LETTERS
LETTERS Kids today Jason DeParle's "The Case Against Kids" [July-August] combined the best and worst of Washington Monthly journalism. In an age of pervasive materialism, it is bracing to read...
...Feelgood, but he's probably incapable of properly serving a two-course meal—he'd likely start with dessert because it tastes good and leave the main course for some liberal democrats, if not the house cats...
...Paul ("any more than Paul wanted to be remembered as a fisherman") is way off the mark...
...The Reverend Blaxton is the special assistant to the mayor for religious affairs...
...Furthermore, it is possible that Mr...
...Peter, James, and John were the fishermen...
...Mrs...
...Gourley falsely quotes Mrs...
...But in the absence of real research, it's hard to escape the conclusion that we're just reading an author writing about himself ("thumbsucking," as we said during my time in journalism...
...Despite what this letter says, both were quoted accurately...
...Ben - Veniste...
...Still further, Gourley refers to the one meeting Robinson had with Palmer in Labat's office in September or early October 1984...
...Lowenstein John Rothchild ['Arbitrageurs Anonymous," JulyAugust] may be right that Louis Lowenstein would rather not be remembered as an acquisitions lawyer, but his analogy with St...
...GARRETT EPPS Chapel Hill, North Carolina I don't think I've ever seen a more blatantly mislabeled article than "The Case Against Kids ." The article made a good case against parents with misguided values, but virtually none against kids...
...Nolan as having "told Specter that he faced a potentially serious embarrassment...
...ARTHUR BRYANT Washington, D.C...
...There was also an outright mistake in the article, though it had nothing to do with Nolan or Robinson...
...As DeParle writes, he is childless...
...Gourley erroneously quotes Robinson as describing the procedures by which Dr...
...TED RUSHTON Phoenix, Arizona Dr...
...REGINALD G. BLAXTON Washington, D.C...
...HUBERT L. ROBINSON Upper Marlboro, Maryland The author replies: Readers should reexamine the article to see if these objections matter...
...Today's parents do sometimes succumb to a kind of financial panic that seems, from the outside, unwarranted, and this panic does sometimes permit them to rationalize their own surrender to the grab-and-get eighties zeitgeist...
...The error was mine...
...Robinson, "an old friend . ." Gourley obviously intended to leave this remark open for implications of cronyism...
...In the same paragraph, he quotes Nolan as saying, "Palmer saw all these white faces and got scared ." She never made that statement, and the Washington Correction Foundation is a totally interracial body...
...That came from others...
...With a cavalier disregard for facts, Gourley fictionalizes another Robinson quotation: "They [Labat and Palmeri refused to take my advice, so I passed my information on to Richard [Ben-Veniste] ." Even in the Washington Monthly piece, it is quite clear that Robinson was Ben-Veniste's liaison...
...He emphatically denies making such a statement...
...THOMAS P. SENTER Anchorage, Alaska Behind bars We write to take exception to erroneous quotes attributed to us by Jay Gourley ["The Specter Initiative," JulyAugust...
...Margaret Labat was chosen for her position...
...Gourley refers to our joint letter of March 21, 1988, wherein he states that Robinson and Nolan "did not specifically disavow any of the statements quoted in this article...
...In fact, it was only $300 a week at its highest...
...I'll grant him one point: the Perry national program can't be expected to meet its rigorous implementation standards...
...The relationship was professional...
...As far as what was attributed to Nolan and Robinson, the same information is publicly available from other sources and is uncontested so far as I know...
...BRUCE 0. BOSTON Reston, Virginia The author replies: I better get off the ticker tape and back to the Bible...
...It was not Robinson's reponsibility to advise officials of the D.C...
...King to you I read Bill McKibben's breezy and bizarre review [June], and I'm still trying to figure out whether the review was meant as a parody of the headline, "Why Journalists Can't Write About Religion ." McKibben, for example, takes issue with the invocation of Reinhold Niebuhr and Walter Rauschenbusch as sources of Martin Luther King's social thought, simplifying King's understanding to the theological notion "that we are all God's children" And yet we know from his popular apologetic, Letter from Birmingham City Jail, that King, who had two advanced degrees in theology, also had a keen intellectual appreciation of both Niebuhr's and Rauschenbusch's social thought...
...To the contrary, we disavowed the quotes...
...Only one objection is legitimate...
...One authority estimates that going to 60 percent COLAs would save $150 billion per year by the turn of the century, which would comfortably cover the projected $129 billion yearly cost of nursing home care at that point in time...
...In this sense he's much like Jimmy Carter...
...While we address specific quotes, this does not imply our endorsement of the remainder of the article...
...Paul was a tentmaker...
...Gourley's description of the Washington Correction Foundation as "a group of mostly white do-gooders" is of particular concern...
...I regret the ambiguity...
...Nolan has never had the privilege of meeting Senator Specter, much less had a conversation with him...
...But it doesn't have to...
...I believe, therefore, that McKibben's diatribe tells far more about his own religious and theological biases than perhaps he intended...
...Palmer said, "The man and those people...
...Robinson was unaware of Dr...
...I can see it now: Losing Playground, the study of Harold Jr...
...Nolan did not tell me she passed information directly to Specter...
...What's amazing is how little it really takes to make some kind of difference in the lives of poor children...
...and Young Phyllis, two second-graders who have scammed their way into four years of preschool because it's just more fun than elementary school . . . . JOAN WALSH Oakland, California The case against Babbitt Your unabashed enthusiasm for Bruce Babbitt ["The Billy Pulpit," July-August] fails to understand the fatal flaw in his abilities...
...They don't...
...But this panic has economic and political roots...
...What if nothing happens to arrest the slide of our public schools or the tuition inflation in higher education...
...Reagan is almost the exact opposite: he's the ultimate pacifier and Dr...
...Gourley falsely quotes Nolan with respect to teacher qualifications and inmates' reading levels...
...Studies have found that Head Start children, like the Perry graduates, have lower rates of grade retention, special education placements, and dropping out than their peers who didn't have a Head Start experience...
...The same mechanism could also be used to help pay for affordable long term care insurance to provide good home health services and decent nursing home care...
...When Dr...
...MARGARET CARROLL NOLAN Washington, D.C...
...Logically, information gathered and data collected by him would have been submitted directly to Mr...
...What if I become disabled or die...
...In the absence of real research—interviews with more than a few carefully selected parents, reading beyond one out-of-date study, social observation based on something besides network TV—he cannot possibly hope to understand the pressures on contemporary parents...
...He's brilliant at identifying and understanding problems but inept at implementing solutions...
...Losing playground Those of us trying to expand early childhood education programs for poor children had to be a little flattered by Charles Murray's cynical assessment of our work ["My Favorite Poverty Program," June...
...Department of Corrections...
...Based on his Arizona experiences as attorney general and governor, he'd probably be a good editor...
...The quote, "The whites are out to get us," is erroneous...
...In the lonely hours of the night, parents ask themselves frightening questions that have nothing to do with Mercedes SLs or Benetton: Where can I find decent child care...
...Labat took over in 1984, Mr...
...I wrote that Labat got supplemental pay that grew to $600 per week...
...What if my child is mentally or physically disabled...
...the advisory committee was formed for that exact purpose...
...He'd be tough, demanding, precise, and analytical . . . but you couldn't rely on him to organize as much as a coffee break, let alone anything more complicated...
...In an age of pervasive materialism, it is bracing to read a publication that consistently applies a moral test to public and private life...
...The unCOLA I am writing to praise Matthew Cooper's timely article, "The Saturday Night Massacre" [June], which chronicled the swift dismissal of congressional aide Phillip Longman for courageously calling the Social Security program a "scandal" on CBS's "West 57th Street" because it "pays out most of its benefits to people who are middle class...
...Nolan was never involved in any evaluation of teachers and had little, if any, knowledge of their qualifications...
...which in the black vernacular, translates to "whites" This particular point was very carefully explained to Gourley...
...Two decades of research have shown that a wide roster of programs can improve the school performance and social expectations of low-income children...
...And if it doesn't work, we trust that Murray will let us know...
...Levitt (the assertive AARP activist featured on the CBS program along with Phillip Longman) and the more well-off of his extensive constituency might even be willing to forego a portion of their automatic 100 percent cost-of-living adjustments (COLAs) if they knew the money saved would benefit the elderly directly...
...Early childhood education shouldn't be oversold as an answer to poverty, but it has to be part of any antipoverty agenda...
...One way to provide both the funding to aid impoverished seniors and also help correct the current inequities of Social Security is to tax as ordinary income the more comfortable elderly's benefits which are in excess of their contributions...
...Gourley states that Richard Ben-Veniste hired Mr...
...Labat or the Initiative...
...We must be making progress if Murray feels our efforts are worth criticizing...
Vol. 20 • October 1988 • No. 9
