Political Booknotes
POLITICAL BOOKNOTES Driven Patriot: The Life and Times of James Forrestal. Townsend Hoopes, Douglas Brinkley. Knopf, $30. Townsend Hoopes tells us in the preface of this book that as a...
...What makes this belief so tempting is what also makes it so dangerous: It allows us to continue to assume that science will eventually cure the ills afflicting our planet and threatening its future...
...Core white Republicans made up 44 percent of the total southern electorate in 1988...
...By helping to elect hundreds of anti-abortion politicians to state office, they have played a crucial role in passing laws restricting teenagers’ and poor women’s access to abortion in more than half the states...
...Forrestal’s opposition to the creation of Israel-oil was the reason-led to bitter personal assaults by columnists Drew Pearson and Walter Winchellthe kind of criticism Forrestal’s thin skin could not endure...
...Read how the Bob Haldemans and Chuck Colsons isolated Nixon’s longtime media adviser Herb Klein because Klein wanted to open doors for reporters...
...This book is a clear and credible survey of that phenomenon, and it’s especially welcome in a year of generalizations about “the Bubba vote...
...Unfortunately, the finale of this book is so loaded with lavish praise for this “public servant of great talent, influence, and accomplishment” as to be almost idolatrous...
...Neither did Harry Truman...
...There are some colorful moments, as when President-elect Nixon and his longtime secretary ride in an elevator together in strained silence after he’s told her she won’t have a desk near the Oval Office because he needs to solidify Bob Haldeman’s “gatekeeper” power...
...And that’s not simply a provincial profile: Core white Republicans iiccounted for 41 percent of the northern electorate (the Blacks use “North” to describe any state outside of the old Confederacy) the same year...
...And it also is plausible, as his son Michael said, that had he been more balanced, he would have been less interesting...
...His view is staunchly pro-choice, sprinkled with phrases from the National Abortion Rights Action League and Planned Parenthood...
...White southerners possess a cultural fear of forcible intervention that destroys familiar social order...
...Changing that will be no easy task...
...I give him high marks for coming down to the press room frequently to field questions...
...Even Minnette Doderer, a pro-choice state legislator Rosenblatt interviews, said, “You know what I don’t like about abortion . . . ? Who likes to think of themselves killing a fetus...
...Secondly, most of the opposition to animal testing stems from the fact that animals are used to test frivolous stuff like new brands of mascara...
...Roger Rosenblatt...
...Thirty-nine states now usually go Republican, including all 11 southem states...
...For nearly 20 years, anti-abortion activists have fought an uphill but increasingly successful battle...
...Perhaps the statistic is a clue to the rage that continues to fuel our abortion battles when most European countries have managed to accept a compromise...
...For instance, in coalitionsponsored sex education courses, staffers never “promote” birth control, they “give information” about it...
...Maltese reminds us how Nixon, in his television commercials, would stand amidst a group of citizens, fielding questions calmly and brilliantly...
...In the Blacks’ view, and it seems a sound one, the solution for the Democrats is to replay the Carter strategy...
...Read how it all failed...
...Working- and middle-class whites, North and South, have left the Democrats believing that the Great Society legacy diverted their tax dollars and jobs to undeserving blacks and the poor...
...If Rosenblatt had done more first-hand reporting, he might have seen that many people express similarly ambivalent views...
...And if you ever were inclined to point to the Reagan administration’s managing of the agenda for the greater glorification of Ronald Reagan, I’m sure today, with Reagan’s legacy crashing down everywhere, you will do your pointing discreetly...
...One in five births in Bridgeport is to a teen mother, making its teen pregnancy rate twice that of the state’s...
...It has often been said that the Reagan people were the best at news management...
...Both laws underscore that an abortion ends a life and should not be used as a method of birth control...
...Real efforts to bring the two sides together show how difficult it can be...
...Random House, $20...
...A word here about Jimmy Carter, who, as in so many tasks, went in several directions: When he first came to office, Carter opted for a “no-frills, open, tell-it-like-it-is” presidency...
...They spent lots of energy thinking up their “story of the day,” but when emergencies intruded, such as the ill-considered trip to the Bitburg cemetery in Germany where SS graves festooned the landscape, they didn’t know how to handle it...
...The thrust of The Science Gap is the rebuttal of an alluring fallacy: the assumption that, because the history of scientific progress has witnessed a constant overturning of previously inviolate knowledge, claims made by scientists today will, inevitably, be similarly rejected...
...North Carolina, $29.95...
...But all this news management worked, and as president, Nixon wanted to institutionalize it...
...Even such bastions of Catholicism as France, Italy, and Spain incorporate their moral disapproval of abortion into essentially pro-choice laws...
...He quit Princeton months before graduation and soon was well on his way to Wall Street wealth as a bond salesman...
...Science is not without its limits, Rothman argues-and indeed, many of those limits will soon be reached...
...That and signs of the coming war in Europe turned his aspirations toward Washington...
...But every kid in the history of the world who has tried to fly to Mars by flapping his arms and jumping off the top of the jungle gym knows that some things simply aren’t possible...
...In 1987, Hoopes was offered the research papers of the late Charles J.V...
...If you think it’s the president, read this book...
...With the Murphy papers came Douglas Brinkley, now a Hofstra University history professor, who had worked with Murphy for six months...
...these days, the North, too, can cluck over liberal atrocities...
...So what do these southerners, whose wariness of Washington has now spread nationwide, believe...
...His good friend Justice William 0. Douglas called President Roosevelt with “a strong recommendation,” and on June 29, 1940, at age 48, Forrestal began what would tle almost nine years of government service...
...But when he ended up irl trouble, Carter summoned his old media adviser Gerald Rafshoon and revived the dreaded machine...
...That isn’t a temble thing, except that we end up apportioning ever more of our medical resources to people who have already lived most of their lives...
...Rosenblatt ran into this contradiction when he went to Iowa to do some reporting...
...After all, it couldn’t be a less effective way of communicating with the public than the method presidents have been using since 1969...
...He opines, “The more extreme animal-rights activists are little more than the modern version of the old-time antivivisectionists”as if this were a stinging indictment...
...He was also “cursed” by “the ability to see both sides of every hard question...
...Once he “managed four business conferences during lunch-soup with [Navy] Secretary Knox, the main course with his own guests, dessert at the White House, and coffee at the Metropolitan Club...
...The Democrats now enter the presidential campaign with a base of only Minnesota and the District of Columbia-2 percent of the electoral vote...
...Hence the White House Office of Communications...
...Now, you say, “Don’t be naive...
...He drove in an uninarked limousine, forbade the playing of “Hail to the Chief’ when he entered a room, and restructured the Office of Communications out of existence...
...There is something presumptuous about claiming to have the answer to “America’s most divisive social question” in 181 pages of big type and wide margins...
...Harvard, $29.95...
...These countries’ strategies are the very thing Rosenblatt is writing about when he says he would like to permit abortion but discourage it...
...After the war, as first Defense secretary, Forrestal was Laocoon in the Pentagon, struggling to make the selfcentered Navy and Air Force serve national, rather than parochial, interestsas the Army was far more willing to do...
...Talk about buying a pig in a poke...
...Much of what we know now, we know with far more certainty than was ever before possible...
...It may be a long negotiation, but if the goal is to find a way to reflect Americans’ respect for women’s independence and their concern for human life, no effort is too great...
...His fear of Moscow led Forrestal to support Truman’s military unification plan, but only in its weak 1947 compromise version...
...The matter of race is inescapable...
...It turns out that Rothman is less imitated by those scientific beliefs that allow us to keep squandering resources and overrunning the globe than he is by our alleged preoccupation with psychic powers and UFOs...
...As Maltese notes, “Carter violated the old Nixon maxim that presidents must manipulate the media while avoiding at all costs the charge of manipulating the media...
...The Blacks’ most important point here is that Bubba-a white voter with patriotic sympathies and a distrust of Washington-is everywhere, and the Democrats had better pay attention to him...
...Outside Buffalo’s two abortion clinics, anti-abortion protesters scream, “Murderers, murderers...
...If a woman wants a later abortion, she needs permission from two physicians who must certify that the child would be born with defonnities or that the mother’s life would be threatened if she continued the pregnancy...
...President Bush has eliminated some of the worst news management practices of the Reagan years...
...But by and large there is no sex in this book, which I suppose I have to applaud in light of my thesis that presidents should play it straight when it comes to communication...
...Instead, he presents a series of chapters, each aimed at debunking a specific contemporary “myth” about science...
...Let’s face it...
...Perhaps it is 1 his: The southern tradition of honoring the past evolves out of the same fear that made Nixon, Reagan, and Bush attractive to voters everywhere...
...What do you suppose Ross Perot has in mind when he talks about holding town meetings via television if elected president...
...An armory holds nearly 200 arrested members of the national anti-abortion group Operation Rescue...
...Sam Donaldson...
...He did cocktail parties “in eight minutes flat,” turned tennis into ‘‘(3 cult of violence,” and rushed through golf “with a clenched jaw...
...Townsend Hoopes tells us in the preface of this book that as a “recent Marine lieutenant who aspired to meaningful public service,” he found in James Vincent Forrestal “the model hero...
...Murphy, a prodigious Time Inc...
...The abortion rate in the United States is twice that of France, England, or Italy and four times that of Holland, according to the Alan Guttmacher Institute, the leading reproductive health research organization...
...After all, Nixon’s winning campaign for the presidency, which Joe McGinnis immortalized in The Selling of the President, 1968, elevated news management to a high art...
...Other restrictions, such as requiring a woman to notify her spouse before having an abortion, are just months away from going into effect...
...Read how Vice President Spiro Agnew, with the help of trusty speechwriter Pat Buchanan, tried to make the press an issue, calling it an “effete corps of impudent snobs...
...And as John Anthony Maltese makes clear in this wellresearched book, Nixon did not create it to communicate facts about his administration, but instead to marshal choice.’’ -David Z. Beckler them...
...Rosenblatt, a former essayist for Time and now a commentator on the “MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour,” has written a book that aims to be a peace plan...
...Because the coalition is in constant danger of violating the Catholic Church’s prohibition on artificial birth control, staffers get around the problem with verbal gymnastics worthy of Thomist philosophers...
...Forrestal’s Princeton connections led him to his great mentor, Clarence Dillon (father of Douglas, JFK’s Treasury chief) of Wall Street’s formidable Dillon, Read...
...The culmination of the HoopesBrinkley account focuses on Forrestal’s deterioration, his fraying judgment, and his inability to see the need to take “time out” from the Cold War contest...
...The status quowhich they see as legalized murderwill never be acceptable...
...If the Soul h is now a mirror of national themes, is there anything southern about the new alignment...
...n terms of social policy, the Democrats are viewed as nothing less than an invading force...
...After mentioning for the fifth time that perpetual motion machines are impossible because energy simply can neither be created nor destroyed, and that the patent office rejects claims on such machines out of hand for just this reason, Rothman points out that some gullible souls are still willing to invest in perpetual motion schemes, because “There is no law of conservation of money or credulity...
...One reason was his suspicion of the Soviet Union...
...The moral of Rothman’s story should be that, because science will not solve all our current or future problems, we will have to rely on a combination of scientific study and smart planning to do the job, so let’s get cracking...
...But the question that looms in the mind of the reader is this: ’Who’s listening to these people...
...What the Democrats need,” they write, “are extxaordinarily skilled candidates who generate enthusiasm among the party’s two essential groups, blacks and core white Democrats, but who iue also attractive to the South’s swing whites, the conservative white Democrats and moderate independents...
...Though he claims to live in a universe that consists of “elementary particles and the forces by which they interact, and nothing else” (his italics), it is clear that Rothman actually inhabits a world of loopy activists, insensible piano instructors, New Age gurus, astrologers, and bad science fiction writers, all of whom are conspiring to eradicate common sense from the face of the earth...
...Black and Black offer a belated answer to Long’s question: The feds have the bomb, but the South has the votes...
...Kennan’s containment doctrine became Forrestal’s foundation...
...At the end of World War 11, Forrestal toyed with running for office or‘buying a newspaper, but he simply couldn’t leave Washington...
...he did...
...Few reasonable people would suggest giving up cancer research for the want of a few rats -just that we ought to curb our hubris in the matter...
...These efforts are a far cry from what Rosenblatt has in mind...
...They did all right...
...Spin Control: The White House Office of Communications and the I Management of Presidential News...
...He was a whirlwind executive...
...An Irish immigrant’s son, Forrestal was born in 1892 in Matteawan, New York, in the unfashionable southern part of Westchester County...
...But his “natural affinity” was for “the wealthier, more socially accepted Protestant families,” and he seemed “somewhat embarrassed by the whole ambiance of his lower-middle-class Catholic Irishness...
...Those sentiments are as common to southerners as bourbon whiskey or ccirnbread...
...But, for legion:: of white southern voters, the Republicans are the ones who now understand them and speak their language...
...In his postabortionwar idyll, anti-abortion activists will allow abortion until the fetus is viable-the same policy that was in force in the mid-seventies after Roe v. Wade...
...He made it to Princeton, a “poor boy in a rich man’s school,” where he ran The Daily Princetonian and was voted “most likely to succeed’ as well as “biggest bluffer” and, presciently, “the man nobody knows...
...There is a big difference between putting forward your policies in a way you hope will convince people to support them and trying to “control the agenda...
...The other is a strategy that aims to reduce or eliminate discussion of competing viewpoints...
...Much of this biography has to do with Forrestal’s successful efforts to flee that environment...
...For instance, Rothman provides a long discourse on the Heisenberg uncertainty principle to prove that it’s not true that “nothing is impossible...
...Rosenblatt’s plan is both simple and rational, but this does not mean it would work in practice...
...Furthermore, Rothman asserts, the term “theory” is often misleading, because many of the concepts labeled theories are, instead, well-defined and exhaustively tested principles of nature-they will not be reversed, only refined...
...A “pervasive and powerful sexuality” made many women his easy conquests both before and after his 1926 marriage, at 34, to Vogue writer Josephine Ogden, a “bold and creamy beauty” of 26...
...There can be no winner-take-all plan...
...There will be no simple laying down of arms...
...Milton Rothman...
...No one invoking embarrassments of campaigns past, shouting “What about the Hughes Tool Company loan...
...The authors’ judgment is that Forrestal’s “complexities and contradictions were traceable to his roots,” including his lapsed Catholicism...
...Rosenblatt’s only nod to anti-abortion interests is to say he would like to see abortion discouraged, but he does not say how...
...But who, honest to God, really believes that nothing is impossible...
...At the heart of each is fear of the unfamiliar and resentment of intrusive government...
...However, only the most dogmatic of PETA members would claim thst humans aren’t higher on the evolutionary chain...
...She didn’t want a press conference...
...He found it in George Kennan’s “long telegram” of 1946...
...Rothman, a former research physicist at Princeton, points out that vastly improved technology and methodology allow today’s scientists to better prove, expand upon, and corroborate their findings, thus they are much more certain of the validity of their theories than scientists of previous centuries could ever be...
...That’s true...
...Hoopes, who rose to be Air Force undersecretary and who wrote the well-received The Devil and John Foster Dulles, is now 70...
...The South controls 54 percent of a winning electoral majority...
...But these weighty topicsaround which the entire text ought to have revolved-are buried...
...Rosenblatt asks people to accept that they disagree...
...I say they were the worst...
...Alissa Rubin The Vital South: How Presidents Are Elected...
...or some such...
...Jon Meacham environment...
...Earl Black, Merle Black...
...Across the street, members of abortion rights groups retort, “Nazis...
...Chalmers Roberts The Science Gap: Dispelling the Myths and Understanding the Reality of Science...
...I hope Rothman in his next book chooses to focus his clear sight on the more important issues that are bound up in our nation’s inability to grasp the true state of science todaycall it Dissciency-and leave the lunatic fringe to The National Enquirer...
...It is sympathetic yet probing, right down to the title...
...The polls, too, show just how complicated this issue is...
...The South has stories of damn Yankees...
...Hoopes, who became a “young-man-of-all-works” for the first secretary of defense, considered Forrestal’s 1949 suicide “a towering loss to the country and a profound personal tragedy...
...Frustrated by federal orders and intervention, Louisiana Governor Earl Long once shrugged hopelessly: What can a man do now that the feds have the bomb...
...He began to see enemies everywhere...
...When Forrestal finally left office, his friends sent him to Florida but, in alarm, soon rushed him to the Naval Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland...
...The GOP began with those blocs and built stunning majorities, North and South...
...Before long he was, as Robert Lovett said, “a burnt-out case...
...He goes on to assert that such activists hope to create a “knee-jerk revulsion to the ‘elitist’ idea that some animals are higher on the scale of evolution than othcrs...
...Maltese recounts how Dick Cheney, who was President Ford’s chief of staff, told him that to be an effective president, he must control the agenda...
...The White House Ofice of Communications was created by Richard Nixon in 1969...
...But he never seemed to understand or try to help...
...How do we get there...
...Accounts of these seemingly endless intra- and inter-service battles remind the reader how much of the past is prologue...
...One reason we’ve failed to adequately address the greenhouse effect, toxic dumping, deforestation, destruction of biodiversity, acid rain, ozone depletion, and the like is that the technological triumphs of the past century have given us an idiotic sense of invincibility...
...Forrestal soon learned that Truman was going to fire him and install Louis Johnson, a party fundraising hack...
...So if Ross Perot wants to “chew the fat” with the public directly, it might not be such a bad thing...
...Another supporter of legal abortion, Rita Bronson, a mother, says, “I don’t feel comfortable with abortion...
...Or when, in the Reagan White House, Larry Speakes, during a turf battle with David Gergen, publicly labels him “the tall man” in an attempt to make him an object of ridicule...
...I suppose you can argue that distorting reality helped keep the Gipper popular in the short run...
...it is mainstream and conventional...
...cold warrior who had begun work on a Forrestal biography...
...They kept the president isolated, and the more isolated he was, the less able and reassuring he was on those occasions when the curtain was parted...
...Elliott Beard Life Itself: Abortion in the American Mind...
...But many would argue that such a belief is largely irrelevant, because all life is intrinsically valuablt...
...After the war, Forrestal came back to New York for the Roaring Twenties...
...Their two boys, Michael (who would work in the Kennedy White House) and Peter, were badly neglected...
...Years later Kennan would characterize Forrestal as “sharp, tense, inquisitive, potentially very much a hard-liner...
...Solidly Democratic just 40 years ago, the South is now just as solidly Republican in presidential elections...
...But in the end, the horror stories got out-avoiding any serious discussion of the deficit, for instance, didn’t reduce it by a dime-and the reputation of the president and many of those who pulled the levers suffered...
...Abortion opponents will risk arrest, harass abortion doctors, and even bomb their offices-actions that arise from extremities of feeling that aren’t going to dissolve because it might be “reasonable” for these people to compromise...
...Looking at this scene, you might say America is at war...
...Then, he hopes, once people start to listen to one another, they will discover they have more in common than they thought and will lay down their angry placards...
...Although they collaborated, the judgmental tone is clearly Hoopes...
...They feel exceptionally positive toward southerners, conservatives, the military, the importance of religion, all symbolic representations of the established order, as well as toward Re pu b 1 i c an s , ” writ e the authors...
...In those years, Hoopes reports, he was a “self-center(-d, ambitious, tireless striver-but also the serious reader of history and pliilosophy, driven by a powerful urge to expand his knowledge and experience, to realize the strong potential of a questing mind...
...The horror of this doesn’t occur to Rothman...
...If the Blacks are right, then Democrats must recognize that the men and women who turned to the GtOP did so because they couldn’t accept the post-1968 Democratic orthodoxy...
...My favorite moment in this regard was when, after a satellite question-and-answer period with supporters, an open microphone picked up Bush complaining to an aide that the people asking the “spontaneous” questions hadn’t followed the agreed-upon order, thus throwing his cue card answers out of sequence...
...In Italy, a woman may have an abortion during the first 12 weeks of pregnancy, after counseling and a seven-day waiting period...
...Some see it as a culture war, others as a gender war, still others as the centuries-old war between the secular and the religious...
...This is not revisionist history...
...Prometheus, $24.95...
...He came to see himself as the only strategist who could save America from the communists, and in his delusions of grandeur he even sought to control the newly created National Security Council as his, not Truman’s, adjunct...
...Many of the early chapters are spent reexplaining the principle of conservation of energy-indeed, the subject affords him one of the few attempts at levity in an otherwise humorless text...
...Forrestal bccame Dillon, Read’s president at time when the New Deal began probing Wall Street’s excesses...
...Rafshoon labored mightily but drew only buckets of criticism, not because he was particularly loathsome in his efforts (he wasn’t), but because switching from telling it like it is to trying to manage the agenda only made the attempt to control the media more obvious...
...And when Iran-contra broke, the decision on how to communicate was made by a powerful first lady and a powerful chief of staff slamming the phone down on each other...
...Forrestal commuted by Rolls Royce from his elegant Long [sland home, surviving the 1929 crash with $5 million or so...
...A nose twice broken by a professional boxing coach gave Forrestal a life-long ‘‘slight touch of menace” and provided, Hoopes says, “an attractive incongruity between his battered face and his well-cut, double-breasted suits and English shoes...
...One is an attempt to compete effectively in the marketplace of ideas...
...But consider how support has been built in recent years...
...No tough, rude questions here...
...In convincing detail, the Blacks dramatize the great new fact of presidential politics: The South, composed of the 11 slave states that seceded in 1860 and 1861, is the richest electoral prize in the nation...
...To that end, the French government aggressively promotes contraception, offers at least a six-month maternity leave, and gives cash grants to mothers and favorable tax treatment to families...
...Brinkley is 30...
...That view illustrates precisely how modern White Houses have gone wrong...
...In other words, the presidency is now the Republicans’ to lose, and the South is their greatest area of strength...
...When John McCone came to lunch at Prospect House, his Georgetown home, Forrestal pulled the shades, explaining that he wanted to avoid giving a sniper a good target...
...Soon thereafter he began recording what was published in 1951 as the Forrestal Diaries-an intimate account of top-level Washington...
...No one, surely, who would bother to read past this book’s introduction...
...This coalition of about 20 social service agencies from across the abortion spectrum initially aligned to fight teen pregnancy...
...Josephine became an alcoholic whose boozy antics would embarrass Forrestal...
...Who knows, since, as on most topics, Perot has yet to deliver specifics...
...Rothman also condemns animal rights activists for their belief in the myth “All problems can be solved with computer modeling,” and instead argues that we will always need to run tests on animals...
...Hoopes rightly felt there was “a major gap in the biographical history of World War I1 and the postwar period,” and he and Brinkley have helped to fill it with this well-researched, exhaustive, and mostly favorable biography...
...Franklin Roosevelt didn’t have an Office of Communications...
...My only regrct about how Maltese puts forth the history of this pernicious White House office is his scholarly dryness...
...During World War I he became a Navy pilot but sat out most of that conflict at a desk in the office of the chief of naval operations...
...He quickly became Navy undersecretary, then secretary in 1944...
...However you interpret it, those who support legal abortion must acknowledge that the incidence of abortion in the United States-the highest of any Western, democratic country-is disturbing...
...As Defense secretary he could do little toward real unification, trapped by his own devices...
...POLITICAL BOOKNOTES Driven Patriot: The Life and Times of James Forrestal...
...How he came to jump from a 14th-floor pantry window remains today as excruciating a story of bungling medics and lax security as it was nearly 43 years ago...
...His mother, says Hoopes, was “a stern, rather dour matriarch and an unreluctant disciplinarian” who wanted the boy to become a priest...
...John Allen F’aulos wrote a bestseller a couple of years ago called Innumeracy, in which he showed how our country’s widespread inability to deal with malh hurts us in our daily lives...
...Rothman points to “teachers, coaches, cheerleaders...
...He was surely one of the first senior figures in our government to realize that Stalin and the men around him were brutal and high-stepping gangsters...
...he began searching for an American rationale to deal with this new menace...
...The divisiveness of the abortion issue can be interpreted in various ways...
...These do present, as he says, a wave of irrationality, but they are only distractions-symptoms of a much deeper foolishness...
...Then there was Nixon’s slick promise of a plan to end the war in Vietnam, which could not, of course, be disclosed in advance...
...Think, for instance, of the vicious fight against busing in South Boston in the severities, the success of California’s Froposition 13, or New Jersey’s retaliation against Jim Florio...
...And if voters in Savannah stick to the GOP, the Blacks make it clear that voters in Cincinnati probably will, too...
...Consider the Greater Bridgeport (Connecticut) Adolescent Pregnancy Program...
...In fact, he ignores his peace plan’s first tenet: Listen to the other side...
...Clinic defenders scuffle with police...
...Presidents have to build public support for their policies in order to accomplish anything...
...Rosenblatt cites a survey taken in 1989, nearly 20 years after the legalization of abortion, showing that although 77 percent of Americans believe abortion is either murder or the taking of a life, 73 percent also say the abortion decision should be up to the woman...
...Unfortunately, most of the “myths” Rothman attacks are better described as “tiresome aphorisms,” making the book little more than a long complaint about a bunch of trivial slogans that nobody really believes anyway...
...He also presents some thought-inducing information on the state of medical technology, which, he points out, is geared towards helping the population of our country get sick later in life...
...In France, abortion is legal during the first 10 weeks of pregnancy...
...That Bill Clinton is the presumptive nominee in 1!292 suggests that the Democrats are learning that lesson...
...Not only does the group agree to avoid discussing abortion, but it excludes from its ranks representatives of the city’s abortion clinic and Operation Rescue...
...The government pays 70 percent of the cost of an abortion...
...His Navy tour began as a battle to get control of the admirals’ baronies while creating the two-ocean navy...
...John Anthony Maltese...
...Notwithstanding that, his people still try to blow too much smoke and adjust too many mirrors...
...But if he’s talking about something that would reduce the power of-or, better still, eliminate-the White House Office of Communications, I’m for it...
...The coalition includes representatives of the Bridgeport Catholic diocese and Planned Parenthood...
...Yet distractions dominate this book...
...in four of the last five elections, victorious Republicans have swept the South’s electoral votes...
...Less airy individuals who do read on are rewarded much later, when Rothman marshals some terrifying statistics on the nature of exponential growth and its relevance to the future of world eco3iomic and population growth...
...he soon became Kennan’s aggressive patron...
...Chapter titles include “Nothing is Known for Sure,” “All Scientists Are Objective,” and “Advanced Civilizations on Other Planets Possess Great Forces Unavailable to Us on Earth...
...The “citizens” were, of course, a packed house of supporters...
...As Maltese’s book explains, the Office of Communications is behind such charades...
...Forrestal was a driven patriot, and how he came to embody this epithet is the essence of this book...
...When I first heard of it, I was intrigued and hopeful...
...Okay, so he is an assistant professor of political science at the University cf Georgia...
...He gives no ground to the concerns of abortion opponents...
...And who’s served when that happens...
...Still, it is plausible to conclude, as the authors do, that Forrestal’s “inability ever to pause, look back, disengage himself even temporarily from the swift onrush of impersonal events led inexorably” to his suicide...
Vol. 24 • June 1992 • No. 6
