TILTING AT WINDMILLS

Peters, Charles

TILTING AT WINDMILLS To help commemorate our 20th anniversary year, we have gathered together some of our favorite items from "Tilting at Windmills" over the years. "As much as I have empathy...

...All this is not to say that I think the career civil servant serves no useful purpose...
...Regional Directors will now be called Area Directors...
...The truth is that the practice of padding budgets to provide a cushion against possible future cutbacks is widespread, if not universal, in the federal government...
...Now, instead of changing the system, she's joining up...
...I found that much of Costa Rica, El Salvador, and Guatemala was infinitely more pleasant than Washington in the summer, and I resolved to return whenever I could— remembering, of course, to give a martyred sigh to my colleagues as I departed...
...Yet it overturned his conviction...
...All of these stories were typical of what Third-World veterans call missionary journalism...
...So how did the question get into the test in the first place...
...Guess what he was talking about...
...They are capable of being deterred, but only if they think it is probable that they will be arrested and convicted and thaf their punishment will be severe...
...April 1986 Many of the finest Washington lawyers came here because they dreamed of working in government...
...Well, mutter again...
...While on a recent test flight, the plane was forced to return to its base...
...In order to make something worthwhile they would have to take risks and immerse themselves among the common people, and this, he said, was the step they were least willing to take...
...We don't have to go that far, but it does suggest the direction in which we need to travel...
...February 1979 Many people, having read Taylor Branch's Parting the Waters, will tell you how much we need another Martin Luther King today...
...U.S...
...meet the National Notary Association's innovative executives and notarial experts...
...Why not enact a law requiring all banks and savings and loans to be on the top floor...
...Moyers, the argument goes, lends aid and comfort to the Reaganites and to those who hate blacks when he reveals such unpleasant facts...
...The truth is that some poor people are poor precisely because they are virtuous...
...Missionaries used to stimulate the generosity of the parishioners back home by exaggerating the hardships of life in Africa or Latin America...
...And because the black elite is much larger today, the problems Johns described are much worse...
...The story went on to mention "a jungle filled with swamps and electric eels...
...But have no fear as long as one section remains in the bill...
...But if we don't face the facts, however unpleasant, how can we have government programs that are based on reality...
...Well, I guess Rover was getting pretty old anyway"--I think I'll go to Minnesota instead...
...September 1987 The Iran-contra hearings ended without answering the question that has nagged at me the most: Which of the geniuses in charge of our national security affairs recommended that Ronald Reagan send the Ayatollah an inscribed Bible...
...One profession I had especially hoped women would change is the law...
...The organist looked down on the spirituals Johns loved...
...And because too many of their former white oppressors, whom they still emulate, continue to value status and prestige above work, this country is losing the international economic competition...
...He upset them even more with his attacks on their attachment to status and privilege above work...
...If you are planning to travel in rural Wisconsin during the game season this fall, you may derive some comfort from the law's stipulation that the blind hunter must be accompanied by someone who can assist in sighting the weapon...
...Did you know the average retired federal civil servant is paid back all he contributed to the retirement system within 18 months after he retires...
...March 1986 Most murderers are too young, too stupid, or too crazy—at least at the moment of the crime—to be deterred by the fear of their own death as punishment...
...January 1978 Don't Say Anything Bad About the Good Guys is one of the fundamental principles that guide American liberals...
...Because during the trial the prosecutor had called Couture "a rat," "a murderous fiend," and "a merciless killer...
...It advertises a "practical, shirt-sleeved seminar" on how "you can successfully market your professional services...
...For the press, really uncovering the truth would require reporters who spent less time being nasty to the president and Jody Powell, and more time asking questions at the working level of government to find out if the White House knows what it is talking about...
...And farming was too dirty...
...But when the regulators come along, they have to hurriedly shove the cash into the closet and say, "What profit...
...To appreciate its full attraction, you should realize that all the professional knowledge required of a notary can be communicated in somewhere between 15 and 30 minutes...
...But each year, as their earnings from private practice rose, these lawyers found that there were fewer and fewer government jobs appropriate to their present station in life...
...Of this we can have no doubt...
...For those who prefer life, even in prison, over death, it seems clear to me that the death penalty could be a deterrent...
...Miami Beach also provides a unique opportunity to broaden your notarial and legal horizons...
...3) Provide a legitimate reward for political participation and thus attract more people to political activity...
...April 1989 —Charles Peters...
...Since I favor winning international disputes without killing people, as we did with the Berlin Airflift and the Cuban Missile Crisis, it seems to me that the 24-hour nerve gas would be a dandy weapon indeed...
...All of these are valuable roles...
...Another recent example of Don't Say Anything Bad About the Good Guys came from the reaction of some black liberals to Bill Moyers's television special on the black family...
...But why not take it, why not get into work that's interesting and worthwhile instead of boring or morally marginal, as is the case with most of the work in private practice...
...Here is an excerpt from the conference brochure, headlined "The Notary Public in the 1980s": "Come join us for the 2nd Annual National Notary Association Conference & Excursion—May 15-23, 1980—whose backdrop will be exciting Miami Beach and the beautiful rum-and-sun-soaked Bahamas...
...What is better to offer to the people who push the doorbells and hand out the leaflets than the opportunity to participate in putting into effect the programs they have campaigned for...
...But four countries in western Europe came in ahead of Russia...
...June 1989 If you doubt that the American legal system serves the rich, consider the case of the paper bag versus the leather pouch...
...March 1986 The CIA has proposed a bill to punish disclosure of classified information...
...December 1984 Conferences and conventions have become the number one growth industry of America today...
...February 1980 The righteous prejudice against the politician and in favor of the career civil servant is one of the things that has long maddened me about the conventional, respectable establishment mind...
...The state supreme court said that the evidence against Couture was "overwhelming...
...I have always thought that, next to the possibility of some fool pushing the wrong button accidentally or some similar foul-up, the greatest danger of nuclear war lay in our leaders thinking they could survive it...
...Here is a headline that appeared in the Los Angeles Times a few weeks ago: "Jarvis Pushing New Initiative to Restore Pre-Prop 13 Fire, Police Funding Levels...
...and have the time of your life doing it all...
...December 1977 In the renewed concern about chemical and biological weapons, which I mostly applaud, I hope people won't forget that not all such weapons are necessarily evil...
...To potential investors they must say look at our profits, we're a good investment...
...2) agreeable...
...August 1988 A small victory was won last month in the struggle against mindless credentialism...
...April 1986 They're busy reorganizing over at the Small Business Administration...
...He named," Branch continues, "the Alabama State business professors and challenged the congregation to name an actual business to which any of them had ever applied himself...
...These stories are amusing, but I wonder why they don't produce shame and anger at the Pentagon, and among the contractors who take its money—shame, anger, and a determination to do things right...
...The result is that the civil servant in the Bureau of Mines thinks more about the welfare of his fellow bureaucrats than he does about the welfare of the coal miners, and the Pentagon GS-15 worries more about increasing the defense budget than about reducing the size of the deficit that his fellow citizens are going to have to pay off...
...The mayor defended himself by saying he was there only to pick up a campaign contribution...
...The best trial lawyers don't rely on courtroom questions alone to uncover the truth—they go out and interview witnesses beforehand, getting a personal sense of their credibility...
...That sounds persuasive, but my guess is that if we'd had the CIA in the thirties, it would have tried to assassinate not Hitler, but Marshall Tito, General DeGaulle, and Count von Stauffenberg...
...Give the new people two-and-a-half-year appointments, with a limit of five years on the time they would be permitted to remain in government...
...It is much more glamorous to ask those tough questions in an elegant White House room, where it's always warm in winter, cool in summer, and as far as possible from what's really going on...
...To me, the worst aspect of American culture is its vicious competitiveness...
...It began, "Survivors of the Jonestown cult suicide, menaced by flesh-eating piranha fish and other deadly perils of the jungle, eluded searching soldiers in the impenetrable Guyanese wilderness...
...One of the reasons, Pertschuk said, was state licensing of professionals, a process often dominated by the profession...
...March 1979 The people who work for regulated public utilities are compelled to play a shell game...
...Every delegate to the Conference will receive a National Notary Association Certificate of Attendance signifying completion of all Notary workshops and other Conference activities...
...So a few weeks ago, in response to criticism the F-18 has received from many sources, including this magazine, he decided he would take it out for a trial spin himself...
...The courtyard in the center of the Pentagon on a sunny day is, according to one official, "like a town square in Mexico...
...As much as I have empathy for the visually handicapped, I don't believe I can support this," said Alan Lasee, a member of Wisconsin's state senate...
...This in turn means offering decent rewards for a life in politics...
...All the singles and divorcees are out there eyeing one another as they try to line up a happy hour date...
...Call if off," after which Lee ordered the charge to proceed...
...Remember, the last president who did great things was FDR...
...Anyway, as I stood looking at the field Pickett was ordered to charge across and saw the obvious dominance of the Union position, I remembered that Longstreet had said something to Lee along the lines of, "Look Bob this is madness...
...Behind both these approaches is the Perry Mason Fallacy—the idea that a smart lawyer who "asks the right questions" can extract the truth from the person he is cross-examining, even when that person doesn't want to tell it or doesn't know it...
...But then they left, convinced they needed to make enough money in private practice to afford to return to government later on...
...JulylAugust 1985 Good news from Africa...
...The Pentagon is the supreme example...
...December 1988 Have you noticed the inconsistency of the administration's positions on Nicaragua and South Africa...
...In 1962 the per capita incomes of South Korea and Ghana were the same...
...February 1988 To an astonishing degree, modern social life has come to center on the work place...
...I didn't want men to be feminine in the sense of dainty or petite...
...Recall its wrong predictions—that the Shah was secure in 1978, that Vietnam would not collapse in the spring of 1975, that war would not break out in the Middle East in the fall of 1973—and the grotesque mixture of evil and clownishness that characterized its assassination attempts...
...Wheaton mercifully failed to include "the hordes of man-eating jaguars" featured in some of the other dispatches from Georgetown...
...When guilt is clear, why don't we rebuke or penalize the offending official but keep the criminal in jail where he belongs...
...Their first priority should be to improve the law enforcement system to the point where conviction is the probable result of any serious crime...
...4) Send back to the nation as members of the voting public literally millions of people who have personal knowledge of how the government doesn't work, of the reforms that are needed to make it function, and of how to bring them about...
...This was especially distressing because among the men and women of such tribes as the Ibo, the Ashanti, and the Kikuyu, there was often a lively spirit of enterprise and talent for it...
...But we also need people with other virtues, the kind of people shortterm appointments would attract...
...There is always the argument that it's better to assassinate a Hitler than to fight a World War...
...In fact, crossexamination alone is seldom sufficient, because it still leaves the questioner helplessly dependent on the questionee for his information...
...The tragedy is that there are thousands of interesting and challenging government jobs that these people would enjoy filling if it weren't for the injury to their sense of status...
...And the Caribbean resort island of Barbados beat out Lebanon and every country in Central America...
...I support that right totally, including the right to perform in combat roles in the armed forces...
...Now they know that even if they escape the blasts below, they still may be done in by a gaggle of geese...
...The highly mobile nature of American society that has cut most of us off from our roots means that, especially in large cities, the tie that binds is the workplace, where friendships are formed and around which social life is centered...
...A bill to permit the blind to hunt deer and other game...
...October 1988 The article by Lew Wheaton was datelined "Georgetown, Guyana (AP), Nov...
...If we are going to truly reform the American system of government, we need more politics rather than less: more good people running for office and helping other good people run for office...
...3) competitive...
...But again one yearns for the old female values...
...It would also present robbers with a problem, for after they had scooped out the cash drawers and dashed out the bank door they would find themselves in a hallway where they would have to wait for an elevator or run down 12 flights of stairs...
...A truly effective questioner makes sure he has independent, firsthand knowledge against which to test the answers he gets...
...Under Nixon, the Area Administrators became Regional Directors and the Regional Directors became District Directors...
...Michael Pertschuk, chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, recently pointed out that "personal expenditures for lawyers, physicians, dentists, and other professionals are increasing at a rate faster than the average for all goods and services in the economy...
...By 1944, of course, when von Stauffenberg carried his bombfilled briefcase into a meeting with Hitler, the CIA's parent agency, the OSS, was in action...
...Court of Appeals has held that paper bags may be searched without a warrant, but that your belongings are immune from warrantless search if you keep them in a zippered leather pouch...
...But my experience as a participant in and observer of public life has left me with just the faintest suspicion that contributions from such places are sometimes related to protection from raids and other forms of unwarranted police interference with private entrepreneurs who just might occasionally encourage the girls to roll their customers...
...The press thinks it is getting at the truth when it takes whatever information the administration hands out, and then asks tough, hostile questions at White House press conferences...
...Business was beneath them, Johns said derisively...
...This question was dropped from the District of Columbia's examination for taxi drivers: "All but one of the following words describes a person who displays a low dominance: 1) a follower...
...Only 60 cents of the $10.70 goes for welfare...
...expose yourself to the newest procedures and practices of notarization...
...The evidence showed that during a robbery he had killed three men by shooting them in the back...
...July1 August 1988 During the National Women's Conference in Houston, Bella Abzug was quoted as looking forward to the day when women have equality and "men will have to compete a little harder...
...Now you understand how Washington really changes with each new administration...
...Most of all we need to provide the incentives that will attract people who can revitalize our political system...
...He manipulates their fears and insecurities until they are firmly in the habit of consulting him before they go to the bathroom...
...What I had liked most about the unliberated woman was that, not having to compete with men, she could look on the male's aggressions and career anxieties with sanity and humor...
...It is designed to fly above the holocaust so that the president and his top commanders will be sure to survive a nuclear attack...
...the numbers problem has come about because no one else can afford to pay the rent for the ground floors of the expensive new buildings going up all over the place...
...The bright young lawyers on Stuart Eizenstat's staff have tried to run the government in a similar fashion—by poring over the data and decision memoranda handed up from the various departments, and then subjecting a few senior officials of those departments to skeptical questioning...
...But a whopping $9.30 goes to Social Security and pensions for retired federal, state, and local employees...
...April 1983 A few weeks ago, The Washington Post revealed that, during his campaign for reelection, Mayor Marion Barry had been seen in a nightclub that features unclad female dancers and is located in a Washington neighborhood where choirboys definitely do not gather...
...And he hired, not the two thousand employees recent presidents have been able to choose, but two and a half million...
...And because too many members of the black and white elite are too preoccupied with climbing higher on the status ladder, they are failing to lend a helping hand to those down below...
...Today a person who starts out in politics has a very tiny field of opportunity: congressman, senator, governor, and just two thousand federal appointive positions...
...When an official was asked how Star Wars could escape Gramm-Rudman, he replied: "The budget as a whole might shrink, but programs that one wishes to protect within it can be protected by simply asking for more than you must have...
...sharpen your professional skills...
...It is a paragraph taken from a memorandum setting out the objectives for the Navy's 1968 budget...
...The resulting economic wreckage has been dismaying...
...Because you could see the difference they would make, I think you would be much more concerned with the president you elect...
...How could a man earning $350,000 a year accept a role below the cabinet or at least the sub-cabinet level...
...This will probably be perceived by the left as a threat to freedom of the press, as indeed it is probably intended to be by the administration...
...over to your right...
...Today the South Korean is five times greater...
...May 1985 In White House press briefings, moments of candor are rare indeed, but one occurred in January when a group of Pentagon bureaucrats was brought to the White House to meet reporters on defense budget issues, including the Star Wars program...
...Now you just don't give away the game like that in Washington...
...It reads: "The Navy must continue to attract and retain sufficient numbers of high-quality, skilled, and motivated people...
...There is so much that is good about this that one dislikes pointing out the downside, but it is real and it is a problem for the rest of us...
...But what if we opened up hundreds of thousands of federal jobs to political appointees, replacing as jobs come open through normal attrition, roughly 50 percent of the federal government's 2.8 million civilian employees...
...Our answer to this problem is to have a complete exchange between the governing boards of the ABA and AMA...
...Do we really want people out there shooting guns when they don't know where they're shooting...
...January 1979 One thing about conservatives that drives me to distraction is their tendency to assume that rich people are smart and virtuous and that the poor are stupid and shiftless...
...I wish the mayor had said, "I just wanted to see those naked women...
...Why do we also have to beat the shit out of the other guy...
...If I felt that way, I wouldn't advocate retaining half of them as I do...
...Ways must be found to reduce requirements for administrative functions, reduce personal turbulence, and permanent change of station moves...
...Of course, if the family has grown accustomed to a Jaguar and a BMW, a Taurus and an Escort are going to seem like a step down...
...I was similarly tormented at the First Presbyterian Church in Charleston, West Virginia, by a series of choir directors who were choosing hymns that demonstrated their good taste instead of the rousers I loved like "Stand Up, Stand Up for Jesus" and "Lead On Oh King Eternal...
...China ranked ninth, just behind Spain...
...November 1980 Members of Congress took 426 foreign trips last year...
...None of the foregoing should be construed to suggest that I am against women's right to work...
...Having been reared by parents whose family loyalties lay with the Confederacy, I looked upon Robert E. Lee as ranking only below God—who, since my parents were also Democrats, I pictured as FDR...
...JulylAugust 1985 Paul Thayer, the deputy secretary of defense, was once a Navy pilot...
...I remember my first much-dreaded trip to "the steaming jungle" of Central America...
...Thayer is still with us only because there was a very long runway...
...December 1987 There has been a disturbing similarity in the performance of the White House press corps and the White House staff during the past four years...
...June 1983 Donald Couture was convicted of murder by a Connecticut jury...
...You can still have minimum standards just as in the civil service...
...In the Johnson administration, they were called Area Administrators, with the next level down called Regional Director...
...Although this event may have inspired anxiety at the White House and the Pentagon, I take great comfort in it...
...His logic, although compelling to me, failed to persuade his colleagues, and the bill passed...
...As he prepared to land, the nose wheel wouldn't go down...
...The rest of the cost of Social Security and public employees' retirement is paid for by, guess who, you and me and all the other taxpayers...
...Glenn Frankel of The Washington Post reports that socialism is on the decline...
...April 1980 Two problems of downtown Washington—and, we are told, of other American cities—are excessive bank robberies and excessive numbers of banks and savings and loans...
...no, not that far...
...2) Attract a different kind of person—risk-takers who are not interested in job security and who would be less cautious and selfprotective than civil servants...
...My favorite example is one that to the best of my knowledge has so far appeared only in the James Bond film Goldfinger—a 24-hour nerve gas that knocks the enemy out for a day but leaves them otherwise unharmed...
...The paragraph was classified "Secret...
...The crime problem is well known...
...June 1985 To give you an idea of how the District of Columbia spends its public school budget, here are some titles of its employees...
...It just might help you deal with your own...
...This isolation makes them confuse the national interest with that of their own bureaucracy...
...What the Court is saying is that a state can require that doctors be regulated solely by members of the AMA and lawyers solely by members of the ABA...
...Instead of making men more feminine, it has made women more masculine...
...If there's a message to this reminiscence, it is love your heroes, respect what they accomplished, but face their failures...
...The hazard that kept it from remaining airborne was geese that were sucked into one of the plane's engines...
...Large numbers of women with those values in the military could be a great insurance policy against My Lais...
...This is why I think those who want to be tough on crime should stop wasting their time arguing for the death penalty...
...Our favorite convention has to be the notary publics...
...The catch is that they know the criminal law enforcement system is so inefficient that their arrest and conviction is almost never a probability...
...Johns had another bone to pick with snobbery at his church...
...Compensation and quality of life improvements must be competitive in the job market...
...The fact is that there are few government documents that are not overclassified...
...So no matter how hard your sister Susie had worked in your campaign, she still wouldn't get that government typing job if she couldn't type 40 words a minute...
...In case it escaped your notice, it was a version of ping pong in which the object was for two players working together to see how long they could keep the ball going back and forth, playing well but not trying to defeat each other...
...They have been entering it in record numbers during the seventies, but the adversary system, with its emphasis on competition and winning, remains unchanged...
...The situation at the CIA is not unsimilar, only its average may be a bit lower...
...On the contrary, the desire to avoid labor had enticed whites into the corruption of slavery...
...The catch was that in prior engagements with the Communist armies, the Generalissimo's forces had a batting average of around .150...
...With Nicaragua, on the other hand, it argues that an embargo will not hurt the people but will bring down the government...
...Pentagon employees and those of other government agencies don't have enough contact with the rest of the country...
...Robert Helm, the Pentagon's comptroller, rushed to the microphone to denounce the bureaucrat's statement as "ridiculous and absurd...
...I don't think we do—I still like zen pong...
...There's a Community Coordinator and a Community Organizer, an Attendance Aide, Attendance Officer, and an Attendance Counselor, an Assistant for Research and Assessment and an Assistant for Research and Planning, an Employee Counseling Assistant, an Employee Counseling Specialist, an Employee Development Specialist, an Employee Relations Assistant, and an Employee Relations Specialist, not to mention an Interagency Liaison and the clearly overworked Position Classification Specialist...
...If you never again want to face a choice between a Jimmy Carter and a Ronald Reagan, you must make sure you have a lot more people to choose from, a lot more good people pursuing political careers...
...A cleric comfortably sipping his gin and tonic on the terrace of his home in Kenya, gently caressed by 70-degree breezes in one of the world's most pleasant climates and looking at some of the world's most beautiful scenery, would write letters home that would bring tears to the eye, and cash to the collection plate, in a rural church in Mississippi, where the congregation would be sweating in 99-degree heat and 99-percent humidity...
...But instead of building upon these aptitudes, Africa went largely for socialism...
...Remember that Mason and Paul Drake spent the first 40 minutes of every show investigating the facts on their own...
...The latter represents the sickest aspect of the practice of law...
...April 1979 Of all the things that went down the drain with the demise of the counterculture, zen pong is the loss I most regret...
...It says that those accused can escape conviction if the documents were not "properly classified...
...Here is another case where questionable behavior by a lawenforcement official—in this case very mildly questionable behavior—is used by a court to revoke conviction of a clearly guilty criminal...
...He accused them of persisting in the white man's view of slavery—that labor was demeaning—when Negroes should know that it was oppression not labor that demeaned them...
...May 1982 The Census Bureau has reported that government programs provide $10.70 out of every $100 received by Americans as income...
...4) persuasive...
...The average Social Security recipient gets back his contribution, plus his employers', plus interest, within about three years...
...So be sure to get a Gucci for your gun...
...When I worked in the Kennedy-Johnson administration, we routinely classified material as "Confidential" simply because it might embarrass some bureaucrat...
...Treasury regulation #1162.5 permits an income tax deduction for education expenses...
...If we don't want a system that runs on money, then we have to offer something else...
...They argue that if, for example, you say one union is corrupt you will give ammunition to the enemies of all unions...
...And how many others like it are keeping good people from getting jobs in the many fields where such tests are used...
...February 1980 Soon after Howard Jarvis started the Proposition 13 movement in California, this magazine published an article called "The Fireman First Principle," which warned that the clever bureaucrat's response to such budget-cutting efforts is to threaten to fire essential employees while protecting the unessential ones...
...This reminded me of what has been my greatest disappointment with the women's movement...
...explore the technological advances that are rapidly changing the Notary profession...
...When I was travelling through Africa for the Peace Corps in the 1960s, one of the most striking facts about the educated elites in the former British colonies I visited in Ghana, Nigeria, and Kenya was their unquestioning acceptance of socialism and their scorn for entrepreneurship...
...down a little bit...
...I wanted them to become gentler, kinder, less macho...
...It is a brochure sent to lawyers around the country headlined "Rainmaking...
...It says cutting off trade with South Africa would be bad because it would hurt the people, not the government...
...But as I contemplate the possible dialogue between hunter and sighter—"Point it this way, George...
...This would free the bottom floors for interesting shops and restaurants...
...When this problem was solved and he finally put the plane down, the brakes didn't work...
...They argued that Moyers shouldn't have shown Timothy, a young black male, bragging about the girls he had made pregnant and not caring about supporting their children...
...Are you muttering about welfare cheats...
...The old female values could have brought a badly needed shift toward more harmonious ways of resolving disputes that would emphasize mediation and bringing people together...
...November 1979 The Supreme Court has voted that a state can require appointees to a public agency regulating a profession to belong to a specified private organization...
...They are right of course...
...They provide institutional memory and potential whistle-blower insurance against the excesses of the politicians...
...I am indebted to Richard Halloran of The New York Times for an example of the absurd heights the classifiers reach every day...
...May 1979 The current discussion about removing restraints on the CIA reminds me of the 1950s, when the talk was about unleashing Chiang Kai Shek, and the image evoked was of an efficient military machine straining at its shackles, ready to leap across the Formosa Strait and devastate the Reds...
...Most members of the black elite continue to prefer the safety of prestigious jobs in the professions or large corporations to the risks of entrepreneurship, which could provide jobs and opportunities for other blacks...
...This would: 1) Bring people with real world experience into government...
...March 1989 The president has a $149 million jet aircraft that will serve as his command post in a nuclear war...
...No two groups are more aware of the abuses of which each is guilty or more skeptical about the real need for the surgery and the litigation they respectively encourage...
...Someone finally realized that knowing about low dominance has nothing to do with knowing that it takes a left turn from Key Bridge to get to Canal Road...
...The U.S...
...And the salaries paid by these jobs—mostly in the $60,000 to $80,000 range—permit a comfortable, if not lavish, life in Washington, especially if they put the kids through school while they were pulling in all that loot at the firm...
...And some rich people are stupid and have become rich only because of good luck or because they are not virtuous...
...And for the White House, really running the government would require staff members to develop lines of communication to the levels of the bureaucracy below the top echelons, so they could find out for themselves which assistant secretaries were telling the truth, which programs were working, which tanks and missiles weren't...
...November 1980 I still have difficulty facing up to what I saw when I first visited Gettysburg...
...Why on earth can't we gain our satisfaction from doing what we do as well as we possibly can...
...They started their careers with a government agency...
...Some others have simply had bad luck...
...Among the subjects on the seminar agenda are "Putting potential clients in a buying mood" and "Building client loyalty and dependency...
...1ulylAugust 1977 If there is anything good about the war between the pro- and antiabortion people, it is the way that it illustrates that people do not have to have a pecuniary interest to get involved and work hard on behalf of political causes they believe in...
...Unfortunately, this sort of digging is hard work...
...This was true of roughly 20 percent of those I represented while I was practicing law...
...But even more, I think, we need King's forerunner at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Vernon Johns...
...I'm sure you assume they visited the other most important countries in the world—Russia, China, and Japan—and such trouble spots as Lebanon and Central America...
...The ambitious lawyer knows the way to get ahead is to make affluent clients think they can't live without him...
...November 1986 For all my friends in the bar who feel I'm sometimes too severe in my criticism of lawyers, I offer the following evidence of the profession's high-mindedness...
...Johns could make his congregation, the black elite of Montgomery, nervous when he wore muddy shoes or sold fish and watermelon on the side...
...I know a lot of women who are in much better physical condition than I was when the United States Infantry found me acceptable...
...It has, as a recent article by Bernard Trainor in The New York Times pointed out, clubs for sailing, skiing, hiking, bowling—even spelunking—as well as computer user groups and employee travel tours...
...the senator asked...
...But some criminals are smart, sane, and mature...
...Who else would have moved the briefcase away from the Fuhrer the precise distance necessary to let him escape...
...This is because the bureaucrat knows he is much more likely to get his budget restored if that seems necessary to bring back employees who perform vital functions...
...Then we would have doctors monitoring lawyers and lawyers monitoring doctors...
...In Washington, the government agency is usually that place...

Vol. 21 • October 1989 • No. 9


 
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