POLITICAL BOOKNOTES
POLITICAL BOOKNOTES Public affairs books scheduled to be published this month. The Privatization Decision: Public Ends, Private Means. John Donahue. Basic Books, $22.95. For years the...
...They were perfectly capable of turning the same firepower on me as they used on my customers...
...Simon and Schuster, $24.95...
...Donahue's Kennedy School faith in respectable experts leaves him apparently unaware of bureaucratic forces within the Pentagon--military careers tied to the fate of tiny and expendable components—that needlessly complicate contracts...
...It was more than anyone else my age I knew made...
...to justify his role in the invasion of Lebanon in 1982...
...Ariel Sharon with David Chanoff...
...Here he is, for instance, on status at Salomon Brothers: "A new employee, once he reached the trading floor, was handed a pair of telephones...
...Sharon turned him down, a decision he now says he much regrets because he "failed to properly assess the potential this tragedy had to be used as a political cause celebre...
...In the beginning, television had been seen as a threat to box office revenues...
...Conservatives, business leaders, and other proponents, who never really have believed in government or the idea that bureaucracies can be reformed, can't be trusted...
...Such an attitude is not surprising in Protestant circles, where emphasis has always been placed on having direct, personal interaction with God...
...Weird, huh...
...This was Salomon Brothers, remember...
...Say it ain't so, Roone...
...Menachem," he told the prime minister after the commission report was announced, "it was you who handed me over to them...
...Clearly, Americans favor independence in their approach to religion...
...Suddenly there were millions to be made from "Mr...
...William Colby with James McCargar...
...Informed, experienced, fairminded, and minister of everything, Peres, according to Golan, is nevertheless unpopular with most Israelis, who "simply don't like him, [his] way of doing things, [his] drive to succeed at any price, and the fact that [he wants] so much to be liked...
...In 1983, Jim Abernathy, vice president in charge of Wall Street relations, spent over $500,000 of the network's money in a botched attempt to buy ABC chairman and founder Leonard Goldenson an honorary degree from Harvard for his 80th birthday...
...When I had a moment to reflect, I decided I wasn't so pleased...
...More of the same is no future at all...
...Let's guess: The Playboy mansion...
...Three out of four say they tend to rely on their own consciences rather than the teachings of the pope when they face difficult moral questions...
...This was no hostile junk-bond raid, the kind Ted Turner mounted against CBS...
...It appears, for instance, that Peres lent his office too willingly and unthoughtfully to the gang of con men, hustlers, charlatans, and "consultants" in the U.S...
...I was happy...
...The U.S...
...Then Goldenson got Warner Brothers to produce "Cheyenne" for ABC...
...Me: Can I help in any way...
...In his book, he alleges that ABC News President Roone Arledge "seemed to like giving male renditions of the song, `I'm Jist a Girl Who Cain't Say No.'" So "strong and indiscriminate" were certain executives' libidos that, according to Williams, "working at ABC...
...Macmillan, $19.95...
...Still, this high level of belief does not necessarily translate into vigorous religious practice: only four Americans in ten attend church or synagogue in a typical week, and only about two in ten believe that attendance at religious services is necessary for a person to be a good Christian or Jew...
...His is a story Williams tells well...
...Blood was needed from the political echelon, someone to bear the blame for what had happened...
...In the U.S., where government has never owned such ventures, privatization has come to refer largely to "contracting out": paying tax dollars to private companies, rather than government bureaucracies, to accomplish public tasks...
...Privatizing usually makes matters worse, however, when the public mandate for an endeavor is complicated, vague, or everchanging...
...As a writer, Lewis is the real thing, as he surely must have known even as he was selling bonds with a vengeance...
...Joseph Nocera Lost Victory...
...Part luck: the job he finally got, helping to reorganize a bankrupt Paramount Pictures, afforded a smart young attorney unimagined upward mobility, so much so that by the age of 32 he was president of Paramount's theater division...
...The failure led to our leaving behind thousands of Vietnamese that we had led to rely on us, actually kicking them away as they scrambled to board our departing planes and helicopters...
...Since 1970 the studios have owned all programs and leased them to the networks for two airings...
...they had the kind of cachet that caused business school graduates to kill for entry-level positions...
...A vast horny wasteland, an excuse for onthejob mating, and an oasis of promiscuity...
...The crash notwithstanding, this has all happened with scarcely the hint of a recession on the horizon...
...The best thing I could do was pretend to others at Salomon that I meant to screw the customer...
...Warner Books, $24.95...
...Whether you're in favor of more privatization or less, there's simply no getting around the need to reform government bureaucracies...
...Michael Lewis...
...For years the literature on privatization has been so dull or biased that it's been hard to make up one's mind about it...
...Seven in ten still believe in life after death...
...Ed" reruns...
...It is part pluck: Son of a Scottsdale, Pennsylvania department store owner, Goldenson graduated from Harvard Law School at the height of the Depression and had to wait six years before getting a chance to work in the one field that ever interested him—movies...
...his ability to remain detached suggests to me that the possibility of writing about his adventures on Wall Street was always in the back of his mind...
...he would transfer responsibility for designing and developing weapon systems from contractors to public servants...
...It's a country awash in turmoil and tension, confronted by religious and secular bigotry at home and abroad, disillusioned at world Jewry's failure to immigrate to Israel, mired in an intractable war with the Palestinians, still threatened by Syria and Iraq, surviving economically and militarily partly through American largess, isolated diplomatically everywhere...
...It was more than I had contributed to society...
...placed second behind Ireland in the category of belief in a personal God with 66 percent, but it was still way ahead of Norway (40 percent), Great Britain (31 percent), West Germany (24 percent), and Denmark and Sweden (19 percent each...
...He knows the corporate players well and captures the network's ebb and flow from also-ran to number one and back...
...One must always be conscious of the fact that survey results are directly related to how particular questions are asked...
...Most of the world understands privatization as meaning divesting governmentowned assets like steel mills and airlines...
...The eighties were, as much as any single thing, the age of investment banking...
...The Gipper's fondness for deregulation apparently stopped where his Hollywood friends' financial interests began...
...My employer loved me...
...These were the same people who had me blowing up customers with exploding AT&T bonds...
...Surveys also reveal that more than half of all Catholics believe that abortion should be legal in certain cases, although the church strongly condemns the practice...
...Junk-bond LBOs are defaulting, deals are going sour, Wall Street is finding profits rather more difficult to come by...
...I felt cheated, genuinely indignant...
...The show was a hit, ABC turned a profit, and the relationship between Hollywood studios and network television changed forever—or at least until next year...
...Matti Golan...
...While mainline Protestants (Methodists, Lutherans, Presbyterians, and Episcopalians) have long been "pro-choice" in moral decision-making, stressing the importance of following one's own conscience, rankandfile Roman Catholics are apparently now choosing to make up their own minds as well...
...Then the meeting ended...
...Another puzzling set of statistics has to do with Americans and their presidential preferences...
...He went on line almost immediately...
...make me look a fool, as if I had actually thought the customer was going to make money on the [bonds...
...By the next day Sharon recognized that there had been "more than a few gratuitous killings...
...Would you believe the ABC television network circa the late 1970s...
...That's when the 20-year-old financialinterest and syndication rules limiting network ownership of television programs expires...
...Trader: Get me a burger...
...Lewis says he quit because finally, "I lost the need to make huge sums of money...
...There are two dangers in reading this book: first, having your eyes glaze over from looking at so many numbers...
...Based upon these books neither Sharon nor Peres—nor the present incumbent, for that matter—can offer the Israeli people any possibilities for an improved future...
...where hoped-for results cannot be specified in advance without reams of contractual paper...
...they became the stars of the business magazines, photographed in soft focus, and generally portrayed as icons of the culture, not to mention New York society...
...He writes that he first learned of the murders when Israeli General Raful Eytan phoned to tell him the Phalangists "went too far...
...The apprenticeship of Michael M. Lewis began early one morning in 1985 when he stepped out onto the gigantic trading floor of one of Wall Street's most gigantic trading firms, the esteemed, prestigious house of Salomon Brothers...
...But he seems so concerned with some executives' sybaritic philosophy that he leaves important areas unexplored...
...As should be clear from the above, Lewis always managed to maintain at all times an admirable degree of detachment from the culture he was mired in, not an easy task when you're 25 years old and on top of the world, jamming bonds for fun and profit...
...I wish Donahue had elaborated on his finding that in privatization arrangements where companies and government agencies compete, government agencies lower their costs of doing business...
...The studios' chief lobbyist was, of course, President Reagan, who overruled Fowler...
...Rather than endlessly specifying inputs, military reformers have long called for simple contracts that state how weapons should perform...
...If Sharon frightens many Israelis, Peres has lost their respect...
...They even justified their own unconscionable fees (and bonuses) as a kind of ultimate vindication of their work: If the market paid them so well, then by God, they must be doing something socially useful...
...He had saved himself, and our firm, $60,000...
...Ariel Sharon's autobiography, cowritten or ghosted by one David Chanoff (the book tells us nothing about him), serves quite another purpose...
...People would respect that...
...Capitol Cities wasn't looking to buy ABC and sell it off piece by piece, as Lawrence Tisch has done with CBS...
...Huntington Williams...
...But it is unusual to see such individualism in Roman Catholic populations, where the church has traditionally mediated the divine-human relationship...
...Privatization works and probably ought to be expanded, says Donahue, for public tasks that are relatively simple and where competitors are plentiful: garbage collection, firefighting, and bus and janitorial services...
...Although American culture today is vastly different than it was on the eve of World War II, basic religious beliefs are very much the same...
...After the sale of a big block of bonds and the deposit of a few hundred thousand dollars into the Salomon till, a managing director called whoever was responsible to confirm his identity: `Hey you Big Swinging Dick, way to be.' " Here is Lewis on the relationship between Salomon Brothers and its customers: "I had made the mistake of trusting a Salomon Brothers trader...
...My own guess, however, is that he is being slightly disingenuous here...
...On the way Salomon employees felt screwed at bonus time, no matter how much they were making: "While [Lewis's boss] was explaining that I was paid more than anyone else in my training class...
...The United States embraces religious belief like no other developed nation in the world...
...Barney Frank's Washington townhouse...
...But so too does Donahue's idea of relying more on civil servants...
...Paul Glastris Warrior: An Autobiography...
...Matti Golan's Shimon Peres is about quite a different sort of public figure...
...And now (heh, heh, heh) just as the decade is about to end, it's all falling apart...
...The Pentagon fits this bill perfectly, says Donahue...
...hundreds of millions from reruns of "Cosby...
...Peres was a Ben-Gurion protege, a skilled defense analyst, a democratic socialist who continued to maintain cordial relations with many European socialists even as they criticized many Israeli actions, a man whom Washington preferred to deal with rather than Begin or Shamir, let alone Ariel Sharon...
...It was certainly more than I was worth in the abstract...
...Contemporary Books, $22.95...
...According to Gallup data, 58 percent of the Catholics surveyed believe that premarital sex is not wrong, a stand that contradicts the official teachings of the church...
...Public employee unions fight hardest, he says, for retaining those areas where private competition could give taxpayers the most value, while corporations seek government contracts that offer monopoly profits and lax supervision...
...Sharon is unwilling to shoulder any blame for the massacre of Palestinians by Israel's Phalangist allies in the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps...
...and where high entry and exit costs mean few companies can compete for government business...
...Though God forbid you should ever ask them exactly what that might be...
...You are the one who did it...
...As the musician Jimmy Lunceford might have said, "It ain't watcha ask, it's the way atcha ask it...
...It was instead the crowning moment in Goldenson's epic career...
...One would hope that two of its most prominent personalities would offer their citizens some clear alternatives to the status quo and some humane, civilized notions that might encourage Israelis and their supporters to believe that the recent litany of blunders and failures can be overcome...
...You've got to look carefully at the questions in these polls as well as the results...
...The Road to Peace: A Biography of Shimon Peres...
...Like, for instance, the creative community in Hollywood: the writers, actors, and directors who have a huge impact on a network's destiny...
...John Eisendrath The People's Religion: American Faith in the 90s...
...And Lewis is writing from the inside...
...If he could make millions of dollars come out of those phones, he became the most revered of all species: A Big Swinging Dick...
...Lewis, like so many bright young men of the 1980s, was the lucky recipient of the firm's expansionist dreams: barely 25 years old, he had been hired straight out of the London School of Economics, practically sight unseen...
...I was rich...
...Since the studios owned the programs, they made the money...
...But in a cultural sense, being born-again is associated with a threatening kind of zealousness, while having a personal savior is considered rather benign...
...And so on...
...Norton, $18.95...
...Not to begrudge the man his achievement, which is considerable...
...It was while he was director of the CIA that the agency failed to predict accurately the collapse of South Vietnam until two weeks before the event...
...and second, taking those numbers too seriously...
...I was at once furious and disillusioned...
...When Prime Minister Begin was pressured to appoint an investigative commission, chaired by two eminent jurists, Sharon writes in his own defense that "a cry for blood was in the air...
...Christ, if social contribution had been the measure, I should have been billed rather than paid at the end of the year...
...Still, virtually every student of the war has concluded that his role was central and that, as two respected Israeli military correspondents, Ze'ev Schiff and Ehud Ya'air, concluded in their book, Israel's Lebanon War, Sharon "transformed the war in Lebanon into a personal campaign, even though the cabinet had disqualified his approach, the country's intelligence community cautioned against it, and the senior ranks of the army—not to mention the political opposition and certain sectors of the press—forthrightly opposed it...
...Eight in ten still say they believe they will be called before God on Judgment Day to answer for their sins...
...When surveys were taken in the U.S...
...Atheneum, $19.95...
...Religious faith has remained remarkably stable throughout the past 50 years...
...Me (reddening): I just wanted to ask you a few questions...
...The funny thing is," he adds, "that I was largely unaware how heavily influenced I was by the money belief until it had vanished...
...His] old friend Uri Dan pleaded with me time and again to set up a blue-ribbon commission to investigate...
...Lewis sidles up to a veteran bond trader and tries to act inconspicuous...
...He writes that he was forced to assume the major share of blame for the war although he kept the cabinet in Jerusalem thoroughly apprised...
...How could anyone be so stupid as to trust a trader...
...But that didn't solve the problem...
...Unhappily, though, these books offer no such hope...
...And I thought again...
...This is not to say that Colby was innocent of wrongdoing in Vietnam...
...Salomon Brothers, in a lovely, ignominious turn, was "put into play" by everyone's favorite nouveau cad, Revlon CEO Ronald Perelman...
...But this does not mean that a majority of Catholics are pro-choice about abortion...
...Donahue takes on the subject with the fair-mindedness extolled at the Kennedy School where he teaches, and where one might fear dreary quantification, he offers clear and compelling prose...
...About 50 percent would support a constitutional amendment to bar legal abortion except in the case of rape, incest, or danger to the mother's life...
...Heritage USA...
...Hmmm...
...Even Begin gets the back of his hand...
...Liar's Poker might be just the thing that turns the . worm...
...Goldenson turned ABC's fortunes around by convincing Hollywood that television could be a customer instead of a competitor...
...Fowler's efforts were opposed by a barrage of Hollywood celebrities who descended on Capitol Hill to lobby on behalf of the studios...
...With ketchup...
...That, perhaps, is the biggest point Donahue fails to make...
...I loved my employer...
...Making performance-based contracting work requires drastically overhauling the Pentagon...
...was like making love in front of a mirror...
...arms-for-hostages deal...
...For instance, 62 percent of all Catholics believe that abortion should be legal in certain cases, such as rape, where there is danger to the mother's life, or deformity in the baby...
...After all, no TV legend— not the Fonz, not Archie Bunker, not Ben Casey—was the creation of a network executive...
...Widely considered the finest bond-trading house in the world, Salomon was awash in profits and prestige in 1985, and expanding madly, as was all Wall Street in those days...
...By contrast, the takeover of ABC by Capitol Cities in 1985—the first network takeover in the history of American broadcasting—was, by Williams's account, an orderly, logical, and friendly affair...
...I was converting $90,000 into British pounds and putting them into perspective...
...I decided, in the end, I had been taken for a ride...
...Donahue makes clear that the private sector does have Rotary Club advantages over the public sector: focused accountability, lower labor costs, fewer work rules, more incentives to watch costs and exploit innovations...
...In the 1980s, with the explosive increase in the number of cable and independent stations, the demand for programs outstripped the supply and the value of programs once seen on the networks skyrocketed...
...One reason is his genuflection before the United States, which so often has placed Israel in the position of acting as America's extra "aircraft carrier...
...And part guts: in 1951 Goldenson paid $25 million for ABC, which at the time had no source of programming and was losing $2 million a year...
...When Williams sticks to his larger theme of the relationship between Hollywood, the networks, Washington, and Wall Street, he weaves a compelling tale...
...He also gives a detailed and nuanced assessment of the private prisons issue that will confirm the pitinthe-stomach fear a lot of people have about turning incarceration over to corporations...
...Henry G. Brinton Liar's Poker: Rising Through the Wreckage of Wall Street...
...Trader: What the fuck do you think this is, a charity...
...At 80 and ready to retire, he had found in Capitol Cities "the right home for this company...
...But neither can privatization's main opponents—liberals and public employee unions who feel there's nothing wrong with the civil service that a stiff pay raise won't solve...
...And rarer still that such a work is published at a moment like this: when the world is beginning to have its doubts about the worth of investment banking, but when the worm has not yet completely turned...
...For instance: In 1976, a year of then-record profits, ABC gave free commercial time to United Airlines in exchange for free use of the airline's 17-room triplex suite at the Plaza Hotel in New York...
...Farmer and war hero, supporter of settlements on the West Bank, ultrarightist politician and cabinet minister, Sharon has clear aims: to describe how almost single-handedly he won many of Israel's wars...
...It is deeply, weirdly appropriate that Lewis's delicious memoir of his short, three-year stint at Salomon Brothers is published now, just as the sun is setting on the eighties...
...This book will play a crucial role in the national reconciliation on Vietnam that most thoughtful people know is important to any future consensus about the use of force by America in the Third World...
...The Gallup Poll results assembled in this book indicate that Americans have remained rather orthodox in their beliefs over a half century of tumultuous social change...
...He also relies too much on national security analysts like J. Ronald Fox and William Perry, who attribute the complexity of Pentagon contracts to the demands of high technology, never questioning the need for all of that brittle gear...
...Although his peevish, overblown rhetoric (which seems directed mainly toward executives he did not interview for the book) undercuts some examples of a network truly out of control, the examples are still striking...
...Sharon dwells on the invasion of Lebanon...
...The crucial point of Lewis's book, to my mind, is that no matter how bad you thought the investment banking culture was, it turns out to have been much, much worse...
...Quickly, however, he is spotted...
...Investment bankers set the tone for the kind of pointless paper shuffling that became the decade's excuse for business activity...
...Polls indicate that Americans are less likely to vote for a candidate who describes himself as "born-again," but they are more likely to vote for a candidate who says that Jesus is his "personal savior...
...It seems to gravitate from crisis to disaster, from insurmountable problems to fratricidal conflict...
...Huntington Williams does...
...If you believe, as I do, that such a consensus involves accepting such seemingly inconsistent facts as that many South Vietnamese did not want to live under the communists and that the massive involvement of American troops in 1965 was a horrible mistake, you'll want to read William Colby's story...
...He hac drawn on the pooled ignorance of myself and my first customer to unload one of his mistakes...
...By the standards of our monopoly money business, 90 grand was like being on welfare...
...Then he proceeds to slash his enemies who dared criticize him...
...It is rare indeed that a writer with his flair for both the telling anecdote and "the big picture" is able to infiltrate a place like Salomon Brothers, if infiltration is, in fact, the right word...
...Now, from a theological perspective, there is not much difference between the two...
...The weak-sister network Goldenson had purchased in 1951 for $25 million sold 24 years later for $3.5 billion...
...Ah, Goldenson...
...But, all in all, the impression this book leaves is of a decent and reasonable man trying to deal with the daily ambiguity and complexity that characterized the life Americans led in Vietnam...
...More than any other advanced nation, Israel has lived in an emotional meat grinder since its founding in 1948...
...A short colloquy ensues, which Lewis recounts: Trader: What fucking rock did you crawl out from under...
...Murray Polner Beyond Control, ABC and the Fate of the Networks...
...The networks' only solace was that this jackpot coincided with a deregulation wave in Washington that washed into the chairmanship of the FCC Mark Fowler, who wanted to abolish the financial interest rules and expand network ownership of programs...
...Nine Americans in ten still say they have never doubted the existence of God...
...Lewis's book offers as useful an explanation of why Wall Street is getting its deserved comeuppance as anything you are every likely to read...
...After a brief training period, he, like the rest of his "class," was let loose on the trading floor, to begin learning the mysterious craft he had chosen as his profession: the trading of bonds...
...Williams worked at ABC from 1981 to 1985 and is currently editor of the Gannett Center Journal, the quarterly publication of the Gannett Center for Media Studies...
...Bellyaching would...
...and to excoriate his many enemies in Israel...
...George Gallup Jr., Jim Castelli...
...and Europe in 1981, Americans ranked at the top in rating the importance of God in their lives...
...The last book to make this point was Ken Auletta's Greed and Glory on Wall Street, but Auletta's characters look like candidates for canonization compared to Lewis's...
...Political pressures, however, appear to be at variance with Donahue's recommendations...
...And when the Kahan Commission rendered its verdict that Sharon bore "indirect responsibility" for the massacre and suggested that Begin fire him, Sharon warned, "If you accept the conclusions of the Kahan Commission, you will be branding the mark of Cain on the foreheads of the Jewish people and on the State of Israel with your own hands...
...That was called `jamming.' I had just jammed bonds, albeit unknowingly, for the first time...
...For two years, one of the network's chief programmers kept a psychic on the payroll in order to help him select what shows the network should air...
...I'm busy...
...Charles Peters...
...The problem is finding public tasks for private companies where those qualities can flourish, and yet where others common to government contractors, like overbilling, shoddy workmanship, price collusion, influence peddling, bribery, etc., do not...
Vol. 21 • November 1989 • No. 10
