Political Booknotes

...Would that all business leaders-and more politi-cians-had such heart...

...PAUL HEWITT is the executive director of the National Taxpayers Union Foundation...

...Ours, available from the store that outfits the Washington, D.C...

...Listen to him describe the first U.S...

...At the very least, a professional soldier wouldn’t have concluded this book as Hackworth does, with this Tarzan-like chest-pounding: “So be warned, all you Perfumed Princes and Propaganda Poets, all you slick political porkers and weapons makers with your hands in the till...

...So writes Peter G. Peterson in his wake-up call to politicians on the dangers of merely representing, rather than leading, an electorate woefully unprepared for the agewave soon to overtake American society...

...He castigates the special intemts that flooded the Kerrey-Danforth Entitlements Commission with 350,000 postcards before it considered a single recommendation...

...As we have come to expect from his writings, he carefully documents how well-meaning and popular old-age benefit promises have launched the American economy on a perilous journey into darkness...

...GM went through an unprecedented marketing test for the Impact, making 50 copies and offering them free to drivers around the country, as a field test and a test of the attitudes of potential buyers...

...He also hits the nail on the head in underscoring the single greatest scandal in our military, the continuing imbalance between the resources devoted to acquiring high-tech gear and the resources devoted to improving the lot of the infantryman...

...First in a full-length biography and now in the series of lectures which comprise his current book, Carter has taken such a lucid and precise measure of the man and his times that a portrait of much greater depth and breadth emerges: not just Wallace and Alabama and the segregationist South, but the sweep and substance of a halfcentury of American politics...

...This was rather like a meatandpotatoes host ordering take-out tofu to prepare for the visit of a kooky vegetarian...

...Supreme Court and all “demonstrators” and “anarchists...

...You’ll have some fun...

...MATTHEW L. WALD covers transportation for The New York Times...

...Electric Dreams By Matthew L. Wald WHEN CALIFORNIA DECIDED IN 1990 that it would require the production of electric cars, General Motors commissioned an outside firm to build one...

...Dallek also makes the case that successful presidents don’t necessarily need huge mandates to start, but must understand where political consensus is or can be reached, then exploit or create it...

...And it was a time that encompassed the Persian Gulf war and renewed concern about oil imports...

...Hackworth is at his blowziest in the chapter on his role in the suicide earlier this year of Adm...

...As I recall, a generation of Pentagon reporters put bread on their tables precisely by grinding out encyclopedic stories about those projects...

...He reminds us that it is essentially the same model being followed by our new competitors, the fast-growing economies of Southeast Asia-not to mention our own forbears...

...The distinction tends to be lost on the general population, especially the political and economic elites who know little and care less about military affairs...

...It hits the key points of how soldiers behave, and how they are commanded...

...Can GM move into the related industry of recharging electric cars by marketing fast charging stations to shopping centers and office buildings...

...Making the Corps...

...We don’t even find out how many GM hopes to market...

...We don’t read anythmg about these issues...

...The Marines really do operate differently than-and frequently better than-the Army...

...Bill Clinton has certainly been thinking about this question as he contemplates a second term...

...A company that made itself into the world’s largest manufacturer of the internal-combustion engine looks askance at a technology that could replace what is literally the engine of its success...

...You’ll learn a lot...

...But the book, despite its title, isn’t really about the Impact (now the EV-I), or electric cars at all, but about General Motors, which is cast in a somewhat heroic light: It met the engineering challenges not so much of inventing an electric car- that, after all, was done before the turn of the last century-but of manufacturing one by the thousands...

...For example, he notes that GM has also begun producing an electric version of its Chevy S-10 pickup...

...Then, three pages later, he portrays himself asking Sen...

...theirs really only protect against shrapnel and other bits of flying metal, hence the name “flak jacket...

...His framework is not deeply systematic, but his categories are sensible...

...Worse, The CRY That Could misses much of the context in which GMs work was done...

...It was also a period in which natural gas and methanol vehicles, once hailed as quicker, less complicated alternatives than the electric car would be, seemed to rise and then fade in the technological horse race...

...Pragmatists without vision are seen as opportunists,” he writes...

...I intend to keep sniffing around like an old coyote, chewing on the Military Industrial Congressional Complex and calling ’em as I see ’em...

...Stealth bombers (costing $2 billion a pop) and the like get all the attention, while the soldiers who actually carry out most of today’s missions tote outdated equipment...

...Sam Nunn and senior Army officers to promote an Army friend that Hackworth considers a true warrior-as if lobbying for promotions were a reporter’s proper role...

...Graying means paying,” Peterson observes...

...If anyone has demonstrated that it is possible to stuff 10 pounds of bull into a five-pound bag, it is David Hackworthor, as it says at the top of every other page in this book, “Colonel David H. Hackworth...

...Some of the reasons have bearing on electrics, such as the public’s perception of the future price and availability of gasoline...

...Oil dependence is not why the Air Resources Board wanted electric vehicles, but along with carbon dioxide buildup (another problem that electric cars could ameliorate), it is a major reason that enthusiasts give for elecmcs...

...In an interview with The Washington Post, he talked about the fact that most great presidents, like Lincoln, Wilson, and FDR, developed their reputations conquering crises like great wars or depressions...

...e Bush, House Speaker Newt Gingrich, k d the conservative counterrevolution of the past 30 years...

...Shnayerson does give some interesting hints of GMs relationship with its closest competitors, Chrysler and Ford...

...Has the company thought that far ahead...

...He notes that Teddy Roosevelt “made his mark on the White House not simply by turning himself into a celebrity whom millions of Americans admired, but by idenafylng himselfwith a progressive and romantic nationalism that promised to bind the country together and make it a force for law and order on the world scene!’ Hail to the Chiefis solid, well-written popular history...

...These are the arguments Congress must use-not only to educate the public on what must be done, but to justify its actions afterward...

...His recommendations on large-scale defense policy are just as tired...

...Are there lessons here from which this president can profit...

...Particularly fascinating and compelling are the depictions of Wallace as a master political craftsman in his national campaigns for president, and the extent to which Wallace and Nixon viewed each other with fear and hatred-and grudging respect- throughout their years as adversaries...

...Powell may disagree with that assessmentbut not the soldiers out on the pointy end of the stick...

...It would be instructive to hear of the internal debate on how GM decided to sell the Geo Metro or the S-10 to Solectria, which has been buying both and discarding their gasoline engines, transmissions, and exhaust systems to convert them to electricity...

...With the permanently wounded Wallace out of the political picture at last, Nixon and the Republicans were momentarily free (before Watergate) “to build a ‘New American Majority’ on the solid foundation of the conservative South,” Dan Carter asserts...

...Dallek competently covers the historical waterfront, focusing in greater detail on some of the more celebrated and vilified presidents...

...Good Presidents, Bad Presidents by Norman Ornstein WHAT MAKES A GOOD PRESIDENT good, and a lousy president lousy...

...Yet in the past, Peterson’s recommendations have centered mainly on balancing the budget...

...One burst from an AK-47 or an incoming RPG coulcl turn the Grungies into colanders and anyone in them to salad dressing,” he writes at one point in his inquiry into the October 1993 firefight in Mogadishu that killed 18 American soldiers...

...Now, in his Walter Lynwood Fleming lectures in Southern History, delivered in 1991 at Louisiana State University, he succinctly summarizes the rise and fall of Wallace as a regional and national fipu1...

...Hail to the Chief may raise these questions without providing any neat answers: but it is worth reading nonetheless...

...But we never find out if this is “The Car That Will”sell, that is...

...With California’s intentions hard to read (in fact, the state eventually delayed the mandate), and with General Motors lurching from profit to loss and back, the company’s Impact program was inconsistent, moving in fits and starts...

...Unsuccessful presidents often overstep their mandates...

...Among his prescriptions: a mandatory savings plan that initially supplements and then gradually replaces the unfunded Social Security program...

...There is a lot to criticize, but he misses the target altogether when he calls for more stories about Pentagon spending on projects like the Milstar satellite, the early Bradley fighting vehicle, and the B-1 bomber...

...The book jacket assures us that Shnayerson had “unlimited access...

...If Hackworth were a professional soldier, he probably would have been able to look at the big picture more insightfully...

...Hackworth doesn’t do himself or his employer, Newsweek magazine, any good when he casually charges that Newmeek‘s regular defense correspondent, John Barry, “had been so busy practicing hey-let’s-do-lunch journalism that it is small wonder he didn’t discover or develop the Boorda story himself’ He uses the episode to lecture Barry on the job of a reporter...

...Our satellites can see license plates from outer space, but our mine detectors can’t see the mines under our soldiers’ feet...

...He should have been as proud of the Navy as it was of him...

...Inter-service rivalry” is a familiar target, and he fires at it predictably, as have a dozen previous authors in ripthelid-off-the-Pentagon books...

...Dallek argues that virtually every successful president has not only articulated a larger vision, but coupled it with pragmatism-an understanding that political accomplishments often require flexible means...

...It should be like invading Grenada was for the U.S...

...Moreover, they did not allow themselves to be overwhelmed by unanticipated problems, but rather seized upon them as opportunities to lead the nation through a time of troubles...

...It was an era of tremendous progress in the field, much of it outside the workshops of General Motors, and sometimes =outside GMs ken, too...

...But however he may have intended it, this book isn’t really written for the vast middle class...

...I was aware that the 1st Brigade, commanded by Col...

...Indeed, much of this fact-laden book is devoted to disproving claims that America can wriggle out of its demographic future...

...All the more reason to admire a scholar such as Dan T Carter, the Kenan Professor of History at Emory University...

...37875 W Twelve Mile Sute 101 PO Box2006 Farm ngton h 11s...

...The fact is that Hackworth isn’t a professional journalist, but a gifted amateur...

...But as the state stuck to its guns and said that by the 1998 model year auto companies would have to make 2 percent of their cars “zero emission vehicles,” GM got serious about the tofu and decided to make its own...

...Instead, Peterson calls on Congress to replace the ‘’vicious cycle” of debt and dependency with a new “virtuous cycle” of saving and self-denial...

...But then it is as if another round of drinks arrives at the table, and your drinking buddy’s focus wavers...

...If he makes it to a second term and never faces the equivalent of a depression or a Civil War, can he find the means to craft a memorable presidency...

...and pareddown, means-tested health benefits that stop lavishing the most expensive care on those at the very end of life...

...But if he knows what the test drivers said, he does not share it with us...

...On the other hand, it does not want to be left behind...

...One of Wall Street’s leading investment bankers, Peterson is a very wealthy guy...

...How would electric cars enter the market...

...Successful presidents have personalities that either demonstrate charisma or that embody American dreams or currents...

...troops in Bosnia in December 1995, from the 1st Brigade of the Army’s 1st Armored Division: “During the time I spent with them I never saw a soldier out of uniform, a dirty weapon, an unalert warrior, and I never heard a leader raise his voice...

...that would come to dominate the rhetoric of American politics...

...Retirement Plans By Paul Hewitt THERE ARE MOMENTS IN THE HIStory of great nations when a single choice can mean the difference between alternative futures-one bright, the other dark...

...those within the company who wanted to kill the program do not show up in any detail in the book...

...But by Washington standards, his proposals are bold...

...When he blows, he blows hard...

...only a few, like Teddy Roosevelt, managed to show greatness without that kind of challenge...

...Even so, the Alabamian singlehandedly “gave shape and focus to a whole range of social issues...

...In the broad sweep of things this concept is hardly radical...

...As the baby boomers retire over the next three decades, America will experience a sustained rise in consumption by persons who no longer produce as much as they consume...

...And the Navy really quietly believes that its radar can detect more of the Stealth bomber than the Air Force lets on...

...The problem with the story as told by Shnayerson is that producing an electric car is something that a company with as many talented engineers as GM ought to be able to do...

...Shnayerson quotes one GM executive who called the EV (electric vehicle) development program “a rogue cell hidden from the corporate immune system...

...For eight years, he labored on a biography of Alabama governor and presidential aspirant George C. Wallace, who to this day has not deigned to speak to the professor...

...Political Booknotes Soldiers' Stories By Thomas E. Ricks READING DAVID HACKWORTH'S new bookis like spending an evening drinking in a bar with a smart, talkative U.S...

...He is similarly good at pointing out how badly run the U.S...

...Hackworth‘s precise description reflects his hiowledge of what is important to notice in a military operation...

...police, can stop some bullets...

...And I laughed at his description of his “Deep Throat” source in Haiti who dished the inside skinny...

...While noting the significant differences between economic and social conservatives, particularly in regard to the politics of race and gender, Carter nonetheless asserts that the two streams “ultimately joined in the political coalition that reshaped American politics from the 1970s through the mid-1990s...

...More than that, as Carter shows in his last two essays, many of the conservative ideas, issues, and tactics of the 1980s and ’90s that have worked so well for Reagan, Bush, Pat Buchanan, and the new congressional majorities are traceable to the Machiavellian mind of the little man from Alabama...

...Not only was that move “a major factor in the collapse of the Democrats” in 1972, says Carter...

...There is always a tension between the two in American military culture...

...Yet when it comes to the politics of change, Peterson is no bomb-thrower...

...The company, for example, continued to complain that it couldn’t make its batteries perform in cold climates, while Solectria, a tiny challenger, solved the problem on the Geo Metros it was converting to electricity...

...Instead, Peterson appeals to the sensibilities of decent people...

...I’m pretty sure from his description that this inside man was the same guy I and a dozen other journalists interviewed over beers in the garden of the Hotel Montana, up in the plush suburlis overlooking Port-au-Prince...

...LEHMAN - Government is Bad * Punishment Deters Crime - Foreign Aid is a Waste * Capitalism as a Theology * We are Overtaxed as a Nation *The Iledia is Controlled by Liberals * Liberals Help the Poor for Votes Paperback 132 p p 90% of profits go to charity GLS Publishing Inc...

...His media criticism, for example, is perplexing...

...Implicit in Peterson’s sometimes technical, sometimes rambling narrative is a personal appeal for Congress to act first and explzn later...

...It is unlikely that there was more than one garrulous Canadian advising the Haitian junta and talking to reporters...

...The first two of Carter’s four LSU lectures are the most incisive, if only because they offer a perspective on the 1960s and ’70s that can’t yet be had on the more recent decades...

...On the electric car, Chrysler’s approach to regulatory compliance was, loosely stated, “The dog ate my homework...

...His career needed no embellishment...

...Southern Fried Politics By John Egerton ONE OF THE GREAT drawbacks of writing biography-or so it would seem to me-is the unavoidable necessity of spending huge blocks of time studying your subject, dead or alive...

...Can he find enough of a vision, or create enough of an atmosphere of trust, to go down in history alongside his two Roosevelt role models...

...Michael Shnayerson, a contributing editor to h i t y Fair and Conde Nast fiaveler, captures a good portion of that conflict in his new book, with a slew of in-depth interviews and some valuable insights...

...I was there with those troops, and that is a better description than I was able to write at the time...

...We still have little idea after reading this book...

...This could get to be tedious...

...He is at his hest when he is talking about, and talking to, the soldier in the trenches...

...a consumedincome levy that taxes what people spend, not what they earn...

...and goes on to document the Alabamian’s profound influence not onty on Southern Republicrats but also on Presidents Ronald Reagan and Georg...

...And, when he hlrIlS belligerent, you might get a punch or two thrown at you...

...The further Hackworth gets from the front lines, the less sure his touch becomes...

...Dallek identifies five characteristics common to successful presidents-vision, pragmatism, consensus, charisma, and trust-and looks at each one in terms of presidents who have had them and presidents who have not...

...As examples, he cites Jefferson and the Louisiana Purchase, Andrew Jackson’s role in democratizii American politics, andJFK’s handlug of the Cuban Missile Crisis...

...He does denounce “the unspoken truce between ‘supply siders’ opposed to any tax increase, and ‘liberals’ opposed to any cut in domestic spending” who settle their differences by borrowing...

...He offers clear-headed advice on what must be done, and why...

...As a student of history, Clinton will welcome historian Robert Dallek’s new book, which surveys all 41 American presidents to examine the qualities that made and unmade their reputations...

...Pragmatists with vision are seen as statesmen, or at the very least, good politicians...

...To some extent GM seems to have plowed ahead simply because its Detroit brethren did so badly...

...CNN’s communications capabilities, in the house the network rented on the bank of the Saw River, also outclassed the Colonel’s...

...Throughout the book, GM gets credit for reviving the electric car, a technology that has mostly languished since before World War I. Perhaps Shnayerson is too kind...

...If anything, Carter’s admittedly more liberal proclivities and Wallace’s cold shoulder made the author bend every effort to be thorough, fair, and honest in his portrayal of the foremost segregationist of the mid-20th century...

...it could have led to Wallace’s nomination had he not been crippled by a would-be assassin’s bullet...

...Aided by the superb research of Neil Howe and Richard Jackson, he combines the latest official data and studies on the future of the budget and the economy to systematically explode the myths used to rationalize the unsustainable age-based welfare state...

...Carter’s The Politics of Rage: George Walhce, the Origins of the New Conservativn, ana’ the Transfoolmation ofAmerican Politics received critical acclaim when it was published in 1995 and won the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award earlier this year...

...Wallace wouldn’t talk to Carter, but he talked to lots of others, and Carter has found them, scoured the record, and painted a full portrait of the man and his legacy that stands as its own indictment...

...Solectria wanted GM to sell them without engines, but GM never would...

...10th Mountain Division was when it was in Haiti, undercutting its morale...

...But confrontation isn’t his style...

...It may produce redundancies (which, in fact, aren’t always bad in war), but it also introduces an element of competition and truth-telling in the services...

...It amazed me in Bosnia last winter that every reporter wore better body armor than did the American troops they were covering...

...MI 48333 cessful presidents with vision and pragmatism have made huge mistakes-Wilson with the Treaty of Versailles, FDR with courtpacking, Truman with the Korean War...

...Ford was more earnest but less apt, sticking to the sodium-sulfur battery, which it invented 30 years ago but hasn’t made practical...

...In the 1972 campaign, hints of a deal between the two adversaries accompanied a Wallace return to the Democratic Party from his previous candidacy as a third-party renegade...

...Carter vividly describes a Wallace rally at Madison Square Garden in October 1968, at which a throng of “20,000 of the faithful, the largest indoor political gathering in New York City since a Franklin Roosevelt speech in 1936,” roared in anger with the pugilistic Alabama governor as he delivered “a performance that was palpably sexual, bizarrely blending the sacred-God, Mother, Country-and the profane, with calls for violence and retribution” against the U.S...

...Yet he rarely misses an opportunity to use his formidable intellect and powers of persuasion to further the twin causes of economic growth and generational equity...

...And so they did, and so it is that George Wallace can be declared the red father of contemporary Republicanism in Dixie...

...I was prepared to t r d i this book...

...But Shnayerson misses the other side, the paradigm question, which was clearly still an open one when his story began...

...Finance it with taxes, and you will drastically lower the living standards of middle-class families...

...We’ll have to take his word for it...

...But it is important...

...But once you get past the swaggering persona, Hackworth, who retired spectacularly from the army 25 yews ago, makes a lot of sense...

...He calls for public education, and for the vast, dependent middle class to become part of the solution...

...While many of the superstars in presidential history earned their acclaim for their responses to crises, he says, “Some of our most successful presidents were those who converted relatively lesser dangers into political capital...

...The story of General Motors and its electric car, which is now entering the market in California, is as complicated a love/hate relationship as any in the history of technology and marketing...

...Marines...

...It could be much worse if the person were someone you didn’t particularly like, someone whose philosophy and behavior you found reprehensive, and someone who was hostile to your biographical intent...

...This time he makes a comprehensive, urgent case for a savings policy-an expansion of government’s regulatory powers in the interests of protecting posterity...

...The new rhetoric-carefully tested and marketed by political consultantsmay lack Wallace’s visceral edge (and wit),” Carter declares, “but it reflects the same callous political exploitation of the raw wounds of racial division in our country...

...In his latest book, Will America Grow Up Before It Grows Old?, Peterson gives voice to a growing anxiety that we are fast approaching the day when, if we do not act, we will pay a terrible price...

...Given his bias for the grunt down in the mud, Hackworth also provides a surprisingly fair infantryman’s assessment of Colin Powell, who is his polar opposite in military culture, the staff weenie who never strayed too far from the flagpole: "General Colin Powell is a fine political officer with distinguished career as a military bureaucrat....He was never a romping, stomping, war-fighting general...

...In the process, taxes will crowd out savings and investment, and with it our ability to compete in world markets...

...The history buff may learn little new about the presidents, but he will profit from Dallek’s approach, and perhaps have fun trying to read the book from Bill Clinton’s perspective...

...Finance this consumption with deficits, he warns, and the economy will collapse amid soaring interest rates and debt service costs...

...It asked them, among other things, how the car limited their driving, and how much they would be willing to pay...

...Yet even sucbdsiness basis Government should De human It snould have a neart HERBERHT...

...He and his children are likely to do fine in any future our policy makers create, bright or dark...

...Fontenot’s...

...The whole experience could be enough to make you swear off writing forever...

...THOMAS E. RICKS is the Pentagon correspondent for The Wall Street Journal and the author of the forthcoming book...

...Behind the scenes of Nixon’s victory in 1968 and his subsequent handling of racial and social issues, Carter says, there was always the specter of Wallace lurking over his right shoulder...

...More than a n M 7 Will Amerika Grow Up is about leadership...

...His self-defense rings hollow, and his words grow mushy: “[HJis suicide was a tragedy...

...My boots were warmer than Col...

...Gregory Fontenot, had about the most crackerjack chain of command I’d ever seen...

...As an offshoot of a related industry, the way Sony and I?hillips, television manufacturers, moved into VCRs, or as a new industry...

...NORMAN ORNSTEIN, is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute...

...Over the years, no public figure has more consistently sounded the alarm over the financial devastation that awaits if we fail to prepare for the baby boomers’ retirement...

...Mike Boorda, who at the time was the chief of the Navy...

...But inter-service rivalry is underappreciated...

...This follows on his military career: He was a “warrior,” not a professional soldier who manages the violence of others...

...What's more, though most Republican conservatives try to ignore George Wallace “in fervent hope that he will quietly disappear out the back door of our historical memory,” Carter finds his fingerprints all over the party dossier: on Barry Goldwater’s vote against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, on Richard Nixon’s subtle manipulation of the busing issue, on Reap’s genial demolition of affirmative action, on Bush‘s use of the Willie Horton commercials, on Gingrich’s demonization of welfare mothers...

...The meat of the book, the transition from a one-of-a-kind show car to a mass-produceable version, is the story of a real achievement...

...JOHN EGERTON's most recent book is Speak Now Against the Day...