POLITICAL BOOKNOTES
POLITICAL BOOKNOTES Somoza Falling. Anthony Lake. Houghton Mifflin, $18.95. Few events in recent times have been hashed over as frequently as the Nicaraguan revolution. Anybody choosing...
...His campaign slogan—"After eight years of charisma and four years of the clubhouse, why not try competence...
...Mario Biaggi...
...He decries the downfall of education and the "decay of the family...
...but Manes's suicide in January killed the deal...
...It's fine to protect confidential sources, but many readers will want to know how, for example, a witnessless conversation has come to light, or what documents contain which facts...
...Strangely enough, there is one simple innovation that would reduce the danger, a change that all firefighters would welcome: mandatory sprinkler laws...
...Perhaps the most notorious case is that of John Paton Davies, the legendary foreign service officer who served in China in the 1930s and 1940s...
...Bribery or pleading may elicit a window key from one of the maintenance people...
...James Ledbetter The Wise Men Know What Wicked Things are Written on the Sky...
...In 1951, when William F. Buckley Jr...
...Russell Kirk...
...What is it like to be an assistant secretary...
...Corruption, whether in Watergate or city hall, has the aura of grand conspiracy and high drama, but the nittygritty details of government-by-graft are in fact quite mundane...
...the dollar has triumphed over all other currencies . . ..The crime rate is diminishing...
...I told him not to dump our captains, and he said no problem...
...Policymakers, he writes, need "an understanding of the past causes of revolutionary explosions...
...Surely one of his greatest triumphs was the sell-out he and other New York City machine bosses orchestrated around Ed Koch...
...As the sordid mess unravels following Manes's suicide in early 1986, they tell the story through the eyes of columnist Jimmy Breslin and through those of the protagonists...
...The foreign service is hardly the repository of courage that Lake makes it out to be...
...Somoza Falling provides a floor-byfloor guide...
...A conservative used to be a dull fellow who believed that things were just peachy in the country—a small-town booster like Sinclair Lewis's George Babbitt...
...Michael Massing Firefighters: Their Lives in Their Own Words...
...wrote God and Man at Yale, he described himself as an individualist rather than a conservative...
...Kirk, a small-town eccentric who had retired to his grandfather's ancestral home in Mecosta after a brief, unhappy career as an instructor at Michigan State College, uncovered an Anglo-American conservative tradition extending from Edmund Burke through Henry Adams and George Santayana...
...The department ignored him, of course...
...he asks...
...Still, City for Sale is a convincing indictment of a New York City era and a case study in how systemic corruption undermines democratic principles...
...Machine captains were not fired...
...he was revealed to be a business partner with the principal of an asphalt firm to whom he had given $3.5 million in contracts...
...Kirk's conservatism was what later came to be called "traditional" as opposed to "libertarian ." Kirk believed in the power of prescribed tradition and religion over reason...
...Patricia Haigh, a junior economics officer at the embassy in Managua, inadvertently gets caught in a firelight, then rushes back to the embassy with dirt on her face to announce that there's "a war out there...
...But the fire department is my first love and always will be my first love," says one fireman...
...In his view, Washington failed in its goal of replacing Somoza with a "moderate alternative" and thus staving off a Sandinista victory...
...Certainly the professionals lauded in Somoza Falling— people like Warren Christopher, William Bowdler, and Viron Vakydid not do all that well, especially in the case of Nicaragua...
...When I was a teenager, I wanted to be a fireman...
...When Kirk talks about Reagan, he sounds as if he were cribbing from Michael Deaver's handouts...
...they were determined to impose American versions and definitions of events upon Asian peoples ." The Best and the Brightest first appeared 15 years ago, but, rereading it recently, I was struck by how familiar it all seems...
...The big enchilada, however, was the gubernatorial bid, as Koch believed he wouldn't stand a chance without the county leaders...
...in economic liberty based on private property rather than on political liberty (Burke was "always a liberal never a democrat," Kirk wrote...
...There are tips on parking (country directors are just senior enough to get a coveted spot in the basement lot), food at the cafeteria ("somewhere between edible and enjoyable"), and weekend attire (sport shirts and tennis shorts are acceptable, blue jeans are not...
...he abhorred egalitarianism ("civilized society requires classes and orders...
...Certainly, conservatives have been routed, forced back from ditch to palisade," Kirk wrote, "but they have never surrendered" Kirk's elegantly written history still might have gone unnoticed if ex-Time editor Whittaker Chambers had not convinced Henry Luce to feature the book in the magazine's Independence Day 1953 issue...
...Koch knew exactly how to play this legacy to voters...
...Koch media adviser David] Garth didn't want to use my name...
...But if this second series of lectures, entitled The Wise Men Know What Wicked Things are Written on the Sky, from a G.K...
...If a policymaker finds himself dealing with a situation in which every item on the checklist seems present," he writes, "it is probably time for the kind of crisis that wonderfully concentrates the mind" Lake also urges the foreign service to recruit better people...
...As Halberstam relates, such an attitude helped lead us into the war in Vietnam: "The Americans who followed John Davies would be very different...
...The junior officer defers to the senior by coming on the line first, so the latter is not kept waiting...
...Kierkegaard said, "Purity of heart is to will one thing...
...Somehow the image conjured up by Somoza Falling—that of mid-level experts sitting in their overheated offices, poring over eight-point checklists—does not inspire much confidence...
...Both Vietnam and Central America show the need for career diplomats to speak out and professional appointees to listen...
...Once Koch took office, funny things began to happen...
...During the past years, productivity has increased greatly...
...In a tight New York campaign there is simply no substitute for the logistical aid—petitioning, clubhouse endorsements, palm cards, phone banking—that the machines dispense...
...Lake uses Somoza's overthrow as a case study...
...Newfield and Barrett argue that he continued to need the machines...
...Esposito had a special knack for making this motto a self-fulfilling prophesy...
...This became clearest after the September 1977 primary, in which he and Cuomo finished with the most votes, requiring a runoff election...
...Friedman held 167,000 shares in a dummy company called Citisource, which received a $22 million contract from the bureau to build hand-held computers for parking meters, even though Citisource had no assets, no employees, and no computer...
...When he was elected mayor in 1977 Koch's reputation rested on his antimachine credentials...
...But while retaining his critical views of contemporary society, Kirk has insisted upon seeing the Reagan administration as the triumph of his principles...
...The reformer had come full circle...
...City for Sale may be the first book to document the corruption in Koch's administration, but it probably won't be the last...
...A systems analyst who pointed out these facts was told he'd be fired if he didn't recommend Citisource...
...The one thing they will is to put out fires...
...And firefighting can strain a family, since it requires so much time away from home...
...Kirk once told historian George Nash that he felt closer politically to the socialist Norman Thomas than to the anarcho-libertarian Murray Rothbard...
...Dennis Smith...
...was aimed at incumbent Abraham Beame, a crony of Esposito's who had put the city in financial ruin...
...The last chapters give wonderful detail from the trials of the PVB plunderers: Friedman downing glasses of Absolut in a New Haven bar, the tension between defense lawyer Thomas Puccio and prosecutor Rudolph Giuliani, who had long been personal friends...
...During the McCarthy years he was subjected to no less than nine investigations...
...In both cases, those in charge of making policy knew next to nothing about the regions in their charge, and they had only contempt for those who did...
...But the final and most devastating deception was cutting deals with the party machines...
...A week earlier, Kirk asked the debate's organizers what the subject was and learned that it was the environment: he was to be "against it ." Kirk advised the organizers to find another topic...
...As described in David Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest, Davies knew as much about China as anyone, having spent much of his boyhood and part of his college years there...
...Somoza Falling reads like a handbook for bright graduate students intent on entering the foreign service...
...Henry G. Brinton City for Sale: Ed Koch and the Betrayal of New York...
...But by 1982, he was kicking off an ill-fated gubernatorial campaign with a press conference flanked by Democratic party bosses—Bronx boss Stanley Friedman (convicted in 1987 for bribery and racketeering), Queens boss Donald Manes (who committed suicide in 1986 while under investigation), and Esposito (convicted in 1988 for bribing Rep...
...in fact, there have never been multiple deaths in a building with an operational sprinkler system...
...The overworked bureaucrats in Washington, distracted by crises elsewhere, failed to give Nicaragua the attention it deserved...
...In addition, City for Sale has flaws as investigatory journalism...
...And are we proud pagans or defiant Christians...
...When duty calls, I have to go...
...But aspiring diplomats eager to learn how Foggy Bottom really works had better look elsewhere...
...He indicated as much in his cables to Washington and recommended that the State Department establish ties with the Communists...
...And while most of New York watched the Myerson trial as soap opera, Newfield and Barrett are the first writers to put it in the context of the abuse of power...
...Harper & Row, $22.50...
...It's a bit unseemly in a book on cronyism...
...The book cries out for more such examples of how graft has affected poverty programs, housing policy, and city services...
...That is the central story of City for Sale, written by Village Voice reporters Jack Newfield—who moved to the New York Daily News in mid-1988—and Wayne Barrett...
...If an official is sighted carrying a memo "in an ascending elevator, the text of a draft is probably being delivered to some superior...
...Deputy chief of mission Tom O'Donnell is "a goodhumored, unflappable professional," assistant secretary William Bowdler conveys "an extraordinary sense of solid dignity," and NSC aide Robert Pastor works such long hours that he never gets to eat at home...
...This is a reasonable analysis, but the same story is told in Robert Pastor's Condemned to Repetition, which appeared in 1987 and which Lake cites repeatedly...
...An amused Kirk told me the story of being invited 'to a college to debate socialist Michael Harrington...
...Already the job of ambassador to the United Nations, traditionally reserved for big-name windbags, has gone to Thomas Pickering, as pin-striped a professional as Washington has to offer...
...The only attempts to guide a reader are the index and a partial list of interviewees with no indication of who said what...
...Regnery-Gateway, $1795...
...policymaking on Vietnam uncannily anticipates the Reagan experience in Central America...
...Sooner or later," he maintains, "presidents and the nation they serve pay a serious price when the voices of the government's middle-level experts are either unclear or ignored" After eight years of Reaganism, it's hard to argue with this...
...Diplomats who become too attuned to local populations and their needs risk being accused of "clientism"—or worse...
...Since Ronald Reagan's election in 1980, Kirk has been lionized—awarded the Ingersoll Prize and appointed a Distinguished Fellow at the Heritage Foundation, where two of his lecture series have been published...
...In part this was because Koch had cut his deals with the press as well...
...In the fifties, he scorned the "mass-mind juke box culture" created by advertising...
...foreign policy is made...
...He compares the nuclear families that have survived the holocaust of vice to the "Christian households of the decaying society of the Roman Empire...
...Chesterton poem, is any indication, Kirk has had trouble coming to terms with the success of the movement that owes its name to his 1953 book...
...Noting the woeful quality of the intelligence estimates provided on Nicaragua, he recommends an increase in the "number and influence of career experts" in Washington...
...To that end, Lake provides a list of eight elements common to revolutions— vast social changes, restrictions on access to the political process, repression, etc...
...The epilogue provocatively suggests that the closing of New York's Williamsburg Bridge in 1988 after cracks were discovered was linked to corruption...
...There are worthwhile passages in these lectures—among them, an interesting discussion of the concept of human rights—but the whole is marred by Kirk's inability to come to terms with the Reagan years...
...What does a member of the National Security Council staff do every day...
...Almost all are worth reading...
...The extent of the madness became evident during the Iran-contra hearings, when no less an official than Robert McFarlane observed that he was reluctant to suggest a more conciliatory approach toward Nicaragua lest William Casey or Jeane Kirkpatrick brand him a communist...
...What was new was Kirk's claim that there was an "American" side of the tradition...
...Furthermore, Newfield's power as kingmaker in New York politics is only slightly less than that of bosses he writes about, and the book has a tendency to dissolve into a press release for a Giuliani mayoral bid...
...The Parking Violations Bureau was run on a complex system involving hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes, which went to PVB chief Lester Shafran and to Manes...
...As a result, these lectures are a confusing amalgam of right-wing boosterism about Reagan and Burkean lament about the downfall of virtue...
...Take a place like Zaire...
...You can't be lukewarm about a job that requires battling fires in ships, grain elevators, highrises, warehouses, and slums, constantly risking burns, smoke inhalation, and building collapses...
...There is prejudice in fire departments, directed against minorities...
...or 300 A.D...
...The passage of such laws would make us all firefighters, and would save 8,000 lives a year...
...One way was to parade about with Myerson, the politically connected former Miss America, to thwart rumors that Koch was a homosexual...
...Firefighters are "all fundamentally good guys who care about other people," says one...
...I joined the fire department because I believe in the individual in American society, individuals helping each other," says another...
...Municipal corruption in New York has a lustrous history...
...And in January yet another city hall patronage scandal began breaking, with revelations that the bosses exposed in this book used a Kochinitiated affirmative action program to place their hacks in key city agencies...
...Koch badly needed the Brooklyn and Bronx votes that only the machine could deliver, but he couldn't afford the negative publicity of being endorsed by a party hack, especially one with reputed mob ties like Esposito's...
...He saw the state as a means of ensuring ordered liberty rather than as an intrusion upon elemental freedoms...
...The Kirk of The Conservative Mind clearly saw himself as a Christian among pagans...
...Koch's platform was staunchly antimachine...
...Voters should know, and will one thing: laws requiring sprinklers in all buildings...
...As a traditionalist, Kirk's views also diverged from the conservatives who identified capitalism with virtue...
...This desire came not from hearing sirens and watching firetrucks, but from reading Smith's bestseller Report From Engine Company 82...
...Some conservatives, like sociologist Robert Nisbet, kept their distance from the Reagan administration's antiintellectualism, corruption, and its Wilsonian attempt to export democracy...
...The book's timing is particularly apt, as it was released during the Bess Myerson trial (which had featured testimony from the mayor himself...
...But, according to Smith, politicians are in the pockets of the real estate and construction moguls who know that sprinkler installation cuts profits, so there are very few residential sprinkler laws in the United States...
...John B. Judis...
...Halberstam's account of U.S...
...He promised me access and that he would be a good mayor...
...The second strategy was to publicly support the death penalty, a popular issue with which Koch could needle two of his strongest primary opponents, Bella Abzug and Mario Cuomo...
...The fanatical exploits of ideologues like Elliott Abrams and Oliver North have done the foreign service a great service, making people pine for the good old days when cautious bureaucrats held sway...
...though cleared, Davies was broken by the experience, and he eventually moved to Peru to open a furniture factory...
...Where they are less successful is in spelling out how corruption impairs city government...
...But everyone knew I was calling the shots...
...A liberal congressman from an ultraliberal Manhattan district, Koch had a history of reform that was almost as deep-seated as his ambition...
...Somoza Falling offers some useful guidelines...
...If this is true, then firefighters have the purest of hearts...
...Worried about telephone protocol...
...With the mayoral primary coming in September, investigative journalists and opportunistic opponents are going to have a field day examining the paper trail of corruption...
...Koch appointed Anthony Ameruso, an Esposito crony, as commissioner of transportation, even though a screening panel Koch personally established found Ameruso unqualified...
...A veteran of the State Department, Lake describes how he left Washington in 1981 to teach at Mount Holyoke College, only to find that his students had a seriously twisted view of how U.S...
...As far as parking and phone calls go, Somoza Falling is a reliable guide...
...He made the cover of Time and was discussed as a possible nominee on a presidential ticket...
...According to Smith, "You go out on a job, you eat some smoke, you take a little heat, and you get the great satisfaction of confronting the flames and defeating them:' Purity of heart is to will one thing: death to the flames...
...All the while the media hailed Koch as a new Fiorello LaGuardia, an almost mythical figure who made the city work by force of personality and commitment...
...Yet one has to wonder how much better the career people will do...
...Privately, however, Koch knew he could not win without machine support...
...Concerned about getting around the State Department...
...To be elected mayor of the entire city in 1977, however, required several measures designed to distance himself from the image of the goo-goo from Greenwich Village...
...Koch cut a similar deal with Bronx boss Stanley Friedman...
...Lake introduces us to a series of mid-level bureaucrats, each of them heroic in his own small way...
...A conservative intellectual was a contradiction in terms...
...It connotes someone who brings a professional touch to diplomacy and someone who makes a career of it...
...And the word wasn't fire...
...Smith describes the language around a firehouse as scatological: he once heard a firefighter use the "F word" 63 times in a commentary on the staleness of a bagel...
...Then came the publication in 1953 of Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind...
...Kirk's conservatism was a critical rather than celebratory faith...
...Equally familiar is Lake's prescription for putting things right...
...Similarly, the official who oversaw bridge maintenance resigned just before the scandal hit...
...The narcotics traffic, though still alarming, is less formidable...
...Any truly professional diplomat stationed there cannot help but be appalled by the corruption and brutality of Mobutu's rule, but Mobutu is our friend, and sending uncomplimentary cables about him would not enhance one's career prospects...
...in fact many were promoted to high positions in contract-rich agencies...
...Anybody choosing to write about it now, ten years after the fact, should have a compelling reason...
...Since the windows at the State Department don't open, offices can grow uncomfortably warm, but Somoza Falling offers a solution: "An enterprising occupant may be able to adjust the heating with a bent paper clip...
...His experience left a deep imprint on other foreign service officers, who concluded that honesty and accuracy did not always advance careers...
...In the seventies, Kirk sympathized with environmentalists...
...But no firefighter is alone...
...But the Kirk of today appears torn between the two postures...
...Kirk compares the Reagan years to the reign of Augustus Caesar, who laid the basis for four centuries of Pax Romana, and he suggests that Reagan's views on education "may foreshadow the development in this country of an Augustan mode of education" But in the same lecture series Kirk laments that "virtue in this land of ours seemingly never lay at a lower ebb...
...If in a corridor, the hurried official is probably off to persuade a counterpart in some other bureau to clear such a draft before it can go upstairs...
...From this kind of zeal comes courage, and courage is needed if a person is going to walk into flames and thick smoke and rescue people...
...Under the reign of James Baker, career officers are sure to make a comeback...
...This requires very nice judgement by the secretaries who initially place and receive most calls...
...Since writing The Conservative Mind, Kirk has produced numerous books and articles, including several Gothic novels...
...Oddly, Lake, while so reverential toward the policymakers, finds little to praise in the policy itself...
...Newfield quotes Esposito as later bragging: "I get whatever I fucking want from [Koch...
...When professionalism and careerism conflict, the outcome, sadly, is rarely in doubt...
...what's more, when Mao finally triumphed, Davies, rather than be rewarded for his prescience, was accused of having "lost" China...
...In 1977, according to the authors, Koch agreed to Rupert Murdoch's request to place a particular attorney in a future administration in return for the New York Post's endorsement...
...Jack Newfield, Wayne Barrett...
...According to the authors, Esposito was extorting a bribe from a New Jersey company that made a concrete enhancement product for bridges...
...The term "career diplomat" cuts both ways...
...When evidence of corrupt activity made it to city hall, it was ignored or suppressed...
...we see all about us a decline in public and private morality...
...If Ed Koch ends up with a different job in January 1990, he—and New York City—will have Newfield and Barrett to thank...
...He wrote this book to help set them straight...
...Today's reformer is tomorrow's hack," Brooklyn boss Meade Esposito used to say...
...Newfield and Barrett, the skunks at the party that New York's media threw for Koch, are the most logical chroniclers of Koch's decline: while other papers were praising Koch's reign, the Voice kept throwing darts at city hall till they stuck...
...Newfield and Barrett do an excellent task of keeping narrative interests in mind...
...Camaraderie grows from the things that firefighters see: "the shared grief, the loss of another fireman, the loss of a child at a fire, the unspeakable things...
...I was convinced that no job could be as pure and good as fighting fires and saving lives, and this adolescent belief has been largely reaffirmed by Smith's latest book...
...based on them, he concluded that revolution was inevitable...
...So at a Sunday morning breakfast at Esposito's mother's home, Esposito agreed to give Koch secret logistical support in return for access to his administration...
...Anthony Lake offers his in the preface to his book...
...Fluent in Chinese, steeped in the country's culture and history, Davies had a broad range of contacts in China...
...By the time the NSC and State Department finally agreed on what to do about Somoza, the Sandinistas were already on the outskirts of Managua...
...Jay Turoff, Koch's head of the Taxi and Limousine Commission, for example, personally supervised the use of more than 30 taxi and car service companies to ferry Koch voters to and from the polls in the 1985 primary, free of charge (a contribution worth an estimated $45,000...
...And while the government could certainly use more "men and women who understand foreign societies," as Lake asserts, the reality is that such men and women rarely get listened to in Washington...
...Why did Koch, whom not even his most severe critics consider personally corrupt, tolerate the mess around him...
...Of course, firefighters are not saints...
...The real problem runs much deeper than Somoza Falling indicates...
...Doubleday, $18.95...
...Who can argue with this...
...There are no footnotes, no notes on sources, no documentation of any kind...
...This book of interviews with paid and volunteer firefighters reveals that these civil servants do not worry about ambiguity...
...Sprinkler systems are extremely effective in stopping fire...
...Is it 30 A.D...
Vol. 21 • March 1989 • No. 2
