Political Booknotes
POLITICAL BOOKNOTES Public affairs books scheduled to be published this month. Washington Rollercoaster. Sondra Gotlieb. Doubleday-Canada, $24.95. Fasten your seat belts folks. Sondra Gotlieb,...
...Not stars of the Powerful Press like Katharine Graham, Barbara Walters, or David Brinkley, who were deemed sufficiently famous and influential to be part of her crowd, and who came to her aid, but rather "the swarm of freelancers, hatchet girls, hacks, desperadoes, and paparazzi who would sell their underpants to Lyndon LaRouche in order to get a piece or picture published in anything from People magazine to the Post...
...population is black) the eight Ivy League schools alone would need more than the available pool of blacks—making it impossible for the dozens of other top-tier universities to approach their minority quotas...
...But more than 70 percent of black students fail to graduate...
...Despite all her harried hostessing and exposure to "quality" folks, i.e., important jobs, Sondra finds few kind words for most denizens of the federal city...
...Childs, who wrote a column himself, was woefully bad in his arithmetic—unless, that is, he actually had three specific mediocre solons in mind...
...In whatever field any of these groups were "underrepresented," the presumption was discrimination, and the accused employer or institution had the burden of disproving the presumption...
...Newspaper punditry was overrated in 1975 when Childs was writing...
...Reagan's behavior...
...Morrow, $17.95...
...I knew how to make a table happy...
...One wonders why...
...Meyer's omnibus rescues some of the newspaper contributions of Eugene Field, George Ade, and Don Marquis, among other midwestern columnists whose work appears here along with the somewhat better known output of Peter Finley Dunne and Ring Lardner...
...the results, according to Sowell, have been disappointing and have come at the cost of lower standards in education and other areas...
...The prime minister, unwilling to play the heavy, turned him down...
...To Sondra's chagrin, O'Neill witnessed what Sondra calls "a private incident," and ever so impolitely broke the story...
...official, academic, and journalistic writings have been notable for the dearth of data on the results of such programs...
...Fifteen years ago Marquis Childs suggested that columnist James Reston of The New York Times wielded the power of three U.S...
...Less familiar to professional students of newspaper history is the body of marvelous work done in boisterous Chicago at the turn of the century...
...But the United States remains the laboratory where Sowell most closely examines the gap between the goals of affirmative action and the results...
...A self-styled expert on the complicated nuances of seating, she "just couldn't bear the thought of fussing with those tables at such a late moment...
...But Sowell takes the minority-group activists to task for ignoring the size of the available pool from which to fill those slots...
...Sondra became famous, or infamous, for her "Dear Beverly" columns, a series of satiric letters in which she gave good gossip to a friend back home...
...or more to the point, the world has always been complex and columnists have grown to recognize the limits of the form, and their own limits...
...But one lone reporter, Juliet O'Neill, of the Canadian Press, "not a guest," as Sondra points out—as if she had been trespassing—was nevertheless alert in the driveway...
...The average SAT score at Berkeley is 1181...
...Let's get right to the heart of the matter...
...What Sondra slyly suggests is that the dynamic duo were responsible for the demise of her literary career at The Washington Post...
...CBS television used to do an annual interview with Walter Lippmann...
...The next day she decided to diet in order to squeeze into a tight new red dress...
...I was told—sotto voce—that Ben Bradlee and his wife Sally Quinn were unhappy about me writing for the Post...
...Trying further to prove her innocence, Sondra goes on to question both O'Neill's reporting skills and her eyesight, but enough of that...
...Although Sondra considers herself a humorist, somewhere along the line she has lost her wit...
...A variety of ever more restrictive measures against the Tamils was put in place, including a cutback in the number of Tamils permitted to go on to higher education, particularly in science and the professions...
...Our gal Sondra is always quick to make a point: "Potomac fever is a highly communicable disease, especially among those who have tasted power...
...Sandra McElwaine Preferential Policies: An International Perspective...
...Jimmy Breslin and Murray Kempton hanging out around the police precinct and criminal-courts building...
...Sondra Gotlieb, "wife of" the former Canadian ambassador has struck again—Washington Rollercoaster is more than just a bumpy ride...
...The median score for blacks was 952, which is above the national average for all groups...
...Ellen Goodman in casual conversation at the dinner table...
...As my good fortune increased, so did my enemies...
...They couldn't do much about it in the short run because the op-ed section was ruled by Meg Greenfield...
...This meant that to achieve "statistical representation" (11 percent of the U.S...
...Perhaps the world is less understandable today than it was in Lippmann's and Reston's day...
...She never ceases to grumble about running the embassy and labels herself "the unpaid manager of a small hotel...
...Without, that is, lowering their standards— which is what, under various euphemistic guises, they have done...
...The whole slap flap can be laid right at Nancy Reagan's door...
...But because they are in the highest echelon of what she calls "the upper media," she does not trash them...
...So, when Connie Connors announced that the seating of the dinner had to be rearranged, it was too much to bear...
...To many of today's liberals, Thomas Sowell will come off as cold, hardeyed, and unsympathetic...
...There were, in fact, several golden ages, each skillfully mined by Meyer...
...Not only is Sondra obsessed with perfect placement, she also credits herself with a unique talent: the smarts to know which super sparklie to seat where...
...A number of people benefited politically, socially, and some I think financially because they sat next to the right person at our embassy...
...universities have entering classes with average combined SAT scores of 1,200 or above, in 1983 fewer than 600 blacks in the entire nation had scores of 1,200 or higher...
...Although she is now comfortably ensconced in a new million-dollar home in Toronto, while "husband of practices law, publishes a magazine, and serves on various boards, Sondra professes to miss Washington...
...Preferential policies will continue to spread because, however ineffective, they are popular with politicians—a quick fix at a low down payment with the real financial and social costs to come later...
...The best of the columnists in this collection writing today tend to think small rather than in the grand Lippmannian manner: Art Buchwald, Russell Baker, and Molly Ivins working in a deadpan comic style...
...With opportunity closed off to the younger Tamil generation, violence broke out...
...In Sri Lanka in 1948, the Tamil minority, while only 20 percent of the population, accounted for 32 percent of the government's doctors, 40 percent of its engineers, and 46 percent of its accountants...
...Now the Hoover Institution economist has expanded his inquiry to preferential policies—those specifying that not all individuals be judged by the case criteria—in the many parts of the world where they are in force...
...The night before the slugging, the Gotliebs were late for a White House state dinner, and Sondra says the first lady was rude...
...senators...
...Edwin Diamond...
...She never knew what to say, what to wear, or whom to tip...
...One long, petulant whine...
...The first included Ben Franklin, James Alexander, Tom Paine, James Madison, and the other authors of the Federalist Papers, who helped "invent the United States," in Meyer's incisive phrase...
...Passionate commitment to 'social justice,— writes Sowell, "can never be a substitute for knowing what you are talking about...
...By 1985, India had 40,000 Tamil refugees, and in 1987 India landed 50,000 troops in Sri Lanka to take over the maintenance of order from the Sri Lankan army...
...Granting that SAT scores are hardly the sole or even the most important criteria for college admissions, the following observations of Sowell's are nonetheless interesting: While dozens of U.S...
...The sudden yearning for the star-studded years...
...Ironically, in a reverse situation, the Indian government, following initiatives begun under the Raj, maintains well-motivated preferential programs to help the miserably oppressed untouchable castes improve their lots...
...Instead of facing up to her own actions, and reality, she found somebody else to blame...
...Wherever preferential policies exist, Sowell believes they share these characteristics: Although designated as temporary, they tend to become permanent and to widen their scope...
...The tragic irony, Sowell notes, is that the blacks who failed to graduate from Berkeley were perfectly capable of graduating from the average American college...
...As Karl Meyer makes clear in this indispensable collection of newspaper columns, the art form has had a glorious past...
...by being mismatched with Berkeley they were derailed by a perverted notion of do-goodism...
...Living well was not revenge...
...In 1987, of 312 blacks entering, all were admitted under affirmative action programs rather than by meeting the standard academic requirements...
...Whack, Connors's earring went skittering down the driveway...
...At this point, according to later reports in the Canadian press, the ambassador launched a clever preemptive strike...
...They were busy partying inside...
...All the other heavy hitters, so to speak, and important newsier missed the scene...
...Thomas Sowell...
...Sondra says she was so distressed by Nancy's slight that she failed to sleep that night...
...Writing after the Bay of Pigs debacle, at a time when Khrushchev seemed to be riding high, Lippmann drew a counterintuitive moral: There was, he wrote, no reason for the United States to emulate the Soviet Union by conducting "large secret conspiracies...
...With independence in 1948, the proportion of Tamil professionals grew even larger...
...A more discerning eye may see in him a reasonable blend of conservatism, libertarianism, and vintage liberalism, a man with the courage and intellect to take on a crusade that can only bring him grief and opprobrium...
...So why the nostalgia for Powertown...
...Karl E. Meyer...
...Leonard Reed Pundits, Poets, and Wits: An Omnibus of American Newspaper Columns...
...within the designated groups, benefits have gone disproportionately to the already more fortunate . . . they have increased polarization, with the non preferred group reacting with political backlash, mob actions, or other forms of violence...
...It became a chore and a bore...
...On March 19, 1986 the ambassador and his wife were entertaining the "A" list of Powertown at an official dinner for Prime Minister Brian Mulroney...
...When "Dear Beverly" disappeared shortly after the punch-out, Sondra puzzles, "I wondered if somehow Ben Bradlee and Sally Quinn's opinion had finally prevailed...
...Nowadays to get a columning job, a man need only have the soul of a Peep Tom or a third-rate prophet...
...As late as the 1960s, newspaper columnists still mattered in the political and literary life of America...
...The media...
...Pointing out, for example, that the average age of Mexican-Americans is 18, Sowell asked whether one can logically expect an ethnic group, half of whose population consists of infants, children, and teenagers, to be represented in high-level adult jobs in the same proportion as ethnic groups with an average age of 46 (Jews), 40 (Poles), or 37 (Irish...
...It is part "Perils of Pauline," part innocent abroad, part long-suffering spouse, with a large dollop of revisionist history thrown in...
...The only real alternative to communism, said Lippmann, "is a liberal and progressive society"—a judgment triumphantly borne out three decades later in Eastern Europe, and indeed, in the Soviet Union...
...She adheres to the credo "get mad and get even"— and does so with the venom of a cobra...
...By eight in the evening she was starving, exhausted, and still unnerved by Mrs...
...Weekends with the Annenbergs in California, Katharine Graham in Martha's Vineyard, not to mention the beautiful people in Palm Beach and the Hamptons, were unadulterated hell...
...Sondra thought she was home free...
...The situation was ripe for a demagogue: In 1956, a stirring political upset by a prime ministerial candidate running on a program of preferential policies favoring the Sinhalese majority led other politicians to vie with each other to jump on the bandwagon...
...Meyer is too evenhanded to argue that the old days were better...
...Sondra was sage enough to realize that her golden days were numbered...
...My nature turns nasty at the end of the day when I try a starvation diet— especially if I haven't slept well the night before," she writes...
...The outlook, according to Sowell, is not much rosier...
...He offered to resign on the spot...
...And claims for its power are certainly exaggerated today, when the newspaper column threatens to become little more than the opening act for the hustling exhibitionists' more lucrative performances—the book, the lecture circuits, the TV panel show, the motion picture, the video cassette...
...There are plenty of loud clowns and bad poets at work on papers today...
...Oxford University Press, $24.95...
...Even such Powerful Jobs as Sally Quinn and Ben Bradlee have been stung by her poison pen...
...The slightest criticism during her seven years in Washington is attributed to a jealous journalist or an "embassy rat," i.e., a diplomatic groupie, who was not on her "A," "B," or "C" list and therefore coveted an invite to one of her inimitable soirees...
...Conceived to compensate blacks for the retardation of opportunity they suffered from enslavement and Jim Crow laws, affirmative action programs quickly expanded to include groups with no such history: Hispanics, Asians, Native Americans, women, the elderly...
...These types—since there is no mention of jockey shorts, it seems safe to assume that she is singling out women—along with a "couple of nasty ambassadors' wives who perhaps had been previously envious of my profile in Washington and some members of the social press who had never met me or barely knew me but who used to call to be asked to our embassy as a guest"—are all held personally responsible for her downfall...
...Their work is well known, except perhaps to graduates of American colleges...
...Writing about Don Marquis, White observed: "In 1916 to hold a job on a daily paper a columnist was expected to be something of a scholar and poet, or if not a poet, at least to harbor the soul of a transmigrated poet...
...They were also regulars at her salon, but more important, both have the ability to strike back...
...White wrote that in 1950 . . . long before McLaughlin and Company...
...Unable to control her emotions over such an egregious situation, she expressed her dismay by hauling off and slugging her social secretary, Connie Connors, who was standing dutifully by her side...
...Preferential policies—whether designed for the disadvantaged or advantaged—specify that not all individuals be judged by the same criteria...
...Vanity Fair's "twinkling hostess" had committed a serious faux pas...
...Bush to arrive, Sondra got miffed at a lastminute cancellation...
...Hours later, the unsuspecting ambassadorial couple were celebrating what they considered a successful evening when they were engulfed in what Sondra describes as "a tidal wave of poisonous abuse and denigration from the media...
...Dealing with such taxing problems as swimming pools, servants, party tents, house guests, and dusty diplomats brought on continual panic attacks...
...White...
...Enough said...
...Meyer's selections from Lippmann columns show why the columnist was more than a supreme presence, "the name that opened every door," as a colleague once put it...
...Standing on the steps of "the Residence," waiting impatiently for Vice President and Mrs...
...For well over a decade, he has been challenging with icy logic the rhetoric of activists for preferential policies—known in this country as "affirmative action...
...But Meyer does more or less give the last word to the essayist E.B...
...In case you were on Mars, I had better explain...
...Within one generation, the politicization of race and ethnicity had brought groups who had lived in amity to the point of implacable hatred and civil war...
...In 1980, in an article in the Wayne Law Review, he demolished the basis on which activists claimed that racial discrimination accounted for minority groups not being represented in the professions and high-level positions in proportion to their numbers in the population...
...He sees much to admire in the current work, and his contemporary examples bestow as much pleasure as the earlier ones...
...Nancy Reagan made her do it...
...There was a time, however, when the Times's Reston and his crosstown rival, Walter Lippmann of The New York Herald Tribune, really did count...
...A dramatic example of the disservice affirmative action may do to the groups it is designed to help can be seen at Berkeley, where the entering class closely reflects the population pattern...
...He believes, for example, that improvement in education will start in the public schools when we learn to treat classroom disrupters as problems to be gotten rid of rather than as "victims" to be defended...
Vol. 22 • June 1990 • No. 5
