POLITICAL BOOKNOTES
POLITICAL BOOKNOTES Public affairs books scheduled to be published this month. What Should We Tell Our Children About Vietnam? William McCloud. University of Oklahoma Press, $17.95. In February...
...Rockefeller introduced Joan to her husband, Tom, a former CIA agent, and ultimately launched him as a journalist by giving him money to buy a newspaper in Oceanside, California...
...Melvin Laird, Nixon's first secretary of defense, remarks that, had the nation heeded President Eisenhower's advice in 1955 not to become involved in a land conflict in Southeast Asia, "there would have been no Vietnam...
...The title, from a Dorothy Parker poem, describes the latitude her husband has allowed her in her pursuit of the power elite...
...Admittedly, Nixon would have been hard to bag for an interview, but Ambrose scarcely talked to anybody...
...This section will thrill campaign volunteers who have dreamt about having an impact on political history...
...Chemical reactions begin in the mind," she explains, "and move downward quite rapidly until you feel the tingling all the way to your toes...
...What is worse, All By Myself doesn't give outside and impersonal forces due consideration...
...If you are wondering, as I am, what possessed Joan Braden to write a book, the answer lies in the foreword...
...How long would we have had to occupy the country...
...But realizing this potential requires a brave new workplace—one where managers issue fewer commands and share more information and where broader incentives (like employee ownership) give all in the enterprise a shared stake in success...
...Cited most frequently is the notion that the United States should never again enter a war unless it's fully backed by Congress and the American people...
...It's hard to see how revisionist history could plausibly alter this interpretation, and Ambrose is no revisionist...
...Dukakis certainly deserves blame...
...The bulk of his information came from sifting through the archival record (from which Nixon's lawyers have withheld the juiciest documents) and previous books and news accounts...
...Sasso stayed, then left to spare Dukakis the trauma of having to fire him...
...He looked at me saying nothing and pulled his tie off...
...The reeducation camps, the boat people, the extermination policies of the Khmer Rouge—all of this should trouble those who profess a concern for peace and human rights...
...In May 1988, the Dukakis high command anticipated the Bush attacks on prison furloughs and the Pledge of Allegiance...
...But like Dukakis, All By Myself also falters in its analysis of the campaign and election...
...Chris Black, Tom Oliphant...
...Consequently, the primary objective should have been to overthrow Ho Chi Minh...
...Alas, after reading this book, neither do I. —Timothy Noah Just Enough Rope...
...This view led Frankfurter to join six of his fellow justices in upholding the Smith Act, which made it a crime to teach communist doctrine (Black and William 0. Douglas dissented...
...War is a terrible thing," announces Shelby Stanton, a Vietnam vet and military historian...
...D'Alessandro strode into Dukakis headquarters and found 1,200 scripts for unproduced television spots strewn across desktops and planters...
...Particularly men...
...Congress, after all, had passed the Smith Act, however stupid and evil it might be, so intellectual consistency demanded that Frankfurter go along...
...Surely, at minimum, this meant that the Congress should make no law limiting discussion of political ideas...
...Many precious American lives were lost," declares Jimmy Carter...
...Villard, $18.95...
...It is that she has chosen to disclose her ignorance, along with her climb to the parlors, and perhaps, the bedrooms, of the mighty, by writing a book about it...
...The Pentagon devours the few engineers and scientists we turn out, dooming our shrinking R&D efforts to commercial irrelevance...
...Vietnam was so complex that even 800-page tomes have not been able to do it justice...
...As a result, Ambrose breaks little new ground...
...Never go to a dinner party when you're ill...
...George Bush admits that the United States "misjudged" China's intentions, wrongly assuming that it was seeking to use the war to expand its influence throughout Southeast Asia...
...Unsophisticated, inexperienced Tom, she feels compelled to divulge, was a definite "hay tosser...
...As he also remarked to Goodwin: "It is what we mean by democratic government...
...By the time Sasso confessed to Dukakis, the candidate was on record as saying he would "probably" fire anyone in his employ who engaged in dirty politics...
...Suddenly as I was asking [Douglas] some trivial question, he turned to me, looked me full in the eyes and said, 'I want to be your best friend.' " Alas, the whole experience was far more memorable to Braden than to Kirk Douglas...
...Instead, Braden announces that David Bruce was far too courtly and experienced to be caught in such an ungentlemanly act...
...She knows nothing about sex...
...But their suggested alternatives to "competence" came back from Dukakis with "a curt, almost always unexplained rejection: I'm not going to do that, guys...
...but that, Tom, her husband of 40 years was not...
...Media skills are as much a part of the presidency as they are of the campaign...
...The collection is useful in one respect: It points to an emerging consensus about the war's key lessons...
...Globe Pequod Press, $19.95...
...They were together on some of the most important decisions of their era—Brown v. Board of Education, where both were on the right side, and wartime relocation cases, where both were wrong...
...What Braden unwittingly reveals is that she is an ambitious, or upwardly mobile man-izer...
...In case you're still wondering, it was all Michael Dukakis's fault...
...So we give each other total freedom...
...Similarly, conservatives, while moaning incessantly about our failure to take the war to Hanoi, never bother to examine the full implications of that position...
...during crises, John adapted but Michael denied...
...Reich's hit parade of our economic follies are all on view in this lively collection of Reagan-era essays...
...Allen Ginsberg notes that the government was unable to understand what was going on in Vietnam because Joseph McCarthy had "knocked anyone who could speak Chinese out of the State department...
...We go to Russia...
...I don't know...
...No doubt because they have no answers...
...This is endorsed by such hardliners as Caspar Weinberger, Ronald Ziegler, and John McCain...
...Competence" was not only dull, they argued, but it also invited opponents to exploit the tiniest flaws in the governor's decades-long record of policy decisions...
...As she puts it, "Joannie wants to get to go...
...Taking control from the linear thinkers, he concocted a series that would feature two fictional Bush packagers, a cynical pair of white guys who manipulate their candidate but fail to fool the American people...
...He notes, for example, that tax reform's scrapping of progressive tax rates and the earlier move to a voluntary army both eroded the democratic values of shared sacrifice...
...Robert Reich...
...But to say that because you love your husband, it's impossible to love another man is as silly as to say that because you love your son, it's impossible to love your daughter...
...Upon meeting the famous movie star, Braden became unbalanced and developed a chemical reaction...
...Braden began her professional career working for Rockefeller and continued to do so on and off throughout his lifetime...
...Michael Dukakis, this book makes clear, has the rhetorical ability to impress bright liberals—and not much else...
...We go to France...
...I'm not going to impose my views about communism on the rest of the country...
...When he propositioned her in the office, she feigned outrage...
...contains few revelations...
...Simon & Schuster, $19.95...
...Joan Braden...
...When his current term as governor expires, he should consult, teach, write, and otherwise serve as a moderator of the same discussions about national affairs that he is too stiff a man to dominate...
...So read these essays, but not in one sitting...
...If you doubt my veracity on Joan's ignorance of the birds and the bees, listen to this: "I like warmth on a cold night as well as the next person...
...The evidence of Sasso and Company's foresight impresses...
...ponders Braden in a chapter devoted solely to her "special" friendship with the former secretary of defense and head of the World Bank, a widower...
...The press has lately gone anniversary-mad, making up for the tedium of domestic peace and (relative) prosperity by commemorating such colorful events of the recent past as Woodstock and the Apollo moon landing...
...Times Books, $19.95...
...Stephen Ambrose...
...As to whether I am keeping Bob McNamara from getting married, it worries me...
...Her reasons are too puerile to explain...
...It wasn't that Frankfurter overestimated the Red Peril...
...On another occasion she asked if she could use his shower, and when he decided to join her, she did what every well brought-up young girl would have done: jumped out, toweled off, and headed straight for the nearest party...
...I think Frankfurter's democratic constitutional philosophy is absolutely right, except when the Bill of Rights is involved...
...What would I do without him...
...Who's "us" anyway, Reich asks, when there's more American workmanship in today's Tennessee-built Nissan than in today's offshore Buick...
...As the chapter on advertising demonstrates, such options make the report both livelier to read and truer to life...
...Her book is a series of close encounters—part feckless who-done-it, part embarrassing kissbutdon't-tell...
...Powerful man number four: Kirk Douglas...
...trusting in each other's honor, love, and sense of courtesy...
...This may have been true in August 1988, when every Democrat in America longed for the presidential nominee to quit diddling with his state duties so that he could counter the Republican assault...
...On these, Black was on the side of the angels, while Frankfurter committed error after error that will forever blight his otherwise distinguished record...
...But the trouble is not just Braden's lack of carnal knowledge...
...But the authors underappreciate his brusque "That's not me" dismissals of staff suggestions...
...We go to Greece...
...Diapered MBAs and trembling CEOs shuffle zillions of dollars in paper while new products languish...
...Sandra McElwaine The Antagonists...
...I feel for her family...
...But I couldn't do anything about it...
...All right,' he said...
...The author of an admiring biography of Dwight Eisenhower, Ambrose never misses a chance to contrast Nixon's paranoid style with Eisenhower's soldierly self-confidence...
...The dilemma she faces is that she wants to go everywhere...
...Harry McPherson, special assistant to Lyndon Johnson, rues our "lack of a clear objective...
...The question throughout the vacuous slim volume is: Who did she, or didn't she, do IT with, and above all, why should we care...
...The authors ask us to make sense of the rise and fall of Team Dukakis through the prism of a "Scenes From a Marriage" theory: Michael brought the executive skills, John supplied the passion and savvy...
...Must we also assume that the Bush team would have failed to adjust its strategy and tactics...
...Since the debates revealed that he couldn't stretch his persona even when he had agreed to do so, it strikes me as unreasonable to argue that he should have changed when and as his staff saw fit...
...And when I told him I wasn't, that I didn't know any more about it than a girl on spring vacation, he dropped the pretense of polish which had distinguished him for 50 years in at least five diplomatic posts...
...This is her personal best...
...Several of Reich's pieces shed light on the symbolic costs that come with seemingly positive policy changes...
...And if [Tom] wants to consort with another woman he does...
...Adopted by the Founding Fathers as a limit on the power of elected officials, it says these things you cannot do...
...advice that asked him to violate his sense of his public self cannot be regarded as sound, even if it seems abstractly appropriate in narrative hindsight...
...Now, with this slim volume, we, like Oklahoma's students, have the benefit of their collective wisdom...
...straight, untutored, virginal...
...But I don't know a thing about sex...
...Today Nixon is often portrayed as a borderline-respectable figure ("He's Back...
...Yet the "perfect staff' effect is also a fiction of the campaign melodrama genre, wherein every phone call brings a message on which the contest will turn...
...This is an absorbing and illuminating account of the intersecting lives of two giants of American law, Felix Frankfurter and Hugo Black...
...Second thoughts about making a tape juxtaposing Joseph Biden's speech with its Neil Kinnock progenitor led the intern to tell Dukakis press secretary Patricia O'Brien that Sasso had commissioned the deed...
...Black and Oliphant trace the death of one candidacy and the decapitation of another to the pivotal behavior of a Dukakis intern...
...His best example comes from Eisenhower's last press conference, when the president was asked whether reporters had been fair to him...
...So did a Time story and phone inquiries from The Washington Post and The Boston Globe...
...We trust each other...
...Don't use age as an excuse for not caring how you look...
...Am I keeping Robert McNamara from getting married...
...Yeah, and then what...
...I was what I was...
...Still, a subject as rich as Nixon deserves exhaustive, Robert Caro-like legwork that Ambrose is unwilling to provide...
...Ambrose gives Nixon his due for his two acknowledged accomplishments— normalizing relations with China and establishing detente with the Soviet Union—and is even somewhat compassionate about Nixon's struggle to keep both Left and Right happy with his policy of "Vietnamization...
...Reich's most compelling (and frequently repeated) theme stresses skilled labor as our only likely source of sustainable advantage in a global low-wage marketplace...
...and playing hostess for Henry Kissinger, which put her on the social map...
...In short, I have more fun with Bob McNamara than I do with anybody else in the world, sometimes but not always excepting my husband...
...He put his arms around me and pulled me down on the bed alongside him and we lay there for a long while and cried...
...Simon and Schuster-, $24.95...
...he conducted only 20 interviews for his first two volumes...
...The government, meanwhile, fights yesterday's "us versus them" battles, imposing quotas to stem a tide of imports that include American companies' offshore production...
...he admits he shouted "napalm" and "body count" during a 1970 speech Nixon gave at Kansas State University...
...So we're supposed to believe this happy couple has sailed blithely along, always trusting, never cheating, and, above all, never, never, asking a leading question, like, "What did you do today, dear...
...Amid the disarray, the candidate asks his advisers if he should be known as Mike or Michael...
...More than 120 people wrote back, including George Bush, Dean Rusk, Henry Kissinger, McGeorge Bundy, and even the notoriously uncommunicative Robert McNamara...
...We have too much respect for each other's individuality to want to destroy it by fixing boundaries on friendships and the developments of friendships...
...Whatever the reason, publishing houses are now stepping in to fill in the gap...
...Would the Republicans have ignored their previous experience and sat on their resource advantages, including the powers of incumbency...
...There was one matter in which Black and Frankfurter agreed that I had forgotten but which is a great tribute to the humanity of both...
...In February 1987, Bill McCloud, a junior-high-school teacher in Pryor, Oklahoma, decided that the time had come to teach students about Vietnam...
...And many interpretive and explanatory passages smack of reporter-source coziness, especially the description of John Sasso as he returns to the campaign helm after 11 months on Elba...
...Eisenhower answered with words Nixon could never have uttered: "I don't see what a reporter could do much to a president, do you...
...Michael Cornfield Nixon: The Triumph of a Politician, 1962-1972...
...Bob and I go to the Netherlands...
...One quarrel: Like many writers infatuated with a thought, Reich has an irritating habit of recycling pet phrases...
...Why do they assume it...
...The field and fund-raising operations weathered the sudden departure of John Sasso, and the lock-'em-up-early delegate strategy, outlined by a primaries prodigy aptly named Tad Devine, worked to perfection...
...left alone, Michael reeled, and John came back too late to save him...
...My lack of sophistication appealed to him, and I sensed that it made me physically attractive...
...He accurately described communist influence in this country as "puny...
...That's not me...
...Against this grave miscarriage of justice, these two great antagonists found common ground and fought the good fight together...
...The spin doctors called in David F. D'Alessandro, a "proactive" executive from John Hancock Insurance, for which he created the glossily gritty "Real Life, Real Answers" series of commercials...
...And first among them is: "Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech...
...Discourtesy chez Braden means indiscretion and is to be avoided if possible...
...Given this approach, it is somewhat odd that the book provides less personal detail about Sasso and the admittedly highprofile Dukakis than about Willie Horton...
...Several Nixon biographies are due out this fall, starting with Ambrose's book, the second in a three-volume work...
...Poor Joan Braden has a serious problem...
...Yes, I love Tom...
...The only reason for entering a war is to overthrow a government that is doing something we cannot accept," writes Thomas H. Moorer, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff...
...But once alerted, O'Brien pressured Sasso...
...The book consequently reads like a collection of soundbites, or the history of Vietnam according to USA Today...
...And I'm the one that gets to go...
...They are such good friends that Braden says she plays the role of wife, and best of all, Joannie gets to go to some swell places...
...James F. Simon...
...Nada, zip, zero, zilch...
...Powerful man number three: Robert McNamara...
...It's a spectacle of myopia...
...according to a Newsweek cover story in May 1986), but The Triumph of a Politician shows that reporters had it right the first time...
...Strangely, however, the 15th anniversary of another dramatic event in the lives of newspaperand-magazine-buying baby boomers— the resignation of President Richard Nixon—attracted little notice...
...Like any veteran campaigner, he should have had final authority as to what he could pull off as a performer...
...Liberals, while dwelling on the disastrous effects of our involvement in Indochina, pay little attention to the evil that ensued...
...Who are they trying to kid...
...Because the next person always seems to know and confide in me that they know all manners of mysteries and techniques...
...Do they wish to torture that intern with guilt...
...Above all, however, the skills of skilled labor depend on education and training, an area we continue to leave unreformed despite the usual sound and fury...
...McCloud, a veteran of the war, found few teaching aids, so he wrote to a variety of people connected with the conflict—cabinet officers, generals, pilots, and protestors —asking what they thought was most important to teach about the war...
...The other high point of the book, its account of the Biden Videotape Crisis, details a similar frenzy of image consciousness...
...Nixon criminally abused the powers of his office, prolonged the Vietnam war to no advantage, and further polarized a badly divided nation...
...She also wastes a lot of ink on dispensing advice under the heading, "Ancient Truths," with such sage suggestions as: Lie about your age...
...Despite having eight children, I don't know as much as the next person...
...Joan's observation that it is different from most other unions is surprisingly accurate...
...Then let's have a toss in the hay.' " At this point there is no swell of music or graceful fade to black...
...What would we have done about the millions of heavily armed North Vietnamese roaming the countryside...
...It was Bobby...
...Deploring monogamy, Braden, a former Rockefeller aide, Kennedy campaign aide, Kissinger friend and hostess, public relations consultant, and wife of syndicated columnist Tom Braden, portrays herself as the perpetual jeune fille, chaste, yet irresistible to men, whose only aim is to gain entree to the smart set...
...Most of the letters in this volume come to no more than a few paragraphs and some only a few sentences...
...What puppet regime would we have installed to replace him...
...I confess that I do not understand this complex man," he writes at the beginning of volume two...
...Most of the rest of her work deals with evenings in Camelot and travels with the Kennedys...
...But Estrich and Kiley labored in vain to get the Democratic nomineeapparent to develop a catchy theme...
...Alas, What Should We Tell Our Children About Vietnam...
...The Dukakis advisors appear prescient, unanimous, and unerring in their recommendations to the obstinate candidate...
...Passion and the pleasures of the flesh have miraculously eluded this woman of a certain age who has spent a little time flirting, courting, and globe-trotting with some of the world's most attractive and, of course, important men...
...Looking back on those days, Frankfurter said to Richard Goodwin, who was one of his clerks: "I was appointed when this Court almost wrecked the country and itself by trying to substitute its economic views for those of the president and Congress...
...We are a democracy except that no majority has the right to silence the voice of a minority or even of one individual...
...To attend every glitzy party, meet every famous male—occasionally a female—while leaving her children at home and dragging her often disgruntled and impecunious husband in her determined wake...
...They joined in opposing the execution of the Rosenbergs...
...Matthew Miller All By Myself: The Unmaking of a Presidential Campaign...
...She describes being with RFK in an Indianapolis motel room the evening of the day Martin Luther King was shot...
...Powerful man number two: Bobby Kennedy...
...It's quite plausible, of course, to argue that America could have done little about these horrors, but most of the doves represented in this book seem not even to care...
...And men assume, I don't know why, that I must know all these mysteries and techniques...
...McNamara] attracts the attention of a certain number of women who are divorced or whose husbands have died and who wouldn't mind going along...
...Never tell a white lie...
...Boston Globe reporters Chris Black and Tom Oliphant have confected a campaign melodrama about the very best efforts of John Sasso, Susan Estrich, Tubby Harrison, Jack Corrigan, Tom Kiley, Nick Mitropoulos et al to guide the Massachusetts Governor into the White House in spite of himself...
...James under Kennedy] used to suggest during quiet dinners that I was a walking encyclopedia on these matters...
...If I want to consort with another man I do...
...You're an ignoramus...
...Cliches abound...
...Despite Ambrose's obvious antipathy for Nixon (and what appears to be downright hatred of Henry Kissinger), this is a responsible work that avoids the gratuitous smears that have marred much writing about Nixon in the past (especially Fawn Brodie's Nixon biography...
...Charles Peters...
...After this ingenuous statement it is probably time to enlighten the reader on the Bradens' unique philosophy of marriage...
...In sum, for no apparent reason, she seems convinced that she is destined to play both role model and catalyst for other "average" but persistent women who—what else?—want to get to go...
...The hawks never bother to pose such questions...
...At the time, it was widely speculated—even in Dukakis headquarters— that it was someone in the Gephardt campaign who had given such a tape to The New York Times...
...Michael Massing The Resurgent Liberal (and other unfashionable prophecies...
...Black and Oliphant show us little more than the figure of Michael Dukakis standing between the staff and victory in late September...
...Too many aides feared too many viewers wouldn't get it, so only one installment aired...
...The basic ingredients of All By Myself are the Dukakis team's memoranda and sideline whispers...
...David Bruce [the patrician ambassador to the Court of St...
...But he was convinced that if Congress found otherwise, the Court should defer to the wisdom of the legislature...
...Yes, I've always loved him...
...What is most exasperating about these letters is that both hawks and doves fail to take on the really challenging arguments confronting them...
...The latter, Braden informs us, would undoubtedly spoil her marriage...
...There was a knock on the door...
...This amounts to a repudiation of the domino theory...
...tea and fast repartee with Alice Roosevelt Longworth...
...What's more, he is unable to give his subject the sort of flesh-andblood vividness a Caro might provide...
...We're told several times, for example, that yesterday's "muckrakers" are today's "investigative journalists...
...For the sake of argument, let us suppose the staff did have the power to breathe vitality and wit into the candidate during his public performances...
...In his recent bestseller, The Ragman's Son, in which he tells all about the women he has known, Joan Braden does not warrant a mention...
...Whenever I tell a new friend or acquaintance a story about what I've seen or done, the new friend or acquaintance expresses astonishment...
...Many of the cases about which they disagreed involved communism in America...
...Posing as a breathless chronicler of the great, glamorous, and powerful, who run the nation's capital, she has penned a coy and name-dropping memoir, Just Enough Rope...
...A rare consensus quickly emerges: Michael will make him seem bigger...
...The options Dukakis rejected that would not have worked should have been analyzed here, too...
...There seems little doubt that Frankfurter was influenced in this view by his experience as an unofficial adviser to FDR in the early days of the New Deal when the Court was striking down measure after measure that Congress had enacted to try to rescue the country from the grip of the Depression...
...They split on crucial First Amendment issues during the forties and fifties...
...problems with her various jobs, as well as with her husband, children, and their innumerable exotic pets...
...I don't believe that when the Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution they meant for basic questions of social and political policy to be decided by nine men in a secret conference on a Friday afternoon...
...We go to Africa...
...We go wherever he has board meetings or seminars or speeches that interest me...
...As Braden likes to tell it, Rockefeller's interest went way beyond office chitchat...
...Yet surely a campaign that generated 1,200 ad scripts also produced a surfeit of other memoranda...
...the correct arrangement of lights, the eroticism of perfume, the sensualness of clothing, the gentle touch of fingers...
...I have always thought the Rosenbergs were guilty but that the death penalty was grotesquely wrong...
...Let's start with powerful man number one, her original mentor, the late Nelson Rockefeller...
...The best chapter of the book exhumes the fall advertising campaign...
Vol. 21 • October 1989 • No. 9
