Political Booknotes
POLITICAL BOOKNOTES The Brutality of Nations. Dan Jacobs. Knopf, $22.95. In this era of instant history, when one calamity erases the memory of another and tragedies like the...
...The best parts of the style—the feeling that some things are simply wrong and should be opposed for that reason, and a deep respect for individual rights—inevitably led SDS to early positions on the right side of such major issues as civil rights and Vietnam...
...Berger argues that the Fourteenth Amendment, which he views as very limited, did not change the importance of state sovereignty...
...Even the least controversial of nineteenth century legislation is too much for Berger...
...It had few friends among the area experts at the State Department and Whitehall...
...Its main activity (aside from a lot of theorizing) was a series of community organizing efforts in ghettos that had no lasting effect...
...It was only a minor participant in the civil rights movement, which stands as the great example in modern American history of the power of nonviolent direct action...
...There is something admirable about his willingness to follow an idea wherever it leads, even to the point of total absurdity...
...Peter Mooney Straight from the Heart...
...For researchers and academics this is a valuable book...
...SDS never knew exactly what kind of society it was trying to create...
...They would have been appalled at Berger's fanaticism, as they disapproved all deviations from balanced good sense...
...And, not one to shrink from the unpalatable consequences of his thesis, Berger expressly states that federal food and drug laws are unconstitutional...
...Hayden could go from meeting with Averell Harriman or Robert Kennedy in Washington to delivering a pep talk to the Weathermen in Chicago before they embarked on the pointlessly destructive Days of Rage...
...What did SDS do, exactly...
...For those of us who continue to attach some importance to the views of the Framers, however, this book is a considerable embarrassment...
...Robert Rector, Michael Senera, eds...
...He fails to recognize, however, that his vision of sovereignty died on the fields of Gettysburg, well before the Fourteenth Amendment was proposed...
...Juan Williams Democracy Is in the Streets: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago...
...Not surprisingly, given that they were adolescents, all the early SDSers saw radical politics as, perhaps primarily, a means of selfdiscovery and self-expression...
...Luckily, Berger wasn't around to advise President Lincoln to surrender Fort Sumter...
...Standing apart from politics was SDS's great mistake...
...But international aid at times was running 9-1 in favor of the starving on the government side...
...To the extent that SDS helped to polarize the country in general and the Democratic Party in particular in the late sixties, it may have held back the achievement of its policy goals...
...The Soviets were no angels either...
...While the Nigerian military shot down relief planes and carried out mass executions of Biafran civilians, Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, U.N...
...in an early draft of the Port Huron Statement, he had a line praising small business for being anti-elitist...
...University of Oklahoma Press, $16.95...
...Congress has no right to interfere with "WINGO...
...He knows that individual men are rarely evil, but when they are part of a bureaucratic framework, they often end up doing evil things...
...This was due mostly to the influence of Tom Hayden, who is the hero of this book...
...the most populous nation in Black Africa and a power in the then-emerging Third World majority at the U.N...
...Jacobs, a speechwriter, political analyst, and United Nations consultant, has a liberal's sense of moral outrage but, thankfully, doesn't wear his heart on his sleeve...
...Pity the starving children in Renamo-held areas, whom almost nobody seems to care about...
...SDS wanted to establish a lasting student movement in this country, but today places ranging from West Germany to Korea to Mexico have vastly more active left-wing student movements left over from the sixties than the United States does...
...That's nothing to be dismissed out of hand...
...Like Calhoun, he contends that matters of inherently state and local concern are absolutely beyond federal regulation...
...In Ethiopia, there were two break-away provinces, Eritrea and Tigre, which together accounted for half of the famine victims...
...That's more or less what it took...
...Not an appetizing thought, but with the same cunning a liberal administration could stir up backwaters like the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and give us all a more effective and compassionate government...
...The bad guys in this book are precisely the ones who are most loyal to the narrowly defined needs of the institutions they served be it the U.N., the State Department, the British Foreign Office, the Canadian government, or the International Committee of the Red Cross...
...Presumably, federal narcotics laws are equally unconstitutional...
...Yet this is relevant...
...Given his unswerving devotion to original intent, Berger would probably not shrink from the conclusion that every law passed since 1860 was unconstitutional...
...The good guys are often those with the least amount of institutional loyalty...
...One lesson of Jacobs's book is that there should be fewer pious pronouncements about the rights and wrongs of each particular secessionist struggle, and more efforts to get food to famine victims trapped in rebel areas, whether the recognized governments like it or not...
...In this era of instant history, when one calamity erases the memory of another and tragedies like the Ethiopian famine are already being forgotten, it would seem quixotic to write about the famine in Biafra, which occurred almost 20 years ago...
...But at least the rebels in Eritrea and Tigre had a left-wing reputation to draw on, which won them a lot of help and sympathy in Western Europe...
...Very little that the federal government has done since Roosevelt would pass muster under Berger's test...
...So SDS's real contribution was a style, not an organization or a program...
...Here is a collection of some of Jesse Jackson's speeches, interviews, and opinion page articles since 1976...
...Universe, $24.95...
...Nicholas Lemann...
...As for the British Labor government, Wilson, in a private meeting, reportedly "remarked that if a million Ibos had to die to preserve the unity of Nigeria, well, that was not too high a price to pay...
...Speaking in person, Jackson moves facts towards a crescendo that demands change...
...Jackson is the best political orator in the country...
...Though the Nixon White House, with Kissinger's approval, supported a more straightforward, "humanitarian" approach, according to the author, Richardson was swayed by the "hard political line" of State's Africa Bureau...
...The idea that the Framers have important things to tell us about the meaning of the Constitution is not a monopoly of the Meeses and Bergers...
...lobby...
...You wouldn't think liberals have much to learn from the likes of Jeane Kirkpatrick and Bruce Fein, but they would be wise to listen...
...Simon & Schuster, $19.95...
...Diplomatically, too, Nigeria was a big fish...
...For a general audience, attracted to the book either by an interest in Jackson or his politics, however, this book is like flat ginger ale...
...But it is this passion for consistency that separates Berger from the Framers he so admires...
...On paper his speeches suffer terribly for that absence...
...It's hard to see why it deserves the immense respect it's accorded from both left and right as a potent political force...
...While the Ethiopian government, with Soviet support, was strafing relief convoys with MIG-23s and poisoning wells in drought affected areas, U.N...
...Michael Harrington, a fascinating secondary character here, was furious at Hayden for allowing a young American communist to attend the Port Huron conference as an observer...
...Roger D. Hatch, Frank E. Watkins, eds...
...The same malevolent forces that prevented food from reaching the children of Biafra in 1969 were also at work preventing food from reaching the children of northern Ethiopia in 1984...
...It is most famous for its role in the antiwar movement, but, as James Miller demonstrates here, the war swelled SDS's membership rolls just at the moment when it was falling apart as a real organization...
...After all, the Constitution does not expressly deprive them of this right, nor does it give the federal government any express power to oppose them...
...Fortess Press, $18.95...
...Berger began his scholarly career with an insightful study of the history of impeachment, moved on to a provocative book on the Fourteenth Amendment, and has now turned to the subject of federalism...
...They were intensely practical men, whose highest goal was not abstract consistency but good government...
...He does not explore political concepts or make arguments...
...Therefore, he reasons, it is none of the federal government's business, for the founders, he says, "sought to preserve an independent, 'inviolable' sphere of action" for the states...
...That's why, according to this insider's story—Jacobs was a U.N...
...To win the Civil War, Lincoln had to go far beyond the narrowly circumscribed powers Berger allows the federal government...
...This latest work, however, lacks the plausibility of a good legal brief, failing to pass what lawyers call "the straight face test" (i.e., could you get up in court and make this argument with a straight face...
...But Miller is so thorough and so intellectually honest that he does also shed considerable light on what SDS really amounted to...
...And from what we know so far, the record in Mozambique will be no different...
...Oddly, SDS's greatest legacy today is probably the vague but pronounced influence its ethos had on baby-boom politicians like Gary Hart, Albert Gore, Jr., and Joseph Biden (the opening line of the Port Huron statement is, "We are people of this generation")—not the strength of the alternative political structures it spawned...
...This book does not convey his skill as a speaker, his intonations, his rhythms and the passion he can arouse in a crowd...
...In conception, SDS was most noteworthy for being an organization of the left that simply didn't care about socialism...
...This book is written from the assumption that SDS was a major political movement—is there any other left-wing group whose meetings, manifestos, and internecene squabbles would attract the attention of a big commercial publisher like Simon & Schuster...
...Berger's view of federalism is unusual, to say the least...
...These essays would help President Dukakis as much as they would President Kemp...
...The British Labor government even pumped arms into Lagos, rationalizing that a quick Nigerian victory would be followed by an opening of the air and land routes into Biafra, thus allowing food to flow in...
...press officer at the time of the Biafra crisis—men like Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger come out of this whole affair looking much better than such lofty personalities as U Thant, Pierre Trudeau, Harold Wilson, and Elliot Richardson...
...Coming out of a nonpolitical midwestern background, Hayden was motivated by moral idealism, not by hatred of capitalism...
...Students for a Democratic Society, whose name is curiously absent from the title of this history of its founding, today stimulates the urge to debunk...
...James Miller...
...The essayists in this volume are true believers, ex-Reagan officials and conservative academics, who know how hard it is to run the federal government (hence the title) and who want to pass their vision on to the James Watts of tomorrow...
...Given Berger's view of the Constitution, the South probably had the right to secede...
...Whenever Wilson seemed to be wavering in his support for the Nigerian military, the Russians were right there to supply as many arms as Lagos needed to finish off Biafra—for the sake of influence later on...
...the crucial flaw was the conclusion that therefore mainstream American politics was never to be trusted...
...All these institutions had a vested interest in good relations with Nigeria, a nation that was on the brink of an oil bonanza promising jobs and contracts for many western companies, particularly British ones, with colonial links to draw on...
...Instead we see a steady retreat into the "motherhood and apple pie" troika of "justice," "peace," and "equality...
...Having covered the famine in Ethiopia myself, all this has a familiar ring...
...The book makes a reader wish he had bought a tape instead of a text of Jackson speaking...
...In a way, the road from Port Huron to the human-potential movement—a road that several of the SDS founders traveled—was a perfectly straight one...
...For example, he argues that the Supreme Court erred in 1903 when it upheld congressional power to ban the interstate transportation of lottery tickets...
...Getting thrown in jail in the South was a way not only of helping people but also of taking the personally liberating step of burning one's bridges to the organization-man life...
...It wasn't even a member of the U.N...
...There's a sense among people between, say, 35 and 45 that the importance of SDS is so obvious that it doesn't really need to be established...
...Secretary General U Thant, and Under Secretary of State Elliot Richardson were urging the Biafran authorities to cooperate more with international relief efforts, while saying nothing about the atrocities committed by Nigerian government troops...
...Robert D. Kaplan Federalism: The Founders' Design...
...anyway, the war that SDS supposedly helped end went on long after SDS had become defunct...
...The great theoretical banner under which SDS marched, "participatory democracy," was, as Miller shows, not very well defined...
...The Renamo guerrillas fighting the internationally recognized government in Mozambique are less fortunate...
...So when Nigeria employed starvation as a weapon of war, the international community— as represented by these institutions— basically collaborated...
...It had no U.N...
...and other officials were advertising the Ethiopian government's concern for the welfare of its people...
...For instance, the former director of the Office of Personnel Management, Donald Devine, found provisions of the Carter-era Civil Service Reform Act that allowed him to pepper the bureaucracy with loyal Reaganites...
...Dan Farber Steering the Elephant: How Washington Works...
...This argument was made by President Buchanan...
...Protection of public health is, after all, traditionally a matter of state concern...
...Raoul Berger...
...On the other hand he infuriated SDS's original parent organization, a rabidly antiStalinist branch of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, for consistently refusing to issue blanket condemnations of the Soviet Union...
...SDS was fatally drawn to the establishment of political entities with no connection to elective politics, and these were terribly prone to sectarianism and had little chance of surviving when the radical mood of the sixties faded...
...On the other hand, Biafra, the break-away province of Nigeria's industrious Ibo tribe, had no such leverage...
...While they cover everything from sweet-talking the Washington press corps to manipulating statistics, one theme prevails: don't rely on career civil servants...
...The part of the participatory democracy ethos that has lasted is the notion that the famous consensus politics of the fifties was excluding too many people...
...POLITICAL BOOKNOTES The Brutality of Nations...
...The flavor and pizzazz of Jesse Jackson, the flash and daring, are not on view here...
...Youthful idealism unfettered by ideology can be a powerful force for good, and we ought not let SDS's inglorious end in factionalism and violence lead us to lose sight of that today...
...SDS proved, too, that American radicalism need not be tied to European socialism or Soviet communism...
...Port Huron took place very much in the long shadow of the fifties, and the participants were convinced they were being groomed for the kind of conformist society that one sees described in the work of C. Wright Mills and David Riesman...
Vol. 19 • September 1987 • No. 8
