Political Booknotes
POLITICAL BOOKNOTES Submarine Warfare Today and Tomorrow. Capt. John E. Moore, Cmdr. Richard Compton-Hall. Adler & Adler, $22.95. A disappointing book on a topic that cries out for a...
...Is the Society "educational...
...Lee Kennet...
...Pinochet told him he never had U.S...
...a videodisc project...
...The division took on computer software development...
...policy...
...military forces...
...One has to wonder," he...
...He assumesthat further economic decline and discontent will create the conditions for these political transformations...
...News and World Report, have produced a worshipful book that, paradoxically, makes Rayburn seem a dull fellow...
...and a collaboration with the American Association of Geographers and school districts around the country...
...Then does the National Geographic Society deserve to be tax-exempt...
...economy to spread its wealth adequately among all its citizens...
...He offers one innovative response: that the U.S...
...Kennet also makes clear the differences that emerged in combat conditions between the Pacific and European theaters...
...Prentice Hall, $18.95...
...The IRS threat to revoke the Society's tax-exempt status if it did not undeniably demonstrate its educational purpose has already been seen and answered by Grosvenor and the rest of the top NGS brass...
...Not any more than Rand-McNally or McGraw-Hill...
...Howard S. Abramson...
...The idea is not as Utopian as it first might appear...
...centers on the lowest possible denominator in warfare: the common soldier...
...Paul L. Savage Rayburn: A Biography...
...In part, Sulzberger's omission of Nixon's anticommunist roots is due to his bad habit of accepting world leaders at their word...
...For government to work, Mead acknowledges the need to find alternatives to current bureaucracies...
...Those who actually fought, about 10 percent of an army of more than eight million by 1945, were for most of the war the "dregs" of the draft...
...Does NGS devote itself to scientific exploration...
...Mead also predicts that future economic planning and distribution will be guided through a government-supervised cartel of banks, brought to such a state by their foreign debt problems...
...That Britain, France, and Germany "progressed simultaneously" to democracy would come as a surprise to most Europeans...
...Unfortunately Submarines Today and Tomorrow is poorly written and hopelessly disorganized, a book in search of an editor...
...push for a kind of international minimum wage...
...One suggestion is jury-like citizens' panels to make decisions in such adverserial situations as the location of highways...
...Horrific to imagine, but at least original and plausible...
...Yes, Nixon, in one of his "exclusive" moments with Sulzberger, admits that dropping military conscription for the All Volunteer Force was a mistake...
...sentiment...
...More often than not these inexperienced youths were promptly put "on point" for the practical reason that they were far less useful than the battle-hardened old timers— though few infantrymen lasted long enough to become "hardened...
...Because Allende told him so...
...His analysis certainly highlights the question of whether the gulf between neoliberals and institutions such as labor can be bridged...
...But there was more passion and substance to Rayburn than the saying suggests...
...Readers who somehow penetrate the book's semantic countermeasures will discover a disjointed but persuasive argument on a proposition rarely seen in these pages: that nuclear submarines are so much better than diesels, the extra expense is justified...
...Not exactly...
...These were common themes of the late seventies that suddenly sound topical again at a time of collapsing currencies, mounting debts and interest rates, and high comedy disguised as national security policy...
...Abramson didn't examine this TV sideline closely enough...
...A disappointing book on a topic that cries out for a first-rate treatment...
...They then should have continued, providing cover for the South Vietnamese army after a major withdrawal of U.S...
...This large generation is just as likely to atomize or lurch further to the right as it is to provide the driving force for a new venture in liberalism...
...Fortunately, Mortal Splendor is two books...
...In an effort to score rhetorical points, Mead is given to excesses and plain sloppiness...
...Army shortly after the war...
...surface fleet the fastest-sinking investment since the 1929 stock market...
...He criticizes institutional prescriptions such as protectionism but is more critical of the neoliberals for failing to understand the threat of Third World low-wage competition...
...Moore, a retired British submarine driver and now editor of Jane's Fighting Ships, and Compton-Hall, director of an .English submarine museum, have attempted to spell out what modern submarines can do and whether in a future war they will make the roughly $500 billion U.S...
...They perceived German soldiers to be much like themselves in combat, as prisoners, and certainly during the occupation...
...Sulzberger...
...Crown, $17.95...
...While I worked there, EM doubled in size...
...Michael D. Mosettig...
...less than 1 percent of revenue funded research and exploration in 1983...
...This can be downright embarrassing...
...Sulzberger also tells us that Kissinger was the sole architect of clandestine CIA operations in Chile...
...Texas Monthly Press, $21.95...
...That it takes sides is disturbing...
...Houghton Mifflin, $18.95...
...Rayburn's actions so angered Wilson that he lent support to Rayburn's opponent in the next election...
...Mortal Splendor does not pretend to be a work of original scholarship...
...Sulzberger offered seven specific recommendations for U.S...
...Cy Sulzberger's many years as foreign correspondent and columnist for The New York Times should have produced a better balanced book, one less dependent on its subject's own writings and public statements...
...Moore and Compton-Hall also argue that the size of contemporary mega-subs like the U.S...
...Never once is motive or vantage questioned...
...Mead's prescriptive analysis, while inevitably controversial, at least offers some thoughts for Democratic liberals before they begin assigning themselves downtown office space for 1989...
...That it refrains from the Nixonbashing commonplace among American journalists is refreshing...
...In fact, NGS has been working hard to protect itself...
...Sulzberger discussed this with General Pinochet, whose.coup displaced the Allende government...
...Indeed, Mead acknowledges that his babyboom generation is as unanchored and politically unsettled as any in U.S...
...But virulent hatred was directed at the Japanese, and took on an increasingly racist dimension...
...Until a really first-rate biography appears, the curious will do better to read Robert Caro's brilliant chapter on Rayburn in The Path to Power...
...Like his other prescriptions, it is based on the assumption we will need and want more government in the future...
...No new Nixon revelations or reassessments here...
...As a political theorist, Sulzberger is a realist...
...Instead, troops fought for each other, their small unit...
...Is its mission "for the increase and diffusion of geographic knowledge" so unique...
...in World War II and his basic training, which was often unrealistic and was related only marginally to later battle experience, and goes on to the problems of adapting individualistic Americans to military norms, the lunatic randomness of actual battle, the anticlimax of occupational duty, and the unseemly hasty dissolution of the U.S...
...Moreover, the commitment to education is self-serving, feigned for the protection of its nonprofit (read tax-exempt) status...
...But his defense is incoherent and Sulzberger simply lets his tape recorder run...
...Unfortunately, Hardeman, a former Rayburn staff member, and Bacon, an editor at US...
...This is a loosely organized review of Nixon's foreign policy, based on the well-founded notion that Richard Nixon is not the beast that most Americans find him to be...
...American replacements were individual soldiers who faced isolation for some time in their new units until accepted by the veterans...
...While Japanese soldiers rarely surrendered, American soldiers often refused to take prisoners even when there was a clear opportunity to do so...
...A critical study of the theories and practices of Nixonian foreign policy at this juncture is sorely needed...
...Yet he fails to accept the central fact that for Nixon the U.S...
...Nixon asked him for a report on a visit he made to Chile in March 1971...
...Absolutely not...
...The Society may well lose its nonprofit status, Abramson states, especially if recent forays into video technology provide more and more of its revenue...
...The problem with mega-subs, they say, is that the vessels are so expensive only a few can be produced...
...But like Tad Szulc in The Illusion of Peace, the only other significant work that seeks to tell the Nixon foreign policy story, Sulzberger seems more interested in settling scores than shedding light...
...There is no flag waving or patriotism in G.I...
...Other armies, allied and enemy, pulled fighting divisions out of battle for replacement, refurbishing, and retraining...
...The book begins with the drafting of the American G.I...
...More important than the contents of this maddeningly uneven book is its publication now—as another liberal effort to prepare an intellectual and political agenda for the post-Reagan years...
...Scribners, $20.95...
...backing (which may be true) and that he was fearful that Allende's government might doom Chile by serving as a base for Soviet and Cuban activities...
...But after dancing around the topic of whether surface capital ships are still worth building, Moore and Compton-Hall whiff on this key question, which will leave many readers with a "why did I bother reading this...
...Today he is remembered chiefly as a reticent survivor who admonished younger legislators, "in this House, the people who get along the best, go along the most...
...I was one of those soldiers, an infantryman in Italy...
...Walter Russell Mead...
...Perhaps, but there is no compelling evidence in this book that a populist coalition has a program or is ready to take power...
...for abandoning the diesel submarine altogether...
...Michael A. Fernandez G.I.—The American Soldier in World War II...
...history...
...Kennet rightly decries the American.replacement system that kept divisions in combat for protracted periods during which they were ground up by attrition...
...claims, "how the IRS will respond as video products and television shows consume increasing portions of the Society's enormous operating budget and generate more of its income...
...Soviet conflict is ideological and power politics must account for it...
...the Society's subtle sexism...
...Given the broad public objections to the bombings at the time, it's hard to imagine why a seasoned journalist failed to follow this up by questioning the effect that bombing might have had—and did have—on Cambodia...
...Trident and Soviet Oscar and Typhoon does not make them notably more vulnerable than smaller subs, as noise, speed, and diving properties have more to do with avoiding detection than girth...
...Basically, however, this book is far longer on analysis than prescription...
...Tony Simonelli The World and Richard Nixon...
...The tension between Rayburn's populist ideals and the need to "get along" ought to provide material for a first-rate biography...
...And with Rayburn's protege, get-along, goalong, Jim Wright, recently ascended to the speakership, this is a useful time for such a biography to be published...
...For those who did not serve during World War II—a population with a vanishing sense of history— GI reveals the heavy burden of war and death borne by those with the least to say in great political and military decisions that shape, take, and frequently waste their lives...
...Nixon also admits that his timing of the Cambodian bombings was all wrong...
...C.L...
...Along with the bombing and mining of Haiphong, he says the Cambodian bombings should have been sooner to force an earlier Paris Accord...
...Kennet recognizes, as do most combat soldiers, that motivation has nothing to do with such vacuous notions...
...He suggests that Kissinger incorrectly viewed Allende as a radical aligned with Cuba...
...Sam Rayburn served as speaker of the House longer than anyone else— from 1940-1961, with time out as minority leader during the Eisenhower administration...
...the upper classes did not see combat until very late in the war, when those sent to colleges and universities for special training were finally pressganged into the infantry to replace unexpectedly heavy losses...
...Sulzberger writes: "I tend to believe Pinochet, a man who is not blessed with a winning personality but whose unvarnished arguments have a telling ring ." This blind acceptance is complicated by Sulzberger's unwillingness to be a simple observer...
...and some big lies such as the lengths to which NGS went to name Navy Admiral Robert E. Peary as the North Pole's discoverer— all for its own publicityseeking self-promotion...
...But its scientific achievements, Abramson says, lie mostly in the publication of its magazine...
...And to assert that Stalin, Hitler, and Roosevelt were equally preoccupied with the need for their governments "to establish and maintain an intimate link with even the humblest of the nation's citizens" boggles the mind...
...Mead concludes that the Establishment will have to turn over power to the children of its housemaids and that the Democrats will have to become a more populist party...
...Gilbert H. Grosvenor's penchant for fascism, complete with antiSemitism...
...In 1984, it created a new division called Educational Media (EM) for producing filmstrips...
...The world's largest nonprofit scientific and educational organization, Abramson discovers, is a monolithic mail-order publishing house interested only in its own survival...
...rather it is part polemic and part prescription...
...Abramson, a Washington Post financial editor, discloses in this book a number of little secrets about the Grosvenor family business—the National Geographic Society (NGS)—such as old Dr...
...On numerous occasions he volunteered, or was asked, for his opinion...
...Not only does NGS not pay a penny of the $670,000 in property taxes its downtown real estate would generate annually, but it benefits from reduced postal rates for nonprofits...
...The Society is an institution created by well-intentioned people that continues to do wellintentioned work...
...Hardly a new frontier...
...the NGS's genteel Southern racism...
...an NGS-Apple ComputerLucasfilm co-production for the classroom...
...Once again, a liberal book is talking of limits, openings to the Third World, and the inability of the U.S...
...Timothy Noah Mortal Splendor, The American Empire in Transition...
...While still a freshman, Rayburn sponsored legislation giving the Interstate Commerce Commission the authority to approve all new transportation securities—a measure that brought Rayburn into conflict not only with the thenpowerful railroads but also with President Woodrow Wilson...
...Gregg Easterbrook National Geographic: Behind America's Lens on the World...
...Though the authors chide the U.S...
...Even those familiar with military lingo are likely to find many passages difficult to follow...
...For example, soldiers in Europe rarely expressed hatred of their German enemy...
...In Behind America's Lens an IRS official explains: "It is very difficult for us to judge what is 'educational' and what isn't...
...Tax-exempt since its founding, NGS has the advantage of ambiguous regulation...
...Strange that Nixon, the man who developed a national reputation as a dogged anti-communist on the House Un-American Activities Committee and participated in the famous "kitchen debate" with Khrushchev, would be so oblivious to ideological concerns years later...
...Hardeman, Donald C. Bacon...
Vol. 19 • June 1987 • No. 5
