POLITICAL BOOKNOTES
POLITICAL BOOKNOTES The Media Show: The Changing Face of the News, 1985-1990. Edwin Diamond. MIT Press, $19.95. From his twin perches at New York University and New York magazine, Ed Diamond...
...They believe the weapons are safely stowed...
...Joseph Nocera...
...They add: “[Friedman] didn’t digress into why he personally had wanted to wager $300,000, several times the annual salary of a college professor . . . or what exactly he planned to do with all that money if his bet paid off...
...Among them you’ll find workers at the notorious (and recently shut-down) Rocky Flats nuclear facility in Denver, Coloradeworkers who stopped hanging around their colleague, janitor Don Gabel, when he was dying of a mysterious brain tumor...
...that a man named Francis Dellenbach is living in an abandoned missile silo and has painted its doors (which leak) hot pink...
...With so many lives on the line, that’s a truly disheartening choice...
...One of the pioneers of serious media criticism, he works hard at what he does, and though I often-to-usually disagree with him, I take him seriously...
...From his twin perches at New York University and New York magazine, Ed Diamond has been watching the media for a good many years now...
...It is a loosely connected series of short-attention-span takes on the behavior of the media-mostly American, and mostly TV, with print and the Soviet Union present largely for purposes of comparison-over the second half of the eighties...
...Further, even when Coll and Vise stick to their main point, they are not completely persuasive...
...Put this shrug together with some questionably skewed perceptions-e.g., George Steinbrenner, regularly shredded in the sports pages of every New York paper, was according to Diamond “larger than life and free of the pull of mundane judgments’’-and you have a problem...
...Despite Frank’s great efforts to portray his father as an unnatural monster, he comes across as merely pompous, plump, cowardly, and mediocre...
...Liza Mundy In the Shadow of the Reich...
...The Carters do not mind...
...And then: “[Tlhe people of this place that has been on the front lines of momentous history have learned that there is always a silver lining in nuclear weapons work...
...In their conclusion, the authors manage to insert two of their most oft-used cliches almost simultaneously in an apparent effort to sum up the book without actually saying anything...
...All I had to say after a couple of kilometers was, ‘Do you happen to realize that I am the son of the Minister of the Reich without Portfolio and Governor General of Poland, executed at Nuremberg as a major war criminal?’ ” That spiel almost always got him warm sympathy, antisemitic tirades, and a free lunch someplace along the Autobahn...
...Because of people like you,” he writes to his father, “your Eternal Germany is threatened once more from within rather than from without, and its conscience is like yourswhich is to say, it does not exist...
...When he feels a twinge of pity coming on, he stops himself by thinking of photographs from the concentration camps...
...Having assembled all this great stuff, the authors decline to write an influential bookor even a very readable one...
...Instead of setting forth any kind of argument, they confront the unthinkable with platitudes...
...My interest instead was historical...
...Is the decline of network news an inevitable function of private, profit-oriented ownership (Marx, who might at once have been wrong about communism and right about capitalism...
...Or does the visual medium itself hold the seeds of its own destruction (Neil Postman, whom Diamond mentions only to dismiss...
...The comparison will not reflect well on Coll and Vise...
...Knopf, $23...
...Ideally, the book format gives the deadline-whipped reporter more room to play...
...While those youths are probably justified in their resentment, Frank sees a dark side to their righteousness: “Once again, a choking, suffocating, putrid mantle of political self-glorification has settled down over Germany...
...They seem to think that anyone who makes a lot of money is, by definition, worthy of suspicion...
...And who could disagree...
...Worried about the maturity date of their CDs and the health of their tall fescue, these people prefer to ignore the fact that the mild drama of their lives is being lived out, literally, next door to the bomb...
...You get the sense that Coll and Vise are trying so hard to prove they cracked the SEC that they can’t bear to leave any of their hard-won discoveries on the cutting-room floor...
...You’ll find John Bartlit, a scientist at New Mexico’s Los Alamos lab who heads up an environmentalist group called New Mexico Citizens for Clean Air and Water but, according to this book, declines to tackle the problem of radioactive waste produced by his own employer...
...It confirms one’s sense that Coll and Vise wound up with a subject that was more the sideshow than the real thing...
...high-tech SDI investors who brought a very temporary affluence to Colorado Springs...
...Stewart’s book is a compelling narrative that tackles the main event-the crimes of Boesky, Milken, et al., and how they were ultimately brought to justice...
...They are comfortably afflicted with what Nietzsche called the “will to ignorance...
...It is a plea to understand coupled with a hatred that precludes the author’s understanding...
...It may not be Pulitzer material, but it’s interesting to know that the MIRACL laser (a proto-Star Wars weapon) costs more to run per second than the entire federal government...
...that as many as six officials may have access to the code that would launch a nuclear strike...
...Many people familiar with Gemany disagree with that assessment, although Frank, now a journalist covering German politics, is what they call a well-placed observer...
...How many taxpayers heard the news when a repairman inserted a test tape into a missile-tracking computer at the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), sending the message that an enemy attack was coming...
...He was in a concentration camp...
...True daily reporters, they have amassed an impressive arsenal of fact and outrage...
...Indeed, the only time Hans Frank talked specifically about what was happening to the Jews in his temtory, as far as the book recounts, was when he was trying to persuade his wife to divorce him so that he could marry his mistress...
...They visited ranchers living near the Trinity site in New Mexico where the first A-bomb was detonated in 1945...
...Even the targets of SEC investigations are never told if and when their cases are dropped...
...One wonders what forced the metamorphosis, especially since most young Germans today resent being blamed for the sins of their fathers...
...After all, what truly matters to most of us...
...she unwittingly drove her car into one of them and was crippled for life...
...For this reason, we must tip our cap to Coll and Vise, two Washington Post reporters who have done a remarkable job of piercing the SEC’s veil to put together this account of the agency during the tenure of chief John Shad-in effect a study of the agency during the Reagan era...
...In the book, the argument tends to vanish in a muddle of extraneous information: page after page describing long-forgotten investigations into small-time scams...
...show...
...According to this book he became a war criminal not because he craved killing Jews and Poles but because he wanted a chauffeured car, a fat paycheck, and a long title to precede his bombastic speeches...
...Searching out minute details of his father’s life and death, Niklas made visits to old Nazis, to his family’s wartime servants, and even (in Albany, New York) to Father Sixtus O’Connor, the priest who had heard Hans Frank say his last words: “Jesus, have mercy...
...The good thing about it,” Richard Carter explains to the authors, “is that there is so much clear area behind the house...
...Or that the Department of Energy “lost” Gabel’s brain after shipping it off to Los Alamos for examination...
...Or that in 1957, a nuclear bomb was dropped on Albuquerque (but failed to detonate) when an airman fell against the wrong lever...
...an Albuquerque glassblower who learned his art in occupied Poland and now applies it making lasers for Star Wars weapons...
...During the next 40 years, his embarrassment became a burning, obsessive hatred...
...But it is not something he does anything about...
...Then there are the potential victims of barely averted nuclear mistakes...
...When he got around to saying so, Frank was referring to corruption, at which he himself was expert...
...I don’t live in Washington, so I never read that series, but people tell me it was a pointed piece of work...
...Shad arrived with Reagan and left five months before George Bush was elected...
...This is what makes In the Shadow of the Reich different from Eichrnann in Jerusalem and scores of other books on Nazis...
...They don’t think about whether they themselves might be a nuclear target...
...Tad Bartimus, Scott McCartney...
...But not necessarily ours...
...Particularly in network television, this was a time of corporate conglomeration followed by-at least in the news divisionscorporate cheese-paring...
...On the other side of that fence stretches empty land...
...Though The Media Show lacks the vacuum-cleaner exhaustiveness of Ken Auletta’s telling of the same story, the processes and outcomes of rampant bottom-linism are generally well reported...
...The SEC meets in closed sessions, conducts secret investigations, encrusts its documents with layers of “Eyes Only” classifications...
...Or is this simply progress, and all’s for the best in this best of all synapsestraining worlds (Camille Paglia, when she’s not getting all bothered by sex...
...Those were tumultuous times for the SEC, for they gave rise to (among other things) corporate raiders, junk bonds, insider trading scandals, leveraged buyouts, the wild bull market and subsequent crash of 1987, hostile takeovers, and so on...
...government misjudged wind patterns when it built Rocky Flats, ensuring that folks living downwind from the facility would be exposed to its emissions...
...Scribner ’s, $24.95...
...The entire book is written as a scathing letter to this dead and omnipresent father, addressed in alternating sarcastic and brutal tones...
...this mostly describes foibles...
...They describe great crimes...
...I filed a Freedom of Information Act request not long ago with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC...
...I have occasionally bumped into him as we’ve covered the same story (most recently, the Daily News strike, during which most of his reporting was indistinguishable from the official management line), and on one memorable evening a few years back, we were bear-baited together on the Morton Downey Jr...
...the documents I wanted were all at least 20 years old...
...Native New Yorkers Mary and Richard Carter decided to enjoy their retirement someplace more temperate and sedate...
...Steve Coll, David Vise...
...The Carters fall into that category of sturdy citizens (and you can find them everywhere in the world) who prefer not to confront the unthinkable...
...May he be wrong about the future...
...extended forays into policy disputes that now seem stale and arcane...
...Even though this practice seems manifestly unfair to the subjects of lapsed investigations, such notions simply don’t rank very high on the SEC’s list of bureaucratic imperatives...
...The people of the Nuclear Highway,” they tell us, “have learned that no army ever retreats, that living next to the Bomb can be hazardous, that you can never put the genie back into the bottle...
...Perhaps the conscious, concerted withdrawal of empathy was the only way to learn to hate his father...
...But who heard that Rockwell International, the private firm contracted to operate Rocky Flats, contributed only $10 to the memorial fund of the cancer-ridden Don Gabel...
...The result was that crimes like insider trading went undetected far longer than they should have...
...The lengthier book version attempts to make the same essential point, but something got lost in the translation...
...They note with distaste, for instance, that economist Milton Friedman was one of the first to come up with the idea of currency speculation when he asked his bank back in the late sixties to loan him $300,000 so he could sell short the price of the British pound...
...What they do think about is the pleasure of having governmentowned land right next door...
...What amounts to the first draft of this book-a multi-part series that ran in The Washington Post- won the Pulitzer Prize...
...Niklas Frank, translated by Arthur S . Wensinger with Carole Clew-Hoey...
...Everything else was protected...
...Air Force’s largest storage facility for nuclear warheads...
...During Frank’s years of hitchhiking, just one German driver stopped, opened the passenger door, and silently let him out on the shoulder of the road...
...They chose a ranch house in Four Hills, an exclusive subdivision perched above Albuquerque, New Mexico...
...In years of poring over Hans Frank’s diaries, Niklas found only a handful of quotes that were brutal and even fewer that show hatred of Jews...
...Niklas would stand there and laugh uproariously as the skinny people struggled to get to their feet...
...But this is not a very good book...
...Still, Niklas wanted to know whether the hangman’s rope felt rough through the black cloth hood and exactly what sort of snapping sound his father’s neck made as it broke...
...The grisly specter of Mutually Assured Destruction...
...to do so would require the agency to tip its hand, which is something it has always been loath to do...
...The SEC was filled with dissension over the propriety of many of these developments...
...For this reason he agreed to let the Air Force house a Minuteman missile in a silo on his Wyoming ranch and continues to support the idea of nuclear proliferation as a means of nuclear deterrence...
...Nevertheless, Niklas was embarrassed of his father, Hans Frank...
...His is a powerful recounting of the past...
...POLITICAL BOOKNOTES The Media Show: The Changing Face of the News, 1985-1990...
...By now it’s public knowledge that the U.S...
...There really were advantages to growing up in the Federal Republic as the son of a major Nazi war criminal,” he writes with blunt irony in this book...
...And you know that nobody is going to build up against us...
...He specifically enjoyed an outing to a place where a jolly man would persuade skinny people to get on the back of a donkey that would buck, throwing the skinny people to the ground...
...Their basic point was that Shad’s natural empathy for Wall Street caused him to rein in the agency at a time when it should have been given even more leeway to ferret out wrongdoing...
...young Air Force officers who staff the MX missile silos in Wyoming...
...Susan Benesch Eagle on the Street...
...So it goes at the SEC, which may well be the most secretive federal agency this side of the CIA...
...Especially in dealing with yesterday’s news (and the book is largely composed of recycled magazine material), what happened is less interesting than why...
...Though the book’s not so lightweight it threatens to float away, you wouldn’t miss a whole lot-on either side-if you half-read The Media Show while half-watching the nightly news...
...After much delay, the SEC finally made its decision: It concluded that the only document it could release to me was a press release...
...How many people know that the Air Force accidentally bombed-not once but twice-Oppenheimer’s gang at the Trinity site...
...Shad, a veteran of Wall Street whose view of the SEC before he arrived was that it tended to leap before it looked, became a lightning rod within the agency...
...But in reaching that pureness of feeling, the writer has been unable to deal with a second enemy-himself...
...As a teenager in West Germany during the fifties, Niklas Frank was a great hitchhiker...
...You’ll find Ken Kirkbride, a World War I1 veteran who believes the timely detonation of the bomb saved his life...
...Most of them are long streams of self-important foolishness that could have been written by politicians anywherealthough the German language lends itself easily to convolutions like, “Unfortunately, in this most violent struggle in the world’s history, something arises every now and again, something that surely cannot be reconciled with the glorious German concept of morals, and may I here articulate just what that something is, speaking with full assurance, in a very clear and forthright way...
...Hardly...
...In the distance are concrete doors built into the mountainsdoors reputed to mask vaults containing cruise missiles, Titan I1 and Minuteman I11 warheads, and other offal of the arms race...
...It is a most human, most ordinary portrait, yet throughout rhe long, ranting book, Niklas Frank does not permit himself even a flicker of affection or a moment of sadness for his father...
...and scores of citizens, protesters, believers, and spokespersons who occupy the hot stretch of Western desert that has changed utterly since J. Robert Oppenheimer and his crew sojourned there...
...Kirkbride’s aunt probably feels differently...
...I don’t doubt it, because Coll and Vise are both very good reporters...
...Geoffrey Stokes Trinity’s Children: Living Along America’s Nuclear Highway...
...We learn of Hans Frank’s childhood sweetheart, his obsession with eggs, his tight-fitting jodhpurs, his enormous bathtub, his excellent Chopin, and his taste for chocolates...
...What matters is the sanctity of property values...
...Confronting the biggest bang of all, Trinity’s Children ends with not so much a whimper as a deliberate flat note...
...The bank refused...
...To which Diamond’s response is, more or less, “I dunno...
...narrative detours that lead nowhere...
...Repeatedly, however, Trinity 5 Children subjects us to the most shopworn of homilies...
...Niklas Frank never describes how he changed from the teenager who used his father’s title to get rides into an adult consumed by shame and hatred...
...I suppose that’s what Eagle on the Street is really trying to say, but you have to wonder whether it takes an entire book to say it...
...All of which makes it doubly disappointing that the result of their labors is so hard to follow...
...Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, $22.95...
...Over and over we are reminded that “good fences do not make good neighbors...
...At the edge of the Carter’s backyard runs a chain-link fence...
...Young Niklas enjoyed butter, eggs, and sausages in luxurious abundance while his father was setting rations below starvation levels for Polish slave laborers...
...The information I wanted was not explosive in nature nor embarrassing to the agency in any way...
...Shad may well have been too quick to believe that everyone on Wall Street was honest, but Coll and Vise err in the opposite direction...
...While the Air Force was digging the silos, they did annoying little things like fail to mark trenches dug in main roads...
...Coll and Vise are doubly cursed because their book will undoubtedly be compared with another insidertrading book that’s just been published: James Stewart’s Den of Thieves...
...Nestled in the Manzano Mountains, the house abuts what is generally believed to be the U.S...
...The Carters are two of dozens of compelling characters Associated Press reporters Bartimus and McCartney found up and down America’s “Nuclear Highway”-that stretch of Interstate 25 that begins around Las Cruces, New Mexico, and ends around Casper, Wyoming-during their grim four-year assignment...
...As for Shad, he winds up looking more foolish for neglecting a sexual harassment suit brought against the agency than for faiiing to crack down on hostile takeovers...
...In addition to dredging up these sorry incidents, Bartimus and McCartney show a keen eye for detail...
...What is lacking, as the book’s breezy, TV-ish title suggests, is something approaching a theory...
...He was viewed by the hard-liners as too easy on Wall Street and by the free-market theorists as too intrusive in the natural workings of the market...
...I suspect he planned to spend it...
...This is something Diamond knows -indeed something he specifically addresses in considering the changing role of print journalism in a television age...
Vol. 23 • November 1991 • No. 11
