POLITICAL BOOKNOTES
POLITICAL BOOKNOTES Reflections of an Afllrmative Action Baby. Stephen L. Carter. Basic Books, $23. Shortly after Harvard Law School rejected him, Stephen Carter got a rush of calls from...
...Sure, you could cut 50 or 100 of its 600 pages and no one would notice...
...But Carter goes well beyond that...
...Auletta’s reporting reveals how hollow this claim really is...
...Yet Rieff seems to be saying that L.A...
...Carl A. Weiss, who shot Long, was married to the daughter of an anti-Long judge, and Hair claims Weiss was motivated by a rumor that Long was preparing to revive a “racial slur” that his wife’s family had black blood...
...Billionaire Larry Tisch tells a top CBS executive he can’t order a bagel at the Beverly Hills Hotel because it costs too much...
...If these mass psychologies really exist, it’s hard to believe they differ that much from city to city, or even nation to nation...
...He not only informed Shreveport that he wouldn’t support the land transfer until the free textbooks were distributed, but he also demanded, among other things, that its representatives support all his bills in a special session of the legislature...
...Ken Auletta...
...Beyond describing Thomas to further illustrate the harsh treatment black dissenters receive in the black community, Carter makes two important points about him...
...Ambitious journalists with the stamina to unearth them should eye Auletta’s example and find their own lode to mine...
...First, he shows how sensitive Thomas has been to the shunning he has received from black intellectuals...
...POLITICAL BOOKNOTES Reflections of an Afllrmative Action Baby...
...What economic interests swayed the legislature before Long wrested control for himself...
...The syndrome haunted him-and other AfricanAmericans-into professional life...
...That’s true only if you think postponing footage of the Pope’s visit to Miami in favor of the finale of a tennis match could have undermined the republic...
...When a book’s ambition is to paint an entire industry, there must be at its heart a supreme effort of reporting and, equally important, a bias to err on the side of inclusion...
...Ask yourself, as I have many times, would you have voted for Huey Long...
...indeed, when invited to do so before the Senate Judiciary Committee a couple of years ago, he declined...
...The overnight verdict on Auletta’s book is that it’s longwinded and underedited...
...Thus they succeed in peddling the preposterous myth that any attempt to make the network news run efficiently actually threatens the workings of democracy itself...
...Long used the leverage...
...Imagine you’re a network owner who must cut costs to survive...
...In the second part of Reflections, he exposes one of the most serious problems plaguing African-American intellectuals today: their tendency to dismiss the views of black dissenters, particularly conservatives, as illegitimate...
...What exactly was the role and power of Standard Oil in the state...
...Senate seat even before completing his term as governor, ruled Louisiana from the Senate, and sought to position himself as a political threat to President Franklin Roosevelt.Then, in September 1935, he was struck down by an assassin in the skyscraper state capitol he had built...
...He is not a conservative, neo- or otherwise...
...After all, without afirmative action, Carter acknowledges, he would not have gained admission to Yale, and he finally comes out in favor of some system of preferences, at least at the undergraduate level...
...Hair figures that Long was “mainly bluffing” in issuing demands, and he drops the story after repeating the “I stomped them” quote...
...says...
...It is true that the result of racial preferences is sometimes the hiring of black people not as qualified as white people who are turned away, and preferences of that kind do much that is harmful and little that is good,” he...
...the conservative Michigan politician whom Ronald Reagan nominated to be an assistant attorney general and who was opposed by the civil rights establishment...
...In arriving at that judgment, Hair seems to have an implicit goal: to rebut the treatment of Long in T. Harry Williams’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, Huey Long, published in 1969...
...They served up something called “dorito brei,” a mixture between Huevos Rancheros and matzoh brei...
...On the other, that is a small price to pay for trying to combat the enormous problems facing black America...
...Shortly after Harvard Law School rejected him, Stephen Carter got a rush of calls from Harvard professors...
...Wouldn’t he like to come after all...
...Consider this: None of the networks conducted any internal post-mortem on their vacuous campaign coverage in 1988...
...Thomas has been called the usual names-an Uncle Tom, a traitor, and the rest-and he has said of the situation, ‘It is lonely, I mean really lonely...
...He succeeds only to a limited extent...
...As a result, the division is now losing more than $50 million per year...
...Williams, writes Hair, was ‘‘overly sympathetic to Long...
...Hair writes that the “conclusion is inescapable that everything he did in politics was for the purpose of augmenting his own power...
...After all, that’s their business...
...While struggling with that question helps deepen your understanding of history, it’s self-revealing as well...
...The question impels you to come to terms with incidents such as the clash between Long and the Shreveport establishment in 1928, the first year of his one-term governorship...
...The Roosevelt White House played political hard ball against Long, but it also began delivering hope and assistance to people striving to make ends meet...
...Richard Turner...
...Hogwash...
...Hair might have come closer to his goal of rebutting Williams had he achieved fully his explicit purposethat is, to tell the Long story in the broader context of the economic, political, and racial situation of Louisiana in the twenties and thirties, to put the emphasis more on the “times” than on the “life...
...There’s much to marvel at in Los Angeles, and some problems that are unique...
...In terms of context, Hair does not significantly improve upon Williams’s biography or Alan Brinkley’s Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression...
...They live “in a First World way on Third World prices,” he says, meaning that they reap the benefits of cheap labor to tend their children, clean their houses, mow their lawns, park their cars, and clean their high-rise offices...
...Both points help to humanize Thomas, who has been vilified by some blacks (and whites, too) as being so conservative that he is something less than human...
...Someone should write a book about it...
...Worse, according to Rieff, these bourgeois yuppies don’t truly interact with the immigrants working for them...
...But Carter’s objective here is not to defend Thomas...
...At the same time, Shreveport wanted the legislature to approve the transfer of 80 acres of land for the Army Air Corps to build a new base just outside the city...
...From age 25 to 42, Long became a utilities regulator, won one term as governor, barely survived an impeachment, won a U.S...
...Circumstances have changed dramatically in the past half centuryAmerica, and even Louisiana, has a more middle-class electorate-but an alienation and an economic uneasiness once again course through the body politic, and once again they await a compelling response from the Democratic party...
...William Ivy Hair...
...Gary Lee Three Blind Mice: How the TV Networks Lost Their Way...
...Both Hair and Williams, for example, tell the textbookair base story...
...It’s hard to figure just what it is about...
...Reiff can’t hold back: “And yet, like the future itseu, there it lay on our plates, its improbable mixture of aromas steaming pungently up at us...
...The author laments that he could never be viewed as anything better than the best black...
...residents who aspire to own a home with a little patch of walled-in green around it are racists...
...I didn’t coerce them,” Long said...
...The local school board had declined to accept the free textbooks that Long had prodded the legislature to provide-too humiliating to take such charity, the community’s leaders said...
...So why is everyone complaining...
...Carter seems to genuinely care that blacks don’t limit their intellectual potential or resources by discrediting those whose views fall out of the mainstream...
...And that story is indeed one of the most fascinating of twentieth century America-a story of a restless soul, an obsessive personality, a hunger for power, and the will to use it...
...But preferences can also be a means of selecting highly qualified black people from a pool of people who are all excellent...
...Long emerges as a dictator with nasty nicknames for his many enemies and with little interest in promoting fundamental change in the condition of blacks in a rigidly segregated society...
...In the Louisiana of 1935, few calamities could be worse than being stigmatized as ‘colored,’ ” Hair writes...
...If you already thought network news basically consisted of blow-dried video stenography, Auletta proves you weren’t jaded enough...
...At one point, he even makes a list of them, and in so doing, he appears to protest just a little too much...
...I stomped them...
...Random House, $25...
...has a bright future as the “gateway to the Pacific Rim...
...If he stopped there, his book would be remembered for bringing a much-needed, if not decisive, perspective on race in America...
...He obsesses about some sort of mass psychology of can-do-ism, with a tone of “Boy, are they in for a surprise . . .” Angelenos, he keeps saying, seem to have an illusion that they can control their own destiny, that things will work out...
...While Long financed his political operations by skimming a percentage of his appointees’ government salaries and placing the money in the infamous “deducts box,” how did the opposition forces finance their politics...
...In the end, the schoolchildren got their free books and Shreveport got its air base...
...He is careful to avoid that...
...Supreme Court came after Reflections went to print...
...Yes, there are a lot of rich jerks on the Westside of Los Angeles (and in the many other middle class areas of the city), and yes, people on the planet Earth tend to be concerned with parochial things like their own circle of friends and their neighborhood...
...He gives a wide range of examples: There’s the story of Julius Lester, formerly a professor of AfroAmerican studies at the University of Massachusetts, purged from the faculty after his conversion to Judaism...
...The next minute, though, he’s a leftist academic brooding on L.A.’s future...
...The dilemma hangs over Carter’s whole narrative, and his views about it are wildly mixed...
...Rieff doesn’t bother to puncture that optimism by discussing exactly where he thinks L.A.’s future lies...
...It has all the charnand some of the inanity-of an ivory tower seminar...
...And the story of Shelby Steele, a professor at the University of California at San Jose, attacked for declaring that blacks spend too much time crying race...
...NBC program guru Brandon Tartikoff muses that it may just be time “to bring voluptuous women back to network television...
...But now they had learned he was black...
...Unfortunately, Hair does not explore in sufficient depth the political and economic structures that existed in Louisiana when Long burst onto the scene...
...Simon & Schuster, $20...
...He is equally adamant in rejecting the view of himself as a black neoconservative, partly because he dislikes labels and partly because he has many views that are truly left of center...
...Another example Carter uses is Clarence Thomas, though the U.S...
...Williams points out that Shreveport’s leaders “did not think the state should give anything to the people” and that they “epitomized in extreme degree the psychology of conservatives of their c 1 ass . ” Williams assesses Long’s actions as “those of a typical pragmatic American politician” who sought a compromise and whose “fierce threats were only strategy, designed to frighten his foes...
...In the debate over affirmative action currently rocking America, with one side decrying the policy as discriminatory against whites and the other defending it as the least that can be done for America’s oppressed minorities, little has been heard from the beneficiaries...
...Ferrel Guillory Los Angeles: Capital of the Third World...
...For me, born in Louisiana just after the Second World War, the question is at once hypothetical and unavoidable...
...This is not, of course, a book about food...
...David Rieff...
...The news division’s budget, you learn, has tripled between 1978 and 1987, from $100 to $300 million...
...Louisiana State University Press, $24.95...
...Ultimately, however, Hair is more fascinated with Long’s life than his times...
...But instead of doing real reporting or even descriptive writing, he just kind of hangs out-and he’s not a powerful enough writer to get away with it...
...To be sure, Williams is more sympathetic than Hair, but the Williams biography is richer in analysis...
...Carter, a noted constitutional scholar and Yale Law School professor, is as successful a representative of those beneficiaries as they come, and he tells their story well...
...That lament is shared widely among AfricanAmerican professionals, and it leads in turn to the ultimate question: Are affirmative action programs really worth it from the beneficiary’s point of view, or are minorities better off fending for themselves...
...Our history as a people has been to cast out those whose views make us uncomfortable...
...If it is unsettling to nineties sensibilities to think that a vote for Long is remotely possible, was there any other choice available to a Louisiana voter not part of the conservative, affluent elite...
...His book offers a chilling account of the deep-down racism that ran rampant in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and it serves as a reminder of the historical roots of the forces that have allowed David Duke, even with Klan and Nazi ties on his resume, to emerge now as a state legislator from a New Orleans suburb...
...At times, Carter’s handwringing seems excessive...
...Do you vote for the Huey Long who provides free school books, or do you vote against the Huey Long who wants to “stomp” his adversaries into submission...
...He is an honest black scholarthe product of the pre-politically correct era-who abhors the stifling of debate by either wing or by people of any hue...
...Put yourself in Louisiana just before the Great Depression, a time of minimalist government, concentrated economic power, and rampant poverty, and consider the real-life choices offered to voters when Long ran for governor and for U.S...
...But the people who live there aren’t nearly as strange a species as Rieff seems to think, even if they do have dorito brei for breakfast...
...Hair, a professor of history at Georgia College in Milledgeville, accentuates the negative, delivering a case, in effect, for voting against Long...
...One minute Rieff plays the intrepid traveler setting out to test his sensibility in a foreign land...
...And close to the end of this book, which is devoted to examining the new influx of immigrants here, I began to get excited: Although he hadn’t missed many other cliches about Los Angeles, Rieff hadn’t raised the specter of the kosher burrito one time...
...The status Carter has achieved as one of the nation’s leading legal scholars lends credibility to his conclusion...
...District Court judge’s nomination to the U.S...
...Was another choice possible for a voter who wanted a government that would respond to genuine human needs...
...he just did things like sit with an attendant in the valet parking lot for a few hours...
...What makes his internal debate worthwhile, however, is that a lot of lives have turned-and will continue to turn-on affirmative action programs...
...Then he began telling us about a breakfast he’d had with a “distinguished psychologist” and his “wellknown local portrait painter” wife...
...He’s more interested in attitudes, and he reserves much scorn for the white middle class living on Los Angeles’s Westsidethe people who put him up during his stay in Los Angeles (hey-you’re welcome...
...Long gave voice to aspirations that had gone unfulfilled-at least until Roosevelt’s Democratic party responded...
...Even if they lack other skills, network news organizations are geniuses at publicizing any threat to their bureaucracy and controlling the spin on their own stones...
...Second, on a couple of occasions, Carter quotes Thomas acknowledging that conservatives have invited the wrath of blacks by showing remarkable insensitivity to their problems...
...Every businessnot just “glamorous” ones like television-has its Dickensian story waiting to be spun...
...Of course, the author didn’t spend any systematic time with the immigrants...
...This is particularly true in a city like L.A., which unlike Manhattan, say, has a large middle class sharing space with a huge immigrant populationand with remarkably little xenophobia...
...But critics who attempt to push (or pull) Carter into the ranks of the black right-wing will be making a mistake...
...But the same is true of any Dickens novel...
...In Auletta’s case, all the data builds to pretty damaging effect...
...He clearly comes from this world (he’s the son of Susan Sontag) and he alludes to various highbrow schools of thought about Los Angeles, but he never pretends to be rigorous and the book makes no cogent intellectual argument...
...Hair also reports that when Long became governor, Louisiana had only 331 miles of paved roads and no bridges over the Mississippi River...
...Reflections is a collection and an analysis of Carter’s experiences as a student competing at mostly white schools: Ithaca High, Stanford, and Yale Law...
...Meanwhile, they jog or go to the gym instead of getting their exercise in the back yard, as they would if they were truly integrated beings...
...And then there is the case of William Lucas...
...Rieff keeps seizing on ephemeral cultural attitudes and trying to turn them into detenninants of history...
...It is laced with the kinds of stories of stereotyping that make African-Americans seethe with anger...
...And what about Dan Rather’s famous walk off the set, which resulted in CBS going dark for six minutes and was billed internally as a protest over some serious threat to “news values...
...ABC President Fred Pierce secretly puts a Hollywood psychic on the payroll to help pick hits...
...And he appears somewhat miffed that people are going about their daily lives in the face of this encroaching reality...
...Auletta’s new book on the networks is filled with magic moments like these...
...At the time of Long’s death, a third force was emerging-the force of the New Deal...
...Will New Yorkers be less capable of solving their problems because they’re more “Old World” and cynical...
...In documenting the ostracization of Clarence Thomas, Thomas Sowell, and others so thoroughly, he effectively condemns it...
...And this cornucopia of stories and facts, combined with a capable explanation of the economic forces changing television, makes Three Blind Mice a tour de force of reporting and an example of what business journalism should be...
...Rational people presented with these facts know there’s room to cut-with no impact on “quality...
...In the self-examination that goes into deciding how you might have voted, it is crucial to know not only Long but also his opposition...
...Had Long lived longer, the New Deal may well have coopted him and shown Louisiana voters that they need not continue to vote for a candidate with dictatorial tendencies...
...CNN is putting on 24 hours of news daily (compared to the network’s 3 to 4 hours) at one third of your annual cost and is making a healthy profit to boot...
...Such is the saga of a whole generation: African-Americans who, having gained admission under special preference programs, pioneered the integration of predominantly white institutions in the sixties and seventies...
...And that is the crowning achievement of his noble book...
...Rieff seems tp want to debunk the notion that this influx of people from all over the world means that L.A...
...I was hoping this guy would at least spare us the kosher burrito, that neatly wrapped foodstuff sold conveniently near the Los Angeles Times office building that writers love to use as a metaphor for Los Angeles...
...On the one hand, he argues, racial preferences force blacks into boxes they cannot escape...
...Instead, he just seems peeved that some people dare to be optimistic...
...What was the gap between rich and poor, and what were the conditions of everyday life in Louisiana just before and during the Depression...
...Rieff flirts with a real issue now and then, as when he talks about whether the new wave of immigrants will assimilate in a different way than previous waves, but here, too, he’s relentlessly conclusion-free...
...His record was so good they had assumed he was white, they explained, and so had passed over him...
...Rieff‘s premise seems to be that Los Angeles is wrestling with its high level of immigration, soon to result in a white minority...
...How did the New Orleans political machine function, and what was its base...
...This is because they’re products of television, and on TV, families in sitcoms don’t have servants, yet their houses stay clean anyway...
...senator...
...Matthew Miller The Kingfish and His Realm: The Life and Times of Huey P. Long...
...While there is a magnificent tradition of black dissent in the United States,” Carter writes, “there is no comparable tradition of black intellectual tolerance...
...But he barely mentions the real ill effects of immigration-social services strained to the breaking point, poor health care, and disgraceful public schools...
...ABC has difficulty getting correspondents to volunteer for “American Agenda” pieces because it means giving up a nightly fix of airtime to prepare longer, more substantive segments...
...The smartest students of color were not considered as capable as the smartest white students,” he writes, and “therefore would not be allowed to compete with them...
...Meanwhile...
Vol. 23 • October 1991 • No. 10
