Political Booknotes
POLITICAL BOOKNOTES The World We Created at Hamilton High. Gerald Grant. Harvard University Press, $24.95. The education reform movement is settling into flabby middle age. Five years ago,...
...H. Ross Perot is a self-made man who never pretended to be anything else, but many of America's recently rich act as if they're ashamed of having succeeded on their own...
...Not elected to any office, most have hated the constant scrutiny and criticism...
...Suppose Ed Meese leaves office with a lot of dough, or Vance Hartke, or Paul Laxalt...
...The book is essentially an attack on the Ernest Hemingway heresy—the idea that the rich are different only because they have more money...
...Nearly half the credits required to graduate could be earned by taking electives that ranged from TV Production to How to Fix Your Bachelor Pad...
...They stuck to gracious entertaining for their men...
...Inside the Mafia, Pistone was assured that a resourceful man with his brains, talent, and tenacity could go far...
...Knopf, $19.95...
...Certainly the 1970s student-rights movement got out of control and stripped administrators of needed authority...
...Frances Cleveland and Grace Coolidge were notable exceptions to the advisory role...
...Nottingham's story carries the reader only halfway through Grant's book...
...But the reform movement's eagerness to shift power back to the schools makes me uneasy...
...The FBI and federal prosecutors discovered that through RICO—the Racketeer Influence and Corrupt Organizations Act—the mob could be wounded if not destroyed...
...Suddenly, what has been a crisp narrative turns vague, abstract, and filled with jargon like "value hierarchies," as Grant wrestles with the question of how to establish a positive "ethos" in schools like Nottingham...
...Norton, $35...
...Nevertheless, as Boller's book illustrates, the president's wife can exert more power on the president than many an elected official...
...Later, of course, he was named to the Court, which he'd wanted all along...
...From Peter Peterson on the respectable side to Ivan Boesky and Martin Siegel on the disreputable, people who've piled up money on Wall Street have used it to buy European art, English clothes, old Long Island houses, and other fixtures designed to make them seem born to privilege...
...Lafayette from the guillotine...
...today Shanker talks vaguely about giving teachers more freedom to experiment with computers and audio tapes...
...During his half-century reign, J. Edgar Hoover delighted in infiltrating leftist groups but banned undercover work against the Mafia, allowing its corruptions to flourish...
...even Mad Dog William Bennett is advocating it...
...They knew that wartime service could redeem people who otherwise would come across as pantywaists—think of George Bush...
...But the steady tone of outrage can grow wearying, especially since Simon never really allows for the progress of the past two years...
...Now, mainly through electronic eavesdropping by the FBI and the memoirs of Mafioso turncoats, relatives, and girlfriends, a number of illuminating portraits have emerged...
...The girl's hand is poised gently on his shoulder as she dances, stiffly and unsmiling...
...The idea that only Old Money is good tells people that they can't change— the only way to get the right accent, the right childhood friends, and the right prep-school background is to inherit them...
...Jean-Marie Simon...
...William McKinley chose literally not to leave the side of his wife, Ida, who had developed epilepsy after the death of their baby daughter...
...In a country of selfmade men, Aldrich says, no one can really respect the courtly old ways...
...Democracy requires that governments, both distant and local, never forfeit the right to "interfere" in our public schools...
...But Pistone, the ideal undercover agent, apparently saw no future for himself in the FBI bureaucracy...
...Still, reformers are right that the fate of our schools will ultimately be determined at ground level...
...Like others who think the problems of Guatemala have been created by the United Fruit Company 1ind the State Department alone, she does not seem interested in thinking seriously about the gradual changes that could benefit Guatamalans...
...Mary Lincoln's grief over her son Willie was matched by that of Jane Pierce, who watched her 12-year-old only son killed by the Inaugural train as it passed through Massachusetts...
...Fearful that 0-W students will fail the exit exam, school administrators now automatically enroll students who score poorly on basic skills tests into a rigorous, daily remediation course...
...James Fallows...
...The second power shift was the new freedom afforded Nottingham students...
...Until the Vietnam war, they were more obsessed than most middle-class Americans with the romance of a combat record...
...They include loyalty, service, and modesty, with the downside being raw anti-Semitism and other ugly traits...
...corporate investment of any Central American country, Guatemala never seems to attract much attention...
...Autonomy is the new vogue in education reform...
...So Nancy Reagan consults an astrologer...
...Obviously principals and teachers are primarily responsible for school reform...
...The anecdotes are telling: they portray presidential character, revealing behavior that ranges from extramarital dalliances to extraordinary devotion...
...Senate and then did favors for several special interests...
...Joseph D. Pistone, Richard Woodley...
...The latest comes not from a Mafia traitor but from an infiltrator, FBI agent Joseph D. Pistone...
...I live in fear of getting impaired," says the superintendent who oversees 0-W...
...Legislative victories in state capitals have given way to murky theorizing about how to improve education at the school level...
...Ellen, the first Mrs...
...A weaker generation of Mafiosi, faced with long sentences for racketeering or drug trafficking, proved vulnerable to providing information in exchange for a new life under the Witness Protection Program...
...This book is full of poignant stories that bring us into the early lives of presidents later toughened by war, politics, and age...
...And there is enough truth in the new theories that they can do so in good conscience...
...He apparently overrated the mob, viewing it as impregnable, and feared that undercover projects might backfire and tarnish the bureau's reputation for invincibility...
...Jefferson's tormented grief at the death of his wife was monumental...
...But for most families other than the Adamses of Massachusetts, the whole concept of an American aristocracy is peculiar...
...The result was racial tension that boiled over into violence...
...This is a perverse form of vanity— why should Americans pretend that they had inherited their position rather than having earned it...
...The infamous Newsweek ads showing George Will sipping tea in his study are powerful proof that old-money snobbery is far from dead...
...New American Library, $18.95...
...And long-forgotten personal tragedies thread through the history—Rachel Jackson was hounded to her death before her husband's inauguration by her vilification as an "adulteress " Her first husband, it seems, had not obtained a divorce, contrary to what Andrew Jackson had been told when he married her...
...Rushing in to block the way, one soldier swung down his wood baton and struck Garcia on the head...
...Pistone was in his late thirties when the undercover operation began...
...That, and that alone, is the basis of all the rumination about the burdens of upperclassness...
...Simon rightly points out that the violence continues...
...There are enough insights arid revealing anecdotes in this book to keep the reader going despite the meandering, often fuzzy tone...
...But Old Money status, the appearance of being upper class, seems much more important now than it was a generation ago...
...They revere their club lives and, above all, their prep schools...
...But the wives, on the whole, have been a brave, even heroic, bunch...
...In fact, Aldrich says, America's old rich are different in being repositories of certain values that can't survive elsewhere because they're inconvenient for non-aristocratic people who are worried about getting ahead...
...Organized by survivors of the disappeared, the GAM often drops in on events, bearing placards adorned with snapshots of men and boys abducted by the military...
...Less than 100 years ago, his great-grandfather was a Rhode Island politician who decided to sell out...
...But Grant understates the need for the state and even the federal government to keep an eye on things...
...Obviously an exotic bird in the FBI aviary, Pistone had the cultural background, sensitivity, and toughness to pose as a Mafioso candidate...
...The point was made: high-minded overtures notwithstanding, the wounds wrought by a grisly past still fester...
...GAM protests tend to tarnish the fine veneer of democratic reform that is Cerezo's firmest asset...
...Gerald Grant's book is a good place to start...
...Sure, Guatemala City made the news last August as the place where the five Central American presidents signed the Arias peace plan...
...The long separation from his wife and three teenage daughters generated unending difficulties and unhappiness, but the FBI made virtually no attempt to lighten his family's plight...
...Most of their time is devoted to endless scheming for a share of someone else's illicit plunder and bickering over advancement...
...Timothy Noah Donnie Brasco: My Undercover Life in the Mafia...
...Still, the book is important...
...Eliot Richardson is an orphan, a littleknown fact that makes his accomplishments all the more admirable...
...Presenting its grim, powerful message at a time when the initial success of the Arias peace plan has offered hope to those inclined to be hopeful, it has an effect on the reader analogous to that of Guatemala's most important human rights group, the Mutual Support Group, or GAM, as it is known...
...The original plan called for Pistone, using the fictitious name of Donnie Brasco, to work undercover for six months...
...Academically, Nottingham was a success...
...Were the schools' test scores to decline, the school district would risk being declared "impaired" by the state, giving the governor authority to fire the superintendent...
...They consciously center their lives on family ties (although he doesn't make the parallel, they sound about as familyconscious as Italian immigrants...
...yet for some reason he presents himself as a 20th-generation prep-school man...
...Between 1967 and 1974, the mean SAT score fell 60 points...
...Unlike the Hoover era, when the FBI favored agents with predominantly middle-class, white-collar backgrounds, the bureau began recruiting some street-oriented types...
...He also dug into the school's history...
...But he bemoans two power shifts...
...I suspect Grant would have been less critical of outside interference had he written his book about a school in a reform state like South Carolina...
...There is also a hey-wait-a-minute factor to this book...
...Nelson Aldrich...
...As Nottingham became a war zone, wealthy students fled to the suburbs and academic performance went into a tailspin...
...But education reformers mustn't forget that the gains their movement made in this decade were not the product of local schools but of faraway state capitals...
...Aldrich is persuasive in at least the first part of this argument: showing that Old Money families think of themselves as different...
...He infiltrated the Mafia by masquerading as a jewel thief...
...loyalty, service, and modesty seem on the defensive at all levels of American life...
...Nottingham desegregated in 1965 in order to qualify for newly available federal funds...
...In the mid-1970s, after Hoover's death, the FBI and the Justice Department finally launched offensives against the Mafia...
...The president broke protocol in order to sit beside his wife at state dinners, and adroitly whipped out his handkerchief or napkin to cover Mrs...
...Some of the 141 color photographs are lovely, such as the pictures of brightly patterned Indian textiles...
...After completing his testimony in cases connected to his undercover project, Pistone resigned...
...Maybe the patrician values have faded...
...The federal crackdown resulted in the first significant splintering of Omerta, the code of silence...
...A moment later the metal gates were closed and the conflict settled into a noisy standoff, but the violent act hung in the air—like one of Simon's photos...
...Nearly all the wives acted as sound: ing boards and behind-the-scenes advisors...
...But even though it has the largest population, the worst human rights record, and the most U.S...
...Is this going to leave us with future Meeses and Hartkes and Laxalts agonizing about the meaning of old wealth...
...Instead, he burrowed so deeply into a Bonnano crew in Brooklyn that the operation lasted five years...
...Until recently, insight into the Mafia was limited to the scraps that investigators, journalists, and scholars occasionally excavated...
...With all the coverage of Central America, not much has been heard of Guatemala...
...Finally, SAT scores started climbing again...
...He left office a rich man...
...Eventually, Grant gets around to his point: schools and teachers need greater autonomy...
...What heritage, in fact, was Aldrich born to...
...It wasn't until the reformminded 1980s that the school board toughened graduation requirements...
...Students performed at least two hours of homework a night, and nearly everyone went on to college...
...Soon after Cerezo concluded a proud, fiery opening speech, the National Police got into a scuffle with GAM members outside...
...He doesn't seem a bit resentful...
...Despite differences in the times, their ages, upbringing, and style, presidential wives have had much in common—so much, in fact, that historian Paul F. Boller Jr.'s book, a companion to his Presidential Anecdotes, somehow brings reassurance that the Republic will stand...
...In a recent Education Department report, he complained that "the principal enjoys little real management latitude...
...In the 1960s, outside, "impersonal" forces were required to end segregation in Syracuse schools...
...Others are grim...
...But it was Edith, the second Mrs...
...They are supercilious toward, but secretly afraid of, ambitious striving people, especially the Jewish ones...
...There are also shots of the mutilated bodies...
...Bess Truman bluepenciled Harry's speeches...
...Grant, a sociologist at Syracuse University, conducted research on one Syracuse high school over an eightyear period, eventually settling in fulltime to teach urban anthropology (and recruit students to conduct research for his book...
...Steve Kettmann Presidential Wives: An Anecdotal History...
...McKinley's face when he saw a seizure coming on...
...Moreover, Mary Todd Lincoln tried to reach her dead son Willie, via seance...
...One shows a soldier dancing with a girl in Nebaj, a town in the country's northern highlands where guerrilla activity and massacres of civilians have been heaviest...
...More than anything else, the trend probably reflects the need to reassure the education establishment...
...Paul F. Boller Jr...
...Sometimes at lunch they would speak in edit-talk: "The soup comma my dear comma is delicious semi colon Maggie is an excellent cook period No wonder exclamation you taught her period...
...But the price was racial segregation...
...When Nottingham High, the real name of Grant's "Hamilton High," opened in 1953, it served mostly upper-middle class whites...
...It took a pittance of FBI cash and the opening of a bar in Florida, which the crew hoped to use for gambling and loansharking, to trap supposedly suspicious Mafia leaders...
...This shift seems premature: legislative solutions have not been exhausted...
...As if speaking for the lot, Caroline Harrison wailed, "What have we ever done, that we should be held up to ridicule by newspapers, and the president so cruelly attacked and even his little helpless grandchildren made fu.n of for the country to laugh at...
...Wilson, who became her husband's surrogate in his official capacity while he recovered from a stroke...
...Aldrich presents the Old Money values as being, on balance, quite admirable...
...By 1985, scores were twothirds of the way out of the postdesegregation trough...
...Simon, a photojournalist and stringer for Time, has written an odd primer—a cross between a coffee table book of vivid pictures and a recitation of body counts...
...Selwyn Raab Guatemala: Eternal Spring, Eternal Tyranny...
...American society is still more entrepreneurial than any other, but the allure of Old Money snobbery is so strong that people often try to conceal the fact that they've risen on their own...
...Through incredible guile and unquestionable courage, Pistone manipulated his way deeper into the outer ring of several Mafia families than any previous lawenforcement agent...
...Oxford University Press, $19.95...
...For example, although most states have mandated competency tests for prospective teachers, only a handful have taken the additional step of testing teachers already inside the classroom...
...Martha Washington and Mary Lincoln accompanied their men to the battlefields, and Louisa Adams entered a French prison to save Mme...
...It's also more destructive to American values than it would be in most other societies...
...The faith that people can change their lives is the trait that makes American society most different from all others...
...GAM leader Nineth de Garcia led a knot of protesters toward the main gate, and the soldiers, caught off guard, panicked...
...POLITICAL BOOKNOTES The World We Created at Hamilton High...
...Pistone, with a blue-collar upbringing in Paterson, New 3ersey, was one of the limited new breed...
...They deserve to be more than footnotes to history...
...For the American Mafia, these are hard times...
...One was the increased leverage of outsiders over Nottingham...
...As witnessed by Pistone, daily life for the rank-and-file mobster is as dreary as toiling on an assembly line...
...Woodrow Wilson, proofread all her husband's writing...
...A key reason for Pistone's success was the crew captain's belief that Donnie Brasco was a potential big earner...
...Mary Lynn Korz Old Money...
...In 1984, South Carolina legislated an overall increase in teachers' salaries, merit pay, no-pass, no-play rules, alternative teacher certification, and a new exit exam that students must pass before graduation starting in 1990...
...Grant argues that fear of legal retribution left the school staff too timid to punish misbehaving students...
...So did Florence Harding, who was advised that her husband Warren "would never live to complete his term" as president...
...For example, two Supreme Court cases and a subsequent ACLU statement led the school board to subject discipline procedures to "grievance and courtroom-like review...
...Although not overtly critical of the FBI, Pistone hints that the bureau's periodic bungling and indecisiveness hampered him and may have even endangered his life...
...At a recent conference of the South Carolina branch of the National Education Association, I saw a speaker draw cheers from a roomful of disgruntled teachers by declaring, "Accountability is the darling word of the far right" Teachers unions are so weary of public scrutiny that education reformers now find it prudent to stroke them...
...During one cafeteria riot, even the principal suffered a fractured skull...
...And if education reform depends on the performance of individual schools, citizens and policymakers would be wise to start learning what makes them tick...
...But Grant wasn't satisfied to know the school as well as its teachers and students did...
...And there's no doubt that personality influences policy...
...What's less persuasive is Aldrich's wistful assumption that this old class has lost its allure...
...As for hostessing, however, none came close to the vivacious Dolly Madison, who lifted her "little husband" into society, served as First Lady for the widowed Jefferson (yes, there was Talk), and led Washington in fashion and entertaining until she died at 81...
...in the 1980s, these forces pushed schools to bolster curricula and make teachers accountable...
...Pistone's observations demystify the myths concocted by novelists and moviemakers about a benevolent, roguish side to the Mafia...
...We see the girl's face and the soldier's back, complete with a shiny black machine gun...
...In theory, autonomy is a good idea...
...am reminded, for example, of the fall 1986 meeting of the Organization of American States at Guatemala City's National Theater...
...Aldrich says he has spent much of his life reflecting on the psychological effects of having been born to an Old-Money family...
...And sometimes it seems to stand on the shoulders of the woman beside the president...
...The impact of these "impersonal" forces on OrangeburgWilkinson High School, where I recently spent some time, has been almost entirely favorable...
...And she includes a short but interesting interview with President Venicio Cerezo that contains his candid admission that the military controls the country and only lets him be head of state...
...Five years ago, enlightened education leaders like Albert Shanker were talking about career ladders and teacher competency tests...
...Helen Taft made her husband, the judge, turn down two appointments to the Supreme Court by Theodore Roosevelt because she thought he had a chance at the White House...
...He worked his way into the U.S...
...Grant clearly believes that, no matter how painful, integration was necessary and worthwhile...
Vol. 20 • June 1988 • No. 5
