Political Booknotes
POLITICAL BOOKNOTES Reclaiming the Mainstream: Individualist Feminism Rediscovered. Joan Kennedy Taylor. Prometheus, $24.95. It’s not easy finding a woman who’s proud to call herself a...
...Victorian novelist Mrs...
...Tracing the history and development of five cultural institutions and phenomena that achieved prominence during the twenties, thirties, and forties-the New York Herald Tribune’s book-review section...
...Strong anti-rape laws and abortion rights are necessary, she argues, because they are based on the rights of the individual to be protected from harm and to control her own body...
...Stuart Sherman, the editor of the Herald Tribune’s supplement, “Books,” allowed his “unanalyzed prejudices” and “intuitions” to supplant his moral rigor...
...Mo lJdall a damning 1,500word, three-page letter by registered mail in order to draw attention to its contents...
...book clubs, including the Bookofthe-Month Club...
...Lederman also supplies a blithe version of the convulsion at Wachtell when partner Ilan Reich confessed to his role in Dennis Levine’s insider trading ring...
...I had prayed to God this thing was fiction and I knew now that it was fact,” he said afterwards...
...Critics and historians have categorized American culture of the first half of this century as being either the highbrow output of the modernists, expatriates, and writers for “little magazines,” or the lowbrow offerings of the worlds of movies, sports, and amusement parks...
...Joan Shelley Rubin...
...That was my job that day . . . I carried out the orders that I was given and I do not feel wrong in doing so...
...Which brings us to a word you won’t find in Reclaiming the Mainstream: misogyny...
...Unfortunately, it isn’t...
...But Lederman’s facts contradict that contention...
...For all the reconstructions of critical meetings and board room faceoffs, this book is oddly equivocal...
...Asked to persuade ,I bank to forgive a loan to a drug treatment center Phoenix House sought to acquire (even nonprofits weren’t immune to the empirebuilding craze), Lederman phoned a friend at Cravath who represented the bank and wrangled the release...
...Down in Georgia, we are reminded, Governor Jimmy Carter declared an “American Fighting Men’s Day,” urging Georgians to turn on their automobile headlights and “honor the flag as ‘Rusty’ had done...
...Legalization would eliminate the high cost of unsuccessful prohibition, but it would also almost certainly lead to a dramatic increase in the instances of drug abuse...
...she concludes he was “less dishonest than lost-an uneasy, floundering figure whose out ward resemblance to an Emersonian man of letters concealed his inability to sustain that tradition in post-World War I1 America...
...Ronald Ridenhour, a helicopter door gunner with the 11th Infantry Brigade, heard of the massacre from another soldier and began his own investigation...
...Kleiman convincingly shows that the current prohibition of marijuana, cocaine, and heroin is not cheap...
...Many of the people who brought us this war went on to receive honors and rewards...
...one can imagine the large bite such a measure would take out of organized crime...
...Kleiman fudges, though, on questions of equality...
...Lederman had not only helped train the hapless Reich, but also hired the other partner nabbed for insider trading, Carlo Florentino...
...Since neither lawyer used the profits of his illegal trades, he asserts that “fear of failure,” not mere greed, was the link between the two disgraced counselors...
...It’s not easy finding a woman who’s proud to call herself a feminist these days...
...That this tentative, speculative judgment was reached in the midst of a book and career full of valuable analysis doesn’t make Kleiman’s proposal any less bizarre or disappointing...
...She argues that feminism should return to what she considers its roots: a commitment to securing individual rights for all women-and nothing more...
...But she believes it lost its popular support when its opponents-followed by misguided advocates-began to claim it would impose restrictive anti-discrimination rules on the private sector...
...Like the massacre and Nixon’s subsequent suppression of its atrocities, Daniels’ letter has become a victim of our national amnesia...
...Just so readers know he isn’t a total greedhead, the author devotes a chapter to his pro bono work for Phoenix House, a New York residential treatment program for drug addicts...
...But My Lai had some genuine heroes-like helicopter pilot Hugh Clowers Thompson Jr., who spotted the massacre from the air...
...Then he told his superiors w!hat he had seen...
...Paul...
...Reich was the second Wachtell partner in five years nailed for insider trading...
...That 1s the way lawyers always deal with each other,” Lederman explains...
...The underlying story is Lederman’s own climh up the class ladder...
...In a point typical of the hundreds he makes, he observes that in Washington, D.C., where cocaine dealing seems “to be limited not by a fear of the law, but by the lack of opportunities, as represented by customers,” arresting sellers actually strengthens the occupation, by opening up slots for new and other dealers...
...To the jaundiced eye, it would seem that each man was doomed from the start, and the blandishments of a Wachtell partnership would not have made a difference...
...Of those few critics who have applied their powers of observation to the period’s cultural middle ground-Virginia Woolf, Clement Greenberg, and Dwight Macdonald, among othersmost have vilified it as an example of consumerism vanquishing substance...
...According to one woman quoted by Taylor, such women are so politically correct that the only person who could pass their test would be “a lesbian prostitute on welfare who lives in a separatist community and has aborted several male embryos...
...He discusses the burden on the police, courts, and prisons...
...While Lederman coyly notes that the f i i ’ s alliance with managements “proved very successful,” he never offers the crass reality-that by some estimates, he and his cohorts each pulled down more than $ L million a year...
...This was before it became patently ridiculous to include “moral leadership” and Richard Nixon in the same sentence...
...All the White House could do was refuse to have a special commission take over the investigation and turn the matter over to the army, probably in the hope of shielding the president from any further embarrassment...
...Rubin argues that middlebrow culture has today met its demise and offers several reasons why...
...Her book suggests that, even when the organizers of the five phenomena were shining examples of the Arnoldian tradition, their efforts ultimately resulted in the lowering of high culture into middlebrow, of character into personality, of art into commerce...
...Kleiman’s inclusion of alcohol and tobacco shows he’s more serious about drug abuse than most of its loudest condemners: “Alcohol . . . accounts for more violent crime, and more drug abuse deaths, than does cocaine...
...His toothless memoir is peopled by the usual suspects...
...And I wasn’t in My Lai to destroy intelligent men...
...And if it isn’t, why not...
...General Kenneth Hodgson, both of whom “were appalled and horrified by the killings...
...The children were trying to stand up...
...The subject, having been taken for a joy-ride by politicians, is back in the sober hands of policy analysts and economists...
...He also moved away from Arnoldian critical practice by deciding that current books should not be compared with older works-a decision which meshed with the sensibility of a publication whose coverage of books usually took the form of “news” instead of “criticism...
...But in his refusal to grapple with the broader cultural questions of self-control and independence, Kleiman misses what makes this issue, like abortion, a contest ground for Americans’ incompatible understandings of freedom and responsibility...
...and literary radio programming-Rubin redresses the disregard and oversimplification that she feels have been dealt to interwar efforts to make literature available to a wide reading public...
...We were there to kill ideology that is carried by-I don’t know...
...Michael Bilton, Kevin Sim...
...Nathaniel Wice The Making of Middlebrow Culture...
...She opposes affirmative action, saying it would end up quota-ing women out of certain jobs or making their qualifications suspect if they are hired...
...Macdonald, whose 1960 Partisan Review article “Masscult and Midcult” is the best-known critique of middlebrow culture, asserted that “midcult” is more detrimental to society than mass culture: “It pretends to respect the standards of High Culture while in fact it waters them down and vulgarizes them...
...If grudging tolerance is such a good idea for rnarijwna, why not the same for harder drug...
...But Taylor believes the libertarian (she calls it “individualist”) impulse remains the most valuable aspect of modern feminism, and the most likely to “galvanize women into the feminist camp...
...Lederman fails to give us much of a sense of how he feels about it all...
...Taylor approves of the Equal Rights Amendment as it was originally conceived, to prevent discrimination by the government itself...
...Is it not strange to use those facts as arguments for treating other drugs as we now treat alcohol and tobacco?’ Kleiman ;:s most critical of current policies towards marijuana and alcohol...
...Instead, 400 unarmed Vietnamese villagers were shot, raped, sodomized, mutilated, and executed, SS style...
...To destroy communism...
...On college campuses, survey after survey shows, feminism has a bad reputation among the generation of women who’ve benefited most from it...
...Julie Cohen Tombstones: A Lawyer’s Tales from the Takeover Decades...
...As the title suggests, Against Excess is a critique of both legalization and prohibition, of drug freaks and control freaks...
...Henry Kravis crafts leveraged buyouts, Bruce Wasserstein dickers with bidders, Robert Bass triggers a takeover, T. Boone Pickens artlessly tries to charm an opponent, and Michael Milken hovers in the distance...
...Reich, he says, never trusted the firm to make him a partner, and he coveted the friendship of conartist Levine...
...Her husband later told a congressional hearing that the operation’s success was “a message from God that fetal tissue research should go forward...
...Unfortunately, Lederman never says what these costs are, aside from a few moguls being forced out of corporations they either built or inherited...
...This quasi-scholarly book, written by an associate professor of American studies and history at the State University of New York at Brockport, is an illuminating and provocative rebuttal to Macdonald and other middlebrowbashers...
...He helped sell Stokely-Van Camp to Quaker Oats, auctioned Macmillan to Robert Maxwell, and unsuccessfully defended West PointPepperell from a ruinous takeover by William Farley...
...Fortunately, the army had some men for whom the massacre was just too much, notably General William Westmoreland and the judge advocate general, Maj...
...With sections called “Cross-subsidy and Risk-sharing,” the book at times reads as though its subject could have just as easily been insurance reform...
...He promptly landed his copter and ordered his door gunner to shoot any Americans killing the villagers...
...middle...
...Henry Alford...
...outline volumes as exemplified by Will and Ariel Durant’s The Story of Civilization...
...great books” programs...
...Rubin concludes her book by limning the irony inherent in Mark Van Doren’s son, Charles, having achieve13 great notoriety in 1957 by memorizing the answers to questions on the TV quiz show “TwentyOne...
...Calling one a $rug and not the other understates the damage done by drinking and might also cause people who have enjoyed marijuana to disregard warnings against more treacherous drugs...
...Although she has the unfortunate habit of offering so many counterarguments that they undermine the strength of her original thesis, this predilection does not keep The Making of Middlebrow Culture from being a thoughtful and accomplished treatment of a timely topic...
...For Kleiman, legalizers understate the problems of addiction, mistaking drugs for innocent, ordinary consumer goods...
...In order to focus on fairly narrow questions about controlling drug use, Kleiman limits himself as much as possible to measurable effects...
...He fought for his country and look what they done to him-made a murderer out of him...
...And Taylor is overly optimistic in her suggestion that changing the feminist agenda can stem the backlash against women’s rights...
...The author seems to believe that if only the two had waited for the grace conferred by partnership, they never would have strayed from the flock...
...In an environment where one’s worth is measured by the number of digits in a deal, it’s not surprising that characters like Florentino and Reich sought a modicum of satisfaction and control elsewhere...
...Although the purveyors of intc:rwar midcilebrow culture that Rubin touches upon-the aforementioned, as well as Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Mortimer Adler, Alexander Vioollcott, and Mark Van Doren-are, as Rubin notes, “victims” of canon formation, they can also be seen as canonizers themselves...
...It’s pretty hard to imagine a humane system of drinking and smoking licenses issued by the state and enforced by retailers...
...It is increasingly difficult for people to tell: Chief among the repercussions of postmodernism and its tendency to subsume pop culture into the high arts has been the blumng of distinctions between the various gradations of cultural sophistication...
...In the midst of it all, corporate plenipotentiary Lederman confers with boards of directors, fields latenight phone calls, and rushes out onto the tarmac to catch the next private jet...
...All the more reason to praise this methodical, forceful, and well-documented book...
...Like the War on Poverty-our last example of a social gospel propagated in martial rhetoric -the drug war has revealed the flip side of our can-do positivism, turning from a crusade into an unsolvable problem...
...So how can those of us still willing to go by the f-word make ourselves and our movement more palatable to the American mainstream...
...Then he sent Rep...
...Prohibition, in other words, reduces the availability of drugs for the middle class and wealthy, but it subjects the poor to the traffic and crime of the illegal trade...
...He thinks poor inner-city neighborhoods deserve more police, judges, and prison cells, but he barely acknowledges the vicious fact that poor neighborhoods have been turned into open-air drug marketplaces and battlegrounds because of laws that protect the children of affluent families from having access to recreational drugs...
...Tutored by the sages at Cravath, the budding legal eagle moved to Wachtell, Lipton, and made partner just as the merger and acquisition era dawned...
...The intrepid Seymour Hersh-also targeted by the White House for investigationwas already on the story...
...Only one person involved in the massacre ever went to prison for the crimes-Calley, who spent a couple of months in Leavenworth...
...Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, $24...
...Calley opened fire again, killing them one by one...
...In his book Body Count, he further sought to explain why it happened: “We weren’t in My Lai to kill human beings, really...
...Kleiman (with his Harvard and government cre’dentials) would be a fine nominee under a Democratic administration for drug czar...
...Shave,” quips my friend Lauren (who doesn’t...
...Let him do it,” he said, pointing at Calley...
...They come along and took him to the service...
...The feminist’s political imperative, as she sees it, is to oppose government interference in business or personal life, whether that interference bars women from male privileges, “protects” them in their role as mothers, or compensates them for past injustices...
...Murray Polner but not gone...
...Bertrand Russell or Nipsy Russell...
...perpetuated gentility, Van Doren captured the admiration of the public by exhibiting the mastery of information, earning money, and redefining culture as performance...
...The moral of this tale is similarly muzzy...
...It’s as if Lederman believes the mere presence of these titans of finance is enough to sustain the narrative...
...But it was too late for Nixon’s bag of tricks...
...In the early sections, Taylor argues convincingly that most prominent early feminist thinkers (Mary Wollestonecraft, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Susan B. Anthony) adhered to an essentially libertarian philosophy, focusing on sbolishing laws that denied women their rights to life, liberty, and happiness...
...Lawrence Lederman...
...If success eluded them, they would seek money to cushion the loss,” Lederman writes...
...Whatever the truth, PFC Meadlo’s mother’s remark was a cry from the heart: “He wasn’t raised up like that,” she told CBS-TV after hearing her son speak of the massacre...
...I wonder if My Lai is ever discussed today in our colleges and universities...
...And, to a feminist predisposed to a civil liberties viewpoint, most of it works pretty well...
...Despite the cutesy chapter headings (“A Funny Thing Happened to Us on the Way to the ERA,” “Inside Every Socialist is an Individualist Trying to Get Out”), this is a pretty dense book...
...In addition to tracing the gradual development of America’s search for self-realization through con,jumption-it was no surprise, she writes, that “students in ‘charm and glamor courses’ were among the groups most receptive to the [Book-of-the-Month Club’s] initial mail-order campaign”-Rubin also points to television’s heightening of our preoccupation with celebrities and to its devaluation of the idea that knowledge requires patient, disciplined study...
...James] Dursi watched horrified as Calley picked the child up, shoved it back down the slope, and shot it...
...She criticizes the prosecution of Jennifer Johnson, the Florida woman convicted of “delivering” cocaine to her unborn fetus, arguing that during pregnancy, the interests of the woman must supersede those of the fetus...
...14.95 paperback...
...And she calls for an end to the governmental ban on fetal tissue research, citing the remarkable case of a staunchly antiabortion minister’s wife who allowed surgeons to use tissue from an aborted fetus to save her own disease-ridden fetus...
...The result is a devastating commentary on a war that continues to haunt us...
...It’s strange that such a scrupulously fair codification of what we do and don’t know about the effectiveness and side effects of drug programs and laws would end with a proposal so, well, stoned...
...Of course, this was only natural in an era when common law prohibited a married woman from owning property, signing contracts, voting, or escaping a brutal husband...
...She also provides specific examples of how the upholders of the genteel aesthetic failed to embrace modernism...
...Taylor cites the ACLU’s Women’s Rights Project several times as an example of what feminist activists should be doing but dismisses the National Organization for Women in five paragraphs for “adopting an increasingly narrow political agenda...
...It’s bad...
...I was ordered to go in there and destroy the enemy,” he said at his trial...
...IUeiman would have both substances subjected to a roughly equal degrel: of control under a system of “grudging toleration” made up of “discriminatory taxation, a conditional and revocable license for personal use, vigorous enforcement of bans on sale to minors, limitations on marketing, negative advertising, and so on...
...In the case of “great books” promulgator John Erskine, Rubin intimates that the Columbia professor’s very program (a selection of classic texts) was not conducive to edification: “By substituting information for aesthetics, [he] once again increased the temptation to regard culture as commodity...
...When one of those men, Captain Aubrey Daniel, the army lawyer who had successfully prosecuted Lieutenant William Calley for the murder of 22 people in the Vietnamese hamlet of My Lai, learned that President Nixon had released Calley from military confinement pending his appeal, he was outraged...
...Although the analysis is not specifically cultural, chemical, psychological, historical, or political, these facets are usually acknowledged, if only in the wellchosen epigrams that adorn each chapter...
...The thirst for its expertise became so great that its lawyers began billing like avestment bankers, abandoning houcly rates in favor of fees based on the size of the deal, with bonuses for favorable results...
...Mothers had thrown themselves on top of young ones in a last desperate bid to protect them from the bullets raining down on them...
...One was Colonel William V. Wilson of the army’s inspector general’s office, who decided after lengthy, grueling interviews of witnesses around the country that the allegations were legitimate...
...Under normal circumstances, Calley would not have done such monstrous things...
...To Taylor, it seems, the sole oppressor is big government...
...Bilton and Sim take us into the events leading to the crime and into the various efforts by the Army, the White House, and some congressional hawks to discredit the men who later reported, as did Vietnam veteran Ronald Ridenhour, that “something rather dark and bloody” had indeed taken place in May 1968...
...It’s evil...
...Cocaine and heroin would stay outlawed, perhaps to be joined by cigarettes...
...After a superficial investigation, Thompson’#s charges were dismissed...
...In 1972, when then-White House aide Patrick Buchanan wrote a memo calling the women’s movement “the Butch Brigade” and “an object of ridicule,” he wasn’t reacting to specific policies advocated by the movement...
...After an orgy of bloodletting, PFC Paul Meadlo stopped shooting...
...It’s feminism ACLU-style...
...Just then a child, aged about two years and parted from its mother, managed to crawl up to the top of the ditch...
...Gaskell or Mrs...
...Rubin deftly chronicles the particular set of tensions that arise at the intersection of literary endeavor and the marketplace...
...Bilton and Sim prefer to lay most of the blame for the failure to resolve the case on the Nixon administration and “its complete failure to establish a clear moral lead for the nation...
...Lawyers are agents for change, Lederman says...
...Tobacco kills more Americans than all other drugs combined...
...POLITICAL BOOKNOTES Reclaiming the Mainstream: Individualist Feminism Rediscovered...
...I was there to destroy an intangible idea...
...But it’s probably worth acknowledging that intrusive laws aren’t the only thing we’re up against...
...Shaken by Reich’s exposure in 1986, Wachtell chieftain Martin Lipton asked Lederman if the firm was somehow responsible for Reich’s errant ways...
...He notes that Florentino dabbled in illegal trading before arriving at Wachtell...
...How else to explain Hollywood’s biggest recent female icons: an ice-pick-wielding slut and a nanny with an ax to grind-literally...
...Educated at humble Brooklyn College, he worked his way into New York Univeirsity law school and landed a job as ii California supreme court clerk in 1966...
...According to Rubin, the agents of intellectual attrition varied...
...My Lai was quickly forgotten...
...As she introduces us to the men and women at the helms of her five institutions, she takes pains to assess whether they uphold Arnold’s genteel aesthetic...
...Before long, one high-stakes deal begins to look much like the next...
...As unreflective-and unsatisfyingas his book may be, Lederman is still the first lawyer of his ilk even to attempt such a chronicle of the frenetic dealmaking of the eighties...
...When he ascended to Cravath, Swaine & Moore (the archetype of law firm prestige and power), a fdlow clerk teased that by going to work on Wall Street, Lederman nsked becoming “a United Fruit fascist bastard...
...Lederman’s explanation for the behavior of his fallen comrades is distressingly muddled...
...In the process other heroes came forward...
...Once at Cravath, he wound up working on a deal for-wink, nudge-United Fruit...
...and the winnowing of both civil liberties and respect for the law...
...Conti pushed the weapon back: “If they are going to be killed, I’m not doing it...
...North Carolina, $34.95 hardcover...
...Who has had a greater influence on you-the Emily Bronte heroine Cathy or the cartoon character Cathy...
...Though he was later awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross, Thompson discarded it in protest...
...His charges were explosive in a Washington where the war had unhinged Tihe White House and its prowar retainers in Congress...
...Taylor runs like hell from any analysis that portrays women as the victims of male oppression...
...Bilton and Sim describe the scene: Tears flooded down his cheeks...
...Rather, asserts Lederman, his friend merely assessed the bank’s legal position and conveniently found it untenable...
...he was just responding viscerallyas others have before and sinceto the extremely threatening prospect of women asserting their rights...
...But soon after began the coverup...
...Bilton and Sim, two British journalists and documentary filmmakers, have laid out the complete story, from the raid to the coverup, in straightforward and often agonizing detail...
...Daniel lectured Nixon in a tone of indignation rarely heard when a subordinate addresses the powerful: “I would expect that the president of the United States, a man who I believed should and would provide the moral leadership for this nation, would stand fully behind the law of this land on a moral issue about which there can be no compromise...
...Ever politic, Lederman assured him that Wachtell, Lipton was not culpable, although he admits to readers that the denial of responsibility continued to trouble him...
...And the radical feminists who hold to such an analysis come off as a bunch of conspiracy theorists and kvetches...
...The elitist tenor of the Arnoldian outlook was often at odds with the idea of bringing the high arts to the masses...
...Taylor’s reply is longer...
...Rubin’s writing is careful and clear...
...Until Martin Lipton publishes his diaries, Tombstones will have to suffice as the fullest personal account of what it was like to act as a croupier for the shuffling of the country’s assets...
...the inefficiencies, violent crime, and lost tax revenue of the black market...
...Nixon’s “silent majority,” unwilling to believe the war was a bad deal, saw Calley as a scapegoat and quickly transformed him into a national hero...
...In addition to all the other benefits (i:ax revenue, treatment, etc...
...When his friend and protector Westmoreland retired, Peers followed suit...
...The style is that of the economist or the game theorist, concerned with costs, side effects, and ironies...
...Blobs...
...No surprise there...
...Rimbaud or Rambo...
...The authors draw especially on the Army’s Crime Records Center, its Vietnam War Crimes Working Group and the papers of the Peers inquiry, interviews with Charlie Company troops and more than 100 survivors, as well as the pioneering work of journalist Seymour Hersh...
...The Battle Hymn of Lieutenant Calley” sold 200,000 copies in three days, and thousands of pro-Calley telegrams poured into the White House...
...Bilton and Sim wIite that while Nixon issued a perfunctory condemnation of the massacre (government and army flacks preferred to call it an “incident,” and “the media duly obliged,” they note) he, typically, “secretly demanded a special investigation of Ronald Ri’denhour” and, as always, tried to blame the media...
...She opposes antipornography legislation on free speech grounds...
...Similarly, she opposes any rules that would bar women of child-bearing age from working in potentially dangerous jobs, saying they hardly differ from the “protective” (read: sexist) labor laws that shut women out of 19th-century workplaces...
...She’s against governmentenforced coeducation or forced mixing of single-sex organizations because she wants women to retain their right to keep some schools or clubs all-female...
...In years past, these distinctions were easily made...
...For readers obsessed with the arcana of transactions, it may be worth an afternoon’s perusal...
...Essential to Rubin’s study is Matthew Arnold’s definition of culture as “the best that has been thought and said in the world...
...I raised him up to be a good boy and I did everything I could...
...But, alas, change in the corporate arena “isn’t always for the best...
...I happen to agree with Taylor that prostitution should be legal, but it’s not exactly a position that’s going to win the hearts and minds of most Americans -including the many feminists who think prostitution should remain illegal because it exploits women...
...upper-middle with an overdeveloped sense of irony about the low...
...The master plan notwithstanding, Against Excess is a hopeful sign that drug issues can be discussed in practical rather than ideological terms...
...Nothing more was done until another hero appeared...
...He turned, stuck his rifle in [Dennis] Conti’s hand, and said, ‘You shoot them...
...conversely, drug warriors wage an unrealistic, expensive, and doomed cultural holy war against certain kinds of intoxication...
...You might get the impression from this book that the widespread aversion to feminism is based on a rational critique of the movement’s political philosophy and legislative goals...
...Kleiman codifies these social costs with a complexity rarely displayed in public discussion, favoring the wisdom one would expect of an effective policeman or treatment counselor to the rhetoric of a “DrugFree America...
...Relax, libertarians, I’m not suggesting a ban on sexist movies...
...And yet, at a time when abortion rights are under siege and professional and domestic demands on women are on the rise, the need for a broad feminist movement is as great as it’s ever been...
...Despite the fact that the Vietnam war was a moral morass, there emerged from it some principled men who were so horrified by what the writers call the “grotesque and horrible and shaming” truth about My Lai that they were not afraid to act upon their claims of conscience...
...Westmoreland and Secretary of the Army Stanley Resor demanded a complete inquiry...
...Thus the detailed logic of Kleiman’s drug policy tome is not as remarkable or controversial as it would have been in the late eighties when the Republicans were playing the latest version of reefer madness and demon rum...
...Like any good liberal (he uses feminine personal pronouns), Kleiman charts a middle course, exhaustively working through the permutations that result from the simple premise that “either we have the problems associated with drug abuse, or we have the problems associated with trying to control i t - o r we can choose some of each...
...As a partner at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, the high-powered New York law firm, Lawrence Lederman had a hand in some of the largest corporate deals of the last 15 years...
...Still, we are left to decide if the atrocity was caused, as historian Guenter Lewy has argued, by “individual moral failure,” or, as Ridenhour put it, by an outgrowth “of body counts and kill ratios and fire-free zones and search-anddestroy missions...
...That’s the way all cases are settled...
...Pawns...
...We’re assured that this is not an instance of legal old-boys trading favors...
...Only a captain, he took on the president of the United States, writing to Nixon that the president had not only damaged the military’s judicial process, but “helped enhance the image of Calley as a national hero” and thereby lent credence to those who believed that Calley and his troops were merely “killing the enemy...
...In emphasizing practical matters like education and treatment, Kleiman tries to render the sexy legalization question as rnoot as possible, but in the end, he succumbs to the temptation to propose his own radical plan...
...He seemed to believe in the righteousness of his country’s cause...
...But if Lederman were as genteel as all that, he wouldn’t have made partner at Hyatt Legal Services, let alone at one of the most competitive firms in the country...
...Second-order questions, such as marijuana’s supposed gateway effect or needle-sharing’s relationship to AIDS, are well treated and footnoted...
...Indeed, the book will be especially rewarding for those interested in the process of canon forma tion...
...Erskine’s more obvious form of pandering was his translation of classical plots into modem language-a technique he later put to use in the novel The Private Life of Helen of Troy...
...And there was the remarkable General William PeersWestmoreland’s choice to head up the investigation-who exposed the coverup and who probably failed to receive a fourth star or promotion to commander of the American forces in Korea because of his actions...
...I looked at communism as a Southerner looks at a negro, supposedly...
...Which brow is yours: high...
...In a particularly provocative section, Taylor applies her individualist dos and don’ts to current legal debates...
...And there are considerablle costs...
...Maybe it sounds whiny to say so, but our society still harbors a strong current of opposition to women’s progress, one that will continue to operate with or without government sanction...
...Pieces of flesh...
...Eventually, Wachtell emerged as ,be preeminent firm representing managements against hostile raids...
...Taylor notes disparagingly in her introduction that even her own friends and colleagues (presumably middle-aged intellectuals) shy away from the label...
...Like his country, he should never have been involved in the war...
...My Lai was not just another “battle...
...The son of a man who, to a great extent...
...Some Charlie Company soldiers had finished their tours of duty and were back home talking about My Lai...
...Perhaps...
...Viking, $25...
...Rubin’s paatrait of the young Van Doren poignantly captures the demise of the genteel tradition itself...
...If the state is oppressive as Big Brother, she argues, Big Sister would be no less a threat...
...By this time Conti could see that only a few children were left standing...
...But as for capturing the imaginations of mainstream American women, Gloria Steinem probably comes closer with her best-selling revelation that self-esteem is critical (something any “Oprah”-watcher could have told you years ago...
...She even goes so far as to argue that discrimination was created by “governmentally enforced inequality,” suggesting that sexism did not predate the laws that condoned it...
...Without my saying anything, he knew it was best to be gracious...
...Ironically, the firm offered both of them success, the antidote to their fear...
...Clearly, tremendous waste would be eliminated if logic guided the drug war...
...James Lyons Four Hours in My Lai...
Vol. 24 • May 1992 • No. 5
