POLITICAL BOOKNOTES
POLITICAL BOOKNOTES Behind the Scenes. Michael K. Deaver. William Morrow, $17.95. Last year the movie No Way Out told the story of a secretary of defense who murders his mistress and then,...
...refuses to take nationalism seriously, it must be considered fundamentally flawed...
...A chemist by profession, Levi worked for 30 years in a paint factory, writing mostly on weekends...
...They couldn't, of course, repudiate the teachings of the gods upon which the communist state was founded...
...He takes us through the years of denial—the total unwillingness to get involved in a European war— to the political fight over neutrality...
...110' The capitalist countries are not doomed by internal contradictions and, in fact, will be around for a long time—perhaps centuries...
...He picked out Reagan's clothes and told him not to use Brylcreem...
...They see the United States as the fulcrum of both the Japan-U.S.Europe economic powerhouse and, of the China-U.S.-Soviet strategic teeter-totter...
...But reading Deaver's memoir, you can't help feeling sorry for him...
...A few of them were also drawn by the opportunities it held for making them rich...
...They also see the irony of the U.S., because of the loss in Vietnam, redressing the balance by developing its rapport with China...
...But his story of the collision of "Big Guy Science," big business, and public policy makes a worthy companion piece to The Double Helix...
...No one paid much attention to this son of a Shell Oil distributor when he was growing up in Bakersfield, California...
...Most famously, he told Reagan where to stand for the cameras...
...With Americans in the 1970s consuming less red meat, the supply of carcasses appeared to be diminishing, just as an aging U.S...
...Early investors in these businesses have become rich and biotech has replaced computers as the glamour industry of Wall Street...
...The investigations into Deaver's lobbying and the perjury conviction that followed all resulted from his inability to make a clean break with the Reagan White House...
...is never acquired again ." He committed suicide in 1978...
...He finds out from a reporter who calls looking for a quote...
...Before Gorbachev, Soviet officialdom found it difficult to entertain any notion about diverging trends within the Soviet alliance and was particularly resistant to the idea that nationalism plays any role within the East bloc...
...He recreates the frenetic chaos of people piled on people—living anywhere and everywhere and commuting from as far away as Philadelphia— and contrasts that with people sitting on their hands with nothing to do because planning was so poor...
...At last the filmmakers had stumbled onto an insight about Washington's bureaucratic culture: the intimacy between a powerful official and his special assistant is a kind of illicit romance...
...You can almost hear him talking as he writes this reminiscence and reflection...
...The rivalry between the three teams soon became the dominating influence on their work...
...He went to parties with famous and powerful people like William Styron and Katharine Graham...
...An early bout with kidney disease meant he could never gain acceptance as an athlete...
...Rather than sanctifying its victims, Levi writes, Nazism degraded them...
...Primo Levi...
...This latter-day Mata Hari also stole the Vichy French navy's code, handing it out a window of the French embassy to be copied...
...I'm the only guy who can help this man in this way...
...Faith in humanity...
...To survive, one had to live as an animal in a state of nature...
...To which Lynch adds: "As long as Soviet analysis...
...Brinkley's criteria for what to serve up are ruthless...
...In spite of Lenin's view that in a socialist order peace would prevail, the greatest threat to the security of the Soviet Union may turn out to be not the United States but its socialist neighbor—and Russia's historical enemy—China...
...Katharine Graham...
...Every year authorities make predictions that turn out to be wrong, forecasting shortages of some commodity—oil, hospital beds, American-born field goal kickers—that correct themselves...
...When Reagan left Sacramento, Deaver followed him to Los Angeles and set up a public relations firm near Reagan's house...
...It remains to be seen whether glasnost will mean that Soviet social scientists will earn some respect in the West as well...
...Nevertheless, the insulin scare attracted a formidable array of scientific talent...
...But while Soviet social scientists are somewhat freer to look at relations with the capitalist nations, relations among the socialist nations are still corsetted...
...it selects certain events and certain people...
...He wrote out of an absolute need to tell about Auschwitz, and his lucid and unpretentious prose reflects the simple drive of the storyteller...
...Instead, he kept house...
...The shame Levi felt from his failure to maintain solidarity with other Jews grew more acute after his liberation from Auschwitz...
...The manager of the new Statler Hotel avoided their grasp by never announcing its opening and filling its rooms with important guests who couldn't be moved...
...Brinkley drops in stunning stories along the way...
...Getting rich was the only way he knew to get it back...
...The collaborators ranged from the lowranking functionaries to the "Kapos," the chiefs of the labor squads who beat the prisoners anc' participated in their selections for the gas chambers...
...After Genetech holds a press conference to announce synthesis of the insulin gene, the story is frontpage news everywhere...
...The haphazard nature of how scientific progress is made in America is summed up when Walter Gilbert wins the 1980 Nobel Prize for Chemistry...
...A secular Jew, he is proud to have overcome the impulse to pray for divine intervention on the threshold of the gas chamber...
...They competed against a team of scientists at the University of California, and a Harvard team led by Walter Gilbert, a former physicist who switched to molecular chemistry at the urging of Watson himself...
...population was beginning to produce more insulin-dependent diabetics...
...At the end of his long romance with Ronald Reagan, Deaver had only a dim sense of what he believed in and a dimmer sense of who he was...
...Anyone who has been tortured remains tortured...," Amery says...
...But one wonders whether the evenings with the Buckleys and the Reagans compensated for the damage to Deaver's sense of self...
...Levi speaks frequently about the incidence of suicide among the survivors following their liberation...
...Men died not despite their valor but because of it," Levi writes...
...When Reagan left Los Angeles, Deaver followed him to Washington and unpacked his bags beside the Oval Office...
...Hall credits the Genetech team, eventual winners of the race, with adroit use of press coverage to keep the company's anxious investors on board...
...Several developments have made it necessary for Soviet leaders to accept what their social scientists have been hinting at for some time: ?In the nuclear age, the capitalist countries are not going to war with each other, and if they did, it would be hazardous to the health of any socialist onlookers...
...People forget about the prediction, the experts move on to some new crisis, and nothing much comes of it...
...He begins with the pancreases of slaughtered cows and pigs from which insulin is produced...
...He recalls the frightening unpreparedness and, indeed, unwillingness of industry and even the armed forces to get ready for war...
...Idealism can't be discounted...
...Lynch's study ends just as the Gorbachev era gets underway, but in recent months it has become obvious that the Soviet foreign policy apparatus is undergoing a major overhaul...
...Along with these rarefied pleasures came the indignities of unrequited love...
...Hardly anyone in the press, however, bothered to ask a rather fundamental question," Hall writes...
...Since the start of Gorbachev's reign, upwards of 75 ambassadors have been replaced, presumably by counterparts more attuned to fresher winds...
...Stephen Hall, a freelance science writer, describes in this fine book how a few mistakes, a lot of fear, and plenty of capital produced America's gene-splicing industry...
...This all came about because the experts were wrong about insulin...
...History may portray the prisoners as martyrs, but Levi believes they were far from innocent...
...Timothy Noah The Drowned and the Saved...
...He evokes the snobbish, selfsatisfied, and segregated town that Washington was, despite the arrival of such New Deal mavericks as Leon Henderson, the brilliant price administrator, who was dimly regarded both by the social establishment and by Congress...
...Most of these critics are less offended by the morality of peddling influence than by the garish way Deaver cashed in—for example, posing, car phone in hand, for a Time magazine cover headlined, "Who Is This Man Calling...
...It greatly eased our North Africa landings...
...As usual, Hollywood depicted Washington as more glamorous and conventionally evil than it really is, especially when it comes to sex...
...They were drawn by the chance to do what they called "Big Guy Science"—to tackle the handful of problems whose solutions held promise of a Nobel Prize...
...Deaver readily concedes he had little interest in the substance of government...
...That assessment would appear to be a model of restraint...
...Before a debate with Jimmy Carter, he allowed Reagan one glass of wine to provide "a little color for his cheeks...
...Deaver acquired a taste for Heitz Chardonnay...
...And when he finally left the Reagan administration to set up a Washington lobbying firm, he couldn't bring himself to turn in his White House pass...
...The superpower relationship remains at the core of world politics, but it is greatly modified by the polycentrism that has emerged...
...Only the interesting and the readable make his cut...
...The armed forces seized anything they wanted— including Mount Vernon College while the girls were home for Christmas...
...Yet Levi's story, one of shame and anguish, offered no chance of full recovery...
...So they cloaked—and were allowed to cloak—their heresies under the new science of "creative Leninism!' Allen Lynch, a fellow of the Institute for East-West Security Studies, assesses the mixed success of the newer approach...
...The race became bicoastal...
...Levi maintains that the need to survive—for collaboration was the prisoner's only hope—makes it difficult to judge guilt or innocence by conventional standards...
...the official notification from Stockholm gets lost in transit and doesn't arrive until weeks later...
...He captures the electricity of the outbreak of war...
...He paints a mesmerizing portrait of Franklin Roosevelt as he maneuvered to help the Allies, invented Lend Lease, and yet refused to put an individual in charge and tried to resolve hopeless problems by layering one unworkable organization on top of another...
...David Brinkley...
...He named his children Amanda and Blair...
...Hispostwar experience, like that of other survivors, refutes the myth that liberation brings "quiet after the storm ." Levi leaves no doubt that he finds the Nazis guilty for their crimes...
...You sort of wonder where he was and what he was doing...
...The reference to Amery is haunting, for Levi threw himself into the well of the four-story spiral staircase in his apartment building last April...
...Of course, all of us who were in Washington during this time will have some aspect of the story that we wish Brinkley had devoted more attention to...
...When his wife told him his dependence on Ronald Reagan was too great, he would answer: "You don't understand...
...He never appears or intrudes between reader and story...
...What spawned this romance...
...After a brief, unhappy stint as an IBM sales rep, Deaver drifted into the world of Republican state politics...
...Like Honda, Marx and Lenin made it: simple: in the competition to sell their goods abroad, the capitalist nations would eventually go to war and destroy each other, and the workers of the world would rise up and unite in a glorious socialist brotherhood...
...Hall occasionally lapses into purple prose in his descriptions of the scientists, and his scene-switching among the three teams sometimes leave the reader bewildered...
...Last year the movie No Way Out told the story of a secretary of defense who murders his mistress and then, through a variety of sinister strategems, covers it up...
...A photograph in this book of Deaver playing the piano at a state occasion is captioned, "They all laughed...
...It should be even better for those who are too young to remember...
...As Deaver puts it, "My exposure to the Reagans did give me an appreciation for good things, a fine painting, the best piano...
...He sees the interesting, the remarkable, the ironic, the outrageous, the decent, the nasty—and the humor of it all...
...Privately, Soviet social scientists conceded that all was not beer and skittles within the bloc...
...The defense secretary's special assistant, an obsessive toady, turned out (it was hinted) to be in love with the boss...
...But Reagan was also Deaver's Prince Charming, sweeping him off his feet with the promise of a more glamorous life...
...Deaver identified so thoroughly with the boss that when Reagan got mad and threw his keys at him, hitting him in the chest, all Deaver could think was, "The governor had a good arm and I admired him for it ." Respectable Washington has criticized Deaver's trading White House influence for money...
...But that doesn't mean that his book isn't a wonderful read for those of us who lived through it...
...Leonard Reed Washington Goes to War...
...Its author is the David Brinkley we have all come to know for his Sunday morning television show and, before that, as one-half of the most famous news team in broadcasting history...
...Like Othello, Deaver loved not wisely but too well...
...She extracted from the Poles the drawings, documents, and other information that helped the British steal a code machine and read the German code for the rest of the war...
...The perceived shortage triggered a race to mass-produce human insulin by synthesizing a human insulin gene...
...There he met a dashing governor named Ronald Reagan...
...This is the story of a slow southern town that "grew almost overnight into a crowded, harried, almost frantic metropolis struggling desperately to assume the mantle of global power...
...The whole thing was rubbish...
...Among all the reporters who described the work, only a handful of publications—among them Nature, Medical World News, and the Los Angeles Times—raised this important point...
...Atlantic Monthly Press, $19.95...
...He looked around and saw a corrupt but socially sanctioned way to cash in on his years of sacrifice...
...For the next 20 years, Deaver never departed Reagan's side...
...And yet it is—as Brinkley typically is—absolutely and completely impersonal...
...In one instance, however, there were lasting and remarkable consequences from a mistaken forecast made by a consensus of experts in the mid-1970s: the world's diabetic population, they said, would soon face a shortage of insulin...
...Today, biotech companies employ thousands of people for work that has nothing to do with insulin—making drugs for heart attack victims and growth hormones and performing AIDS research...
...He doesn't feel he has to tell you everything...
...After Deaver repeated to Reagan bons mots exchanged between Lillian Hellman and Joe Alsop, the boss slapped him down by reminding him that Hellman "still thinks Joe Stalin is great ." And when Deaver boasted to William E Buckley that he'd just bought a top-of-the-like Busendorfer piano, Buckley told him, "I have two...
...The prediction was so dramatic it spawned an entire industry—biotechnology...
...Constant theft forced the prisoners to cling to their meager possessions at all times...
...All in all, it's a globe on which there is no easy way for the Soviets to extend their influence...
...There never was a shortage of pig pancreases, and there never will be," a pharmaceutical executive tells Hall...
...The bureaucratic mishap that started the race probably stemmed from an official who prepared projections for the Food and Drug Administration, who based his data on a mistake in an Eli Lilly training brochure that confused kilograms with pounds...
...Scholars have noted that what has been absent from the history of Marxist thought is a credible portrayal of the power of nationalism among all classes...
...Unselfish prisoners, those who assumed the burdens of the weak or shared their rations with the starving, were among the first to die...
...But in their journals they droned on about "nonantagonistic contradictione= which is how the dispute with the Chinese Communist Party was politely described...
...David Graulich The Soviet Study of International Relations...
...One cannot know the exact reason for his apparent suicide, but the death is a tragic if logical conclusion to his life...
...Knopf, $18.95...
...He is less certain about Jews who collaborated with the Nazis...
...And even in the Third World, Soviet influence has brought questionable results, with an increasing awareness in Third World countries of the limitations of the Soviet model...
...The press, meanwhile, fell in love with the biotech story...
...Jackie Onassis told him he looked like a young Fred Astaire...
...Charles Montgomery Invisible Frontiers: The Race to Synthesize a Human Gene...
...Still, their technological breakthroughs found ready application in the burgeoning gene-splicing industry...
...Gorbachev has repeatedly called for Soviet academics and scientists to join in foreign policy deliberations— which one would hope is an invitation to them to put reality above orthodoxy...
...Besides Miss Thorpe, the only other woman in this male chauvinistic world who was not a hostess, wife, or maid was the brilliant, erratic, tyrannical and Roosevelthating Cissy Patterson, owner of the Washington Times Herald...
...Deaver seems genuinely to believe in the goodness of Ronald Reagan...
...JudeoChristian culture takes comfort in believing that men who suffer unjustly, enduring privation and physical torture, can retain their moral fortitude and even draw strength from it...
...The synthesized insulin, it turned out, had neither economic nor significant medical advantages over the pig variety...
...Washington Goes to War has a point of view...
...therefore, the idea of the inevitable triumph of socialism as a result of the "imperialists" self-destructing is nonsense...
...Cambridge University Press, $34.50...
...She is treated at great length, and deservedly so...
...Mike Deaver's is the classic Cinderella story...
...My favorite is the one of Amy Thorpe, a 1929 debutante who was recruited by the British as a spy...
...Summit, $17.95...
...Like his best friend and alter ego, Nancy Reagan, Deaver helped get Reagan to back off from hard-right positions...
...Did Genetech's insulin actually work...
...Deaver does seem more dense about ethics than most Washington influence-peddlers, and he lied to federal investigators about his lobbying...
...And so, dogma continues to cloud thought...
...With the death of Stalin, it became somewhat less dangerous to life and limb for Soviet social scientists to look around and write about how the world had changed since Marx and Lenin...
...the only reason his San Jose State fraternity accepted him was that they needed a piano player...
...And the answer was: they didn't know...
...He was just a bit greedier than most...
...including Prince Philip...
...However, the plot took an original twist...
...Stephen S. Hall...
...Allen Lynch...
...The shattering of this faith by the senseless violence of National Socialism is the theme of the book...
...In San Francisco, a University of California scientist named Herbert Boyer teamed up with a 28-year-old venture capitalist, Robert Swanson, who had become fascinated by DNA after reading The Double Helix, James Watson's account of research that led to his discovery, with Francis Crick, of the structure of DNA in 1953...
...He tells the story of Jean Amery, a respected French intellectual before the war whose life after liberation was a continual battle against humiliation and depression...
...The competition led to some superhuman efforts and one case of suspected laboratory sabotage...
...Bound by the straitjacket of dogma, Soviet analyses of international relations have not usually been taken seriously by western scholars...
...Boyer and Swanson each put up $500 to start a company that they considered calling Herb-Bob before settling on Genetech...
...Primo Levi, a survivor of Auschwitz, shows how this notion stopped at the door of the Nazi death camps...
...The lost morality of Auschwitz prevented Levi from believing in any form of divine providence...
Vol. 20 • April 1988 • No. 3
