovett at his (and Harriman's) investment banking house and asked them to get back in harness...
...He poses obnoxious questions, like: What is a "terrorist" anyway...
...Imitating J. Breslin, some Greek playright would have had himself a field day with this one...
...The increase went through thanks to some legislative sleight-of-hand but no thanks to the positive press...
...The issue is not what ought to be the adminstration's position on enhanced radiation warheads, but what ought to be the administration's position on the Pincus story," Linsky writes...
...Better than any writer, Wills captured John F. Kennedy's urge not to play by the rules...
...Timothy Noah...
...Rubenstein says he finds the Marxist perspective "more useful...
...On June 6, 1977, Walter Pincus wrote a story in The Washington Post under the headline: "Neutron Killer Warhead Buried in ERDA Budget ." The article explained for the first time how the U.S...
...As a result, Reedy writes, effective power ended up in the hands of a few lowranking senators on the committee...
...Instead of laying out each case study in its own chapter, they're mixed together here in a way that's confusing...
...But what a death, like John Wayne at the Alamo...
...Look how much power we have compared to bureaucrats...
...A new alliance emerged between (mostly northern) liberal Senate Democrats and Eisenhower...
...He even argues, with some merit, that Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein were not responsible for bringing down Nixon...
...We get to see this through the eyes of the officials themselves, though they are overquoted making obvious points...
...The Trib was a distant second...
...Throwing in much dumbness, and what you got was the family, playing like a child with a precious jewel taken from mummy's case, and flawing and cracking it beyond any possible restoration...
...Even now, should some untoward event ruffle the placid surface of American politics, the probability of increased terrorism is high, if only because of the absence of alternative means of expressing hope and anger...
...And Dick Kluger will receive a warm welcome at this year's reunion...
...Understanding its causes is fine, so long as we reject the outcome...
...The Paper is a very long book, carefully researched and well-written, a fair but critical history...
...It seems clear that we are incubating terrorists in the United States," he writes...
...Walter Isaacson & Evan Thomas...
...So I was glad for the ammunition this book provided my argument...
...Simon & Schuster...
...Who in his right mind likes to see a good newspaper die...
...Wills's last book, on the Kennedys, had a bitterly debunking tone...
...What about the Tonkin Gulf Resolution...
...In 1966, the year the Trib died, the days of glory and national prominence for The Washington Post, or respectability for the Los Angleles Times, and of legitimacy for the Chicago Tribune still lay ahead...
...not to lengthen their resumes and win better jobs when they returned to private life...
...He spends pages arguing that George Gipp never asked Knute Rockne to win one for the Gipper and that Jeanne Kirkpatrick didn't invent the distinction between authoritarianism and totalitarianism...
...we go one on thousands or millions...
...Senate: Paralysis Or a Search For Consensus...
...But the book also explains how the press reacts in an adversarial way in part because the government has been conditioned to expect that reaction...
...You got here your arrogance, your ignorance, your snobbery, your, well, thirst for profit, your basic lack of vision, and all the rest of those lacks...
...So when one dies, when the ever popular, although greying prince consort gets wasted, questions are raised, charges are hurled, what-ifs are asked...
...For example, in the early fifties the ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee was Harry F. Byrd—a man who was so conservative on economic matters that he found himself totally out of step with both the committee and the Senate as a whole...
...This doesn't amount to a Robert Caro-like feat of biographical legwork, but it's enough to get Wills's mind into high gear...
...For example, on a public housing proposal that most southern Democrats were obliged to oppose because it smacked of welfarestatism, an amendment was introduced by the Republicans to knock the number of units from 750,000 down to 35,000...
...The change from a cooperative press to a combative, cynical one is usually attributed to Vietnam and Watergate...
...What this book lacks is a moral center...
...Why did the press give it such favorable coverage, accepting without question that those officials make less than people holding comparable jobs in the private sector...
...Reagan's ability to seize on stories that illustrate his world view and then to believe them with all his heart whether or not they're actually true is the quality around which everything else about him revolves...
...No contest, really...
...The book also suffers from what might be called the "oh yeah" school of argument...
...President Johnson assembled them from time to time, hoping to obtain, and normally obtaining, their support for America's involvement in the Vietnam war...
...They then proceeded to explain to their constituents that this had been a vote against public housing...
...The real reason visitors so rarely see the Senate filled with members," writes Reedy, "is that most of them are out engaging in these chats...
...Kennan wrote Acheson: "In international, as in private, life what counts most is not really what happens to someone but how he bears what happens to him...
...The Life and Death of The New York Herald Tribune...
...Judge John J. Sirica did it...
...I doubt I spent much time thinking about the press as distinguished from the general public and the Congress," says Theodore Sorensen of his years as John E Kennedy's top aide...
...In other words, at precisely the moment we broke into the big leagues, we lost most of our power...
...For this reason almost everything depends from here on out on the manner in which we Americans bear what is unquestionably a major failure and disaster to our national fortunes...
...These days, even posing such questions will strike many people as outrageous...
...What separates his terrorism from the presumably legitimate political violence of a "freedom fighter...
...It's hard to tell whether Wills is intellectually courageous or just undisciplined...
...That, along with rush-hour circulation problems, its driver-accomplice, is the mass murderer of afternoon, not morning dailies...
...and George Kennan, thinker, writer, and ambassador...
...Television didn't do in the Thib...
...But we also knew we were working for an American institution, for a publication rich in prestige and accomplishment, and, most of all, for the best written daily newspaper in the world...
...The result is, along with Lou Cannon's 1982 biography, one of the two best books on Reagan to date...
...Oh yeah...
...But we don't really believe it...
...With not much urging, they normally did—not for the Washington climate...
...What Reagan's America and the Kennedy book have in common is that Wills is onto a central truth about his subject...
...Take the recent issue of a pay increase for federal employees...
...This is not exactly how the government described the weapon...
...The rest of us raise our glasses and cheer in agreement...
...Typically, Reagan wildly misreads Twain, and in the process reinvents his own troubled early life, describing his boyhood as a "Tom Sawyer/Huck Finn idyll...
...not simply to hold power...
...We all knew that...
...David Ignatius Reagan's America: Innocents at Home...
...There was a time when "The Wise Men" carried mixed meanings...
...And superimposed on that, the story of the paper is a story of strong-willed and colorful editors, reporters right out of The Front Page, wrong-headed owners, a benevolent and indulgent millionaire— an endless list, a cast colorful enough for any network miniseries...
...That story, and Reedy's generally perceptive and well-crafted observations about the dynamics of the Senate, make his book worth reading...
...Where did this leave the southern Democrats...
...Which just goes to show that at least in those cases when reporters try to wield their power along the lines of their own selfinterest, my friend might be right after all...
...The character of Averell Harriman—who was not particularly brilliant or articulate, yet was endowed with common sense and an indomitable will—became more important than contests over language in position papers...
...This companion volume draws upon Reedy's earlier experiences as director of the Senate Majority Policy Committee in the fifties...
...Reporters can usually be counted on to brag about how stories they wrote caused the closing of a sadistic mental institution or sent a politician to jail back in the days when they worked on the city desk...
...remembered, no doubt, because there have been very few truly great daily newspapers published in our country that did not survive and prosper...
...To other audiences, bitterly frustrated by that war, a mocking echo followed the phrase...
...Martin Linsky...
...T,vo years later, of the 60 newspaper articles about the neutron bomb surveyed by this book, 50 included Pincus's description...
...The two groups forged an alliance to block presidential bills on economics and civil rights...
...But "agenda setting," the most common definition of journalistic power on a national scale, is accomplished diffusely...
...Still, this personalizing of government and policy makes The Wise Men splendid reading for those of us for whom Dr...
...This resulted from bickering between the isolationist Senate Republicans and the more internationalist Eisenhower (who was, after all, former Supreme Allied Commander of Europe...
...Knopf, $24.95 Every year there is a reunion party for the reporters and editors who worked on the New York Herald Tribune, and at every party I have attended, along toward the end of the evening, mellowed by drink, somebody raises his glass and proclaims, "By God, you could take the people in this room right now and still put out the best newspaper in the country...
...After the alliance with the Republicans crumbled, the civil rights cause gathered momentum, and by 1957 the first major civil rights act became law...
...Capitol guides often tell visitors to the galleries that the floor is empty because "most of the work is done in committees...
...Norton, $19.95...
...Richard Kluger...
...Bad newspapers, mediocre ones, non-papers, die and are dumped into hastily dug holes in some journalistic Boot Hill and are quickly forgotten...
...Rubenstein writes: "What terrorist assassination campaign compares with the CIA's 'Phoenix Program,' which resulted in the liquidation of at least ten thousand suspected communists during the Vietnam war...
...Jonathan Alter The Wise Men...
...He goes into great detail about turn-of-the-century midwestern religious history and Hollywood makeup techniques of the thirties and argues, in one especially fascinating but not too relevant chapter, that J. Edgar Hoover's FBI was an integral part of the New Deal...
...John McCloy, high commissioner for Germany...
...government was developing a little-known "neutron bomb" that kills people but leaves buildings standing...
...Consider this: what if the New York Post didn't publish tomorrow...
...Wills is working here in the manner of a jazz musician who can improvise brilliantly for hours on a simple, schmaltzy show tune...
...It is different with the death of great newspapers...
...He writes that the dangers of moving too quickly are illustrated by America's hasty entry into Vietnam, when Congress was not given a chance to consider the issues...
...After completing a tour as press secretary in the LBJ White House, George Reedy wrote one of the most celebrated studies of the executive branch, The Twilight of the Presidency...
...Shouldn't we try to understand the causes that motivate people to commit such extreme acts of violence...
...Doubleday, $19.95...
...Reagan's long career as a front man for business interests, Wills argues convincingly, has to be seen as completely uncynical, though somewhat self-deluding...
...Linsky points out that with 10,000 journalists from 3000 news organizations covering Washington, the institutional power is now so overwhelming that we sometimes forget it wasn't always so...
...Rubenstein is right, the difference between the terrorist and the freedom fighter is not so obvious as the Jeanne Kirkpatricks and Benjamin Netanyahus would have us believe...
...the cabinet secretary reads our stories before he reads their memos...
...Charles Bohlen, career foreign servant...
...Egad...
...Yuppies, wild in the streets...
...As an editor, to have had Whitney as your publisher was, as they say under the hair dryers at Garfinkel's Spring Valley beauty salon, to die for...
...Yet the war was seen as part of the policies they, and others like them, had shaped and administered over a quarter-century, which had thrust us upon the poisoned pungi-sticks of Indochina...
...POLITICAL BOOKNOTES Alchemists of Revolution: Terrorism in the Modern World...
...Reedy details the efforts made by Russell and other southern Democrats to boost LBJ's power...
...The Herald Thibune was gut-shot generations ago, and after that it was only a matter of time until it died...
...If we don't, what the hell are we doing at the office at two in the morning diddling around on a word processor for less money than our brain-dead ex-classmates spend on lunch...
...In many ways it is outrageous, for in seeking to understand what motivates terrorists, Rubenstein loses sight of the evil they do—and of the way that terrorism destroys the fabric of societies where it takes root...
...than any of its competitors" in analyzing terrorism, and he quotes Trotsky's remark that in criticizing terrorism one must remember the "inevitability of such convulsive acts of despair and vengeanc' For Rubenstein, the "inevitability" of terrorism seems almost to justify it...
...To some within the Johnson administration, it meant the group of six men who had, during long careers in and out of government, advised presidents, managed armies, and negotiated agreements on behalf of the nation...
...Nicholas Lemann Impact: How the Press Affects Federal Policy Making...
...Averell Harriman, ambassador and master negotiator...
...The conclusion is that these are disasters that some good p.r...
...The book's format—six lives intertwining through history—tends to make more of essentially superficial connections than the facts warrant...
...anyway, he does not feel at all constrained from the kind of freewheeling speculation that can sometimes lead to piercing insight and sometimes to mere digression...
...Harry McPherson The Paper...
...What fun...
...could have prevented...
...Senate Republicans, meanwhile, had little constituent pressure for or against civil rights legislation but were concerned about Truman's liberal economic initiatives and wary of big government in general...
...He might find it instructive to visit Lebanon, where every militia—left and right, Christian and Moslem—espouses revolutionary violence, and all of them believe (with some justification) that they have legitimate grievances...
...As this passage suggests, the author writes from the left, and expresses understanding and support for many leftist causes around the world...
Vol. 19 • April 1987 • No. 3
