Political Booknotes Reviews

...Nonetheless, having repeatedly assured the public that the case was airtight, the Justice Department pulled out all the stops: Justice froze Noriega's worldwide assets (without ever identifying them as proceeds from the drug trade), making it difficult for the imprisoned general to mount a full-fledged defense...

...Comecon, the trading arm of the Warsaw Pact, recently collapsed...

...His character transformation is only one of the many bizarre subplots in the U.S...

...The third- and fourth-tier people may not go to all the important meetings or see much of the president, but they know a lot and they love to dish...

...Referring to a right-wing group asking for donations for its effort to have him removed from the airwaves, Stern wonders, "Why are they raising money to force me off the air...

...He is also determined for the most part to play it straight, dispassionately recounting what (to me at least) seemed obvious excesses and questionable tactics by the government without even venturing an opinion...

...The main problem is that while Simon & Schuster published Private Parts, it certainly didn't edit it...

...Albert, a San Francisco-based journalist who edits a legal newspaper called The Recorder, tells the story well, benefiting from the obvious cooperation of lawyers on both sides of the case...

...I knew Bush was in trouble when one of Darman's deputies, Tom Scully, told me that health care reform was a "second term issue...

...He was now a certified U.S...

...Anyone who agrees with him is a genius...

...So in the end, the Justice Department was forced to rely on the bartered testimony of certified sleazebags like Lehder...

...In short, Simon & Schuster forgot that you can't get edginess without supplying an edge...

...Against a hopelessly outgunned defense team, it was more than enough...

...Asked if things had been better before, a Polish biology teacher makes this point to Hoffman: "No, of course not...

...When Darman learned that Kolb had alerted Cavazos that his signature had been forged, Kolb became a walking dead man at the White House...

...Beginning in 1990, she traveled the main streets of the former Eastern bloc's capital cities and the back-roads of its villages...

...Yet another triumph of democracy over quality...

...Meanwhile a real hero like Jonas Salk can't afford cable TV...

...Kolb cites an anonymous quote from a Bush aide in The New York Times that summarized the basic problem: "Keep playing with the same toys...

...It was a loser, he [Sullivan] thought," writes Albert...

...What's new are the details of the sheer stupidity of the in-fighting...

...Barely a year after he regaled the jury with this tale, a federal judge in South Carolina refused to grant Taboada the lenient sentence recommended by the Noriega prosecutors...

...It wasn't as if he got infected through a bad blood transfusion or from his dentist...

...We already knew that Bush's presidency was "devoted to an in-box mentality that worshiped process over progress...

...Work might have been thoroughly unsatisfying, and there could well have been four superfluous people performing each task, but at least jobs were available...

...Porter wasn't lazy, just appallingly reactive and a complete pushover for Richard Darman, the true villain of the book...

...Woman: "Okay, but that doesn't sound like good news...

...The stories he tells are frequently trivial, amounting to nothing more than somebody blocking somebody else's memo...

...Jonathan Alter is a senior editor at Newsweek and a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly...

...Not surprisingly, hyper inflation has set in...

...In Poland, nearly everyone was worse off economically in the two years following the fall of communism, and the country's unemployment rate hit 14 percent this year...

...But while Noriega was unquestionably brutal and corrupt—character defects well known to the CIA officials who had long kept him on their payroll—his actual role in the cocaine trade had been grossly overblown...

...Kolb is stunned to learn that even after it was clear that the 1990 budget deal raising taxes was a political disaster, Bush continued to let Darman run the White House...

...Stern observed that Magic had kept hundreds of women he'd slept with in the dark about the fatal risk they were taking...

...Political Booknotes The Case Against the General: Manuel Noriega and the Politics of American Justice Steve Albert Charles Scribner's Sons, $25 By Michael Islkoff During his 1988 trial in Tampa, Florida, Medellin cartel baron Carlos Lehder was portrayed by federal prosecutors as the most monstrous drug trafficker of recent times—a deranged, Hitler-loving thug who turned cocaine smuggling into a multi-billion dollar hemispheric enterprise...

...Because Darman knew that Cavazos would object, he waited until the hapless cabinet officer was in Europe, then had one of his deputies use the department's autopen to affix the secretary's signature to the document needed to approve the grant...

...Nothing ever did...

...Private Parts Howard Stern Simon & Schuster, $23 By Scott Shuger People in book publishing are always complaining about how much material they have to wade through and how little of it is any good...

...Hungary's unemployment rate could climb to 20 percent by January...

...There's utterly no evidence of shaping or guidance...

...Some of the so-called "New Paradigm" was solid, and some of it was silly, but Darman's fundamental cynicism—his notion that Beltway number-crunching, not ideas, was all that mattered—was ultimately self-defeating...

...No matter...

...The decline of communism also brought about social splintering of which violence in Bosnia is only the most notorious example...

...Exit into History: A Journey Through the New Eastern Europe Eva Hoffman Viking Press, $23 By Halle Shilling For people so obviously eager to rid themselves of communist rule, Eastern Europeans seem to be electing a lot of Soviet-style politicians these days...

...the Czech Republic suffered a 35 percent fall in industrial output between 1990 and 1992...

...In December 1989, determined to show his resolve against the cocaine threat, President Bush unleashed Operation Just Cause—an invasion of Panama by 23,000 U.S...

...At one point, the government produced two lowly denizens of the Miami Correctional Center who told a fanciful story of seeing Noriega yukking it up with the cartel barons at Jorge Ochoa's personal office in Medellin...

...What I told my listeners," Stern writes, "was that Magic was pretty damn irresponsible to get it in the first place...

...custody...

...Living under communism provided a common enemy, but after victory, the union that once bonded intellectual and shipyard laborer vanished...

...Michael Isikoffis a reporter for The Washington Post...

...Roger Porter, the Harvard professor who was Bush's domestic policy chief and Kolb's immediate boss, comes across as almost a parody of a timid, ass-covering time-server who lives to play tennis on the South Lawn with the president, visiting governors, and other members of the White House tennis club...

...What's promising about Stern is that in this age of public relations, he's spontaneous, and in this age of pretense, he's plebeian...

...If Bush had even made a stab at addressing fundamental domestic issues, he would have been able to rebut many of Bill Clinton's attacks and possibly would have won the election...

...No, this guy came down with it because he had incredible amounts of unprotected sex...

...Complicating this economic downturn is a set of core beliefs that you'd expect to find in a people who just spent the last 40 years living in socialism...

...At that point, Taboada recanted, confessing he had made the whole Noriega story up...

...Assigned to head the Justice Department's prosecution team, senior litigation counsel Michael P. Sullivan thought the testimony so weak that Noriega could get off...

...Just tune in to my press conference...

...In the end, what doomed Bush was as much the do-nothing notion of "No new toys" as "No new taxes...

...The reason is that, unlike morning radio and big-time publishing, on "The Tonight Show" there are things you can't say, and there was a delightful tension involved in watching Stern press against that limitation (the same point applies to Stern's many appearances on David Letterman...

...Interviews with people in the streets—from former Polish censors to Bulgarian taxi drivers—illustrate how difficult the transition from comrade to citizen has been...

...Us, Them...

...It taped and analyzed his prison phone calls (inadvertently picking up confidential conversations with his lawyers...

...Living in pre-1989 Eastern Europe seems to have been a bit like life in a hospital: unpleasant, but the basics were taken care of, and you never had to expend much energy...

...For Eastern Europeans the work has just begun...

...troops whose primary goal was to capture Noriega and haul him into a U.S...

...The result is that Private Parts isn't about anything...

...That's not exactly a bulletin to those who've been following the degeneration of non-fiction publishing over the past decade's worth of celeb bios and self-help titles...

...Halle Shilling is an intern at The Washington Monthly...

...From Bulgaria's parliamentary rotunda to a gypsy tavern in rural Romania, Hoffman reveals how life in post-communist Eastern Europe has fallen well short of almost everyone's hopes...

...in Romania, a kilogram of sugar that cost 20 lei in 1989 now costs 500 lei, and in Warsaw apartments currently range between $15,000 and $80,000...

...Or to be more accurate, it's all about Howard Stern, and he isn't about anything...

...Department of Justice truth teller, one of the star witnesses in the government's case against the new demon of the moment, Manuel Antonio Noriega...

...And Simon & Schuster must be particularly proud of this sentence: "Her [expletive] must have smelled like daisies, I imagined as I clutched my hot beef...

...Some role model...

...If the gassy memos he excerpts here are any indication, he probably was already...

...This fracturing is reflected in the explosion of new political parties throughout Eastern Europe...

...It's interesting to note that by far the funniest thing Howard Stern has ever done was his one appearance on "The Tonight Show" with Jay Leno (recounted in the book...

...The problem is that what they actually know first-hand is often affected by a tendency toward inflating their own roles...

...Their number and lack of unity diffuses their strength, which helps facilitate the election of a lot of communist retreads who take advantage of the clogged up system...

...The book includes Stern's on-air, imaginary rendition of Magic's less-than-frank discussion with a former bed partner: Magic: "You know what, baby, it would be a whole lot easier if you tuned in to national TV...

...in Poland, 29 parties out of 67 won seats in the 1991 election...

...One might well ask why nobody bothered to check with Sullivan before Bush ordered the invasion...

...The arrival of political freedom has brought with it the slow demise of that intensive care culture, and, not surprisingly, a lot of the patients aren't happy...

...Far more typical is what he says about men who are against abortion: "I hope they, collectively, while walking down the street, get pulled into an alley, sprawled over a dumpster, and [expletive] right up their fat [expletive] asses...

...courtroom...

...There was not a shred of corroborating evidence that Noriega had ever been to Medellin, but here was the U.S...

...In Romania, 74 parties battled for a parliamentary majority...

...The best Darman story here involves Education Secretary Lauro Cavazos...

...It later turned out to have been concocted by Olarte after he was imprisoned and facing a lengthy prison term...

...When Magic Johnson's announcement that he was HIV-positive was greeted with gushing reverence from the media, Stern had his own, more on-point take...

...Scott Shuger is a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly...

...Most of these organizations—the majority anti-communist—hate even the idea of party discipline because it reminds them of the bad old days...

...One charge in the 1988 indictment—that Noriega had taken a $4 million cash bribe from a Colombian drug smuggler named Boris Olarte—lacked even the slightest corroboration...

...By themselves, they are neither valuable nor interesting...

...Then they'll be the ones screaming that they want to have abortions...

...As a result, Albert fails to put the Noriega case into its larger context—the prime example of an American legal system that has become increasingly warped and distorted by the government's need for big name trophies in the "war" against drugs and crime...

...Well, I hear Simon & Schuster is thinking about opening up a chain of massage parlors...

...Combing the depths of federal penitentiaries throughout the country, Sullivan's prosecution team offered inmates with absolutely nothing to lose amazingly lucrative deals— dropped charges, sharply reduced sentences, immigration visas for their loved ones—all for a few words that would implicate the general...

...Magic: "Look at it this way: You can smoke all the cigarettes you want, do lots of drugs, jump out of an airplane, and race cars...

...He "spent countless hours worrying over such trivia as font sizes and the width of page margins...

...In Romania, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia, former communists remain a significant voice in politics...

...it's just the most blatant example yet...

...Excuse me, but does Stern think that men get pregnant...

...Send the money directly to me, and if it's enough, I'll leave voluntarily...

...For all its repression, communism stabilized standards of living, controlled inflation, and made unemployment nonexistent...

...It dispatched teams of investigators to pore over thousands of documents seized during the invasion in hopes that something tying Noriega to the drug trade would turn up...

...There is nothing particularly shocking about such testimony in drug and organized crime trials...

...It was a loser from day one...

...This past October, Polish voters gave the Democratic Left Alliance, a party primarily of recycled communists, a 20 percent plurality in Parliament, and second place went to the formerly Communist-aligned Polish Peasants Party...

...Noriega was convicted on eight of ten counts against him and sentenced to 40 years...

...But rarely has it been presented with such unabashed zeal and excess as in the Noriega trial...

...Never mind that Lehder had never actually met Noriega, or that his track record for veracity was less than sterling...

...government presenting it as fact...

...The revolution, as Hoffman's book makes clear, was the easy part...

...Then they'll be crying, 'We got raped in the ass!' Good for you, you pigs...

...For anybody harboring any remaining doubts, Private Parts proves that in America today, anything can be a "book," and anyone can be an "author...

...This note is adapted from a review that appeared in The Boston Globe...

...Now it's all up for grabs, there's no one to blame...

...anyone on the other side is a lightweight and a knave...

...To be fair, Stern is sometimes funny...

...Indeed, one of the more startling passages in Albert's book recounts the first serious review of the case by professional prosecutors in Miami shortly after Noriega was brought into U.S...

...The blows he lands are clumsy and often stale...

...Another part of the indictment— a tangled story of Noriega seeking Fidel Castro's help in mediating a dispute with the cartel—was thrown in largely for political reasons in Miami and was doubted even by some of the indictment's authors...

...Well, with the publication of this book, a 446-page attack of ver-barrhea from morning radio man Howard Stern, it's going to get much worse...

...Indeed, it proves that anyone can be the nation's No.l best-selling "author...

...His book is not nearly as engaging as John Podhoretz's Hell of a Ride, and Kolb's axe-grinding for himself and the other self-styled "New Paradigm" policy intellectuals pushing the supply-side/empowerment agenda is irritating...

...He's right to condemn the budget director's "Brother, Can You Paradigm" attack on the series of fresh ideas (school vouchers, loser pays in court cases) that Jim Pinkerton and other conservatives offered...

...Not better—but they were simpler...

...government's four-year effort to convict the one-time dictator of Panama—a story that is told in exhaustive and at times fascinating detail in Steve Albert's The Case Against the General...

...What's next for America after a book like this...

...But as useful as these qualities are—and as much as America could use more of them— they are form, not substance...

...Darman wanted an $8 million piece of pork for Dan Rostenkowski's alma mater in Chicago, Loyola University...

...Such testimony, moreover, tends to be highly pliable, depending on circumstances...

...And yet the overall effect is a devastating indictment of the Bush administration's utter failure on the domestic side...

...As a reporter covering the trial, I remember listening to much of this testimony and wondering, how can anyone believe this stuff...

...By the fall of 1991, Lehder appeared to have undergone a remarkably quick rehabilitation...

...Lincoln was spontaneous and plain-spoken, but so was Dillinger...

...The problem, it turns out, is that being a comrade had more than its share of advantages...

...In an on-air discussion with Dick Cavett, Stern combined a reference to Cavett's up-and-now-mostly-down talk show career with one to Cavett's long battle against depression this way: "What's worse, Dick, when they cancel one of your shows or when they cancel one of your prescriptions...

...One of those witnesses, Gabriel Taboada, claimed he had seen the cartel barons giving Noriega a briefcase stuffed with $500,000 in cash...

...But let's paint them a little shinier...

...Kolb, a deputy assistant to the president for domestic policy under George Bush, has that skewed perspective...

...White House Daze: The Unmaking of Domestic Policy in the Bush Years Charles Kolb The Free Press, $22.95 By Jonathan Alter The best way to find out what's going on inside any large institution—including the White House—is a couple of layers down from the top...

...It was a predictable game...

...And, very occasionally, Stern is even funny when the topic might actually matter to someone...

...In Exit into History, Eva Hoffman explains the apparent paradox of these newly elected communists by putting a human face on the aftermath of 1989's revolutions...

...Surveys of nearly all Eastern European countries show that 70 percent of the population think the state should provide a job, a national health service, housing, education, and other services...

...Indicted in the winter of 1988, during the peak of drug war hysteria, Noriega had been publicly portrayed as a "drug lord" and poisoner of American children...

...However, Stern's book contains remarkably few such moments...