POLITICAL BOOKNOTES

...Not whether to cut the deficit, but how...

...Any attempt to pay for that with taxes, he insists, would lead to "a taxpayers' revolt of unprecedented proportions" Instead, the only answer is to cut Social Security, Medicare, and other "middle-class entitlements" Weidenbaum shares Peterson's views on taxes, agrees on the need for cutting entitlements, and also suggests an attack on a handful of nonentitlement programs—the space shuttle program, foreign aid to Middle Eastern countries—and the elimination of food stamps., Here, then, is the stuff that should fuel a great national debate...

...The question now should be how to pay for it...

...A few years later, in 1983, as Eastern teetered on the brink of bankruptcy, labor and management did discover a truly "radical" and "innovative" plan to save the company...

...Starved for savings, the nation has been forced to borrow from abroad...

...Peter Peterson, investment banker and former Nixon administration official, attempts to hold himself above partisan politics and parcels out blame to Reagan and his rivals alike...

...He has not disappointed me...

...ICS Press, $24.75...

...He repeatedly calls Coelho a "would-be priest," referring to the lawmaker's early desire to enter the priesthood, an ambition thwarted by a teen-age car accident and the Catholic church's inscrutable rule barring men subject to epileptic seizures from the priesthood...

...The times have certainly changed since Mike Dukakis's parents came through the golden door from Greece, and our society has changed with them, but surely there are useful lessons to be gleaned from refreshing recollections of what worked before...

...The following year, inflation collapsed, despite the biggest deficit in American history...

...Unfortunately, that's not the way it worked...

...Pennsylvania Democrat Austin Murphy, who was reprimanded by the House in late 1987 for a series of ethics violations...

...The fashion in the immediate aftermath of Michael Dukakis's embarrassment last fall was to designate him as the principal if not the sole culprit in the November disaster, and thus have done with the matter...

...businesses and U.S...

...The outsider supposes that the sachems of the national wing of the Democratic party, doomed as they are to at least another four years of grim exile from the White House, will seek not only sustenance from the pork of liberal programs hunted down by their skilled corps of congressional foragers and the roots and berries of state initiatives gathered by their governors, but wisdom as well from dispassionate soothsayers whose careful inspections of the past may inform their strategies for the future...

...The new story is more modest than before, and therefore more credible...

...Stephen P. Erie...

...On the other hand, judging from his long and loving descriptions of airplanes, from T-33s to A-300s and 757s, Borman never met a machine he didn't like...

...The fact as he perceives it is that the Irish became increasingly selective as their political ranks gradually gained power, padding the voting lists and stuffing ballot boxes only as much as absolutely necessary to maintain their monopolies of municipal and state control...

...Here's what each got from PACs: St...

...And Murray Weidenbaum, former chief economic adviser to President Reagan, does his part to defend his former boss...

...Rendezvous with Reality...

...This amounted to a de facto amendment to the Constitution ." One of Jackson's most important observations—all too rarely noted in the press—is that Big Money contributors can, and often do, buy something far more precious than lawmakers' votes: their intercession with a federal regulatory or administrative agency with whom a donor is experiencing trouble...

...Not surprisingly, then, representatives get 60, 70 percent—or more— of their campaign funds from outside, special-interest political action committees, rather than from their own constituents...

...Sharing sacrifice was never a problem for Borman...

...Unfortunately Borman refuses to assess honestly the groundbreaking accord or his role in it...

...There's no question that Borman had "the right stuff" for an astronaut...

...Local and state leaders who delivered for him got hegemony over the administration of alphabet agencies spewing money and jobs into their fiefs...

...What Erie does not quite say, at least so far as I could tell, is that national elections such as 1988's strongly suggest that the national mutant of the nineteenth-century liberal local machine approach is now in its turn in decline...

...The shift in tax-collection emphasis from local and county property revenues to state and federal personal and corporate income taxes delivered into non-Irish hands in state capitals and Washington the muchlarger wads of cash needed to fund the national welfare class that local and county governments simply could not afford to support...

...My impression of him then—a short-fused military man who understood personal sacrifice and corporate risk better than the slow work of building a company—is borne out by his book...

...Basic Books, $1995 It's no surprise that many Americans have given up worrying about budget deficits...

...Morrow, $1995...

...Instead, his bitterness toward organized labor—while understandable to some—overwhelms everything else...

...That's too bad...

...power in the world will decline...

...The Depression that enabled FDR to complete the transfer of responsibility for public assistance—and thus the principal authority to commandeer and allocate the revenues to finance it—to Washington scuttled and sank local, county, and state political organizations that failed to please those in charge in Washington...

...Germain raised $318,000 to his opponent's $11,000...

...After all, the presumably best braves of their tribe have been soundly clobbered three times in a row now, twice by the California medicine man and once by a fellow who acts and orates like an escapee from Watership Down...

...The up side of the story is the stuff of which American myths are made...

...Chappell had $334,000 vs...

...Well, most likely there are, but a fellow could throw his back out extracting them from this book...

...Naturally they preferred their co-religionists when those precious jobs were distributed, and, logically if injudiciously, they therefore took small pains to reinforce their ranks with later arrivals speaking German, Hebrew, Polish, and Italian...

...On Borrowed Time: How the Growth in Entitlements Spending Threatens America's Future...

...A disclaimer: I am a long-time admirer of Brooks Jackson and, in my own writing, drew heavily from his work as an investigative reporter for The Wall Street Journal...

...Price of admission to Coelho's club: $5,000 a year—hardly the kind of ticket the Average Voter can afford...

...Like a family that owns a house and a car, and some stocks too," the U.S...

...FDR, as Erie in his most cogent sections points out, was absolutely ruthless in his designations of controllers of all the lovely money parceled out from Washington...

...Jackson was granted an exceptional insider's view by a remarkable agreement he reached with California's Rep...

...Murray Weidenbaum...

...The two Tony Coelhos reveal themselves most sharply in the contrast between his rhetoric and his actions about his goals for himself and the Democratic party...

...Which leads, inexorably, to the budgetary behavior that has brought the country to the precipice of financial suicide: so long as no group may be offended, and all groups must be rewarded, the resources of the Treasury must be deemed infinite...

...But deficits certainly lead to debt...

...The greater importance of Brooks Jackson's book lies in its dramatic exposition of Big Money's noxious impact on politics...

...When the 1978 deregulation of the U.S...

...If we are to believe Countdown, Borman saw the powersharing deal as nothing more than a way to get Eastern's spoiled unions to take wage concessions...

...And when it was all over our nation's politicians might have had some notion of what the public really wanted them to do...

...But Countdown tells of Borman's fall with much less honesty than his rise, and it contains an unintended moral: outer space may not be the best place to learn how to run a company...

...Under such pressure, Gray acceded to an independent inquiry, which found Gaubert's principal claim groundless, but the probe did afford Gaubert time to win back temporary control of his principal S&L—until he found himself the subject of another criminal investigation by the FBI and the Justice Department...

...Since the company rarely showed a profit, employees mostly got less...

...Philip M. Stern Rainbow's End...

...Give Borman credit for this: He jabs at just about everybody—from Carl Sagan and Chuck Yeager to Michael Dukakis and the Columbia students who pelted him with marshmallows during a speaking tour...

...But the money was invested in plants and equipment that increased the nation's ability to produce, grow, and pay off its debts...

...Like most of his kind, Mr...

...Gaubert, who had parlayed $1 million into control of a multi-billion-dollar S&L empire, was under constant investigation by the Home Loan Bank Board and, once, by a federal grand jury...

...Asking labor to restrain its insatiable appetite," says Borman in one of his—or Serling'scornball similes, "would have been like asking the sun to rise in the west" He denies the $100 million in employee cost-savings documented by the company controllers...

...Coelho's letter said that the hesitation of the builders' political action committee in making the $5,000 maximum allowable contribution to Minish "causes us to be concerned that the [good relationship the homebuilders have had with House Democrats] will be damaged ." To underline its authority Coelho had the letter signed by the chairman of the banking committee, by Jim Wright, then Majority Leader, and, most important, by the Speaker of the House, Tip O'Neill...

...Bates, $164,000 to $9,000...

...Friedman has a story to tell, and he tells it convincingly, with numbers to back it up...

...University of California Press, $2750...

...Dyson had $364,000 to $0 for his challenger...

...This was a man who endured the "beast barracks" at West Point, the pain of NASA's human experiments, and the peculiar torture of hurtling through space in a sweltering metal box the size of the front seat of a VW Beetle...

...Frank Borman...

...The ductility of the taxpayer is variable, and influenced by a number of factors, but powerful among them is the inverse effect of the distance between him who pays and him who collects...

...That's a brief Newtonian synopsis of Countdown, an autobiography of Frank Borman, the man who guided the Apollo 8 mission around the moon, and then, as the CEO of Eastern Airlines, steered the troubled carrier into a crash landing—when a collision course with Eastern's unions forced the sale of the company to the airline raider, Frank Lorenzo...

...Only St...

...The NASA years are chronicled in great detail, and space junkies will find much in those sections to interest them...

...Exhibit A: Coelho's invention of the "Speaker's Club," boasting the enticements of a- "round of golf with the Speaker" or cocktails with the Democratic members of the powerful Ways and Means Committee, which writes the tax laws...

...World power and influence have historically accrued to creditor countries," he writes...

...Alan Murray Countdown...

...But the person who earns income that he never even sees has no convenient scapegoat for any rage he feels and seldom thinks to hold his congressman accountable for the way the dough is spent...

...The stage was set for a series of conflicts over wage concessions that ultimately cost Borman his company...

...It is consoling—and accurate—to say that the Duke conducted his campaign with all the grace of a man falling out of a tree, but that neither explains how so uncoordinated a chap made it to his diving platform at the top of the party's tree in the first place, nor implies any reason for confidence that his successor at the pinnacle in 1992 will not prove equally inept...

...Michael Dukakis garnered the votes of only 23 percent of those eligible to mark ballots-46 percent of the half of the eligible voters who bothered to go to the polls...

...Whether in a T-33 or an Apollo 8 capsule, Borman displays what he calls the "kind of gut instinct that comes from having cheated death a few hundred times...

...Then in 1982 they told us deficits would stifle the expansion...

...As a military man, known affectionately as "the colonel," Borman never warmed to the idea of calling his troops together and listening to their suggestions on how to take the next hill...

...The phrase, "honest graft," comes from George Washington Plunkitt, a turnofttie-century Tammany Hall figure whose salty, cynical realpolitik epigraphs begin every chapter...

...that's the way things work" tone that I find unfortunate, and probably unfair to Jackson, who has thought a great deal about, and cares deeply for, improving "the way things work...

...In addition, Coelho spent hours with Jackson, confiding to him and his tape recorder...

...In 1981, for instance, a host of economists told us that deficits cause inflation...

...Acculturation and actuarial realities inexorably depleted the numbers of those docile enough to sit still for such treatment...

...Sharing sacrifice was one thing, but sharing power was quite another...

...If there is a significant flaw in Jackson's book, it lies in the title...

...Tennessee Democrat Marilyn Lloyd, who accepted speaking fees from 15 defense contractors, even though she is a member of the House Armed Services Committee...

...A homeowner who sees his property tax double will scream bloody murder at his druggist, who happens to moonlight as a local tax assessor, and if he doesn't see tangible improvements in exchange for his tax money—more streetlights and better paving, with more cops and better teachers much in evidence— he will buy his aspirin elsewhere, and otherwise get even...

...Enormous budget deficits have soaked up most of the nation's pool of savings, he argues, leaving little for private businesses that wish to invest...

...The reader may ask: Didn't the U.S...

...I think Erie's finding can be fairly said to lead to the conclusion that what the Democratic party has since done to cobble up a national strategy patterned on the old local approach has failed precisely because what worked on the relatively personal level of municipal machine politics— individuation of problems and solutions—cannot work on the utterly impersonal level of nationally organized politics...

...With Lorenzo ready to buy, and the bankers ready to seize the company's assets, Borman and Eastern's unions stage a final battle...

...Sic transit the party of Jefferson and Jackson...

...and Murphy raised $101,000 to less than $5,000 raised by his opponent...

...Friedman says taxes...

...Professor Erie's thesis—he teaches political science at the University of California, San Diego—seems to be that the legends of how the Irish gained and exploited their political beachheads in America do not square with the facts...

...Lloyd, $286,000 to $28,000...

...Bill Chappell of Florida and Roy Dyson of Maryland, both suspected of being implicated in the Pentagon procurement scandals...

...The final boardroom meeting, as slanted and factually suspect as some of it may be, makes for great corporate drama...

...Nevertheless, the core of Friedman's argument, if not his conclusions and his searing tone, is largely shared by Peterson and Weidenbaum as well...

...Dyson, for example, got 68 percent of his 1986 campaign money from outside PACs...

...Something is seriously wrong, and it needs prompt attention...

...On page 19, Coelho grandly declares, "Unless you believe that the Democratic party can really help people change their lives and provide some hope, you don't understand...

...At Tony Coelho's insistence, Jim Wright, then Majority Leader, came to the active aid of Thomas Gaubert, a Dallas multimillionaire and major player in the savings and loan industry and also, not coincidentally, a most generous contributor to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee...

...George V Higgins...

...they "violated the basic moral principle that bound each generation of Americans to the next since the founding of the republic: that men and women should work and eat, earn and spend, both privately and collectively, so that their children and their children's children would inherit a better world" But there is more to this book than indignation...

...Try to build a consensus with one of Borman's favorite mottos: "If you don't like what I'm doing, then get the hell out of my way cause it has to be done...

...Surely it is time for them humbly to ascertain not only what they have done wrong, but, much more importantly, how to stop doing it...

...and imagine a GOP contender who had said the only answer is to cut back Social Security and Medicare for the affluent elderly...

...Germain of Rhode Island, as to whom a Justice Department probe found "substantial evidence of serious and sustained misconduct...

...So "donors gained importance at the expense of the electorate...

...The myth as Erie sees it is that the Irish confabulated the Democratic party in the nineteenth century by the same means that the British employed to man their armies and navy: instead of conscripting able, fit recruits from all levels of society, they lured the mentally infirm and financially distressed from the oppressed lower classes into service with small bribes from the public purse...

...Employees traded massive wage cuts and pledges to boost productivity for 25 percent of the company stock, seats on the board of directors, and a say in how the company was to be run, from the shop floor to the executive suite...

...those who displeased him saw the dependent in their midst succored by bureaucrats in Washington...

...Jackson, usually a hard-bitten skeptic, betrays his admiration—even while recounting Coelho's questionable money-raising tactics and painting him as morally schizoid...

...Jackson observes that "increasingly House members [act] as ombudsmen not only for their constituents, but also for their donors," who form a "second constituency" not envisioned by the drafters of the Constitution...

...The consensus is reflected in three new books by prominent economists, each of whom comes from a different point on the political spectrum...

...In Countdown, I was looking for clues in Borman's NASA career that would let me better understand Borman the executive...

...airline industry made that impossible, they soon wondered whether their fighter pilot CEO was recklessly steering them from one financial crisis to the next...

...in unprofitable years, they got less...

...accumulate foreign debt throughout its industrial development in the late 1800s...

...There would have been great wrenching and screaming, angry claims followed by angry counterclaims...

...Those policies were not just wrong, in Friedman's view...

...The American Economy after Reagan...

...Ridiculed for years by discontented passengers, and still the battleground for one of the most bitter and destructive labor-management wars in recent memory, Eastern somehow managed, in 1984 and 1985, to invent one of America's most far-reaching programs of worker ownership and labormanagement cooperation...

...Germain and Chappell were defeated, the latter by a margin so narrow that the final results were uncertain until fully three weeks after the election...

...The budget deficit must be eliminated, but how...

...Alex Gibney Honest Graft: Big Money and the American Political Process...

...Imagine a Democratic presidential candidate who had laid out a plan to close the budget gap with higher gasoline taxes, higher cigarette taxes, and a modest rise in the top tax rate...

...It was a kind of double suicide for which there is plenty of blame to spread around: the pressures of deregulation, Eastern's weak financial condition, questionable management, the squabbling between Eastern's unions and their refusal—until it was too late— to grant the concessions the company needed to survive...

...can keep excess consumption going longer by selling these assets off one by one," Friedman says...

...Both candidates gave vague lip service to the deficit, but neither acknowledged the choices that must be made to tackle it...

...Most Americans may still believe that deficits matter, but they've lost all faith in the economics profession to tell them how...

...Peter G. Peterson, Neil Howe...

...Yet what's clear to Friedman isn't at all clear to Peterson and Weidenbaum...

...Because the public treasuries of the cities and counties consisted chiefly of tax revenues collected from middle-class homeowners (the states, still administered by stubborn garrisons of "native"—i.e., Protestant— political opponents, kept their grip on what little commercial taxation there was), the new Irish bosses had to moderate the demands of their constituents lest they inflame passions for reform...

...Borman's coauthor, Robert Serling, is paid to make his subject look good...

...Four of the six retained their seats...

...When he arrived at Eastern, he cut executive pay scales, abolished executive perks, helped the troops load baggage, and drove to work in a second-hand Chevy...

...As Jackson has observed, that creates congressmen-for-life and, because the PACs shun challengers, protects all but the most assailable members of Congress from meaningful challenge...

...And when the deal falls apart with the sale to Lorenzo, he leaves no doubt as to where to place the blame for all the company's problems: the unions, in particular the International Association of Machinists (IAM), who were always "raising unshirted hell" Though the Airline Pilots Association comes in for its share of criticism, Borman spares Eastern's pilots—with whom he clearly feels a special bond...

...America's slump into debtor status "cannot help but alter America's international role...

...Friedman's Day of Reckoning is especially unforgiving in its critique of Reagan's policies...

...It is increasingly clear that Americans want the level of government activity that we have and that we can afford that level," he writes...

...They don't give Reagan all the blame, but they raise the same troublesome questions about the nation's commitment to its future...

...For reasons of his own, the ambitious Coelho permitted Jackson to sit in on all the committee's staff meetings and, even more extraordinary, to read all of the staff reports to Coelho...

...Benjamin Friedman, a Harvard professor, is relentlessly anti-Reagan...

...So they contented themselves with creating large numbers of notverydesirable jobs in order to acquire and maintain the loyalties of tractable voters from the lower middle class who would trade prospects of wealth for lifetime security, and they bought no more votes than they absolutely needed...

...In an age when the nature of the workplace is being hotly debated, Borman's personal conflict between command and consensus could have made for fascinating reading...

...Ever agile, the prophets of budget doom argued deficits would cause the economy to overheat and quickly lead to another recession...

...In Countdown the villain is Charlie Bryan, the president of the Eastern IAM...

...Today, almost six years into the longest peacetime expansion on record, that warning also rings hollow...

...As CEO, Borman saw the best and worst of that tortured company...

...While voters continue to retain the ultimate power to defeat a candidate, Jackson says, reaching those voters requires ever-larger sums...

...And that was another thing: even as the nationalization of assistance made political ethnocentricity a pitiably obsolete antique, so it engendered the vast bureaucratic army that overwhelmed and replaced the roving guerrilla bands that had ruled the precincts before...

...Those epigraphs give the book an "Oh, well, what the hell...

...Within months, the economy began its recovery at a spectacular pace...

...Yet as a young congressional aide in 1970, this "would-be priest" failed to report to federal prosecutors what Jackson terms a $500 "bribe attempt" by a lobbyist, because "he didn't want to stir a scandal" (Coelho did, however, return the $500...

...Years later, as a congressman, the "would-be priest" also readily accepted a free ride in Philip Morris's jet aircraft, and finagled campaign contributions from business interests, occasionally in the most heavy-handed manner...

...In the end, Borman lost command of his airline and the employees lost their stock and their power...

...He's a. feisty character who goes after his enemies like Jake LaMotta...

...The book is the latest in a series of joint-venture autobiographies...

...After all, the economic Cassandras who warned of their dire effects in the early 1980s turned out to be dismally wrong...

...Because finally, a consensus has emerged among mainstream economists that provides a convincing view of the deficit's dangers...

...True enough, Friedman responds...

...On the face of it, studies such as Steven Erie's contribution of Volume 15 to the California Series on Social Choice and Political Economy would seem worthy of study by the lonely and disconsolate now weary of the texts of all those Gideon Bibles they've been reading in Iowa farmhouses and New Hampshire motels since Jimmy Carter did his Cheshire cat routine in the 1980 rout...

...Brooks Jackson...

...At two in the morning, after the pilots and the flight attendants take wage cuts to escape the union-slayer Lorenzo, Bryan refuses to do the same unless Borman resigns...

...Serling, whose brother Rod created TV's "Twilight Zone," had already written the official history of Eastern Airlines, The Captain and the Colonel, which, like Countdown, too often dresses up' the truth until it's close to fiction...

...It's just too bad that this is not a better book...

...The issue is not whether Dukakis, or the Jimmy...

...What Borman called a "radical departure," the employees dubbed the "Veritable Extortion Plan ." Both sides retreated to the trenches and Eastern was caught in the crossfire...

...For myself, I am perversely drawn to the saga of Eastern Airlines...

...Indeed, he liked them so much that he went on a plane-buying spree at Eastern that, some say, permanently saddled the company with debt it could not afford...

...In 1986, PACs gave 88 percent of their money to incumbents, with the result that they outspent challengers three to one...

...We are simply mortgaging our future living standard" ? Foreign ownership of U.S...

...Carter of 1980, or the George McGovern of 1972, made the most of his opportunities, however great or small, but what fell fortune impels the dispensers of such opportunities to be so capriciously disdainful of political realities...

...Friedman's vision of the future may be unduly apocalyptic, and he overlooks the fact that under Reagan both inflation and unemployment were reduced—something the president's critics thought would be impossible...

...With the exception of his wife Susan, Richard Nixon, and a few others, Colonel Borman fingers enough "nerds," "phonies," and "dumb bastards" to fill a convention hall...

...Democratic Reps...

...And sooner or later, one way or another, debt must be repaid...

...Its basic point is this: Budget deficits may or may not lead to inflation or recession...

...At one point, Wright summoned Bank Board Chairman Edwin Gray to his office and said his friends were accusing Bank Board investigators of "Gestapo tactics," and to show he meant business, blocked a bill Gray was seeking to infuse $15 billion into the ailing S&L industry...

...Plenty of the real Borman comes through, however...

...The only son of a gas-station operator becomes a pilot so skilled that he is tapped to lead the first spaceship around the moon...

...The six are Ferdinand St...

...Consider, for example, the last available pre-election figures on the 1988 money raised from PACs by six of the theoretically most vulnerable representatives, compared with the fundraising records of their 1988 opponents...

...But "becoming a nation of tenants rather than owners will jar sharply against our traditional selfperception" ? U.S...

...He will perhaps protest that what I am about to do to summarize and clarify his treatise amounts to an oversimplification so extreme as to amount to distortion, but, with all respect, one of us had to do it and he left all the work to me...

...I met Borman in 1985, while I was doing a story on this fabled "experiment" in power-sharing...

...my drive [or] why I want to change things" Yet succeeding pages teem with tales about the single-minded intensity with which Coelho drove his party toward protectionist policies (wholly against its historic traditions) and into the arms of Big Business and rich, privileged givers...

...They wanted corporate stability and steady paychecks...

...Since those groups, unlike merely pestiferous individual mendicants, have polling strength sufficient to frighten politicians, politicians who believe that they must be satisfied, just as the loners used to be, endeavor to placate all who stand and shout...

...We are not borrowing against the future earning power of our new industries, for there are none," Friedman says...

...real estate will continue to rise rapidly...

...And even they have a better than average chance of surviving...

...In so doing, he renders the odyssey from gas pump to lunar orbit to Eastern shuttle with folksy similes and the glib PR patter that makes everything sound like 'a press release...

...Peterson's book documents in frightening detail the explosive growth in Social Security and Medicare spending that will come in future years as the result of a convergence of various trends: an aging population, a declining fertility rate, increasingly expensive health care, and increasingly early retirement...

...What goes up must come down...

...In 1984, Coelho dispatched a letter to the Home Builders' chief lobbyist, soliciting campaign funds for New Jersey Rep...

...and California's Jim Bates, a Democrat, accused by members of his staff of sexual harassment...

...So I approached Jackson's book with high expectations...

...Joseph Minish, and reminded the lobbyist that Minish was the fourth highest member of the House Banking Committee, which handles subsidies worth billions to the home builders...

...Borman's solution was what he called "the most innovative, daring experiment in the history of labor relations: the Variable Earnings Program" In profitable years, employees got more...

...Tony Coelho, then chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the DCCC...

...Once the power ebbs from city hall and floods the Capitol, those needful of government assistance, or just greedily coveting it, have no choice but to organize into interest groups that press demands with media bullhorns...

...This is the Breaker Morant gambit, employed without notable success by British army commanders seeking to remove atrocious bloodstains of the Boer War from their escutcheons with the solvent of Australian blood...

...But while these three men agree on the problem, they disagree over the solution...

...But all three adopt a common theme whose nature is readily apparent in their foreboding titles: Day of Reckoning, On Borrowed Time, and Rendezvous with Reality...

...Knopf $1&95...

...But "cheating death" was not what the employees of Eastern had in mind...

...Subtitled "Irish-Americans and the Dilemmas of Urban Machine Politics, 1840-1985," Erie's work ought to be a helpful guide to the forlorn and dejected, dealing as it purports to with the evolution of the party into its palmiest days...

...The level of investment in the 1980s, on the other hand, has "fallen beneath that of any previous sustained period since World War II ." The results: ? American standards of living will stagnate, as the nation is forced to divert more and more of its resources to servicing foreign debt...