POLITICAL BOOKNOTES
POLITICAL BOOKNOTES Gumshoe: Reflections in a Private Eye. Josiah Thompson. Little, Brown, $1795. A private investigator's clients aren't always sultry blondes with gorgeous gams. Many of them,...
...Faced with a strongly ideological nominee backed by a coalition of determined partisans, the anti-Bork forces had little choice but to mount a sharply ideological resistance...
...What they may lack in legs, they make up for in other areas...
...One or two new leads have convinced her that the simplest explanation is also the most likely...
...Most of them can pay their bills, and, while that pay may not be great, it is enough, in Thompson's case, anyway, to enable him to avoid reporting, day after day, to the dull drudgery of an office job...
...Beginning in 1942, the Office of Naval Intelligence had established ties to imprisoned mobster Lucky Luciano...
...The 1968 battle over Fortas's elevation (he was already serving as an associate justice) to replace the retiring chief, Earl Warren, was if anything more bitter than the fight over Bork...
...Press coverage of this feud peaked in the summer of 1888, when nine Hatfields were brought to trial for murder in Pikeville, Kentucky...
...It began with the charge of a stolen hog and caused a dozen deaths in as many years...
...But as Murphy argues persuasively, in this instance, too, the principal reason for the Senate's rebuff was ideological...
...Inside or out of the government, he was a deal maker, not an ideologue: the kind of man that friends like rising Rep...
...and economist Kenneth Boulding—all of whom have done work that touches on the meaning of life and are sufficient mavericks that they are willing to discuss that issue with a journalist...
...Tamar Jacoby All the Right Enemies: The Life and Murder of Carlo Tresca...
...Both George Bush and Michael Dukakis will be under some pressure to pick partisan nominees...
...When they hear the word why they think of the future...
...Acutely aware of the "dull routine that was the reality of most people's jobs," Thompson had come to exhibit all the symptoms of a condition one hasn't heard too much about in the Age of Reagan—the male revolt against white-collar drudgery...
...Harvey Klehr Three Scientists and Their Gods: Looking for Meaning in an Age of Information...
...Bravo for this first step...
...The murder of Carlo Tresca will continue to provide conspiracy theorists with plenty of grist for their mills...
...Vittoria Vidali, a leading Cornintern operative implicated in the assassination of Leon Trotsky, was reported in New York...
...It was ultimately his undoing in the public eye...
...David M. O'Brien...
...A bleak view of Corporate America has fallen from favor in recent years, as the plutographers of the Reagan era have preferred to celebrate the "creative" aspects of American capitalism...
...Waller explains how passions were actually intensified by the intrusion of the state...
...Sometimes there is no avoiding a bitter fight...
...People do hunger for meaning, and Wright may be absolutely on the beam to suggest that the answer will lie in some reconciliation of science and religion...
...He has a powerful insight with what he calls "the Bonus Question: What does it mean that some fairly reasonable (as these things go) attempts to exact meaning and purpose from evolution bear results remarkably like longstanding doctrine of the world's great religions...
...Lyndon Johnson turned to when they wanted to get something done...
...American University law professor Herman Schwartz is an impassioned proponent of this view, arguing in his new book, Packing the Courts, that there can be no holds barred in these debates, so critical for the future of the nation...
...The ninth was 25-year-old Ellison Mounts, the illegitimate, retarded son of Ellison Hatfield, who had no funds for legal fees...
...Questions about his integrity played a part in his downfall (he eventually withdrew his nomination and retired from the Court...
...A mass of circumstantial evidence led police to arrest a mobster named Carmine Galante as the triggerman...
...Fortas was an unlikely candidate to provoke an ideological firestorm...
...In pursuit of foreign policy objectives, government officials sought the cooperation of mobsters...
...Many of them, as Thompson's intriguing account of his decade in the sleuthing business indicates, are paunchy, rather dull men...
...This profile tactic works in places and fails in others...
...She specifically accused a different Hatfield of the murder, but her testimony was ignored...
...In the waning days of his last term, the president nominates a political soulmate for a position on the Supreme Court...
...Tall, handsome, a riveting and passionate speaker, he became one of the stars of the Industrial Workers of the World, popping up to lead dramatic strikes from Lawrence, Massachusetts to Paterson, New Jersey...
...Tresca had offended Frank Garofalo, a close associate of Pope's and a high-ranking Mafioso...
...Altina L. Waller...
...Litmus-test issues like abortion and affirmative action are ready-made for use in political campaigns, and whoever is elected will undoubtedly be tempted to reward his more extreme followers with a like-minded nominee...
...But the opponents' true, political rationale was never far beneath the surface of the hearings...
...Fortas's 1965 appointment to the high court had gone through effortlessly enough...
...Strom Thurmond led the pack with the sensationalist charge that the Court's rulings on defendants' rights had "encouraged more people to commit . serious crimes...
...It's now fashionable on both the right and the left to declare that all is fair in the embattled process of picking judges...
...Alan Crawford Feud: Hatflelds, McCoys, and Social Change in Appalachia, 18601900...
...The scapegoat Mounts was hanged, the feud ended, and the eastern capitalists rode triumphant into the 'Ng Valley on a new railroad...
...But political opponents are undeterred: they perceive him as a dangerous ideologue whose ascension would radically tilt the Court...
...Since history repeats itself, this book bears reading as both factual record and metaphor, with a jaundiced eye toward the present...
...An immigrant's son from Memphis, Tennessee, he struggled out of poverty to attend Yale Law School, where his brilliance caught the eye of Professor William 0. Douglas, whose patronage helped make Fortas one of the whiz kids of the New Deal...
...Arguing that the Warren Court had licensed the sale of obscene material, hostile conservatives screened pornographic movies on the walls of the Senate...
...Robert Wright has written an exceptionally thoughtful and conceptually brave book that not only tackles some complex contentions of science and religion but also basic notions of philosophy and logic...
...When he was shot and killed on a New York sidewalk in 1943, the 63-year-old radical was, as usual, embroiled in numerous battles...
...It had to do with the watching and not being seen .. . . But there was also something more fundamental, something 'gritty' about it . . . .You had to worry about elemental things—having food in the car or else going hungry, knowing where the pay phones were, which streets were oneway...
...Not unless he makes a concerted effort to fight the trend begun with Forms and carried to dangerous extremes in the battle over Bork...
...The Vietnam war had sapped Johnson's strength and his announcement in March that he would not seek reelection emboldened opponents on both right and left...
...But that, according to Bruce Allen Murphy, was precisely his undoing...
...Herman Schwartz...
...But the opposing senators knew they had stumbled on political pay dirt when they unearthed the financial arrangements that Fortas had made to supplement his income—including revelations about the $20,000 consultant's stipend taken from Louis Wolfson, a shady industrialist and stock manipulator under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission...
...His book is structured as profiles of three scientists: Edward Fredkin, a computer whiz...
...The president's men portray the nominee as an unobjectionable centrist...
...Schwartz was a leader of the anti-Bork campaign, and he writes as a happy warrior...
...It is a plausible theory but not conclusive...
...The political significance of these developments is undeniable...
...No doubt the idea made Wnght's book proposal much more palatable to New York editors, who are always most comfortable with personality journalism...
...Gregg Easterbrook...
...But] dropped toast is a bad example, really...
...Dorothy Gallagher...
...There are undoubtedly millions of other middle-class men out there who secretly wish they, like Thompson, could get out of their ruts...
...Schwartz admits as much (he acknowledges the TV ad in which Gregory Peck alleged, without foundation, that Bork opposed voting rights), though he doesn't seem particularly troubled by it...
...By the time of the Bork fight, all the old restraint was gone...
...Yet for all his rhetoric, the evidence marshalled in his book (and in the Twentieth Century Fund study, Judicial Roulette) could not add up to a more damning picture of just what was so wrong with the polarized battle over Reagan's nominee...
...Washington bureaucrats pressured private citizens to cooperate with right-wing fanatics and with communists...
...Carlo Tresca was one of the bestknown anarchists in America...
...A Yale graduate who taught philosophy at Haverford College, 'Thompson gave up his tenure in the mid-seventies to become a gumshoe on the streets of San Francisco—starting salary, $5 an hour...
...Other, more byzantine, theories about the murder surfaced years later, after revelations of a sensitive agreement between a government agency and the underworld...
...Rutgers University Press, $24.95...
...A United States intelligence agency was making deals with drug smugglers...
...But by 1968, the balance of power had shifted in Washington...
...They were separated only by the Tug river, which happened to serve as the state line, further complicating the legal logistics...
...But Galante, who later became head of one of New York's Mafia families before his own execution in 1979, was never prosecuted...
...Between the lines, Waller's study bears witness to the ongoing failure of our judicial system to address the powerful emotional and social components in any legal contest— particularly feuds among relatives, neighbors, lovers...
...The question of who hired him has never been resolved...
...Had I been a drowsy, well-fed passenger lolling back in his seat, fully at ease in the comfortable and the familiar...
...For example: Why does dropped toast always seem to land jelly-side down...
...he writes...
...The scientists among us would seek the answer in the stretch of time preceding the toast's landing: perhaps the laws of aerodynamics dictate that the toast stabilize in mid-descent with the heavier side down...
...Georgann Eubanks Fortas: The Rise and Ruin of a Supreme Court Justice...
...Teleological thinkers are a fairly roseate group, and they prefer questions such as, 'Why does the rain fall?'—to which they can reply, 'So that the beauteous flowers will grow.' " Wright introduces numerous concepts of physics, biology, computers, and the evolving "information theory" with equal painlessness...
...Born to a wealthy family in Italy, he fled to the United States in 1904 to escape prosecution for criminal libel...
...he was a passionate opponent of a government plan to include them in an Italian-American Victory Council...
...Eight received life sentences...
...Packing the Courts: The Conservative Campaign to Rewrite the Constitution...
...Twentieth Century Fund author David O'Brien recalls Bork's apparent dissembling about his own views, as well as the circus atmosphere that developed when several former presidents and sitting justices openly took sides...
...When news of the feud began to circulate, the governor of Kentucky worried that the coal- and timber-rich mountains of his state would soon be seen as unsafe by outside investors...
...But someone teleologically inclined would answer the question by reference to the stretch of time after the landing: the toast ends jelly-side-down so that your day will get off to a terrible start...
...The only witness called was Sally McCoy, who told how her home had been burned that day and her daughter Affair shot...
...I was actually beginning to enjoy the game...
...Judicial Roulette: Report of the Twentieth Century Fund Task Force on Judicial Selection...
...Wilson, father of sociobiology (the idea that human cultural behavior is partly dictated by genes...
...Robert Wright Times Books, $18.95...
...He sent an extradition request to the governor of West Virginia for the "troublemaker Hatfields," hired a special deputy, and offered rewards for their capture...
...The confirmation battle is prolonged and vicious...
...He fought in alliance with and against such prominent figures as Bill Haywood, Emma Goldman, John Reed, and Norman Thomas, and played a key role in the unsuccessful attempt to save Sacco and Vanzetti...
...Finally, when the nomination fails, the disappointed aspirant retires to the lecture circuit, for a while, at least, a hero to the partisans who lost the struggle...
...Tresca had long denounced him as a killer...
...This is precisely the sort of compensation that Thompson and other middle-class men are most likely to appreciate: freeedom from routine, an element of risk, sometimes a hint of real danger, and a sense, most of all, that one's work has some connection to the gritty business of real life...
...Bruce Allen Murphy...
...Women have entered the professions in what, to some men, must look like a virtual invasion, with the result that white-collar men today not only work alongside, but sometimes for, women...
...It all happened during World War II and forms the backdrop for a riveting new historical detective story...
...Even if there is, he'll probably just smile, feeling that whatever else may happen, at least he doesn't have to carry a briefcase...
...But Waller says the feud's more serious and degrading image— Appalachian lawlessness, vigilantism, and ruthless violence—was largely the product of nineteenth-century media hype...
...The popularity of supposedly thrilling tales of high-finance derring-do recorded in the biographies of Donald Trump, Lee Iacocca, and Peter Ueberroth reassure white-collar workers that, while their own careers are dull and tedious, they don't have to be—that there is sometime, somewhere, a fluorescent light at the end of the tunnel...
...The result is wonderfully and eminently readable—far more enjoyable and enlightening than trying to read about any of these topics in the usual abstract fashion...
...Murphy's overly detailed and somewhat tendentious book (he doesn't like Fortas very much) comes to life with the beginning of the confirmation battle...
...There were plenty of suspects...
...The sun has yet to come up, and Thompson, who is waiting to shadow a strike organizer, reflects on surveillance...
...The Hatfields and McCoys were tangled by marriage and many other common interests, not unlike the Montagues and the Capulets...
...Private detectives and bounty hunters flooded the region, ironically provoking more violence, which in turn led to more negative publicity...
...Will the president-elect have the vision to pick a nominee who, as Justice Felix Frankfurter recommended, can "discover and suppress his prejudices...
...Whatever the future holds, he isn't looking back—unless it is to glance over his shoulder to see there isn't some goon back there in a trenchcoat, packing heat...
...But justice was never done...
...The story is familiar enough by now...
...Enraged at Tresca's insults, Garofalo, according to Gallagher, used one of his minions to kill his enemy...
...This is the story of Robert Bork, of course, but it is also the story of Abe Fortas, Lyndon Johnson's controversial nominee for chief justice...
...By breaking with tradition and answering questions about how they would rule, candidates like Bork make a mockery of the idea that judges are independent of Congress and the executive...
...32.50...
...In her remarkably detailed analysis, Waller explains what legend does not: namely, that both Hatfields and McCoys devotedly sought legal redress, ultimately through the Supreme Court of the United States...
...Did Tresca learn about this deal, and was he silenced to prevent its exposure...
...For most of this century at least, the "advise and consent" process did not involve pitched ideological battles...
...Morrow, $25...
...Priority Press, $9.95...
...There are moments of discouragement and periods in which he wonders why he isn't back in the classroom...
...Had I been like that...
...Wright, a former columnist for The Sciences and now an editor of The New Republic, brings a light touch to dissections of what otherwise would be weighty topics...
...The Fortas nomination immediately met with fire from opponents of the Great Society...
...Scribners, $19.95...
...That, of course, is precisely the sort of abstraction that Thompson, for one, has ceased to bother himself about...
...Since thought writing is much harder than personality spiels, and in the long run has far greater impact, Wright ought to resist his publisher's near-certain entreaties to base another book on a personality device, and stick to expounding thoughts— something the world needs far more than profiles, and something Wright appears poised to become a culturally significant producer of...
...The entry of women into professional and managerial ranks, of course, is enormously important...
...The conflict between the Kentucky McCoys and the West Virginia Hatfields ended almost a century ago, but the names have survived, mythically miscast in folk song, comic strip, and the affected gait of Walter Brennan...
...Here, for example, is his explanation of teleology, a semitheological concept that makes scientists gag: "Thinkers of a teleological bent have a peculiar habit...
...The plane "was filled with rows of businessmen, some reading papers, others tabulating their expense accounts, still others sleeping," he writes...
...In addition to helping maintain labor peace on the New York docks, the Mafia, according to Gallagher, may have put its narcotics smuggling apparatus at the service of American intelligence, which, in turn, averted its eyes from the traffic...
...How long will they be content to live this way-and at what cost in the deterioration of morale and mounting social unrest...
...Flying to Boston to dig up evidence for a jailed drug dealer's defense, Thompson begins to answer his own question...
...They do so just as their prospects for the loss of career-related status—and for downward mobility itself—have never been greater...
...Tresca was temperamentally and ideologically incapable of bending to authority or direction...
...University of North Carolina Press...
...Mussolini wanted his old friend and one of his most effective opponents dead...
...In the Bork battle, as during the Fortas hearings, the debate degenerated into hyperbole and smear tactics, with both sides distorting the other's views and playing shamelessly on public misunderstandings...
...Like Bork, Fortas became a symbol of an embattled White House—and like Bork, he was eventually sacrificed in a struggle over the president's beliefs...
...Sunday, November 14, 1976...
...Eventually, though, both sides suffer as a result...
...And opponents from both parties made little secret of their most bitter gripe: resentment of the Court's historic role in integrating the South through decisions like Brown v. Board of Education...
...Both Italian-American communists and fascists like newspaper publisher Generoso Pope hated Tresca...
...The struggle over Fortas raised the acceptable political temperature well beyond the norm, paving the way for fierce disputes over Nixon appointees Clement Haynsworth, G. Harrold Carswell, and William Rehnquist...
...Wright spends a great deal of time on character details that turn out to be nowhere nearly as interesting as his characters' thoughts and ideas, which is true, I would submit, of nearly all memorable thinkers of history...
...Gallagher scrupulously examines the evidence and sensibly refuses to stretch it to fit the elaborate web the conspiracy theorists weave...
...Hostile senators grasped first at nonissues, asserting for example that there was no vacancy on the Court because Earl Warren technically had not resigned...
Vol. 20 • November 1988 • No. 10
