Political Booknotes
POLITICAL BOOKNOTES Public affairs books scheduled to be published this month. Ninth Justice: The Fight for Bork. Patrick B. McGuigan, Dawn M. Weyrich. University Press of America, $21.95....
...Unfortunately, it shows...
...We have a chance because it's Bork...
...Perhaps revealing McGuigan's personal experiences and emotions during this period is supposed to spice things up...
...The purpose of the book, according to McGuigan, is threefold: to provide a chronological narrative of the confirmation battle...
...Despite the urgency that accompanies the conversations throughout Ninth Justice, the authors never explain why we should care as much as they do about the Bork nomination...
...News & World Report...
...Bork details how many Washington reporters oriented their coverage around who was criticizing Bork rather than assessing the validity of those criticisms...
...When I asked them to name countries that resolved these problems, Finland, Sweden, and Austria led the list—all three parliamentary democracies with mixed economies and generous social services...
...McGuigan argues that a slick leftist smear campaign and the Reagan administration's anemic defense of Bork together doomed the nominee...
...While he manages to provide a cogent and often revealing summary of developments in the area, he misses the drama and richness of one of the great upheavals of the 20th century...
...In Hungary, for instance, some 40 percent of state-owned companies lose money...
...Those votes are not just rejections of communism...
...Judge Bork was not merely the victim of superior political organizing by liberal groups, but also of the media's relative ignorance of the law...
...Do you think we can win?' I asked...
...But of course romantic revolutions— even if they are peaceful— have a way of running up against prosaic problems...
...Bork Jr.'s most telling example is an extended exchange between Senator Ted Kennedy and Judge Bork during the confirmation...
...It's just this simple: They [the liberal opponents of Bork] are doing so much, so fast, so thoroughly, and so effectively...
...Abel, who covered the region for The New York Times in the 1950s and for NBC News in the 1960s before becoming a journalism school professor and dean, revisited his old stomping grounds for three months in the summer of 1988...
...But the other side has the Senate, and some of our normal champions aren't exactly pulling out all the stops for this guy...
...Yet the authors never explain why getting Bork confirmed was particularly essential...
...This strategy includes amassing war chests, conducting intricate media campaigns, and threatening congressmen...
...The encouraging news, which Abel mostly misses, is that in many of these countries the people have already shown they are willing to pay what he calls the "punishing price...
...It was news to me, for instance, that before East Germany's Erich Honecker fell, he undertook a last-ditch effort to reestablish some form of traditional German nationalism...
...Let's hope someone can pull it off...
...Journalists who reported wild charges against Bork often didn't understand the legal context in which the claims were made, or justified reporting them on the basis of "objectivity"—that is, the substance of the remarks was secondary to who made them...
...In Poland, the medicine is stiff indeed, and last year practically every visiting expert came home to say privately that Tadeusz Mazowikcki wouldn't last long...
...Kennedy leveled accusations without responding to Bork's replies, then concluded his "questioning" with a devastating sound bite that was featured prominently on the television news...
...This confirms what I found on my trip—that the United States is not the model we sometimes assume it to be...
...Given the conservative voting record of Justice Anthony Kennedy, the judge who eventually replaced Justice Powell, it is unclear why the Bork debacle is significant to conservatives as anything other than a transient political defeat...
...It's not Elie Abel's fault that his account was repeatolly overtaken by events...
...Indeed, McGuigan concludes that administration officials avoided fighting for Bork until it was too late...
...It also includes prayer: "Those committed to the rule of law in our beloved land—and who also believe God is in control—need to remember the spiritual and personal dimensions of such battles on this earth...
...The new government can't help invest in the future...
...In the months since he wrote the book, conservative forces have shown great strength at the polls...
...and to instruct fellow conservatives on how to confirm future nominees...
...O'Rourke...
...The best contribution this book makes is to lay out the economic realities that lie ahead for these countries...
...There is no mechanism in Hungary to evaluate credit-worthiness...
...He got right to the point...
...Bork fits attributes this negative coverage to a spreading hostile environment created by liberal interest groups opposed to Bork's nomination, which meant that the sources quoted in many stories—not just the special-interest groups but also the congressional officials whom they advised—attacked the nominee...
...Although this approach allows the reader to track developments during the confirmation struggle— which is helpful in certain areas, such as Senator Joseph Biden's retreat from pro-Bork statements—it also results in a rather flat narrative...
...In the minds of most citizens, the very word 'reform' has come to stand for harder times ahead," writes Abel...
...We can win, but we might lose,' he answered...
...We are aware of his impressive resume—Nixon's infamous solicitor general, Yale Law School professor, and federal appellate court judge—and are told that he advocates judicial restraint...
...If this isn't the one book to read about the events of 1989, which of the dozens of forthcoming journalistic accounts will be...
...Abel writes that he kept up during 1989 by reading the clips...
...Abel does a good job of explaining how the nomenklatura (entrenched bureaucracy) and ingrained resistance to profitmaking make the prospects of reform bleaker...
...The Prague I saw on a brief visit last December is nowhere to be found in Abel's pages...
...The experts were wrong...
...to provide a glimpse of McGuigan's personal recollections from the hectic four-month period surrounding the nomination...
...Rodger Citron The Shattered Bloc...
...It will have to combine the deep historical understanding of a William Pfaff with the on-theground analysis of a Timothy Garton Ash and the telling eye of a P.J...
...He castigates Howard Baker, the White House chief of staff, and administration lobbyist William Ball...
...Consider McGuigan's conversation with Paul Weyrich, father of co-author Weyrich, president of the Free Congress Education and Research Foundation, and Christian conservative activist: "When he came to my office around that same time, Paul expressed concern for my well-being...
...Rarely do McGuigan's stories or analyses demonstrate more depth than this...
...Here Abel helps explode a particularly chauvinistic American myth...
...As for confirming nominees in the future, McGuigan believes conservatives should prepare to overwhelm liberals with the same deplorable tactics the liberals used to scuttle Bork...
...On the other hand, one might have been created by the time you read this...
...But what kind...
...they are endorsements of some kind of capitalist system...
...Bork Jr., a former writer for Forbes and U.S...
...McGuigan and Weyrich tell the story from the perspective of an "outside," far-right, special-interest group, the Free Congress Foundation...
...Where's the exhilaration...
...In order to assemble the Bork nomination chronology, which starts in late June 1987 with the retirement of Justice Lewis Powell and concludes in late October with the Senate's 58-42 vote rejecting Bork, it appears that the authors simply summarized articles appearing in various newspapers and magazines...
...Abel finds some gold in little nooks and crannies...
...Rather than the stern look that conveys urgency or intensity, I saw in his eyes the concern that occasionally moves him to slow his amazingly frenetic pace, to offer counsel to a friend...
...You've got to step back, ease up, keep things in perspective.' "'You're probably right...
...That was a century ago, Eastern European time...
...Jonathan Alter...
...Charlie Peters believes that a year of law school would benefit most journalists...
...They don't even call it Eastern Europe anymore...
...Writing a book about Eastern Europe is like taking a photograph of a speeding train...
...Tat, you are as uptight now, only a couple of weeks after this started, as you were at the end of the Manion fight [Daniel Manion, a conservative law professor whose nomination to the federal bench was vigorously contested...
...That's called a revolution, all right—a revolution of rising expectations...
...Elie Abel...
...Hungarians are now hoping for many things that until recently they never .even thought of—things that they now know will take many years and lots of sacrifices to attain...
...He tried to rehabilitate Bismarck, Frederick the Great, and Martin Luther...
...The authors keep their promises, but deliver a narrative that ranges from uninspiring (the chronology) to cliched (McGuigan's personal anecdotes) to hysterical and vengeful (the guidelines on future nominees...
...More than a few [of those he interviewed] were troubled by what they viewed as its [capitalism's] essential heartlessness...
...the Bork affair shows this goes double for those covering confirmation fights...
...And West Germany and Japan, which already lost billions in bad loans to Hungary in the 1970s, aren't expected to come back...
...They are daunting...
...they cited our boom-and-bust cycles, recurrent unemployment, the stubborn survival of poverty in the midst of plenty, and the astronomical cost of medical care...
...its hands are tied by the International Monetary Fund...
...But I think Abel underestimates the natural human inclination for entrepreneurial capitalism...
...More than two years after Robert Bork's nomination to the Supreme Court generated a war of position papers and press releases between liberals and conservatives, these groups are battling each other in books over the meaning of Bork's failed confirmation...
...It didn't work, of course, but the details of the death throes of communism have been overlooked in many of the postmortems...
...The most insightful part of the book is the media essay by Bork's son, R.H...
...Houghton Mifflin, $20.95...
...A recent poll of Hungarian students showed that only 37 percent were optimistic about the country's future, compared to 70 percent in 1983, when the push for reform was beginning...
...At other points in his account McGuigan offers anecdotes designed to demonstrate his intense personal commitment to the nominee and to traditional conservative values...
...it's "Middle Europe" now...
Vol. 22 • May 1990 • No. 4
