Political Booknotes
POLITICAL BOOKNOTES Fast Forward: Hollywood, the Japanese, and the Onslaught of the VCR. James Lardner. Norton, $18.95. On a November afternoon in 1976, Harvey Schein, president of the...
...Ambassador William 0. Sullivan, with whom Huyser reports he had a good personal relationship, was apparently operating under different guidelines...
...The Iranian military is the key to the situation," his instructions read...
...If the conflict had any redeeming side, it was its capacity to produce good theater...
...Basic Books, $16.95...
...No issue facing the nation in recent memory had engaged the attention of a more formidable array of elder statesmanhood ." The problem, of course, was that the real-world stakes were trivial...
...As Huyser tells it, Sullivan thought the military would collapse under pressure, "had no faith in Bakhtiar, actually thought a Khomeini Islamic Republic would be preferable to a military takeover," and was encouraged in these views by the State Department, which Huyser sensed was marching independent of the White House...
...Mission to Tehran is Huyser's dramatic recounting of how that undertaking was doomed to failure, not least by an administration in Washington divided on policy and preoccupied with other foreign policy issues...
...Looking back on that tortured period, one of its lessons must be to remind us of the limits of the capacity of any outside power, however influential or strong, to determine the direction that another country and its leadership take, especially a country with politics and culture that are as difficult for outsiders to comprehend as that of Iran...
...Unless something is done now, even more of the hardest working Americans will find themselves finishing their careers with nothing...
...Social security is one of the few social programs that survived the ravages of the Reagan years...
...POLITICAL BOOKNOTES Fast Forward: Hollywood, the Japanese, and the Onslaught of the VCR...
...At the same time, each side was rich...
...It is a very good addition to the range of texts on the public policy process, for students and also for faculty who work in the areas of process, politics, and/or implementation...
...With one exception, Iran's military leaders were imprisoned, executed, or fled...
...Much of his book is spent on his frustrating daily efforts to get the generals to embark on the planning he felt was essential to back Bakhtiar and to thwart the opposition's efforts to destabilize the economy and radicalize the streets...
...As a result, the money and attention lavished on the issue by the warring parties, by the federal government, and, eventually, by the press, was a huge waste...
...The only federal monies they can claim are pitifully small disability benefits and Supplemental Security Income, the welfare component of Social Security...
...It's corporate pigs versus corporate pigs," one congressional aide told Lardner...
...The 1983 compromise that taxed social security and preserved acrosstheboard cost of living increases for even the wealthiest recipients, also raised the retirement age to 67 for those quitting work after the year 2000...
...But Khomeini had already won...
...Their plight is likely to darken...
...Because lawyers and lobbyists risked little prestige—and stood to gain considerable wealth—arguing either side of the issue before the courts and Congress, the conflict attracted an all-star cast of advocates, including Lloyd Cutler, Robert Strauss, Stu Eizenstadt, and Laurence Tribe...
...The shah had deliberately never allowed or encouraged them to work together as a team—no surprise, given the shah's lack of trust in those around him...
...Steven Kelman...
...The problem is scrimpy benefits...
...For instance, Jerry A. Hausman and Lynn Paquete of MIT point to blue-collar and agricultural workers—as usual, disproportionately black—whose poor health forces them to retire early, often in their 50s, occasionally in their 40s...
...Summoned to meet the president a week before the end, Huyser was asked, "What do you think I should do about Ambassador Sullivan...
...State unemployment and welfare programs are available, but notoriously meager...
...And unless they're in a union, they're not likely to have much of a pension...
...Bruce Laingen Making Public Policy: A Hopeful View of American Government...
...Unfortunately, the intricacies of copyright law hold a greater fascination for writers than for most people...
...So what was all the fuss about...
...That's less than the rate for other segments of society, notably children, but it is still disturbing...
...The Betamax war is an excellent case study of the absurdity of special-interest politics...
...Norman Ornstein...
...An intellectual-property peddler myself, even I found my eyes glazing over while reading through the more "serious" parts of Lardner's book...
...The book is really aimed at the college market...
...Bruce Huyser...
...A higher retirement age makes sense for most people, who are more fit at 65 than previous generations...
...Most of the generals, fearing for their own lives, nervously talked of leaving the country when the shah left...
...Gary Burtless, ed...
...by Lardner's reckoning, the tally included four former top advisers in the Carter White House, two former senators, five former representatives, two former White House economists, two former FCC chairmen, and two former chief counsels to the Senate Judiciary Committee...
...He is probably best known for his artful evisceration in The Public Interest of the hyped "findings" of massive waste reported by the Grace Commission...
...Matthew Cooper Mission to Tehran...
...Kelman mercilessly and effectively punctures that balloon...
...Grandson of the great American humorist Ring Lardner, James writes in the foreword to his book that it was the "low-comedy" side of the story that initially drew him in...
...Neither side could demonstrate that its own well-being—let alone that of other Americans—was seriously at risk...
...The essayists in Burtless's book demonstrate that several sub-groups of elderly Americans are likely to go unprotected by the lattice of programs that form social security, Medicare, and private pensions...
...She gets my sympathy...
...While Kelman's writing is clear, and his examples appropriate, his sophisticated analysis makes his book somewhat less accessible to a lay audience...
...Pressing them for action, Huyser says he "felt like he was scolding children...
...It's useful to learn that MITI, much-worshipped by American advocates of industrial policy, proved completely ineffectual in persuading Japanese VCR manufacturers to adopt a uniform format...
...The big problem with this book—and with much of what emanates from Brookings—is that it's tediously written and laden with mathematical equations...
...We are prepared to stick with them...
...The American motion picture industry does...
...Steven Kelman, is a professor of public policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard...
...But amidst millions of comfortable retirees, there is a stubbornly high number of senior citizens still living in poverty...
...But over the long haul Lardner began to take the issues more seriously...
...Each side could assert plausible-sounding rights: Hollywood spoke for "intellectual property" while Sony championed consumer freedom...
...Sony had recently launched an ambitious advertising campaign for the Betamax, its new videocassette recorder, and Scheinberg was outraged that consumers would be able to reproduce Universal movies and television shows without paying Universal...
...Elderly widows are another group at risk, even though the Social Security Act of 1935 was designed with them in mind...
...By then the movie companies were themselves making a fortune off the sale of prerecorded videocassettes...
...Widows receive about half the amount couples receive, but they cannot cut all their expenditures in half...
...A Sony lawyer complained to Lardner that when he argued his case before the Supreme Court, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor asked a question that showed she hadn't been paying attention...
...Huyser seems convinced that while a military coup should have been attempted as a last resort and could have succeeded, it would not have been necessary had Washington given him more unified support...
...Congress gradually came to the conclusion that it was better off doing nothing than offending either side, and the Supreme Court eventually decided in Sony's favor...
...Japanese machines do not create entertainment," Valenti said...
...All these people running around with $500 suits and $3 cigars...
...A recent Villers Foundation study shows 12.6 percent of senior citizens—about 3.5 million people—live below the poverty line...
...Where b( ) is the bivariate density function .") That's unfortunate because this book deserves an audience it probably won't get...
...Social security only picks up the tab when they turn 62...
...A major reason was Sony's American-style determination to stick to its own design rather than admit that it could learn from someone else—a decision it must regret now that the rival VHS format has become the industry standard...
...At lunch, Schein proposed a reasonable, Japanese-style compromise: why not form a committee to get Congress to charge a royalty fee on the Betamax and on every blank videocassette...
...There is a lot of detail that will be of less interest to the non-professional political scientist or student, and some disputes and theses that will not resound for those who are not immersed in the sometimes arcane controversies...
...And on the day the Bakhtiar regime collapsed and the chief of the army was assassinated, Huyser, back at his command in Europe, was asked by Deputy Secretary of Defense Charles Duncan if he was willing to go back to Tehran and conduct a military takeover...
...Until they turn 62, these laborers are forced to deplete their small savings, and as the authors note ominously, cut their food consumption by over 30 percent...
...Even so, any reader of Making Public Policy will come away more knowledgeable, and more hopeful, about the American policy process...
...This project was supervised by the endlessly patient editors of The New Yorker...
...Brookings, $26.95...
...They still have to maintain an apartment and pay for utilities on a single income...
...So you sort of watch it like a pig fight...
...To their credit, the authors propose a solution that deserves real consideration: a supplemental means-tested benefit for those who are forced to retire early...
...He has now written a full-blown text on the public policy process that takes on with special vigor the "public choice" theorists who have articulated a cynical and negative view...
...And that, of course, is something McFarlane et al...
...While 8 percent of married elderly women live below the poverty line, 31 percent of elderly widows do...
...Bakhtiar went into hiding and eventually fled the country...
...Scheinberg turned down the offer—perhaps because Universal's parent company, MCA, had invested in the videodisc, a Betamax competitor—and launched one of the most tedious legal and legislative battles of the eighties...
...But for the disabled worker, the years of vulnerability will grow longer...
...Ever since James Buchanan won the Nobel Prize for economics, public choice has enjoyed a special and largely uncritical cachet...
...The general's mandate, which was provided in writing only with reluctance, seemed clear enough at the outset: to encourage Iran's military leadership to work together in support of the last civilian government under the shah, that of Shahpur Bakhtiar...
...Lardner also shows how Hollywood's "high concept" approach to moviemaking—reduce narrative and theme to a snappy sentence—was adopted by Jack Valenti, head of the Motion Picture Association of America, as a. lobbying strategy...
...Harper & Row, $20.95...
...Unable to haul themselves through mine shafts or break topsoil, they are not eligible for federal retirement benefits either...
...Today's system works against them...
...While he is perhaps a little too harsh on David Mayhew and Morris Fiorina, two political scientists whose work is more subtle and sophisticated than he allows, Kelman's critique is basically on point...
...Air Force General Robert "Butch" Huyser, is the man Carter dispatched to Tehran in 1979 as part of his effort to forestall the demise of the shah...
...His instructions, however, were ambiguous on a key point: what the military leadership and the U.S...
...Huyser's description of the military leadership would seem to support Sullivan's expectations of them...
...To the extent that Lardner avoids the copyright swamp and offers insights into how business and government work, his account is lively and readable...
...Timothy Noah Work, Health, and Income Among the Elderly...
...have just rediscovered...
...were to do if the Bakhtiar regime proved unwilling or unable to act in time to prevent a takeover by the Ayatollah Khomeini...
...In addition, there was an endemic scapegoat syndrome and an assumption that the United States was supposedly capable of "waving the magic wand and all Iran's troubles would vanish ." In Washington Huyser found the administration at a loss.as to what to do next...
...It didn't work...
...On a November afternoon in 1976, Harvey Schein, president of the American affiliate of Sony, met with Sidney Scheinberg, president of Universal Pictures, to discuss a conflict between their corporations...
...How do elderly people fall through the cracks of what is supposed to be a "universal" program...
...Bakhtiar did fail, Khomeini took power, and the military coup that might have prevented the outcome did not occur and appears to have been little considered by Iran's military leaders...
Vol. 19 • May 1987 • No. 4
