Political Booknotes

...had hobnobbed and traveled with royalty...

...To them, Torrijos was a nationalist hero who spoke for the Panamanian masses while standing up to the United States...

...As compensation for attendance, each partner got a crisp $10 bill fresh from the nearby Federal Reserve...

...But at the same time that Minow’s attempted resolution of the dilemma of difference seems merely academic, it may also be, from another perspective, entirely realistic...

...A horrible, horrible end...

...The strategy might work for an article in a business magazine, but for a book recounting scientific tales, it chips away at his authority...

...Nussbaum says Kaposi’s sarcoma, a rare cancer among the general population that afflicts many HIV-infected people, is an opportunistic infection...

...It remains to be seen whether the Endara government-largely white and wellheeledgrasps this...

...But John Dinges, researching the matter further for his own book, discovered some discrepancies: “A lurid description of Spadafora’s alleged sexual tortures is contained in an article in Harper’s, June 1988...

...Atlantic Monthly Press, $19.95...

...Charlotte Allen Making All The Difference: Inclusion, Exclusion and American Law...

...Considering Great Britain has suffered at least 20 times the naval losses of your fleet in the Mediterranean and has been fighting the Italians since June 1940, we had hoped to be consulted or at least informed beforehand...

...Nussbaum’s mistake is not a minor historical inaccuracy: The private funding of polio research raises an intriguing, big-picture question about the role of the federal government in the search for a cure for AIDS, a question he skips...

...The alleged cuts to the inner thighs were not mentioned in the autopsy or in [a prominent doctor’s] analysis...

...He convincingly shows how the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) favors pharmaceutical giants like Burroughs Wellcome over underfunded startup companies that have interesting products but can’t afford the regulatory process...

...Noriega’s agents, they relate, after beating Spadafora at length, took a sharp knife and made two deep cuts on the inside of each of his legs, from just above the knee to mid-thigh...

...Both of these options, Minow says, have problems: mandating equality of treatment ignores the circumstances that have led to the inequality in the first place, while mandating special treatment marks the plaintiff as “different” and may perpetuate the presumptions of difference that led to the inequality...

...Legal analysis treats difference as a deviation from an unacknowledged norm...

...Bruce Nussbaum...

...Americans now grumble that Japan and Germany should act more grateful for past favors done, but Hitchens implies that they are being much more considerate of America’s distress than the U.S...

...If AL 721 is so promising, Nussbaum doesn’t convincingly make the case...

...For all her aspirations to radical theory, the “social relations” approach sounds a lot like something we already know well...

...The autopsy records no trauma at all to the genitals or anus, although it notes the presence of hemorrhoids...

...In one of their Harper’s articles, Koster and Shchez described in chilling detail the murder of Hugo Spadafora, a leading Noriega antagonist...

...Britain obviously did contribute some democratic impulses to America, Hitchens points out: “ . . . the astonishing and germinal moral energy of Thomas Paine...

...But Hitchens shows that antiBritish sentiment has been significant until quite recently, when England ceased to be a serious competitor...

...Nussbaum’s science reporting fails on two levels: when he does it and when he doesn’t...

...Roosevelt reveals the secret of Margaret Thatcher’s stamina-she requires only four hours of sleep a night...

...During World War I, the idea that Britain should be left to stew in its imperialist juices was an important isolationist theme...

...This is far too grudging...

...Sure, the slothful government should act less like, well, the government...

...These days, a firm like Milbank becomes merely a glorified officesharing arrangement, with access to a nostalgic letterhead and a pool of bright associates to exploit...

...As Nussbaum himself might say in the flabbergasted voice he maintains throughout Good Intentions: Shocking...

...all its 65 or so partners had apprenticed with the firm as salaried associates straight from mostly Ivy league law schools...

...But Hitchens shows that this was not at all the British attitude when there was still a chance of limiting American power and sustaining Britain’s worldwide influence...

...Not the cadre of AZT cheerleaders...

...They fouled up on a spectacular scale...

...The theory behind AL 721 is that it disrupts HIV’s membrane, hindering HIV’s ability to bind to cells and infect them...

...Minow is correctly apprehensive that her approach will be understood as nothing but a plea for compassion and enlarged understanding of the disadvantaged...

...She also compliments her and commends her practicality...

...Three pages later, Nussbaum gets his medical history wrong...

...She had also dealt with the daily problems of the diplomatic corps, supervised the multi-million dollar renovation of Blair House, and most of all, tried to please an enigmatic Nancy Reagan, whom she refers to as a “perfectionist...

...Nussbaum thoroughly records their smelly backroom deals, bureaucratic botchings, conflicts of interest, and peccadillos...

...When I said that I thought the whole thing was a press bonanza and that the obsession with monarchy was beginning to bore even the British, the tempestuous Sonia was appalled...

...For most of Good Intentions, Nussbaum assiduously avoids the wily nature of the AIDS virus and the obstacles that drugs combating the microbe must overcome...

...Unlike most male heads of state, Mrs...

...Thatcher traveled light...

...While professing love for the campesino, Torrijos arranges the murder of a popular priest trying to help the poor...

...For 50 years, from 1931 to 1981, the firm never took on a “lateral” partner from the outside...

...For instance, when Roosevelt decided late in the war to transfer captured Italian ships to the Soviet navy, Churchill was stung...

...There are 15 steps in this process, one of which AZT interrupts, stopping HIV’s replication...

...This meant changing from lockstep to merit pay, a gruesome process in which eight longtime partners saw their draws cut and two others were pushed out...

...But time and again a scientific-not a historical-error breaks the book’s momentum...

...She notes that the First Lady never complimented her on her work and says their relationship was strictly business, nothing more, always “cordial and correct...

...Koster and SBnchez discern only one real achievement in Tomjos’s 13-year rule-turning a major thoroughfare in Panama City from a two-way into a one-way street, thereby easing traffic congestion...

...Even Life magazine, owned by the stoutly pro-British Henry Luce, published an “Open Letter to the People of England” in 1942, notifying them that “one thing we are sure we are nor fighting for is to hold the British empire together...

...In that book, Greene, preparing to attend a party, is warned about an American “who would certainly turn up whether he was invited or not-a writer called Koster who lived in Panama City and was supposed to be a CIA agent...

...If Milbank carefully recruited its associates for future partnership, other firms “leveraged” them, as the jargon goes, hiring them in quantity, working them around the clock (at huge salaries), and using their billings as profit centers...

...Ellen Joan Pollock...

...A relentless foe of Manuel Noriega, SBnchez was forced into exile in 1985...

...She says, “Legal rights . . . should be understood as the language of a continuing process rather than as fixed rules.’’ This has a fine academic ring to it, but the victims of discrimination are hardly interested in an invitation to join a “continuing process,” and courts carrying a crushing case load will be no more interested...

...Hitchens suggests that a similar critical distance would be healthy in America’s view of Britain...

...The biggest hoot comes early on...

...For example, when she considers the case of deaf students seeking instruction along with hearing students, she rightly sees that the issue is not only the rights of the deaf students (after all, the hearing students and the teacher have a stake in this as well), but her solution is a howler: all the students should learn sign language...

...The villain...

...entered World War 11...

...And not just any dark blue suit, but a boxy, ultra-staid version-always with a plain white shirt, never stripes-that was the Milbank livery, as peculiar to the firm as its custom of a partners’ lunch every Monday at the Down Town Association, a private club a block away from the Milbank offices...

...Not the NIH, the FDA, the White House, or the Congress...

...What happened to AL 721 is a sad, sad story,” laments Nussbaum...

...Noriega is not the chief tyrant in this account...

...Says who...

...The Americans were to supply the capital, and the British were to provide the class...

...Nice idea in principle, and it would have some real social benefits for all the students, but it also means a net educational loss for all if it’s a class in, say, French...

...Not so...

...In the Time of the Tyrants represents a concertedone might say obsessive+ffort to demolish the Torrijos legend...

...Though the drug CD4 and AL 721 have similar objectives-they ’re both trying to prevent T-4 cell-HIV binding-saying the two operate in similar ways is as meaningful as saying soccer and baseball are similar because both require moving a ball...

...Minow argues that the dilemma of difference is not necessary or natural, but rather proceeds from legal-and popular-conceptions...

...Koster, an American novelist who moved to Panama many years ago, is best known outside the country for his cameo appearance in Graham Greene’s Getting to Know the General...

...But it says more about the players and the system than the drug...

...Farrar, Straus C? Giroux, $22.95...

...In special education cases, it’s an intelligence level above a certain limit that’s selected as the norm, while an intelligence level below the limit is deemed a deviation...

...She remains vague, however, about how the legal system can implement the social relations approach to resolve the dilemma of difference...

...As it stands, we’re never given sturdy evidence that AL 721 is any more effective against HIV infection than dozens of other compounds that look interesting in the test tube...

...The problem of bilingual education offers a clear illustration of the dilemma in a policymaking context...

...Cornell University Press, $29.95...

...This is Hitchens’s other main subject: the way that Americans start sounding and acting like Englishmen when they want to set themselves apart from others in their own country...

...Scientific research continues to show efficacy,” he proclaims near the end of the book, describing positive results from a testtube experiment...

...Yet Nussbaum undermines his credibility with error after error, sullying the genuine facts in the book...

...Several months later, Roosevelt was offered the protocol slot and Nancy Reagan dubbed her “my first defender...

...Throughout it all, he drinks to excess...

...The challenge is to find a way to analyze “difference” in a way that will not result in this dilemma...

...In 1987-1988, he collaborated with Koster on two articles about Panama for Harper’s...

...During the Margaret Thatcher era, the British government has often acted as if it were honored merely to stand on the same side of international issues as the mighty United States...

...She does not blot her copy book by lashing out, preferring instead to heap plaudits on those with whom she established a rapport and to dismiss others as obstructionist and uninformed...

...Granted, this a sad, sad story...

...In this book, Minow tries to resolve this “dilemma of difference,” of which affirmative action provides the most familiar example...

...The free-loading British journalistic character in The Bonfire of the Vanities is generally assumed to be modeled on Hitchens as well as Alexander Cockburn...

...Her problems with these macho types began the first day on the job, and she labels them “munchkins,” “mice,” and “little shits...

...Nussbaum doesn’t analyze whether this is good or bad, opting to attack the symptoms rather than the disease...

...It was a luncheon she gave for Nancy Reagan in the early 1980s, however, that placed her firmly on the political/social map...

...The lawyer is supposed to be the client’s agent and fiduciary...

...The daughter of Lebanese immigrants, she was raised in Tennessee, won a scholarship to Vassar, and gained entree to the highest social echelons after a whirlwind courtship and marriage to the late Archibald Roosevelt, a former CIA honcho and grandson of the legendary T.R...

...There is no doubt that Lucky Roosevelt knows the nuances of the capital-how to pull strings and get things done...

...The position was being downgraded because it was perceived as “a woman’s job...

...Calling for a continuing dialogue among parties and an unceasing suspicion of the categories used in analysis demands that our conception of the “legal system” be expanded to include policymaking and even individual human relations...

...The government of Guillermo Endara, intent on eradicating all vestiges of the military regime, has gone after Torrijos with a vengeance, casting him as the despoiler of Panamanian democracy...

...The United States can be friendly with Italy or even the Soviet Union without necessarily wanting to take on Italian or Russian social traits...

...He says that the breathless host of a CNN chat show, “Sonia Live,” asked him for the latest rumors about Charles and Di...

...the client’s interests-and only the client’s interests-must prevail...

...Reagan’s lack of congeniality...

...But these are preeminently not the sorts of image that leap to mind when the word ‘Brit’ is uttered in today’s America...

...Getting away from stridency about rights and bias about differences is a good thing, but Minow’s approach simply amounts to overcoming exclusion by overemphasizing inclusion...

...No wonder young lawyers are starting to view firms as Ponzi schemes, where, by the time they are seasoned enough to qualify as partner, not only are there no slots open, but most of the partners who hired them are gone...

...In the view of Koster and SBnchez, nothing Torrijos did deserves praise...

...The partner compensation system was an old-fashioned “lockstep” one, in which the size of a partner’s profit share depended strictly on seniority, not on rainmaking skills (Milbank partners flinched at the very idea of making rain) or hours billed...

...When Nussbaum ridicules NIH AIDS bigdome Tony Fauci for wanting to “debunk” AL 721 because he feared it was keeping people away from other, more promising drugs, it’s easier to side with Fauci than Nussbaum...

...The fact is that the people Americans look to for health protection blew it...

...Blast all the wrongdoers to hell and ship in the most brilliant, incredibly imaginative scientists on earth: They’d still have a vexing, humbling problem to solve...

...As Nussbaum even reveals at one point, the scientist who invented AZT in the early sixties, Jerome Horwitz, had a good hunch about the drug’s mechanism of action-though he couldn’t “The way we hoped the drug would work against the cancer cell is just how it works against the AIDS virus,” Horwitz recently told Discover...

...In critiquing the medicalindustrial complex and the orthodox old-boy AIDS network, Good Intentions adds to the history of AIDS, bringing to life the people who shepherded the drug AZT from laboratory to patient...

...Until the mid-eighties, lawyers at New York’s Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy, once the largest law firm in the country, wore nearly identical dark blue suits to their offices at One Chase Manhattan Plaza, headquarters of their chief client, the Chase Manhattan Bank...

...Incredible...

...Torrijos was certainly a tyrant, and the authors have performed a service in chronicling his excesses, especially now that efforts are afoot to rehabilitate him...

...Koster and SBnchez are squarely in the anti-memorial camp...

...Mister Hitchens,’ she intoned in reproof, ‘how can you sit there with that lovely English accent and say such a thing...

...The central, gruesome detail is that Spadafora’s leg muscles were severed in order to keep him from closing his knees during the torture...

...she wrote...

...About half the book concerns the process through which, from the 1920s to the 1960s, the United States “took receivership” for the British empire...

...It’s called politics...

...From time to time, Hitchens writes, American leaders could be flattered or tricked into doing what Britain wanted, but generally they observed Britain’s diminution with a gimlet eye...

...After the appearance earlier this year of John Dinges’s Our Man in Panama and Frederick Kempe’s Divorcing the Dictator, there would seem little left to say about this tropical outpost of two million people...

...Strong personal alliances between Milbank partners and the Rockefellers ensured that the family and the bank would account for most of Milbank’s business for years...

...According to Nussbaum, the scientists at Burroughs Wellcome, the company that marketed (and, depending on your point of view, developed) AZT, “didn’t know” how the drug worked...

...Vividly written and boldly argued, the pieces helped galvanize anti-Noriega sentiment in this country...

...But by 1989, revenues jumped to $178.7 million with $664,000 in profits per partner...

...seated thousands of dinners...

...He also chastises the powers-that-be for ignoring (and deep-sixing) drugs other than AZT and toasts the researchers and people infected with the AIDS virus who bucked the system and started their own community-based drug trial programs., And Nussbaum’s business writing seems largely on the mark, which is to be expected from a veteran Businessweek hand...

...There is no scandal, no scuttlebutt, no startling revelation...

...When a woman is discriminated against, for example, this legal analysis leads to one of the following conclusions: she should be treated as if she were a man (the equality approach), or she should be given special help because of her deviations from the norm (the special treatment approach...

...Dinges’s book appeared more than six months before this one, allowing ample time for rebuttal...

...In the era of “Masterpiece Theatre,” and of Vanity Fair, and of the Ralph Lauren ‘‘I am an Edwardian aristocrat’’ catalogs, and of American fawning over Britons as different in merit as Steven Hawking and Robin Leach, it is hard for most Americans to remember that the “special relationship’’ ever contained elements of deep strain...

...Not even the Panama Canal treaties...

...He journeys through the arcana of how the drug never received a fair trial by the AIDS doyens, many of whom were hired by Burroughs Wellcome to test AZT...

...Anything that might have benefited Panama had Panama been healthy, had it been free, merely fed the cancer, strengthened the barbarians...

...They really work for credit and cash...

...Burroughs Wellcome’s original $10,000-a-year asking price for AZT was offensively high, but so are the price tags on plenty of other drugs (cyclosporin, which prevents the rejection of transplanted tissue, costs $13,000 a year...

...Pollock has done her reporting homework-although Turks and Brahmins has a trudging, dutiful quality that fails to bring to life the numerous strong personalities on both sides of the Milbank revolution...

...But Good Intentions accords these factors too much import...

...All of the above, plus her own ambition and determination to rise to the top, are described in this somewhat pretentious memoir, which offers up a number of amusing anecdotes and stories but is marred by an overabundance of self-flattering tributes, letters, and comments...

...The aim was to promote homogeneity in a culture composed, in large part, of recent immigrants...

...Now that Britain has been reduced to a theme park in America’s imagination, the United States has, Hitchens shows, let English culture become a prop for the worst and most unAmerican forms of social behavior...

...The general comes off as a nasty, brutish thug, interested mostly in screwinghis own country as much as beautiful women...

...Anyone who today attempts to turn back the clock and exclude this group from power risks provoking an explosion...

...Koster and Sanchez offer none, raising further questions about the accuracy of theirs...

...Her depiction of her humble Arabic origins and her climb to the exalted world of super WASPs, with all their pride, privacy, and stinginess, is among the most compelling parts of the book...

...Norton, $22.95...

...presided over innumerable state visits and official functions...

...Unlike Dinges and Kempe-both American journalists-Koster and Sdnchez are longtime residents of Panama who have participated in the bizarre events shaking that country...

...Many major dailies now assign MDs and PhDs to their medical beats...

...Not Koster and SBnchez, though...

...Anyone looking for new dirt on the drug-running dictator and his ties to Washington will be disappointed...

...Regaining control of the canal had long been Panama’s single overriding goal, and Torrijos’s success in negotiating it won praise from even his fiercest critics...

...Milbank, however, seems to have had no choice but to do what it did...

...Pollock was formerly a senior writer with The American Lawyer, the magazine that lawyer-journalist Steven Brill started in 1978 to chronicle and to some extent promote the transformation in the practice of law that the Milbank story exemplifies, a transformation that is part of the larger displacement and decay of what Tom Wolfe has called “the old Protestant aristocracy” that once ruled the United States...

...The general holds fraudulent elections, rigidly controls the press, and jails his political opponents...

...According to Roosevelt, female heads of state, like Thatcher, were often savvier and more assured than their male counterparts and, to achieve their goals, always ready to employ their feminine wiles...

...While NIH scientists should always put the public good above their own gain, since when are drug companies held to that standard...

...The book contains a long, poignant section on the wartime correspondence between Roosevelt and Churchill...

...It may seem a little graceless to dwell on the surprise factor, but it’s relevant in this case-as it was with George Will’s Men at Work...

...The point “was to disable his thigh muscles so that he couldn’t close his legs and disturb the pleasure they meant to take of him...

...It’s a timely topic...

...Since the US...

...Martha Minow...

...Hitchens has in the past been known for a certain flipnessand for playing to the notorious American weakness for British “culture” and “style...

...She cites congressional testimony in which an NIH director noted that in 1953 the NIH spent $72,000 on polio research, while the private, volunteer National Foundation spent nearly $2 million...

...Nussbaum’s enthusiasm for AL 721 clouds this point, leaving the reader with the impression that a great drug is being ignored...

...The relationship between lawyer and client, however, is not supposed to go on at arm’s-length, with each party pursuing its own self-interest to some possible mutual benefit...

...Hmm...

...She claims to have in mind a project more radical than this, part of a broad range of contemporary developments in philosophy, literary criticism, psychology, and feminist theory...

...Nussbaum, in fact, has a book-sized chip on his shoulder (OK, half a book) about AL 721...

...This requires understanding the characteristics that differentiate a class without freezing the group in the classification or marking it off as a deviation that must somehow be “dealt with...

...attended untotaled receptions...

...the Welsh coal miners who fled their grim valleys and whose sad place names still dot the map of Pennsylvania...

...Despite this attention, Roosevelt puzzles over Mrs...

...ambassador to Panama in the early 1960s saw Torrijos on some 50 occasions, we learn, not once finding him sober...

...Her reason...

...Michael Massing Good Intentions: How Big Business and the Medical Establishment Are Corrupting the Fight Against AIDS...

...as the years go by, Churchill moves from the hope that he can manipulate the naive Americans to the galling realization that he must beg for their support...

...The fact is, in the US., health care is a for-bigprofit industry...

...Jack Vaughn, the U.S...

...While Burroughs Wellcome may have had difficulty proving exactly what AZT did in the body, to say the company didn’t know how the drug worked is hyperbole...

...And something was jammed up his rectum, a pole of some sort...

...HIV and its evil ways are to blame...

...Until 1984, no Milbank partner ever had left the firm to become a lateral-hire partner elsewhere...

...A stint in the fifties covering Embassy Row for The Washington Star, and later writing travel articles for Town & Country, added to her knowledge of the haute monde and the dos and don’ts of polite society...

...POLITICAL BOOKNOTES James Fallows Keeper of the Gate...

...When the account of it first appeared in Harper’s, it caused quite a stir...

...Chief of Protocol -the Emily Post of the State Department, guardian of the nation’s manners...

...There are glowing sketches of former Secretary of State George Schultz, George and Barbara Bush, Ronald Reagan, Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip, Malcolm Forbes (whose yacht she frequented), and the Crown Prince and Princess of Japan...

...This would give the British imperial manner a fresh lease, and lend some muchneeded tone to the grandiosity of the American century...

...Shnchez, a native Panamanian, is a popular columnist with La Prensa, Panama’s most important and courageous newspaper...

...White House advance men fall into the latter category and are singled out for special ire...

...He dashed off this protest to Roosevelt-and then, doubtless with a sigh, went back and carefully deleted it from his message...

...The potential for conflict of interest when lawyers hustle themselves and get into their clients’ business ventures is vast and demoralizing...

...The autopsy found his rectum massively damaged...

...Christopher Hitchens...

...Yet another book on Panama...

...She was so secure emotionally and intellectually, she did not need hordes of tom-tom beaters to impress people with her importance...

...But in this book, Hitchens is witty and genuinely funny rather than arch, and he laughs at (among many other things) the games anyone with any kind of British accent can play in the U.S...

...Until Torrijos arrived on the scene, Panama’s mestizo (mixed race) population-70 percent of the total-had little say in running the country...

...By 1984, Milbank’s total revenues were $74 million and its profits $370,000 per partner...

...invasion, Torrijismo has been the subject of intense political debate in Panama...

...Such a rationale is unattractive because it is largely xenophobic, but it is clear, on the other, hand, that an education system does no favors to its students if it fails to make them proficient in the dominant language...

...R. M. Koster, Guillermo SBnchez Borbon...

...They have incorporated that account into their new book...

...This is just a further reminder of how, because complicated topics are easy to screw up, science has long been the journalist’s bane...

...And reporters often read or fax technical passages to their subjects before going to press...

...By contrast, the 500lawyer Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, with a finger in almost every merger-and-acquisitions pie of the eighties, ranked first in the country with $129 million in revenues and $795,000 in profits per partner...

...was of Britain’s...

...In the fifties,” he claims, “it was polio that received the big government research bucks...

...One is therefore baffled at the end of the book when Roosevelt suggests her successor be male...

...In the face of such reverses the old Milbank would have died...

...Panama was (and still is) a country with cancer, a conquered land pillaged by vandals,” the authors write in typically purple form...

...Sure, the product from the small drug developer should receive the same attention as the one from the mammoth pharmaceutical house...

...So when the issue involves gender, men are treated, but never acknowledged, as the norm, while women are considered the deviation...

...A female can never be “one of the boys,” she notes plaintive-Sandra McEIwaine ly...

...It is a polite fiction that scientists at the NIH [National Institutes of Health] and the drug companies work for the public health,” Nussbaum posits...

...Hitchens says that Churchill always resented Roosevelt’s refusal to visit Britain after the U.S...

...Similarly, Nussbaum claims that the drug CD4 operates like AL 721, an experimental drug made from eggs and marketed by a small company...

...As Joseph Nocera pointed out in The New Republic, Will’s book about baseball was vastly superior to his normal writing about politics because Will had, at last, bothered to go out and act like a reporter...

...Before 1923, when the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Meyer v. Nebraska prohibiting such laws, some communities enacted statutes requiring that all education be conducted in English, forbidding the use of any non-English language, even in private schools...

...Koster and SBnchez certainly don’t...

...Indeed, the National Foundation deserves most of the credit for “conquering” polio...

...S t u a r t Johnson Blood, Class, and Nostalgia: AngloAmerican Ironies...

...Her entourage was the smallest we ever dealt with...

...Besides Chase, Milbank’s other major client for at least six decades was the Rockefeller family, which owned Chase...

...Not the reform of the nation’s healthcare system-“equality was achieved all right, but at lower standards...

...Pollock’s book narrates how, during the latter half of the eighties, a determined group of partners transformed Milbank into a high-grossing late-20th century megafirm, more than doubling its size and luring on board such glamorous laterals as former Abscam prosecutor Thomas Puccio and the Asian-business rainmaking dynamo, Alice Young...

...This seems historically right and even practical in the era of the generally unsympathetic Rehnquist court: Minow’s cause will have to find an arena beyond the courtroom if it is to prosper...

...When the Shah of Iran, ailing and alone, seeks refuge abroad, Torrijos almost alone among world leaders agrees to take him in-then makes repeated passes at his comely wife...

...Jon Cohen Turks and Brahmins...

...The way Burroughs’s David Bany sailed AZT through the regulatory doldrums of the FDA, his old employer, is a classic it’s-who-youknow tale...

...Since the late seventies, when the Supreme Court approved professional advertising, self-promotion has been a big part of almost every lawyer’s operations...

...Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), the causative agent of AIDS, infects cells and then replicates...

...In spite of his misdeeds, Torrijos embodied a critical development in Panamanian historythe breaking of the white oligarchy’s lock on economic and political power...

...Good intentions notwithstanding...

...More disappointing, the book fails to examine the implications of the commercialization of law practice...

...The architect of all this was Jacob D. Worenklein, who arrived at Milbank in 1973 and sold himself to clients as an “entrepreneur i a1 c o u n s e 1 or, ” Pollock writes, who would not simply document deals but present clients “with innovative possibilities and sometimes even business partners that added value to the pure legal work Milbank performed...

...For instance, in 1927, when Winston Churchill was Chancellor of the Exchequer, he spoke to his colleagues in the Cabinet with a bluntness that future British politicians simply could not afford: “We do not wish to put ourselves in the power of the United States...

...When victims of discrimination look to the courts to remedy unequal treatment, a court has the option of ordering special treatment or a remedy requiring equal treatment...

...Among its first acts, the government dropped Tomjos’s name from the international airport in Panama City...

...But a small vocal group of Noriega loyalists and left-leaning politicians and intellectuals is upholding Torrijos’s memory...

...When Harold Macmillan concluded that the shift of power from Britain to America had irreversibly occurred, he started talking more and more often about the “ spec i a I re 1 at i on s h i p , ” which , Hitchens says, Macmillan intended “to be a relationship between conservative forces...

...When the issue is race, whites are treated, but never acknowledged, as the norm, while blacks are considered the deviation...

...Some publications with long lead times have researchers vet their science articles...

...Tomjos brought many mestizos into his administration, and his reforms, though often stillborn, did reflect the broad aspirations of the Panamanian people...

...The autopsy, they continue, “found Spadafora’s testicles monstrously swollen, the result (it seems) of prolonged [torture...

...The ultimate insult caused by Nussbaum’s disregard for science is that he fails to inform the reader that the deck is stacked against every potential anti-HIV drug...

...The answer, Minow suggests, is what she calls the “social relations” approach, which does not concentrate on the rights at stake but instead on how the interests of all parties could be made to intersect at the point of controversy...

...Among Panamawatchers, though, this new volume has been much anticipated...

...wined, dined, and yachted with the rich and celebrated...

...This is a surprisingly insightful, generous-spirited, informative, and honest book about the AngloAmerican “special relationship” and its psychological effects on each side...

...In the Time of the Tyrants: Panama, 1968-1989...

...This year, Worenklein became the firm’s chairman...

...Shortly thereafter, Roosevelt, a die-hard Republican, wrote a column for The Washington Post in which she attacked the press for its criticism of the First Lady and implored the media to give Nancy Reagan a break...

...But Roosevelt told him that “England must be out for me for political reasons,” and he “never forgot the reserve strength of anti-British and ‘anticolonial’ feeling” in the United States...

...Not the introduction of a new labor code-“it was destined to hurt production and swell unemployment...

...Individuals or groups raising civil rights issues are treated by the legal system as if they were “different,” and these differences nearly always carry a stigma...

...But no one has identified an agent that causes Kaposi’s sarcoma, a requirement for calling it an infection...

...To spare you the details, scientists have a solid idea which of these steps AZT interferes with and how the drug does its thing...

...When she stepped down in 1989, she had served longer than any other chief...

...Instead it chose to save its life by selling its soul...

...In the fifties, as Jane S. Smith details in her new book Patenting the Sun: Polio and the Salk Vaccine, the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis/March of Dimes funded the bulk of the polio research...

...Chase Manhattan recently announced a $1 billion quarterly loss and 5,000 impending layoffs, and last year, a Japanese developer bought a majority interest in Rockefeller Center...

...In their zeal to tear him down, however, Koster and SBnchez have distorted the past...

...We cannot tell what they might do if at some future date they were in a position to give us orders about our policy, say, in India or Egypt or Canada, or any other great matter behind which their electioneering forces were marshalled...

...and indulged the whims of potentates and presidents...

...The Economist, which has become a kind of voice-of-Britain to the American elite, now makes it sound as if the world could want no better hegemon than America has been...

...Milbank carefully nurtured its “insular, noble culture,” to use the words of Ellen Joan Pollock, a Wall Street Journal writer and editor, who in this book chronicles the firm’s more recent vagaries as its ties to Chase and the Rockefellers loosened...

...In the Time of the Tyrants grew out of those earlier articles...

...Though Nussbaum never produces a smoking gun, assume he’s rightassume the apparent conflicts of interest indeed colored the AZT crowd’s judgment...

...Similarly, what does it mean to belong to a law firm if one is in constant competition with one’s partners...

...The firm did all the legal work on the building of Rockefeller Center...

...Roosevelt is no shrinking violet, but this is not a knife job or a backstabbing tale...

...More troubling still, when Nussbaum does delve into science, he’s often embarrassingly wrong on important issues...

...The focus instead is on Omar Torrijos, the charismatic, mercurial general who ruled Panama from 1968 until his death in a helicopter crash in 1981...

...By 1984, the 200-lawyer Milbank was an almost laughable anachronism, left behind in the great law office revolution of the late seventies and early eighties, when both old and new firms ballooned in size, dumped lockstep compensation for “merit” systems that rewarded achievers, raided each other for star players, and hustled ceaselessly for clients...

...When are you going to stop expecting her to conform to certain criteria to please the fourth estate-criteria, I might add, that change as frequently as the hemline and seem just as capricious...

...But each of these conclusions, as well as the legal remedies they give rise to, re-create exclusion -the one by ignoring past wrongs, the other by emphasizing-and stigmatizingdifferences...

...Efficacy” is a loaded word in science, typically reserved for the final phase of drug tests in humans...