Political Booknotes
Political Booknotes Peace-Process: American Diplomacy and the Arab-Israeli Conflict Since 1967 William Quandt Brookings Books, $15.95 By Barry Rubin American presidents, secretaries of State,...
...Also, he chooses Sue and Lawrence Brooks, warriors for desegregation in Boston with whom Salisbury climbed mountains in the Adirondacks...
...In Washington, scores of experts, journalists, and bureaucrats have built careers on writing, chatting, and—often very badly—trying to interpret this massive story...
...Judd Alexander's book promises to do absolutely nothing about this impasse...
...Why do they exempt disposables like toilet paper and auto fuel...
...A particularly bright bit is his consideration of demographics...
...action in this region has been based on several premises about national interest, some of them clearly exaggerated...
...The Bobby [Kennedy] of 1968 knew there were questions to which no one, not even a Kennedy, had the answers...
...Political Booknotes Peace-Process: American Diplomacy and the Arab-Israeli Conflict Since 1967 William Quandt Brookings Books, $15.95 By Barry Rubin American presidents, secretaries of State, and a good portion of the U.S...
...What series of insane decisions lead us to sink billions into useless airplanes like the C-17...
...And if a few ounces of designer plastic can bar microbes from a side of beef, then the supermarket throws away less and people enjoy their steak more...
...Brassey's, $30 By Jennifer Elsea Retired Air Force Maj...
...Alexander's store of knowledge on the function and history of packaging is helpful —a product that truly could have fostered some understanding between environmentalists and industrialists...
...They are concerned about increased truck traffic, odors, and falling property values...
...For readers interested in food, Smith notes that opportunities to grab a quick bite are plentiful...
...Although one can quarrel with many details and points of analysis, the basic story is presented with considerable clarity and insight...
...He's all too happy to ascribe infallible judgment to the general public when the packaging of their favorite beverage or snack food is under the environmentalists' gun: "We have yet to learn the folly of substituting political and/or bureaucratic judgments for the wisdom of the marketplace...
...He waves away the issues of air pollution from incineration...
...Of course, you need at least two stars on your shoulders to get in the door...
...For example, the Air Force staff's operational support, which works directly for the Air Force chief of staff, is not actually assigned to the staff...
...58 The Washington Monthly/July/August 1993 Assignment Pentagon: The Insider's Guide to the Potomac Puzzle Palace Maj...
...The deal being discussed today is close to what the Arab states and Palestinians might have achieved in 1967 or 1977 had they then been willing to live with a Jewish state in their midst...
...dominance, the defeat of the Ayatollah Khomeini's Islamic fundamentalism, and Saddam Hussein's radical Arab nationalism that made them begin to change course...
...One could have hoped for more from a Pulitzer Prize laureate with more than 20 books behind him...
...then underwent a long—still uncompleted—process to reconcile themselves to that fact...
...Alexander's paper roots really start to show when he produces his own off-the-cuff comparison of paper and plastic grocery bags, and counts biodegradability among paper's advantages...
...Those embarrassingly large wedges of plastic packaging and food waste and grass clippings shrink...
...He has explanations for almost every bottle and plastic wrapper and cardboard container and sheet of shrink-wrap, and most of them make sense...
...And when the Pentagon has been ordered to cut headquarters personnel, it occasionally just shuffles them around and assigns them, on paper, to field units...
...With decades of service to the American Can Company and James River Corporation, though, Alexander is at his best when he defends packaging...
...On matters of which I have independent knowledge—like Khrushchev and the Soviet Union—I am troubled to find Salisbury shaky about his facts...
...An odd assemblage, but why not...
...For these reasons, William Quandt's new book is useful and timely...
...He is the author of the forthcoming book, Revolution Until Victory?: The Politics of the PLO, published by the Harvard University Press...
...The building is supposed to allow a brisk walker (which newcomers quickly become) to get from any one location to any other in under 10 minutes...
...Washington, D.C...
...It's good advice for officers at any level of military staff...
...Salisbury continues, "When later Khrushchev proclaimed, 'We will bury you,' and 'Your children will live under communism,' I knew that he was only whistling in the wind...
...If interested, send your resume, two recommendations, writing samples (articles, term papers, etc...
...In its broad outline, the process has been one in which Arab states and Palestinians first discovered their inability to destroy Israel through conventional military, terrorist, or political forces...
...If anyone can explain those aspects of Pentagon life over a beer, I'm buying...
...During the summer, he recommends the center court snack bar (for you Pentagonians, he's talking about "Thigh Land...
...Details, details...
...But as Sadat himself showed when he made his own breakthrough by going to Israel (an act that greatly discomfited the Carter Administration at first), the local players were in control...
...With Salisbury, we get less insight than hyperbole...
...Salisbury writes that after his 1959 tour of the United States, "Khrushchev was as happy as a small boy...
...At worst, it's foul-tempered playground scrapping...
...It affords you the distinctly American privilege of eating hot dogs that have been sitting on the shelf for six months," bellow the industrialists...
...Jennifer Elsea, a former Army captain, is an intern at The Washington Monthly...
...But beginners at the Puzzle Palace shouldn't be surprised to discover that some of those who get ahead break a lot of the rules and often operate under their own set...
...These biographical sketches, though occasionally interesting, lack a sense of recollection in tranquillity that Theodore H. White, for instance, brought to America in Search of Itself and In Search of History—A Personal Adventure...
...Answer: General Merrill A. "Tony" McPeak, current Air Force chief of staff and aspiring successor to Colin Powell...
...As it stands, the sarcasm, the name-calling, and the strategic omissions of evidence make the excavation of Alexander's valuable knowledge a dull chore indeed...
...It's a narrower defense of packaging and of the free-market system that suckles it...
...It's all wasteful and hideous...
...David Halberstam...
...Plan extra time for getting lost...
...He does, however, assure us that as the "black"—i.e., secret—programs of the eighties become declassified, critics of defense R&D spending will fall silent, and some may even shed a tear of remorse about how wrong they were to distrust the military...
...Also illuminating are some adjustments to our national perception of garbage...
...To think that I was there and missed the story of Khrushchev in San Jose facing up to the coming defeat of communism...
...Job Opening The Washington Monthly will soon have an opening for a reporter-editor...
...The Arabs had to be ready to accept Israel's existence...
...The impression the reader gets is that the supposedly lofty level of integrity and competence at the Pentagon keeps the place honest, and reason generally reigns...
...For one thing, the 156 million ton figure with which we're all now intimate doesn't represent what we throw away in the dump every year...
...It doesn't account for beer cans or washing machines that are recycled, or clothing that goes to Goodwill...
...It was argued that the Arab-Israeli conflict was the overriding (often seeming to be the only) issue in the Middle East...
...We will bury you" was in 1956, in my presence, at a reception in Moscow amid rising disillusionment with communism in East Europe...
...The 20 make an odd assortment— some dead, some alive, some famous, some largely unknown...
...This, however, takes a lot of practice...
...Unless the United States found some solution, the Soviets would supposedly take over the area, the Arab world would turn to communism or Islamic fundamentalism, and wars would erupt at any given moment...
...Furthermore, why don't environmentalists call newspapers "disposables...
...You have to help me,' he told Tommy, 'I'm in a terrible spot.'" That does not square with what the late Ambassador Thompson told me at the time—that he had no knowledge of the flight, let alone the downing of the U-2, until Khrushchev publicly announced it before the Supreme Soviet, pointing to a flabbergasted American ambassador in the diplomatic gallery...
...I knew, too, because I had read my Marx...
...No one but a romantic could write of Khrushchev, "No man could have married a woman so straight and warm and intelligent as Nina Petrovna without a good heart...
...He rushed back to Moscow to prepare" for a reciprocal visit by President Eisenhower...
...Today, success may be in sight, or is it merely another mirage...
...and cover letter specifying the dates you will be available, by August 15 to: Fall Internships The Washington Monthly 1611 Connecticut Ave...
...What this book sorely lacks is a genuine sense of the forces of bureaucratic politics that shape the Pentagon's peculiar culture and lead to such peculiar policy...
...Hannah Holmes is a contributing editor at Garbage Magazine...
...And it means the average American generates 1.9 pounds of household discards a day, not 3.47...
...Packaging, the fulcrum on which the see-saw groans, weighted on one end by howling environmentalists, and on the other by howling industrialists...
...In Defense of Garbage Judd Alexander Praeger, $22.95...
...Salisbury's principal domestic theme is civil rights...
...He doesn't mention, however, that far and away the best deals are offered by the services' separately run officers' "open messes," where you can get a fancy meal served to you on real dishes by actual waiters...
...Pencils, crayons, and chalk are disposable, too...
...and Roger Wilkins (who shares billing with his law professor wife, Patricia King...
...But they suggest that under the exterior of a journalist, there lurks in Salisbury a romantic novelist who can rearrange history and divine meanings from glances...
...Alas, with a little more brain and a little less brawn, this book could have been a bridge...
...The poor quality of the experts as well as the general incompatibility of American and Middle Eastern political culture have contributed to some of the more memorable policy debacles in a number of administrations...
...20009 July/August 1993/The Washington Monthly 59 Heroes of My Time Harrison B. Salisbury Walker & Co., $19.95 By Daniel Schorr When The Washington Monthly called to ask me to review a new book by Harrison Salisbury about 20 of his personal heroes, I ventured the guess that they would include a New York Times publisher, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, and a figure from Salisbury's China experience...
...Hallway trivia question: Whose portrait is the only one in Pentagon history to get defaced...
...This is Salisbury's book, and after a long and distinguished career, he should get to name any heroes he wants...
...There are nuggets to be had, hard labor notwithstanding...
...I was almost right about the publisher (Iphigene Ochs Sulzberger was the owner who designated publishers from her family) and about Khrushchev, but hardly prepared for seven entries from China...
...On other pages, he dismisses biodegradability as a red herring served up by journalists, saying biodegradation creates dangerous landfill conditions and that the solution to roadside Utter is to pick it up or prevent it...
...no series of efforts even approaches it in complexity...
...Americans over the age of five throw out a whole ounce of pens a year, he says...
...How is it, he asks, that we fume and fuss over foam cups and beer cans, but ignore the massive manufacturing costs implicit in furnishing a seven-bedroom home, or the airplane trip implicit in fresh melon and imported prosciutto...
...He offers a spirited and respectable case for ball-point pens, which for the crime of disposability have been indicted by numerous government agencies...
...Snow is one of four journalistic heroes, along with Homer Bigart, longtime correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune...
...Daniel Schorr is a senior news analyst for National Public Radio...
...The Chinese nominees are mainly victims of the regime's oppression, but then there is Premier Zhou Enlai, "the consummate courtier" of Mao Zedong for 40 years...
...It is suspected the perpetrator was protesting McPeak's new design of the Air Force uniform, which very much resembles that of a Japanese commercial airline pilot...
...Salisbury also has a way of stating as fact what can only be matters of conjecture...
...He has written a huge amount about U.S...
...Why don't they demand a "newspaper bill" to force publishers to take back their papers...
...It was this long and bitter experience, casualties and wasted resources, the collapse of their major ally in Moscow, unquestionable U.S...
...Unfortunately, even his best points are tainted by a quarrelsome posture and not a few glaring inconsistencies that undermine his credibility...
...Yet so much has been written about the Arab-Israeli conflict, so many trees with deep, entangled roots obscure the horizon, that it is easy to become lost...
...dioxin is an over-rated hazard and under control...
...Quandt served on the National Security Council between 1977 and 1979 and participated in the Camp David negotiations...
...Perry M. Smith, now CNN's chief military analyst, says this guide is designed to help not only those headed for a first assignment at the Pentagon "who would like to get the kind of informal advice that they might get over a couple of beers at the bar," but also for others interested in how the Pentagon operates...
...By Hannah Holmes Pity poor packaging: reviled by all, understood by none but its creators...
...I knew that the great goal of communism, and hence of the Soviet system, was to abolish the distinction between blue collar and white collar...
...it's what we generate, commercial and institutional sources included...
...The cast of characters makes War and Peace look like a one-act play...
...I caught a glance exchanged between Khrushchev and one of his aides...
...They knew what [Thomas J.] Watson was showing them, even if Watson didn't...
...Meanwhile, they exploited the conflict to muster a great deal of political support, money, and rationalization for their own failures on economic development and democracy...
...Trust in The Market to remove the other sources...
...Middle East policy over many years...
...U.S...
...Smith, therefore, omits any explanation of procurement scandals which are driven by, at worst, lies, and, at best, willful disregard for the truth...
...Shall we return to the fountain pen...
...But this issue will continue to be one of Clinton's major foreign policy problems...
...But, here in America, the citadel of capitalism, the historic distinctions of blue and white collar had been obliterated...
...Desirable qualifications include practical experience working in or writing about politics and government...
...Indeed, Smith warns against the traps of self-serving modus operandi: misplaced loyalty, personality conflicts, and intra-service rivalries that neither serve the interests of the organization nor the nation...
...Whether they help to illuminate the past is another matter...
...He touts POAC as a "great place...
...Add these things to the pie graph, and presto...
...He opened the CBS News Bureau in Moscow in 1955...
...At best, it's an intelligent apology for the size of the industrial garbage bag...
...His romance with Eisenhower was already in trouble...
...If a quarter-ounce wrapper will prevent the breakage and waste of a four-ounce bottle, after all, aren't we still ahead of the game...
...But, lacking any new perception, any real unifying theme, this becomes a conceit, a gathering together of left-over file folders...
...And what you moss noggins know about economics and July/August 1993/The Washington Monthly 57 The Market wouldn't fill a juice box...
...But most of all, they are concerned about danger...
...most toxic heavy metals come from batteries, which shouldn't be burned...
...His most annoying inconsistency concerns the role of consumers in society...
...But those remarks were made not "later," but earlier...
...In fact, after his American trip, Khrushchev rushed off to Peking to face a Chinese Politburo seething with resentment over his romance with capitalist America...
...True, during the second half of the eighties, a conservative Israeli government offered considerably less, but that era was more of an exception than the norm...
...Consider this almost novelistic surmise about Khrushchev's visit to the IBM building in San Jose, California...
...State Department have spent over a quarter-century trying to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict...
...In Defense of Garbage isn't a defense of garbage...
...All this research and experience is used here to good effect in providing the first detailed, comprehensive narrative history of these complex events...
...Applications should be accompanied by a list of three references and by writing samples that demonstrate fact-gathering and analytical ability...
...Perry M. Smith USAF (Ret...
...At any rate, no current issue has kept the United States so long engaged...
...An unknown, felt marker-wielding artist drew a non-regulation mustache under the general's nose...
...As for the American goal of containing instability, the overwhelming economic, diplomatic, and strategic assets of the United States were highly successful in preserving its interest...
...My guess is you will learn a lot from this book, but for the tougher questions about life in the Pentagon—and for some of its more intriguing trivia—you'll need another source...
...Salisbury writes that when word of the downing of the U-2 spy plane on May 1, 1960 reached Moscow, "Khrushchev sought out the American ambassador, Llewellyn (Tommy) Thompson, at a diplomatic reception...
...Fall Internships The Washington Monthly is accepting applications for fall 1993 interns...
...He understood life as he had never understood it before, because he understood death...
...If the question is the management of used materials, however, Alexander rails against public ignorance: People don't understand the problems caused by recycling, they think biodegradation is some form of natural magic, and they distrust incinerators...
...A whole dictionary is needed to explain the issue's vocabulary of terms—each with its own precise meaning and historical context, each with its own bias and implication —such as "Black September," "disengagement agreements," "two-state solution," "territories for peace," "Rogers Plan," "Reagan Plan," and so on...
...If this is a terrible thing to do, what is the suggested alternative...
...In fact, with schoolyard fervor, Alexander drops his full weight on the industrial side of the teeter-totter in an attempt to knock his rivals through the ozone hole...
...The Cold War was already won in the Middle East when the outcome was still in doubt in other parts of the world...
...Smith mentions that the DoD telephone directory is always out-of-date, but the greater problem is that it's next to impossible to find an office in it if you aren't exactly sure of what the office is called...
...Aside from Wilkins and King, there are sketches of Cecil Roberts and Bessie Edsell, white and black women who fought for civil rights in Birmingham, Alabama...
...It falls under the "Air Force District of Washington," headquartered at the nearby Boiling Air Force Base...
...The author says that he deliberately "passed over the most renowned figures of our times" like Churchill, DeGaulle, the Roosevelts, and John F. Kennedy, but then Robert F. Kennedy makes the cut...
...As for ending the conflict, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat once said that 99 percent of the cards were in America's hands...
...Quandt writes of the "alarming regularity" with which "American presidents have found themselves dealing with Middle East crises for which they were poorly prepared...
...Smith recommends you join the Pentagon Officers Athletic Club (POAC...
...Your children will live under communism" was actually "Your grandchildren will live under socialism," and was uttered in 1957 in Khrushchev's "Face the Nation" interview on CBS and again in 1959 during his "Kitchen Debate" with Vice President Nixon...
...For the most part, the book reads like selections offered as "Officer Professional Development" at any of the service schools...
...wail environmentalists...
...His status as a veteran observer and sometime participant makes him a good guide...
...No one should begrudge Harrison Salisbury his eclectic collection of heroes, however much time may have blurred some details...
...On the way back to Moscow from Peking, he stopped at Baku for a speech to renew pressure on the Allied position in Berlin...
...So that's what all those officers who spend half the day down there are doing...
...Offices change names as quickly as personnel rotate and often perform functions entirely different from what their titles imply...
...Barry Rubin is a fellow at the Johns Hopkins University Foreign Policy Institute and teaches at Tel Aviv University...
...More important are intelligence, humor, and the willingness to work long hours for low pay...
...From circulation, production, and advertising, to writing, editing, and researching, Monthly interns gain experience in all aspects of magazine publishing...
...In the final analysis, it's another handful of sand thrown in the eyes of those searching for a way to break up the brawl...
...Or this: "David Halberstam's exploration of the faded American dream, powered by a relentless mind and ever-renewing physical strength, was transforming him into the conscience of the American heritage...
...to exercise your network of contacts...
...Smith provides a map to help you find your way through the building's labyrinth of hallways, but keep in mind that the place seems to have been designed to confuse the enemy...
...Alexander's keen eye for symbols, and their abuse, makes for fun reading, too...
...It has next to nothing to say about the environment, and even less about the notion of living within our earthly means...
...And the price is unbeatable: Entrees of the day normally run from about $4.25 to $6.00 and the food is superb...
...no policy area has seen so many initiatives or frustrations...
...How did we end up paying $600 for a hammer anyway...
...And then, hardly needing more posthumous attention, there's Malcolm X, whom Salisbury met during a stint as national editor of the Times...
...In fact, and here is a point usefully applied to other crises, the conflict has a logic of its own...
...We also chuck uncountable tonnage of such common stuff as construction and demolition debris and cat litter...
...About the time one is ready to conclude that the ticket for admission into the Salisbury pantheon is having been part of his vast journalistic experience, one comes across two whom he has never met—Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov and Edgar Snow, the biographer of Mao Zedong...
...That was the nuance that underlay the quick glance between Khrushchev and his aide____" What a glance...
...Nor possess a son so sympathetic, understanding—realistic—as Sergei Khrushchev...
Vol. 25 • June 1993 • No. 7
