TILTING AT WINDMILLS

...One factor is university presidents who are increasingly demanding that they be surrounded with the trappings we have previously associated with monarchs...

...Then comes Mark Uhlig, who, writing about the same dispute, reported on May 26: "The telephones at the home and the office of the president of the Newspaper and Mail Deliverers' Union of New York and Vicinity, Jerry Cronin, were not answered or were busy late yesterday...

...The Pentagon is the supreme example...

...Among its alumni who have written books that are seriously critical of former colleagues are T. H. Bell, Martin Anderson, Anne Burford, Larry Speakes, Michael Deaver, Donald Regan, Alexander Haig, and David Stockman...

...By devoting so much of its budget to ship construction, the Navy has allocated insufficient funds for aircraft...

...For the American government to be encouraging this promotion of addiction among the young seems nothing short of criminal...

...One that I think we could make much better use of is depriving the young of driver's licenses for reckless or drunken driving...

...Investigators have uncovered widespread abuses...including theft, loss of thousands of dollars in cash and expenditures such as liquor bills as high as $1,197 a month...

...My question is why...

...I remember when I worked for the Peace Corps in the sixties, I would look at the people around me and feel proud to be in their number...

...To an astonishing degree, modern social life has come to center on the work place...

...Envoy's Bulletproof Car Comes Under Fire in Beirut ." In the last sentence of the story, the reader discovers that the Lebanese had a legitimate reason for being agitated: "The police said the ambassador, John Kelly, was traveling through East Beirut, when his bodyguards fired in the air to clear a way through dense traffic, beginning the exchange of gunfire...

...In case you think that the excerpt from "Yes, Prime Minister" that appears in this issue must be a fiction that could never happen in real life, consider these excerpts from a UPI story by Neil Roland: "WASHINGTON — Army spy units with the sanction of the service's top generals, padded their budget by $170 million in the early 1980s by improperly dipping into funds to which they were barred access...

...I'm talking about those custodians of New York's public schools whom I mentioned a few months back who were being paid as much as $70,000 a year and then being paid $50 extra each time the school building was opened, whether for a day of school, a PTA meeting, or a basketball game...

...Forty of these junkets have been taxpayer subsidized...

...Let them live in peace— apart...

...Let me hasten to add that the solution to this mess is not to build more planes but to cancel the two carriers...

...An example of such a headquarters is the United States Forces Caribbean Command in Key West, Florida...

...There used to be a tradition of frugality among conservatives—remember H.R...

...The highly mobile nature of American life that has cut most of us off from our roots means that, especially in large cities, the tie that binds is the workplace, where friendships are formed and around which social life is centered...

...Incredibly, it has produced two winners of our Incurious Management Lackey Award...

...I wore it every day, because, although I was 19 at the time, I looked 15 and wanted to prove to the girls that I was at least old enough to be a veteran...

...And some rich people are stupid and have become rich only because of good luck or because they are not virtuous...

...This is insane...

...Ponder this one dismaying fact: the Chicago public schools require 3,000 administrators to oversee 400,000 students...

...It won't have enough planes to put on them...

...There are some threats that society can make that seem far more likely than the threat of jail to deter undesirable behavior...

...Greek and Turkish leaders from Cyprus are meeting in Geneva this summer to discuss reunification...

...As a result, in Taiwan, for example, sales of American cigarettes rose from $4.4 million in 1986 to $119 million last year...

...And they still don't have to mop the cafeterias more than once a week...

...I know this will offend Americans with their automatic prejudice in favor of union that came out of the misery of the Civil War, but there are some hatreds in this world that are much worse than those that have divided us, hatreds that are so strong that separation is the best way to keep peace...

...A bill now before the California legislature would deny licenses to teenagers who have bad records in school...

...What then are we to make of the Reagan administration...

...But guess what...

...Chicago parochial schools require 32 administrators for 200,000 students...

...There is substantial evidence that when the Greeks and Turks intermingled on Cyprus, they didn't embrace...

...Waste in public primary and secondary school administration is even worse than it is in higher education...

...It was established in response to the reports of a new Soviet brigade in Cuba...

...The Army now is holding a mid-level bursar principally responsible for the loss of funds and has ordered him to pay the government about $80,000...

...I would like to think that only the most arrogant Prussian could possibly conclude that anyone could drive safely at 120 miles per hour on a real highway with real traffic...

...Marsh approved the operations, and Longhofer used the secretary's assent as license to buy the two aircraft on the commercial market...

...The tremendous effort that i s made to save monsters like the one who committed this crime from the death penalty could be far more wisely devoted to improving the police so that the innocent will be protected from such horrors and the guilty apprehended and convicted...

...Under their new contract, the custodians are given a $5,900 raise in return for surrendering their opening fees...

...They hire young, attractive 19-year-old girls wearing short skirts to give out cigarettes free in nightclubs...

...One example is the robber who, when a New York subway clerk refused to give him money, poured flammable liquid into her booth and ignited it...

...And Robert Morgenthau, the United States attorney in New York, in a move that could end the drug problem in Manhattan overnight, has threatened to evict offenders from their apartments...

...Pentagon employees and those of other government agencies don't have enough contact with the rest of the country...

...This isolation makes them confuse the national interest with their own bureaucracy...

...What did it consist of...

...The problem is the slot solidification syndrome that I have noted in this column before...

...It means that once the headquarters are established and various staff jobs are created, people begin to look forward to those assignments so that pressure grows for the headquarters, and the jobs that go with them, to endure even though the need no longer exists...

...Speaking of the military, the Navy is proceeding with its plan to build two new aircraft carriers, bringing the total to 15...

...But they still have to open the schools only one night a week...

...It turned out that the brigade was fictitious, but the headquarters live on because everyone wants a tour of duty in Key West...

...It was a World War II discharge button...

...Why, the curious might ask, did each reporter pursue only one union source and then only "late yesterday" or "last night...

...But the expense account mentality seems to have destroyed it...

...Speaking of conservatives, one thing about them that drives me to distraction is their tendency to assume that rich people are smart and virtuous and that the poor are stupid and shiftless...

...I recently saw a television commercial for the "S" class Mercedes that praised the car's ability to go 120 miles an hour...

...But I have known the sweetest and most reasonable Greeks to froth at the mouth when one even hints at the possibility of any virtue in the Turks, and I have seen the sweetest and most reasonable Turks react the same way to similar hints about the Greeks...

...The only parts of her body that weren't burned were her armpits, and the soles of her feet...

...There is so much that is good about this that one dislikes pointing out the downside, but it is real and it is a problem for the rest of us...

...He has also managed three trips to London and five to Paris...

...Everyone was responsible, yet no one was responsible—giving top officials deniability' " One episode in the story provides a classic illustration of how elected officials like Hacker in the "Yes, Prime Minister" story or cabinet or subcabinet members, like Army Secretary John Marsh, are duped by senior civil servants and high military officers: "In one case, [Col...

...So the reform finally happened...

...So did an aroused public...

...People have been asking me what was stuck in my lapel in the photograph that appeared on our cover last month...

...Gross, the parsimonious curmudgeon from Iowa—at least insofar as public funds were concerned...

...Anyone who has been in the service knows that the word "headquarters" is synonymous with long lunches and leaving early Friday, so that the true figure is probably three or four times greater...

...It's immoral ." That understates the case...

...To the average New Yorker, the prospect of losing a good apartment is worse than the prospect of losing a good job, probably ranking just below losing a child or a spouse, although the trade-off between some spouses and the apartment might elicit the same response the robber got when he said to Jack Benny, "Your money or your life...

...The courtyard in the center of the Pentagon on a sunny day is, according to one official, "like a town square in Mexico...

...James] Longhofer, the head of the special operations division, sought Marsh's approval for a surveillance operation over Central America to be conducted with two aircraft...

...The first is Robert D. McFadden, who in his May 20 account of a limes dispute with its unions was able to get a full statement of the owner's side but was somehow unable to locate a union spokesman, whom he said "could not be reached by telephone for comment last night at his office or home...

...They were already overpaid—Japanese executives receive far less—and productivity gains could have justified no more than a handful of the raises...

...Excessive compensation for executives only inspires similar greed among union members, who, as unemployment declines and their muscle returns, will almost certainly demand more of the booty for themselves and thus inspire another round of the price increases that made us uncompetitive in the seventies...

...Speaking of criminal behavior, I hope that some great legal mind will come up with a way to make corporate greed an indictable offense...

...accounting records were routinely shredded with the approval of General John Vessey....Vessey said that the documents had been destroyed to preserve the operations' secrecy, not to conceal the transfer of funds...

...He has been to Nassau, Geneva, Berlin, Tokyo, and that hot-bed of antitrust activity, Acapulco...

...Another challenge to that great legal mind is to figure out how to indict the auto company that builds cars that can go way too fast and the advertising agency that sells them on the basis of their speed...

...A Taiwanese official recently complained to a reporter: "Younger people are smoking a lot because of American ads...

...I am not an advocate of the death penalty, but there are a few cases for which I can see how reasonable men could think it justified and would be appalled at civil liberties lawyers spending thousands of hours trying to save clearly guilty defendants...

...Isn't the centuries-old hatred between them beyond any realistic prospect of healing...

...Reform seemed inevitable...

...In Washington, the government agency is usually that place...

...The truth is that some poor people are poor precisely because they are virtuous...

...Mutual respect among those who work for it is one of the characteristics of a good organization...

...They appeared to do little else besides turning the key as school buildings deteriorated and became filthier every day...

...It's very difficult for young boys to resist, and then it becomes a habit...

...It was a classic bureaucracy at work,' one official said...

...The Federal Trade Commission deals almost entirely with domestic regulation issues, such as unfair competition or monopolistic practices, yet in the past two years its chairman, Daniel Oliver, a conservative Republican, has spent 95 days traveling abroad...

...All the singles and divorcees are out there eyeing one another as they try to line up a happy hour date...

...The New York Times is making a clean sweep of our honors this month...

...So when the sirens sound general quarters, summoning the crew to their battle stations, those great elevators will rise to the flight deck—empty...

...Seven thousand three hundred jobs can be eliminated from military headquarters around the world, according to a study commissioned by Frank Carlucci...

...But the ad was produced in America and shown on American television For parents wondering why college tuition bills keep rising so much above the inflation rate, I have long urged that they take a good look at the costs of academic administration...

...The New York limes got on the case...

...Charles Peters...

...Last year the compensation of this country's 800 top chief executive officers increased by 27 percent over 1986...

...However, Longhofer's memo omitted the fact that the Army did not have the planes...

...Aren't the two communities better off apart...

...Some others have simply had bad luck...

...Of the many ways Asian nations screw us on trade, the American government seems to have striven most valiantly to remove the barriers to American cigarette exports...

...He has visited Australia, New Zealand, Belgium, and Italy...

...While there are some terrible bigots in our midst, the sweetest and most reasonable of American blacks and whites do not hate one another...

...For example, the new mansion of the president of the University of Colorado is costing $1.5 million...

...There are, as a recent article by Bernard Trainor in The New York Times pointed out, clubs for sailing, skiing, hiking, bowling—even spelunking—as well as computer user groups and Department of Defense employees' travel tours...

...The result is that the civil servant in the Bureau of Mines thinks more about the welfare of his fellow bureaucrats than he does about the welfare of the coal miners, and the Pentagon GS-15 worries more about increasing the defense budget than about reducing the size of the deficit that his fellow citizens are going to have to pay off...

...Instead, they pulled out their guns and started shooting...

...Following a legal review last June, the Army decided not to act against the seven senior officials [who were involved] . . . .However the Army has pursued a variety of actions against more than 500 lower-level officials...