Political Booknotes
POLITICAL BOOKNOTES Public affairs books scheduled to be published this summer. Perestroika For America. George C. Lodge. Harvard Business School Press, $22.95. This book has a simple, and, I...
...What Uncle Sam pumped into Wedtech was peanuts compared to the sums extracted from the investing public, which would not have happened without the highly commissioned sponsorship of the most esteemed names in law, investment banking, and public accountancy...
...He wanted a "Presidential Offensive...
...But as one servant/guardian of the public weal after another sells out for ready cash or bargain-priced (or gratis) Wedtech stock and fastens another tarnished star to the tail of this rising comet, it really makes one think about what sort of polity we have become...
...He might have been justified in believing "everybody does it"— travels the low road—when none of his staff vigorously opposed his darker choices...
...Granted, there is still plenty of work to be done by military analysts: force structure, arms control agreements, and the role of reserves, to name a few topics...
...Quayle gave up those ideas, realizing that America, especially her husband's conservative constituency, was not ready for the image of a woman marching out of the White House every morning with a briefcase...
...We use the political wife to gauge the character of the candidate in times when character counts more than ever...
...As a tale, it is certainly full of sound and fury, peopled by a cast whose contempt for "values" verges on the breathtaking...
...Eventually, the House Government Operations Committee reported that subpoenaed records showed the true figure exceeded $10 million...
...Should we seek military superiority over the Soviets, or should we settle for parity...
...More troubling, Baida's reliance on books and clippings instead of his own digging sometimes leads him astray...
...After Fortune did a story on "trophy wives"—the phenomenon in which wealthy businessmen reward themselves the second time around with lovely younger wives who have glamorous careers—Michael Kinsley, the mordant columnist and television debater, mused about what the Washington equivalent of a trophy wife would be...
...Scribner's, $22.50...
...The president has finally cut off the hemorrhage of Watergate...
...As Lodge recognizes, national visions and strategies have a legitimacy problem in the United States...
...She also realized that she could have more fun with her official job...
...Grimes writes: "Though she is admired for her warmth and caring and her grandmotherly ways, Bar's real strength lies in her political know-how, her tough-mindedness, her charisma, and her formidable ambition—and in the facade she maintains that politics is a hardball business that mere `wives' sensibly shun...
...But if you begin by thinking about how the United States should conduct a war, you avoid a number of troubling questions about how we got there in the first place...
...On the negative side, however, was the incredible time pressure that the assembly workers labored under...
...In a book that focuses largely on Kitty Dukakis and Barbara Bush, Grimes shows—with a plodding prose style but a raft of reporting and a refreshing sardonic perspective—the suffocating box in which the modern political wife finds herself...
...The pickings in the current crop seem mighty thin...
...Individual initiative must be combined with a communitarian vision...
...The enormous changes in the Soviet Union, in Eastern Europe, and in what are no longer the two Germanys, have made NATO deterrence strategy largely irrelevant...
...Kutler's biggest handicap may be that he was not present at the events he describes...
...Thompson is resolute in avoiding questions of "larger significance...
...Like many political wives, Bar has in a way been almost smuggled into power alongside her elected husband...
...Thompson tends, in my opinion, to concentrate too closely on the "deal" side of Wedtech...
...She is concerned about the problems facing teenage mothers...
...Ann Grimes...
...This gushy description of Mr...
...On the positive side, kaizen puts a premium on the intelligence and resourcefulness of the individual worker...
...Simon and Schuster, $24.95...
...Lee Hart—pinioned by cameras—asked me if I could pick up some hairspray for her...
...Then there is the oldfangled model, Barbara Bush, who gave out the recipe for her favorite oatmeal lace cookies on the trail and joked that the only training a woman needed to become first lady was "to marry well...
...While neither modern lawmaker would have the debonair arrogance of Randolph to enter the chamber with a pack of snarling mastiffs, quirkiness in Congress may not be entirely dead...
...America needs perestroika because its standard operating procedures have not usually involved cooperation and planning...
...America loves to glamorize the role of first lady for the same reason we love Princess Diana: we are still royalists at heart...
...Texas Instruments, Unilever, Nestle, McDonald's, and Coca-Cola are hugely successful in Japan because they carefully adjust their products and procedures to fit Japanese standards...
...In the generally acknowledged "Golden Age of Movies," as Miller observes, films often ended with the stars gazing outward toward a better tomorrow...
...Adam Yarmolinsky Congressional Chronicles...
...Can Mazda really represent such an ominous threat to America's economic security when one-quarter of its ownership resides in Dearborn, Michigan...
...I recall vividly being NBC's White House reporter the night Nixon fired the special prosecutor and accepted the resignations of the attorney general and his deputy...
...The sparseness of contemporary entries in this book supports that suspicion...
...One wonders why, if Gray sees so little military utility in nuclear weapons, he is not more interested in reducing their numbers, or at least in modifying their configuration...
...Beware of an author who begins a sweeping history of American business and the literature surrounding it by writing about his own nightmares...
...Michael M. Thomas Working for the Japanese: Inside Mazda's American Auto Plant...
...cute character, production look, soundtrack, trendy topics) can live longer through sequels, series, pseudonews stories, and toys...
...As he says, "The issue seems to be: How much crisis will it take...
...It needs a new structure to formulate a bottoms-up economic game plan and to find some institution to play quarterback—the role played by MITI in Japan and by the universal banks in Germany...
...One of the first things that impressed Mazda's new American workers," the authors say, "was the willingness of the Japanese to let workers figure things out for themselves...
...This is not to discount the misery that Flat Rock workers underwent...
...But what about the music...
...Over a period of roughly 10 years, beginning in 1975, an inconsequential South Bronx machine shop, Welbilt Electronic Die Corporation, later renamed Wedtech, managed to gather and utterly dissipate approximately $150 million of public money and private capital...
...Colin S. Gray...
...For the first time, a Japanese automobile company, Mazda Motor Corporation, would operate an automobile plant on the home turf of America's Big Three car makers...
...firms could not work together, and the Bush administration's firing of the most important government actor in government-industry cooperation—Craig Fields, the head of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), I find this a deeply pessimistic book...
...I also sympathize with specific parts of the Pantheon agenda...
...And one could argue that military intervention is most likely to be successful only when it offers the antagonist a face-saving alternative...
...They are Bobby Baker's Wheeling and Dealing and William "Fishbait" Miller's Fishhait...
...When I think of how hard it must be to be a political wife, I recall two incidents...
...Lacking fast-forward, many theatergoers turn their backs to this procession and head home...
...Even Bob Dole, perhaps the only major political figure with a well-honed sense of irony, is passed over...
...I would like to have learned more about this...
...Despite the magazine articles and television specials that praised the Japanese system for treating workers with dignity and respect, and despite the noble promises made by Mazda during its orientation, workers at Flat Rock were not happy...
...The story of the Mazda-Flat Rock plant is recounted by Joseph and Suzy Fucini, a husband-and-wife journalist team based in Michigan...
...Would an all-male college invite Denis Thatcher to give a commencement address...
...Lodge writes that "in the 1960s the British government sought to collaborate with business and labor to formulate something like an industrial policy, [but] neither the institutions, the instruments, the personnel, nor the ideology were there to make it work...
...Anthony S. Pitch...
...Ten years ago, Colin Gray wrote an article arguing that the United States could and should plan to fight and win a nuclear war against the Soviet Union...
...The midnight of the "Saturday night massacre," as I walked toward my car to go home, two of Nixon's senior aides emerged from the White House's west wing...
...He called vote fraud and dirty tricks familiar stuff...
...Free Press, $19.95...
...But even ignoring two events that have occurred since this book went to press (the collapse of U.S...
...The Fucinis conclude that, ultimately, the Mazda experience became a nightmare for the Americans...
...One was after the election, when the Bushes invited the traveling press corps over to their Kennebunkport home for wine and cheese on Thanksgiving weekend...
...What a life, I thought...
...Lies toppled Nixon, as Kutler observes in the book's final pages...
...Actually, Johnson had only a dictating machine, while Nixon used a seven microphone, automatic mixing and switching system...
...I looked at Lee Hart and she looked back, chagrined...
...An American manager is "stocky and confident, with meat-hook arms and a jaw that still looks square and strong...
...Perhaps it's because Kalwins needs to borrow the moral glow of the civil rights movement to quiet his discomfort at finding himself on the same side as Ted Turner...
...The writers could have harkened back to Alva Vanderbilt's $250,000 ball in 1883 or the formal dinners that Newporters threw for their dogs at the turn of the century...
...Peter Baida...
...Rowdiness and excessive disputation may be less common now than when Charles Sumner was beaten to within an inch of his life by Preston Brooks on the floor of the Senate, but it was not too long ago that Rep...
...What risks are we prepared to run to avoid being red...
...There was no matter too mundane to be covered up...
...No one ' is sure how much independence is expected from mates any more or how much will be tolerated by the electorate...
...Just another clever way for the Bush administration to try to have it both ways...
...Closer, continuous, and more imaginative focus on some of these characters would have enlivened the narrative even as the coils of complication drew tighter...
...Moreover, the boost in presidential popularity was also short-lived...
...Russett observes that both political and media elites find it harder to criticize forceful action by a president than conduct that may be viewed as too conciliatory...
...Once, during his long quest for the presidency, George Bush was approached by an adviser about whether he could have a word with his wife about dying her hair and sprucing up a little...
...General Motors owns 38 percent of Isuzu, and nearly 70 percent of GM's 1989 profits were from foreign operations...
...Thompson's account neglects an inferential side of the story that also needs to be addressed...
...That this was to a great extent true, I have no doubt, but it took 10 years to kill this company...
...It must be industry-led...
...When the Supreme Court scolded his Justice Department for unlawful wiretaps, Nixon responded that his administration had reduced wiretaps by 50 percent from the all-time high under former Attorney General Robert Kennedy...
...It's unfortunate that by the time Miller reaches film example number 238 (my unofficial count), his essay has taken on the relentless, gimmicky, hard-sell qualities he himself deplores when he finds them on the screen...
...Today, most movies don't end at all...
...they reflect a contradictory and ambivalent range of feelings about women's shifting roles...
...Illustrative is the general approval of President Gerald Ford's military action to rescue the Mayaguez crew, although it turned out that the crew had already been released and many American servicemen died in the mission...
...George Lodge appears to believe that he is writing an optimistic book...
...Japan's love affair with the Franklinesque virtues of thrift and hard work has brought it to the fore...
...Lester Thurow Seeing Through Movies...
...Bush has used wit and political skill to elude the sort of criticism that the brittle "Queen Nancy" engendered...
...I have long thought one document was a tip-off of Watergate to come...
...Now he has written a big book arguing that the United States must develop a strategy or strategies to win a variety of wars...
...After the campaign was over, she told a journalist, "I've heard one of the candidate's wives say she loves every minute of the race, and all I can say is, either she's lying or she's wacko...
...After all, Baida's hero, Ben Franklin, told us that "Time is Money," and few of us can afford to waste either...
...Rather than dignity and respect, they had found a dehumanizing management system at the plant that pushed them harder and harder in pursuit of unattainable production goals and then abandoned them when they became worn out and injured...
...His conclusion is that, despite the complexities of national security problems, the public has enough information to answer the key questions: "When is the use of military force justified...
...Ross K. Baker Running Mates: The Image and Reality of the First Lady Role...
...The double-edged sword that political handlers face these days when they try to figure out how best to use political wives can be seen in the sagas of Kitty Dukakis and Barbara Bush...
...When writing a business book, it's better to let the story tell itself...
...Although some civilian military analysts— Michael Howard, Karl Kaiser, and Francois de Rose come to mind— are beginning to see that figuring out how to achieve military victory is not their primary task, many of them— Gray is just one example—are still too caught up in the excitement of plotting complex nuclear—and even non-nuclear— strategies...
...American businessmen talk as if an incompetent government is filled with venal, dumb civil servants...
...Nevertheless, Marilyn W. Thompson, a New York journalist and an early digger into the Wedtech scandal, has delivered a smoothly written, frequently intriguing, and just as frequently maddening account of the scam's brief life and flush times...
...Paul C. Warnke War, Peace, and Victory: Strategy and Statecraft for the Next Century...
...My own guess is that investigators looking into exactly how now-defunct thrifts were looted—with complaisance if not connivance on Uncle Sam's part that obscured the boundary between mere dereliction of duty and outright corruption— could profit as much as any would-be swindler from a close study of Marilyn Thompson's exhaustive study...
...It should come as no surprise that Baida ends the book with a look at American business's comeuppance at the hands of the Japanese...
...How long the whipping continues before the American firm expires is an interesting question...
...Crushed in a crowd trying to get to her husband at a Democratic candidate debate in New Hampshire, she noted: "This is about as interesting as a bad cocktail party—with no booze...
...Bush has her own discreet agenda that is more liberal than her husband's...
...Bush ever saying a word...
...The Library of Congress lists 229 "Watergate" books...
...Yes and no...
...So in lieu of "THE END," whatever threads of narrative today's movies have extended curl into a bow at the 105minute mark...
...business and government must work together...
...And he seems still to be pursuing the will-o'the-wisp of Star Wars...
...The capacity of the United States to intervene decisively in any of these situations is extremely limited...
...Furthermore, American managers find themselves without power, constantly secondguessed and preempted by their Japanese "advisers," who must refer even minor questions back to Mazda headquarters for resolution...
...Mark Crispin Miller, ed...
...Their political and moral instincts were as bad as his...
...Why are they winning...
...But as Russett points out, all these actions were of brief duration and at least cosmetically successful...
...The 1988 campaign forced everyone to reexamine the role of political wives...
...But it is important for policymakers to recognize that, like it or not, they must be responsive to popular opinion...
...She has a quiet influ?nce over her husband, teaching him sensitivity on issues such as AIDS and the homeless, and she influences staff choices, having promoted the pro-choice Dr...
...But aren't those days over...
...At the turn of the century, antitrust laws were passed in response to the excesses of the robber barons...
...Films win praise for opposing the dominant culture, as when Miller smiles on the "superb and antithetical Raging Bull" after grimacing over the Rocky series...
...In a long wetkiss chapter about IBM, he retells stories of IBM's relentless rise to business dominance without mentioning the company's recent struggles to hold its place in the personal computer revolution, with most of the sales now going to clone makers...
...Finally, the book has a flaw common to many new business books: the authors attempt to inject novelistic descriptions into the narrative to enliven the story...
...In light of that, does the Watergate break-in seem surprising...
...For example, he states that the CIA must obtain court approval for domestic wiretaps, when in fact the CIA is barred from surveillance activities within the United States...
...That's why the Colin Grays of the 1990s need to think less about winning wars and more about keeping the peace...
...it would embrace a vast cast of suborning and suborned: street-smart "dese, dem, and dose" types, a congressman, a goodly portion of the backchannel operators of the Reagan White House and associated executive departments, assorted New York politicos and, at the end, financial exotics of the sort only California seems capable of spawning...
...In politics," suggested Kinsley, "a trophy wife is the older first wife who doesn't have a career...
...Twenty-five percent of Mazda is owned by Ford Motor Company, a fact that is mentioned by the Fucinis but not sufficiently explored...
...Haldeman to use bogus and misleading mailings in his 1962 California gubernatorial campaign...
...This is not, as the publisher's blurb suggests, "the worst domestic scandal of the Reagan administration...
...Marilyn W. Thompson...
...Anyone who reads the business pages...
...His wife and I just looked at him...
...How important is it to have a modus vivendi with the Soviets...
...More elegant and respectable but no less full of wonderful anecdotes about the Congress of the recent past is Eugene McCarthy's Up 'Til Now...
...Bush refuses to talk publicly about those differences or to hammer at her husband to change...
...A little less buttoned-down, blow-dried primness might prompt voters to cut members of Congress a little more slack...
...And the spread of democracy thus holds the best promise of a peaceful world order...
...One explanation for the low esteem into which Congress has fallen is that its members present themselves to the voters as choirboys who then fall embarrassingly short of that image and come off sounding like hypocrites...
...Silvio Conte did not too long ago...
...Pantheon Books, $24.95...
...Bush wears expensive designer clothes and has used society interior designer Mark Hampton to redecorate several rooms at the White House and Camp David, but, as Grimes points out, Mrs...
...Journalist Susan Riley of The Ottawa Citizen wondered, "What is the political wife saying about women, about marriage, about the way power is distributed in our society...
...Bush is interested in the needs of poor women and women who have been left by their husbands and need job training," Grimes writes...
...Instead, he recognizes that the principal purpose of nuclear weapons is to discourage the other side from using nuclear weapons as well as to damp down potential conflicts that might escalate into conventional and then into nuclear wars, and he justifiably chides the proponents of "flexible response"—gradual escalation from conventional weapons to "tactical" nuclear weapons to larger-scale nuclear exchanges—for not thinking seriously about where flexibility can lead...
...Our" job is not, apparently, to help build a successful American medical industry...
...worker tells the Fucinis, "To me, the complaints I've had have been a managementlabor thing, not a JapaneseAmerican thing...
...Europe, Japan, and North America will all want the same high value-added, high wage industries: micro-electronics, biotechnology, the new material science industries, robotics, civilian aviation, computer hardware and software, and telecommunications...
...Lodge gives sensible advice on what it takes to form a successful consortium...
...A look at my own Nixon files reminds me that as far back as 1938, when Nixon was a young Los Angeles lawyer, he was accused of deceptive misconduct in the sale of a home, although the trial judge did not hold him responsible...
...Lodge's words could refer just as easily to the United States...
...Gray goes on to suggest that the principal deterrent "in the foreground" to discourage Soviet leaders from waging war on the Western Alliance in Europe, or upon its "vital interests elsewhere," would be the fact of "an economically vastly superior enemy coalition" persistent in defending its interests...
...The critics have submerged, and in a few cases suppressed, their aesthetic sensibilities...
...Thank heavens University of Wisconsin historian Stanley Kutler has gathered in 620 pages most of what you need to know about Watergate and Richard Nixon just at the moment when Nixon, who has spent a lifetime concocting alibis, is at it again...
...one of them asked, referring to the president's firing of Archibald Cox and his order to close the special prosecutor's office...
...Political wives are a fault line in our society...
...The fact that these guys stay married to the same woman for 30 years is the trophy...
...The Wellesley students who protested the choice of Barbara Bush as their commencement speaker argued that young women no longer need as role models wives who have spent their lives enhancing a man's career...
...Grimes points out that when the illusion cracked, her ordeal raised disturbing questions about where the line of privacy should be drawn for candidates' family members...
...This book has a simple, and, I believe, true thesis...
...Nixon didn't want public relations...
...But the book whose congressional vignettes have never been surpassed and probably never will be is Harry McPherson's A Political Education...
...Explaining her determination not to differ from the president in public, the first lady said: "I think a good mother and father make a decision about a child behind a closed door and then come out united...
...Government's role is as a legitimizer, a power broker to protect small companies from large ones, a provider of supplemental funds, a coordinator with other government policies, a socializer to spread the benefits to the community, an overseer to ensure that the project stays on track, and a defender of the clearly defined national interest that is to flow from the consortium's activities...
...When Nixon ordered the IRS to harass White House "enemies," he insisted he was only doing what the Democrats did...
...By contrast, in both Germany and Japan, industry grew up with government as a big brother...
...The drama and turbulence are missing...
...Mrs...
...Still, there's no gainsaying the narrowness of vision and style that corporate control has imposed on movies...
...They can't afford to risk closure, not while their merchandising elements (e.g...
...His voice, a rich baritone that seems to draw its strength from deep within his muscular sixfootfour frame, filled the entire room...
...semiconductor industry is experiencing while the European semiconductor industry is still getting its act together...
...Finally, Russett astutely observes that the lack of a coherent strategy can interfere with the constructive interaction of opinion and policy...
...Steve Gunderson...
...So who needs another one...
...John Burton made an obscene Sicilian gesture to a Republican in the course of a debate...
...We learn about the Japanese strategy for conquering robotics, information policies in Brazil, and about the problems the U.S...
...I shook my head, and said, "You guys are crazy," and headed off into the night...
...she follows too hard on the money, too closely and too doggedly, and after a while the changes rung on a single theme become monotonous and wearisome...
...The torrid pace of a fully kaizened JIT assembly line keeps the worker in motion for 57 seconds of every minute, 12 seconds longer than at a typical Big Three plant...
...Our failures to capitalize on our lead in remote space satellite sensing devices is also recounted...
...Maureen Dowd...
...In 1985, the small suburb of Flat Rock, Michigan, located about 20 miles south of Detroit, became the site of an event rich in industrial symbolism...
...Memories, because U.S...
...There is of course the sin of silly writing, such as in this gem: "The deficit, it seems safe to say, is a bomb that might or might not explode...
...Two highranking American managers quit in disgust, and New Directions, a dissident union group that seeks a tougher negotiating stance with Mazda, wins an election over the official UAW slate...
...Instead, as the book title suggests, the Pantheon school wants readers to look past the artifact and confront the large forces and complex ideas that movies embody...
...The exception in Europe is the relationship between Greece and Turkey, which he notes are "among the poorest countries of this group, and only sporadically democratic...
...One side believes in having a game plan and a quarterback, the other does not...
...He can barely contain his contempt for arms control efforts...
...He invited you...
...But to the degree that Mazda management was obtuse, its failures probably had less to do with the intrinsic nature of Japanese management than with the sorry truth that all big, bureaucratic corporations do foolish things, regardless of their nationality...
...Ever since the days of Mary Todd Lincoln and Edith Wilson, first ladies have been going nuts and usurping presidential power...
...What is truly astonishing about Wedtech is how receptive to co-option one "obstacle" after another was...
...The guidelines on cooperative work behavior were supposed to extend to the workers' personal lives...
...When the Pantheon critics concentrate on what they find in batches of films instead of what they think the films mean, their work shines with insight...
...Keeling continues for five more lines...
...While the foibles of Daniel Webster or the wit of Henry Clay even now prompt smiles, and the outrageous carryings-on of Robert Kerr and Everett Dirksen still evoke some amused recognition in those who remember those bumptious corsairs, color in Congress seems to be a thing of the past...
...In the Pantheon School's golden era, movies ended in gloom, their idealism no longer couched in the possibility of transcendence, but in a recognition of how far short America had fallen...
...The side that does not may not be dying, but it is certainly being severely beaten...
...Moreover, the expanding networks of strategic alliances, joint ventures, and transnational investments are making old nationalistic labels—"Japanese company," "American company"— obsolete...
...From the movie I take them back to the novel, where Dorothy's slippers were silver, not ruby, and to the presidential election of 1896, for which Oz is a parable...
...David Graulich Controlling the Sword: The Democratic Governance of National Security...
...The sense of fun...
...I fear not, however— which brings me to my final quarrel with Thompson's approach...
...The "democratic governance of national security" thus can be seen to be doing a good job of "controlling the sword...
...With the movie audience now also languishing on China Beach, it's no wonder that in connection with our nation's involvement in Vietnam, so few Americans care to consider the Boland Amendments, the justification for the Panama invasion, and the negotiation over Cambodia...
...Lodge recognizes that we won't act differently until we have a different history...
...Michael Cornfield The Wars of Watergate...
...As the gaggle of reporters, photographers, and technicians tagged after Barbara Bush up the driveway to the house, Jessica Lee of USA Today thanked her for the invitation...
...Well, you probably ought to take it back off the shelf...
...He describes Nixon as "the last casualty" of a haunting decade of war, unprecedented social protest, and assassinations...
...Kutler succeeds in giving context to the events of Watergate...
...Seeing Through Movies offers no illuminations on these aspects of film...
...Those events did not end the Nixon presidency...
...Harvard University Press, $22.50...
...And then, for the next nine minutes, credits trudge up a black screen...
...As Ann Grimes documents in her new book, those days are far from over...
...Thompson's version focuses too greatly on the financial fun and games, making Wedtech seem as if it existed solely as a shell, a boiler room invention through which one money malefaction after another could be concocted and implemented...
...Losing consumer electronics has not done it...
...And if her family knew about her cyclical depressions and the extent of her addictive nature and emotional fragility—which eventually led her to drink rubbing alcohol while she was on antidepressants—why did her robotic husband put her through the grinding experience of a presidential campaign...
...This reflects the public support for measures that are seen as reducing the risks of nuclear war, which was demonstrated by the nuclear freeze movement of the early 1980s...
...Apparently, it will take a very large crisis...
...The problem with Thompson's book is as much a matter of taste as anything else...
...Don't thank me," the first lady-elect said, with an edge to her voice that distinctly implied she would prefer to be alone with her husband...
...The assumptions about her position on abortion are true," a White House source confides in Grimes...
...My main quibble with this highly entertaining little book is that it leans a little too heavily on the early examples of congressional eccentricity and overlooks people like the diabolically acerbic Eugene McCarthy or that irrepressible phrasemaker Alan Simpson...
...The mayor of Flat Rock is "old and kindly...
...Indeed, incipient mulcters of the public purse could do worse than to take her version (I believe at least one other "big" book on Wedtech is in the wings) as textbook and Cicerone...
...Along with the advertising mentality, the other pervasive influence on current American movies is, of course, television...
...Presumably, while the sharks tore at the carcass, other principals, like cofounder Joseph Mariotta, who all but disappears from Thompson's account, were busy on the factory floor...
...I think it is important that books on the current wit and wisdom of Congress not become more and more slender...
...His analysis finds a "complex interaction between leaders and led," with public opinion sometimes influencing policy and policymaking sometimes being shaped in an attempt to obtain the desired popular reaction...
...If New York trophy wives are sleek superwomen like fashion designer Carolyn Roehm, wife of Wall Street's Henry Kravis, and public relations expert Linda Robinson, wife of American Express Chairman James Robinson, Washington trophy wives are stalwarts like Helena Schultz, Jane Weinberger, and Barbara Bush...
...There were no reserved parking spots or executive dining rooms...
...Ah, there's the rub...
...A shortcoming of the Pantheon school is that no films are held up for contemplation as something other than a commodity and/or a political ideology...
...Public opinion is understandably as confused as the policy itself...
...If Mr...
...In the bulk of the book Lodge takes a random walk through the failures of American business firms to work together, to work with government, and to compete successfully against those in Europe or Japan who have learned to work together...
...Someone must represent the ceremonial side of government and provide juicy celebrity gossip...
...Losing autos, steel, and machine tools has not done it...
...But that technique backfired badly—in one of the episodes that helped cost him the election— when Dukakis could not muster any emotion in his answer to a debate question about whether he would want the death penalty for someone who had raped and murdered his wife...
...Carl Stern Poor Richard's Legacy...
...In the course of the argument, Gray displays extraordinary erudition about past wars, from the Peloponnesian to the Napoleonic, and about past exponents of strategic theory, notably Clausewitz and Jomini, and he makes a number of sensible observations...
...Mino Publications, $12.95...
...If we continue to squander our inheritance," Baida concludes, "our most precious bequest to our grandchildren may well be a copy of Poor Richard's Almanack, to show them where we went wrong...
...Perhaps too much context...
...While we Americans have failed to get our act together thus far, we are slowly and painfully learning both within our business firms and within our government...
...Thank George Bush...
...In other words, Nixon is still blaming other people...
...John Randolph striding onto the floor of the House followed by his hunting dogs, might have mentioned Speaker Tom Foley's amiable dog Alice or Les Aspin's hound Junket...
...Having nonsupervisory workers (two-thirds of the work force) with real hourly wages 11 percent below where they were in 1973 has not done it...
...Although she has more liberal views than her husband on issues important to women, such as abortion and gun control, Mrs...
...The results here are painful cliches...
...Not taking a higher road than my predecessors and my adversaries was my principal mistake...
...Any book that tries to do so much in so little space is going to have failings...
...How can you be such a slob...
...The danger of a nuclear holocaust would be only a "deterrence makeweight...
...Wasn't it masterful...
...Its founder-promoters early battened on to the possibilities afforded by well-meaning "set-aside" legislation designed to give minority-owned businesses a leg up in government contract work...
...In the mid-19th century, transportation was regulated when the railroads attempted to rip everyone off...
...he gives equal space to what he calls "dissenting voices," antibusiness thinkers from Henry David Thoreau to the muckrakers to Ralph Nader...
...Good popular work with political significance is rarer still in America, because most Americans aren't that interested in politics...
...He could afford to take Donna Rice out on the town, but he begrudged spending $6.50 for his wife to look good for his pathetic campaign...
...But every time Gray comes down on one side of a specific current issue, he seems to come down wrong...
...The Pantheon School hasn't convinced me to budge from my favorite generalization about popular culture: good work is rare in every era, in every medium, through every mode of production...
...strongly motivated, competent people with career paths within and outside the consortium must be attracted and a common culture built...
...It is difficult to imagine, for example, anecdotes being told in years to come of the antics of Senator Connie Mack or Rep...
...Or dead...
...As an economic system, communism may be dying in Eastern Europe, but there is another battle underway in the world between two different forms of capitalism—best represented by Germany and Japan on one side, and the United States and Great Britain on the other...
...Most spouses of the candidates in the Democratic primary were career women who refused to be treated as meek appendages...
...To stay within the ceilings, the Soviet Union has continued to destroy older silo-based ICBMs as it deploys its new mobile SS-24s and SS-25s...
...Indeed, almost every chapter of Kutler's book reminds the reader of one consistent thread in Nixon's anxietyridden life—reaching for the leastprincipled option, based on the rationale that others did as bad or worse...
...Standing on the White House lawn, struggling to describe the enormity of the moment, all I could think of to start my story was "President Nixon tonight jumped from the frying pan into the fire...
...He had in mind penetrating the camps of political enemies, such as that of Senator Edward Kennedy, so that the White House "attack group" could plan in advance to undercut and counter their moves...
...Louis Sullivan as secretary of Health and Human Services...
...Why is it, when I hear people call the process an abomination, that I remember my former neighbors talking about keeping the colored out...
...Other examples cited are the wide popular support for our invasion of Grenada, the bombing attack on Libya in response to its sponsorship of terrorism, and the military action to get Manuel Noriega out of Panama and into a Miami prison...
...Baida draws from the classics to present brief biographies of personages ranging from John Jacob Astor to ad man David Ogilvy...
...Two books published within the past 20 years provide enough delicious scurrility to obviate the need for delving back into a Congress that no longer exists...
...In 1969, when Jeb Magruder joined the White House staff, he was given a Nixon memo which said, "P.O., not P.R...
...If Kitty Dukakis had become first lady and fallen apart, a nightmare she now believes might well have happened, what effect would her illness have had on his presidency...
...His chapter on "Nuclear Weapons and Strategy" no longer offers the dubious consolation that U.S...
...In the first chapter of this book, Peter Baida lets us in on the stirrings of his subconscious while he attended the Wharton School of Business...
...The government returns the hostility: Lodge quotes an FDA inspector as saying, "Our job is to get the violators...
...Kutler doesn't mention other examples that come quickly to mind...
...Everyone, including line workers and management, wore the same uniforms...
...By the time the sorry "saga" had run its course, Wedtech or, more properly, the relatively small public and private money sources to which it provided special access, had become a schooling ground for as rich and greedy a variety of shark as ever gathered in one place in the history of American business...
...Russett's book may be seen as sometimes belaboring the obvious...
...In his latest memoir, the former president writes, "I played by the rules of politics as I found them...
...The facts show, as Kalwins painfully admits at the end of his essay, that Turner was not only the rightful owner of the films that directors and actors banged their spoons over, but that he has also been a better friend to the cause of film preservation than either said luminaries or the government...
...The book's limitation is that the Fucinis are better reporters than they are analysts...
...In an era where Spike Lee goes on "Nightline" and Michael Moore (Roger and Me) has ascended to Ralph Nader's pulpit to denounce the auto industry, we should all be doing our best to learn what—and how—the movies project about politics...
...Pat Aufderheide, in her essay, for example, shows how American movies have never squarely represented the Vietnam War as a part of American history...
...Americans, who cheerfully presume that all politicians lie, are nonetheless outraged when one is caught doing it...
...On the Vietnam war, public opinion outpaced official policy and eventually forced our withdrawal from that costly and quixotic enterprise...
...Deception became a way of life in the sweaty atmosphere of the White House...
...Mazda training procedures emphasized teamwork and cooperation, instead of the traditional Detroit model of managementlabor confrontation...
...Wedtech was a tale played out by some of the most florid characters a novelist could wish for...
...Not that fatigue wouldn't, to some extent, be inevitable...
...Nor has she lent her voice toward shaping a national family policy...
...I bring up The Wizard of Oz on the first day of class because it is one work of serious fiction all my University of Virginia students already know intimately...
...When her husband was chosen as George Bush's running mate, Marilyn Quayle quickly made it clear that she resented not being paid for her services as the wife of the vice-presidential candidate and that, once her husband was in office, she might return to the work force as a lawyer or run for her husband's old congressional seat...
...As world events drive economies towards greater integration, Japan's provincialism and its difficulties in exporting its management style look like its Achilles' heel in the 1990s...
...So successful is this cultural integration that many Japanese consider McDonald's a Japanese company...
...Most action pictures today conform to the odd-couple buddy-cop formula...
...I said, $6.50...
...No one who watched Gary Hart drag Lee Hart around to shopping malls on his post-Donna Rice reentry into the Democratic race—dubbed "Return of the Living Dead" by reporters—could help but wonder whether it wasn't time for abused political wives to start screaming, "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it any more...
...timing must be right, with a sense of urgency and agreed-upon deadlines...
...But the electric energy, radiant smile, and passionate strength were all an illusion, behind which Kitty Dukakis was frantically trying to hold on to her selfworth...
...Nixon may be right in at least one respect...
...Knopf, $24.95...
...It is this quality of concentration, this extraordinarily high per-dollar ratio of peculative diversity and creativity, that gives the Wedtech story its particular flavor...
...But in fact, Nixon had taken tax write-offs long before he became president...
...Essayist Peter Biskind sees Vietnam in every frame of their blockbusters...
...Perhaps Pitch, in recounting the tale of Rep...
...To their credit, the Fucinis provide plenty of detail about daily life in a Japanese manufacturing plant...
...As one U.S...
...Kutler's compendium has flaws...
...A corporation's success has less to do with its nation of origin and more to do with its skills at internationalizing its operations and having "insider" status wherever it serves customers...
...We want our first ladies to have charisma and don't want them to meddle in Cabinet meetings, arrange summit schedules according to the position of Uranus, or distract the president with any Valley-of-the-Dolls or conflict-of-interest problems...
...According to Lodge, to be successful, countries and industries, as well as individual business firms, must formulate and carry out the resulting strategies...
...But those who know the first lady well joke that she is "the real Nancy Reagan," or "Nancy Reagan with brains," and point out that she is just as much a lioness when it comes to protecting her husband from those she considers disloyal and just as much a force when it comes to issues she cares about...
...It seems that Baida used to dream about stern old Benjamin Franklin and high-spirited young Huck Finn wrestling with his soul...
...It sounds as if she is saying that women are status symbols, possessions, mirrors for the men they live with...
...He specifically opposes a treaty to limit the development of antisatellite weapons...
...The biggest laughs and stunts are reproduced for advance viewing in television commercials, "infotainment" segments of news shows, and reviews by such odd-couple buddy-cop critics as Siskel and Ebert...
...I find perverse hope for Americans, if not the movies, in this response...
...There were sounds of rebellion on the Republican side as well...
...Most business journalism seems so shallow because, although many of the writers know the numbers, few have gone beyond them to learn the history that underlies the event they write about...
...This means a crisis...
...I doubt, by the way, that any member of the House and Senate l00 years ago would have donned a plastic pig snout to denounce a public works project, as Rep...
...Bush's snowy hair and wrinkles have become a beloved part of her growing myth, now that she is a potent political symbol on her own, GOP strategists leak information designed to bolster the belief that Mrs...
...leadership, the air and sea wars, and the Vietnamese...
...He fails to note, however, that, although never ratified and expiring by its terms at the end of 1985, the treaty today continues as a de facto limit on the strategic arsenals of both sides...
...More than half the sales of companies like Caterpillar, Dow Chemical, and Xerox are outside the U.S...
...That laurel surely belongs to the stillunfolding savings and loan crisis, the criminous underpinnings of which are only now beginning to become visible...
...This first part of his observation is supported by the silence of the Democratic leadership and the absence of adverse media comment when President Bush resorted to military force in Panama...
...Though President Reagan announced in 1986 that the U.S...
...The rhetorical means, as opposed to the political resonances, of the story...
...He was the one who was elected, she insists...
...But perhaps it is premature to write Congress off as just a collection of humorless bean counters who hang around for years, crouching behind a battlement of blandness...
...In its traditional profit line—mainframe computers— IBM is losing ground to rivals like Amdahl and Fujitsu...
...casualties in a nuclear exchange could be limited to 20 million...
...the key players must have top management support...
...A case in point: The late Malcolm Forbes's 1989 birthday bash was covered as if nothing so outrageous had ever happened...
...Yet, Gray's thinking has moved some distance over the past 10 years...
...Experience in the years since World War II seems to me to confirm Professor Russett's thesis...
...But America still clings to the old-fashioned image of wives as loyal, wellbalanced helpmates...
...William Morrow, $22.95...
...substantial time must have been spent planning strategies...
...When the company finally collapsed, it employed over 1,000 people in several plants...
...Pitch ever gets to a second edition, he would do well to consult these sources that went untapped in his current effort...
...The Democrats unashamedly used Kitty to try to give her stiff husband an aura of passion...
...When the hidden White House taping system was revealed, Nixon said Lyndon Johnson's was far better than his...
...William Morrow, $21.95...
...Another key concept, "justintime" (JIT), attempts to keep human and material resources at the barest possible minimum...
...So does Kutler...
...But, she said, `I am not going to be one who's speaking out on women's issues, so-called.' She makes no connection between these women's needs and what Americans have traditionally come to perceive as women's issues: pay equity, abortion rights, and an equal-rights amendment...
...This is reason enough for most of us to place the book gently back upon the shelf and congratulate ourselves for avoiding another dumb read...
...Like most contemporary business journalism, Feeding the Beast is relentlessly nonjudgmental...
...These may by turns be fascinating, outrageous, even bloodcurdling, but in business, even of the shadiest sort, process must inevitably boil down to meetings, conversations, and the preparation of documents...
...an enlightened workerparent would say, "Johnny, you're a wonderful son, but you must clean up your room so you'll be able to find things more easily when you need them...
...John Schwartz Feeding the Beast: How Wedtech Became the Most Corrupt Little Company in America...
...During our history, the economic activities of government arose in response to the excesses of capitalism...
...This charming book showcases the outrageous, picaresque, and downright goofy aspects of Congress, but is forced to reach fairly far back in history to come up with most of its congressional oddities...
...everyone needed to work together to catch up with England and the United States and rebuild after the destruction of World War II...
...Mark Crispin Miller excels at detailing the pernicious effects advertising divisions have had on entertainment divisions...
...would no longer be bound by the treaty's terms, we have remained largely in compliance...
...I bought her the first small canister I could find...
...He rejects the idea that some nuclear weapons contribute to strategic instability...
...Barbara Bush gracefully responded that it was a matter of different generations and different expectations, and that, perhaps, by the time those graduates were her age, there would be a first gentleman looking adoringly at a female president...
...He answers both questions affirmatively...
...Bruce Russett...
...Ted Turner, in short, is a specimen of the public-spirited capitalist whose existence confounds dialectical theories of political evolution...
...His book also suggests that the combination of electoral politics and economic distress is a dangerous one for international relations...
...Business is now more and more globalized...
...In this regard, he refers to the failure of the SALT II Treaty to achieve ratification in 1979...
...Some striking examples come to mind...
...When Gary Hart came up a few minutes later to reimburse me, he asked how much...
...But Gray is not prepared to consider that sometimes no conceivable military means may achieve the desired political or economic ends...
...Another time, when I was following Gary and Lee Hart around in a mall during their sad revived campaign, I broke off to go into a drug store...
...Joseph J. Fucini, Suzy Fucini...
...he even mistakes Yoda, the Samurai doll in The Empire Strikes Back, for Mao TseTsung and Ho Chi Minh, and claims the title sequence of Raiders of the Lost Ark reminded him of the fall of Saigon...
...For example, instead of telling a teenage son, "Just look at this pig sty...
...She argues convincingly that Vietnam films have fixated upon the "noble grunts" (American foot soldiers), thereby slighting the U.S...
...George Lucas and Steven Spielberg receive lots of blame for ushering in the Second Dark Age...
...We are cops, let's face it...
...Now that Mrs...
...Stanley I. Kutler...
...In May 1973, when the press office was asked how much public money had been spent on the president's private homes in Key Biscayne and San Clemente, it put the sum at $39,525...
...It is no accident that the most famous rehabilitation center in the country for drugs and alcohol bears the name of a former first lady...
...As Russett points out, moreover, the industrialized and democratically governed nations "constitute a vast zone of peace," without expectation of or preparation for war among themselves...
...He points to the dichotomy in our strategic policy, whereby our announced arms control objective is to achieve survivable and nonprovocative retaliatory forces, consisting of second-strike-only weapons, while our declaratory policy in NATO councils is a threat to use nuclear weapons first...
...I sympathize with this pedagogical stratagem...
...But she still shows impatience with her volunteer status by referring to herself on travel manifests as second lady, even though no such title exists, and by handing out Marilyn Quayle key chains—take note, David Letterman—with her signature engraved on them instead of her husband's...
...Meanwhile, many cinematic techniques are vanishing because they don't suit the tube: deep focus, slow dissolves, broad tableaux with back- and side- as well as foreground movements...
...The second part is confirmed by the right-wing attack on the START Treaty agreements reached at the recent summit...
...The system is based on a philosophy of continuous improvement, called kaizen, which seeks to weed out inefficiencies and waste (ntttda) and achieve equal or greater output in less time with fewer workers...
...When Nixon got in trouble for taking huge illegal tax write-offs on the presidential papers he donated to the public, he said he got that idea from Johnson...
...Local managers are given lots of decisionmaking autonomy and don't have to check with distant bosses over every detail...
...In contrast, some presidential decisions to employ military force have evoked a "rally around the flag" reaction and increased the approval rating of the incumbent...
...It is to be hoped that Wedtech is merely a curious and singular bit of brigandage and not a symptom of the general degradation of our commercial culture...
...Stuart Kalwins opens his confused essay on colorization by comparing it to cross-burnings...
...In CocaCola/Columbia's Missing, for example, Jack Lemmon's heroic character "takes rare (and noticeable) solace in a bottle of Coke, whereas inside the nightmare stadium where the [Chilean] army does its torturing and murdering, there stands a mammoth Pepsi machine...
...Basically, what built Wedtech up and tore it down was overrepetition of a business strategy as honored by time as it is worn: If someone is in your way, make him an offer...
...He said, a bit resentfully, "You have expensive taste...
...Military intervention is a risky supplement to, never a substitute for, a range of political, economic, and diplomatic means...
...Poor Richard's Legacy is a damn useful book, a kind of Cliffs Notes of business history and thinking...
...The empirical answer, unfortunately, seems to be quite a bit...
...She is almost exclusively concerned with the processes of fraud...
...What the authors consider a Japanese menace is really a grave Japanese competitive weakness...
...At Flat Rock, the American workers are chronically stressed out and exhausted, as they were during the record-breaking temperatures of summer 1988...
...Within the dimensions of the story as she has chosen to tell it, surely nothing has been left out...
...That way, the strategists reason, they can please both sides of the spectrum without Mrs...
...In the face of persistent skepticism, the figure was twice revised and finally set at $1.3 million...
...Presumably, while the boardroom shenanigans were being played out, the company was actually making something...
...Finally, of course, it must be remembered that nothing gets as far as Wedtech did without the participation of "respectable" elements of society, persons of standing at the bar and on the exchange...
...In the 1930s the failure of capitalism led to the rules and regulations of the New Deal...
...Disputes flare up over such issues as whether the Americans have to wear "voluntary" baseball caps or attend "voluntary" morning exercise classes...
...An improvement of as little as six-tenths of a second is considered significant...
...In this regard, American and European companies are way ahead of the Japanese...
...They track the experiences of a group of American workers, many of whom were newcomers to the automobile industry...
...Mrs...
...Clearly, Grimes hopes and believes Barbara Bush is a dinosaur, the last of a breed of strong first ladies who must publicly feign disinterest in power, even as they privately wield it...
...Or is Wedtech just another glittering rhinestone in the diadem of the American genius for financial duplicity, rating somewhere alongside Fisk, Gould, and Vanderbilt's Erie Railroad caper...
...In addition, the assembly plant would be staffed by members of the United Auto Workers and operated by Japanese and Americans in what Mazda optimistically described as "a third-culture plant...
...Phil Keeling, a dissident union leader who is one of the book's heroes, is said to resemble "an ancient Viking warrior [with] clear blue-green eyes, large prominent brow, and sturdy jaw...
...Who will want to read it...
...As Shoichiro Irimajiri, senior managing director of Honda Motor Co., told Business Week, "We're 10 to 20 years behind in internationalization...
...He cites example after example of films with feel-good cues (Ghosthusters), happy-ending revisions of familiar stories (Rocky 1-V), and, most egregiously, the propagandistic display of product labels...
...This collection lashes out at the corporate state, whose singlemotive mentality and interlocking registry of white-bread names has, according to the theorists gathered here, straitened American film for 70 years, except during the late 1960s and the 1970s, "that chaotic interregnum between the demise of the old studio system and the onset of the new monopoly...
...In the 21st century, comparative advantage will be man-made, based upon the invention and mastery of new product and process technologies...
...Someone like convicted and disgraced ex-congressman Mario Biaggi is easy to understand: he arrives on the scene with his hand out...
...Are our military defense levels basically adequate or seriously wanting...
...There is the newfangled model, Kitty Dukakis, a feminist who tested conventions and tried to move beyond the phony deference expected of political wives, a woman who spoke out strongly and made it clear that she tried to influence her husband's opinions...
...Baida asks...
...Professor Russett asks whether public opinion influences national security policy and, if so, whether this is a good idea...
...participants must have clear, shared objectives...
...Listening to a Nixon press conference at Disneyworld in late 1973, I counted 14 false or misleading answers Nixon gave to 17 questions...
...As a cautionary tale...
...Kutler resists psychoanalyzing Nixon, saying little about the personal demons that led him to break into the dean's office at law school to look for his grades or to conspire with H.R...
...He threw the messenger out of his office...
...Hattie Babbitt, an attractive and celebrated trial attorney in Phoenix, set the new tone...
...Narratives climax with the periodicity of commercial breaks...
...those 1,000 employees must have been doing something during that time, andvery possibly doing some of it right...
Vol. 22 • July 1990 • No. 6
