Political Booknotes
Swope, Matthew Cooper,Judith Havemann,Michael Lind,Matthew Miller,Joseph A. Page,John L. Parker Jr.
Political Booknotes A Win for the Good Guys by John L. Parker Jr. IF YOU THOUGHT THAT BLATANT, pervasive, corporate-sponsored racism could not exist in America in the last quarter of the...
...It is a backhanded testament to LBJ's remarkable industry that he was able to launch the Great Society and fight the Vietnam War, given all the time he lavished on foiling RFK initiatives...
...Most Republican leaders probably think that Leo Strauss is a brand of jeans...
...Tommy Warren worked exclusively on the case for four years without receiving a penny for it until he was fully victorious...
...Enter Henry and Billie Elliott, a white married couple who managed a Captain D’s seafood restaurant, which is part of the company that also owns Shoney’s...
...and for the Tommy Warrens, who dare to champion them...
...troops influenced the decision not to give the Bolivian army the up-to-date hardware its generals were requesting...
...But who will pay for it...
...presence in Bolivia to an absolute minimum and to provide the Bolivian army with only the support it actually needed to defeat the guerrillas...
...Despite the president’s efforts to include him in important discussions, Johnson was a virtual nonentity in the Kennedy administration, an object of derision for the New Frontier loyalists...
...Ash recognizes that whatever betrayal he feels is nothing compared to what East German victims must feel...
...v. Shoney’s, Inc...
...The list of Strauss’ students and admirers includes a number of luminaries of the conservative intellectual movement between the 1950s and the 1990s: Willmoore Kendall, Irving Kristol and his son William, Robert Bork, Harvey Mansfield, Alan Keyes, Clarence Thomas, and William Bennett, among others...
...The ideological engine propelling the dramatic reforms was a Republican belief that welfare caused the high rates of out-of-wedlock births and family disintegration that they consider responsible for the plight of the inner cities and depressed rural areas...
...The department agreed to provide the cash, only to shelve the successful model used in the pilot and replace it with a do-your-own-thing approach, scattering the money to untested models advanced by applicants in the public housing field...
...One would be disappointed...
...People will do evil things, perhaps out of wrong-headed convictionsas with Ray Danner - or because they are paid well, as were his lawyers...
...Unfortunately, the vast majority of the book‘s sprawling 18 chapters is devoted to advancing the “evil Republicans” charge...
...6 intellectuals who fled Hitler (or in some cases Stalin) in the 1930s and 1940s...
...Kamber has opinions on lots of subjects-political history, rhetoric, economic and social policy, suburbanization, Presidents Reagan and Clinton, progressivism, and electoral politics-and has tried to cram them into one book...
...Finally, the setting of a limited, achievable goalthe destruction of Guevara’s guerrilla band-reflected a lesson learned from the open-ended involvement that was producing a quagmire for U.S...
...It’s just not as easy as it was in, say, 1750, for a reasonably intelligent layman to follow the march of science while also staying awake...
...Postwar-American conservatism also counts among its patron saints intellectual exiles from Europe such as Ludwig von Mises and Eric Voegelin...
...Louis...
...Well, yes, but won’t anyone else ’fess up and say that much of the book is unreadable...
...Despite his access, Chitester-who I knew casually when I was covering the White House-doesn’t dish much dirt...
...Shoney’s assembled a veritable army of lawyers to defend the indefensible, including Nashville’s highpowered Jim Neal (of Watergate fame, and also currently Al Gore’s lawyer) and Birmingham’s Butch Powell, a bearded, blustery, three-pieced thug who actually told Warren at one point that what he (Powell) wanted most of all from the case was to get Warren disbarred...
...The late Allan Bloom, in The Closing of the American Mind, and Francis Fukuyama, in The End OfHistory, have made the larger public and not just the intellectual community aware of Straussian themes...
...And he was serious...
...If we truly believe in fairness and equality, as we say we do, we’d better thank our lucky stars that some among us have that impulse-for the Henry and Billie Elliotts of the world who, against crazy, unwinnable odds, stand up to injustice...
...Watkins, who teaches at Mary Washington College in Fredericksburg, Va., occasionaly allows the sheer mass of material generated by this case to overwhelm him (the notes and sources sections in the back of the book go on for 33 pages), but he does an admirable job of making the legal intricacies of a modern civil’-rights class action intelligible...
...In Bolivia,” Ryan notes, “the American theory of counterinsurgency and the Cuban theory of revolution met head -on...
...And Pinker’s vivid explanations of many points make it clear the fault does not lie entirely with him...
...mentors has been a source of inspiration for writers and filmmakers alike...
...If there is a flaw in Shesol's account, it is a failure to keep the reader fully abreast of "the big picture...
...Still, the long hours took their toll...
...More importantly, the reader is left wondering what the Kennedy-Johnson schism meant in the broader context of the unraveling of the Democratic party...
...About 200,000 poor people are dropping off welfare every month...
...By the early IB90s, the neoconservatives who had joined the Republican party had ceased to differ in any significant respect from old-fashioned Republican conservatives...
...In Leo Strauss and the American Right, Shadia B. Drury, a professor o f ’ politics at the University of Calgary in Canada, examines the influence on the American right of one of the most celebrated Cmigrk intellectuals, Leo Strauss (1899-1973...
...Board of Education, and it devolves finally, as do all great contests in human affairs, into a passionate clash of wills...
...Ash discovers that Michaela’s betrayals included not only him, but also the West German boyfriend of her stepdaughter...
...Because the clips are so valuable, Chitester wound up on virtually every presidential flight using his laptop computer to get the latest news reports...
...That may sound like hubris...
...and Ralph “Pappy” Shelton, who led the Green Beret contingent that trained the Bolivian Rangers and developed a much warmer rapport with local peasants than the Cubans who came to “liberate” them...
...Jump out of the window?’’ she responds...
...Here, Pinker synthesizes and defends the view of the mind that’s emerged from two distinct but increasingly intertwined strains of modern science: evolutionary psychology (which argues that our minds, like our bodies, are the product of eons of Darwinian natural selection), and artificial intelligence (which, by replicating human processes, sheds light on the engineering feats involved in mundane activities like guzzling a beer...
...The informant is not the only participant who feels anguish...
...The results have ranged from a first-rate novel by Jay Cantor (The Death of Che Guevara) to a beyond-dreadful Hollywood film with Omar Sharif in the title role (‘%he...
...Poison Politics is ultimately a victim of its own sprawl...
...The sad fact is that the two postwar conserva1:ive intellectual movements in the United Statesthe largely Catholic movement centered on William F. Buckley Jr., and the more recent, largely Jewish movement of which Irving Kristo1 was the informal leader-have left little or no trace on the substance of American conservative politics...
...But Pinker's desire to make the science go down easy can't compensate for hundreds of sentences like this one: "The other answer is that the unique pattern of symbol manipulations triggered by the first symbol mirrors the unique pattern of relationships between the referent of the first symbol and the referents of the triggered symbols...
...When Johnson became president in November 1963, Kennedy aides reacted with the same incredulity as Franklin Roosevelt’s staff had 18 years earlier when a former haberdasher was called upon to fill the shoes of the man whom they would continue to call “the President” well after April 1945...
...All of these ideas, though, need greater exposition than Kamber provides...
...Instead, the book focuses on demand-side reforms...
...Nothing could be further from the truth...
...Schorr also describes how many programs are judged by how much they spend, how many people they can get to show up, and their timeliness in meeting paperwork requirementsrather than by whether they have helped the people they were designed to serve...
...The bad blood between the two can be traced back to Johnson’s rather anemic campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1960, only to crystallize during JFKs administration...
...The book articulates and applies this approachamounting to what Pinker dubs “reverse engineering the psyche”to everything from our eyes’ design and the nature of altruism to the thorny question of why humans still find poems, jokes, and even love indispensable...
...It was amazing how seriously people took the packages of news clippings we produced each morning,” he writes...
...The conservative intellectuals did not take over the Republican party, but were taken over by it...
...The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 remain President Johnson’s greatest accomplishments...
...As she reads the pages of information that Ash provides her from his file, she begins to realize the harm in what she has done: “I can’t read any more...
...a more detailed examination of the legacy of these two remarkable figures would have been appropriate...
...The whole reform discussion occupies only one chapter...
...What happened to the Elliotts, it turns out, was not particularly unusual in Dannerland, but their reaction was...
...So what should I do...
...Drury finds plausible the claim of The New York Times that Leo Strauss was the godfather of the 1994 Republican Contract with America...
...The 30th anniversary of Guevara’s death has sparked a renewal of interest, a spate of books, and a "Che chic" phenomenon exploited by memorabilia merchants and entrepreneurs who bring starry-eyed tourists to the remote backlands where a Bolivian Ranger battalion cornered, captured, and summarily executed the Argentine-born revolutionary on October 9,1962 The romantic figure of Che Guevara has remained as dominant during this revival as it was in his heyday as the paladin of Fidel Castro-style revolutionary communism...
...But whenever Air Force One lifts up frorn Andrews, the presiclent is so isolated--as are his staff and the press corps-that they might as well be in a TV studio...
...JOSEPH A. PAGE, author of The Brazilians and Peron A Biography, is a professor at the Georgetown University Law Center...
...under Ronald Reagan "the fabric of our nation quietly unraveled...
...Drury’s account of the relationship between Strauss and other antiliberal and anti-democratic 19th- and 20th-century German thinkers like Friedrich Nietzche, Carl Schmidt, and Martin Heidegger is generally persuasive...
...This widely shared bias in favor of the Greeks and against the Romans (and Italians) is a legacy of 19th-century German and British Romanticism...
...Just as Harold Ickes, the president’s friend of 25 years had to read in the paper that he was out on his rear, Chitester had a similarly inelegant departure...
...Hunting Che by Joseph A. Page VER THE PAST THREE DECADES, the end game played out by Che Guevara, the Bolivian army, and its U.S...
...and by using economic and social aid to strengthen their internal security...
...He lived and worked in Berlin in 1991...
...Kamber would give four hours of free airtime to each party during their national conventions, and additional radio and television time to the parties during the fall campaigns...
...He seldom spends more than a paragraph or two explaining any of these proposals...
...I came to realize that working at the White House is like eating chocolate cake, no matter how delicious you think it is, if you eat it for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, seven days a week, 365 days a year, you will get sick of it...
...But then Dickens had an excuse: he was paid by the word...
...They were fired in 1988 primarily because they refused to fire black employees and replace them with white ones at their Panama City, Fla., restaurant...
...But even if there’s nothing scandalous here, there are plenty of interesting observations about the life of a staffer...
...This problem has escalated rather than diminished under the new welfare regime...
...And he did so, apparently, by spending the bulk of his days flying and driving around the South to various company restaurants adjusting thermostats, weighing pieces of fish, and instructing managers to keep black employees either out of sight in the kitchen, or off the payroll altogether...
...Richard Weaver, an early conservative intellectual, wrote a once-celebrated book entitled Ideas Have Cnnsequences...
...She denies knowing that she was considered an informer and refuses to look at the evidence Ash has brought to show her...
...Much of this may be true, but Kamber can’t be bothered with assembling evidence...
...In fact the Contract owed less to the Herr Doktor than to the Spin Doctor...
...When Clinton took office, Chitester wrangled a job with the news analysis group in the White House, the people who put together the newspaper clips about Clinton...
...It’s hard to know what to make of this disappointment...
...Fortunately, as with Dickens, it turns out you can skip 10 pages here or there and not really lose the drift...
...Selling Out Strausvs by Michael Lind N THE PAST HALF CENTURY, ONE of the most striking phenomena in American intellectual life has been the influence of European Cmigr...
...He echoes the words of numerous Kennedy partisans in suggesting that the hard-as-nails attorney general “grew” into a genuine champion of the downtrodden in the years following his brother’s death...
...But the impulse to do good often remains something of a mystery...
...After four years and thousands of hours of painstaking detective work and court battles, that single thread eventuallv unraveled a massive taDestry of intentional, illegal, corporatewide racist behavior and led to the largest class of plaintiffs ever certified in the federal civil rights action, Haynes et al...
...Clinton and the nation’s governors are declaring victory over intractable social problems on the basis, not of a handful of numbers, but on a single one: the decline in caseload...
...those on the right have surely heard all this before Kamber's strong liberalism leads him to frequent namecalling and questionable evidence to support his thesis...
...This is not to say that the book doesn’t have some redeeming features...
...Stronger party messages might actually improve public comprehension of campaign messages-an outcome devoutly to be wished...
...IF YOU THOUGHT THAT BLATANT, pervasive, corporate-sponsored racism could not exist in America in the last quarter of the 20th century, read The Black (9: Racism and Redemption in an American Corporate Empire, by Steve Watkins...
...A Weak Antidote by Steven E. Schier THE RECENT CAMPAIGN MADness detailed in this fall's Senate hearings has turned the sins and shortcomings of our elections system into the topic du jour...
...The problems Schorr identifies are the right ones, and her suggested solutions are sound...
...Kamber points out how far is too far when going negative, offering vivid examples from recent campaigns of attacks on candidates’ character, race, gender, or sexual orientation that will make most readers’ stomachs turn...
...He began pulling on that single loose strand of evidence, and the more he tugged the more incriminating incidents and witnesses he found...
...His former colleagues and the Clintons will continue to like him...
...The weight is heavy...
...One informant, “Michaela,” when being confronted with evidence of her cooperation with the STASI, replied that someone of her position was “obliged” to cooperate...
...Although the various biographers of each man have of necessity discussed the Kennedy-Johnson rivalry, none has covered the matter as comprehensively or as well as Shesol does here...
...He argues, without significant evidence, that negative advertising doesn’t depress electoral turnout...
...He sprints from topic to topic, spouting opinions instead of giving the reader what he or she really could use: evidence that is better balanced and a more sustained analysis of the problems with campaigns and how to reform them...
...Ash was astonished to receive hundreds of pages detailing his movements in East Berlin and recounting his conversations...
...A secular Jew, Strauss believed that the harsh truths of philosophy should not be publicized, for fear of undermining the public orthodoxy on which any stable community must rest...
...Whatever one thinks of Strauss as a philosopher, he cannot be blamed for the opportunism of his followers...
...Got that...
...So perhaps the problem lies not with ourselves, but with our science...
...Uncovering social services programs that work without the strict cutoffs and tough penalties of the new law, Schorr analyzes the common qualities of these gentler efforts, figures out how they can be expanded, and then scathingly explains why they haven’t been...
...wake up calls, 10,000-mile plane rides, and staff bickering are enough to make anyone tired...
...The hermetically sealed world of the president is probably inevitable...
...Pinker argues persuasively, if hardly romantically, that the mind is “a system of organs of computation, designed by natural selection to solve the kind of problems our ancestors faced in their foraging way of life...
...Each morning the inch-thick stack compendium of clips is read by major honchos in the White House...
...The American New Left of the 1960s would hardly be conceivable without the influence of Herbert Marcuse and other German Marxist Cmigrks...
...This is a policy shift that runs exactly counter to what mainstream social science research has promoted for the past half century...
...Utilizing official documents and interviews with many of the participants, Ryan reconstructs the responses of the State Department, Pentagon, and Central Intelligence Agency as they played lead roles, at times in concert and at times discordantly, in the hunt for Guevara and his band of mostly Cuban guerrillas...
...a narrative as old as David and Goliath, and as modern as Brown vs...
...They took their story to Tallahassee attorney Tommy Warren, who had some experience as a civil rights litigator...
...Strangelove, and Don Corleone...
...because somebody else was, and they didn’t want to be left out...
...And since Kamber offers little in this indictment that kindred observers on the left have not already stated more cogently, many of his chapters make for a tedious, drearily familiar read...
...But Roosevelt had not been assassinated, nor had he an obvious successor for New Dealers to rally around...
...Political scientists Stephen Ansolabehere and Shanto Iyengar provide a mass of systematic, contrary evidence in their recent book Going Negative...
...For someone like Chitester, it was a heady experiencedespite the drudgery of the work, it afforded him a proximity to power that few pols ever know...
...Guevara, Ryan argues, was carrying out Cuban foreign policy as encapsulated in the slogan that “The duty of all revolutionaries is to make revolution...
...JUDITH HAVEMANN covers social issues for The Washington Post...
...Though Kamber favors lowering PAC contribution levels (to the current $1,000 individual level), he does not join the chorus endorsing the McCain-Feingold ban on soft money to political parties...
...by training and equipping local military and police...
...from overreacting to the guerrilla threat...
...No wonder conservatives were able to discredit the government’s social policies...
...In Poison Politics, Kamber takes a valiant stab at providing insight into our political process, but ultimately comes up short became his arguments need more elaboration and his book lacks a disciplined scope...
...These are minor shortcomings that do not seriously detract from this engrossing book...
...However, he fails to give the Bolivians the attention they merit, which is ironic in light of the on-the-mark criticism he levels at some American officials for their condescending attitude toward the South Americans...
...Spies Like Us by Sandeep Puri AS A TWENTY-SOMETHING COLlege graduate in the early 1980s, Timothy Garton Ash went to live in East and West Berlin...
...Some will say Schorr is too late...
...I feel sick, I want to puke...
...Is this a representative sample...
...Great idea...
...Moreover, the Bolivian military’s eagerness to obtain modern armaments would have been made more comprehensible by an explanation of the continuing national obsession with regaining the corridor to the Pacific Ocean that Bolivia had lost during a 19th century war with Chile...
...He was hardly alone...
...But there is another, hitherto-untold side to the story of his demise...
...The Fall of Che Guevara, a brisk monograph by retired U.S...
...AIS she talks-with pathos now-of the horrors of the camps, of her dead husband, of her faraway son, we both understand that she is placing the weight of her suffering into the scales of my judgement...
...Except President Clinton: “The debate is over,” he declared in a recent speech in St...
...We now know that welfare reform works!’ Not exactly...
...Lisbeth B. Schorr’s new book, Common Purpose, flows out of that former mainstream...
...While this may be true, everyone knew that the real battle would be in the Senate where, as Jesse Helms has so recently demonstrated, geriatric Southern conservatives are still masters of obstruction...
...To be sure, Pinker’s prose is often lively, and the text is dotted with popculture references to the “Twilight Zone", "Saturday Night Live," Dr...
...As Ash leaves he asks himself, “By what right, for what good purpose, did I deny an old lady, who had suffered so much, the grace of selective forgetting...
...Shesol is so skillful in handling what he has chosen i:o include in his book that it is perhaps a bit unfair to complain about what he left out...
...Nearly a decade later, when the files of the STASI, East Germany’s secret police, became available for people to read, he asked to see the file on him...
...The Baby in the Bath Water by Judith Havemann N AMAZING SOCIAL PHENOMEnon is occurring in this country...
...Drury treats “neoconservative” and “conservative” as synonyms, even though the most impressive neoconservative intellectuals-Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer, Theodore Draper-refused to follow Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz into an alliance with Pat Robertson and the Business Roundtable...
...She then begins to describe her life under communism...
...It is impossible to picture Leo Strauss, a reclusive thinker who shunned political involvement, declaring his belief in creationism at a press conference as part of a strategy for securing the allegiance of the trailer-park South to the GO...
...whereupon Barrientos asked journalists to choose one of the three chutes used by the dead men, took the parachute that was selected and made a successful jump with it...
...Shesol is a bit mingy in acknowledging LBJ’s virtues...
...Upon meeting those who had informed on him, Ash would frequently pop a question like, “. . . do you have an inkling why I have sought you out today...
...Ryan also describes the C W success in putting together an intelligence system for the Bolivians and the blundering by one of its field agents, whose overzealousness led to erroneous reports that agency operatives had killed Guevara...
...Almost from the moment he assumed office, Lyndon Johnson’s chief political worry was the threat of a Kennedy restoration...
...Even as she was researching her book, Congress reversed the social course of the nation, making her solutions seem less attainable than four years ago...
...As for Clinton himself, Chitester has all the conventional observation about the president’s stamina, appetite, intelligence...
...For exam.ple, Catholic and Jewish intellectual conservatives in Anierica have found it expedient to sacrifice the pro-labor strains of European Catholic c:onservatism and of Cold War liberalism in order to flourish as the house intellectuals for Republican business elites and foundations endowed b y dead tycoons...
...The licentious quality of the American love of freedom and its resemblance to the freedom of Weimar was therefore a reason for disquiet...
...Within minutes I am telling her that I have no right to sit here as her judge...
...For example, he notes that the Kennedy administration had already lined up the necessary votes in the House to pass his civil rights act by November 1963...
...He demonstrates how slow the Americans were to recognize that Che was actually in Bolivia by 1966, as well as their Idure to grasp that the lack of support he was getting from the Bolivian Communist Party was seriously hampering his efforts...
...It is true that Strauss believed that many if not most philosophers, for fear of persecution, wrote in ways that concealed their views as much as they revealed them...
...The chapters that bring Kamber’s accumulated wisdom to bear on the subject of campaign practices are original and worth taking seriously...
...Or rake the case of YouthBuild, a program which teaches inner city youngsters to build low income housing while attending school about half the time...
...As such, one might look with high hopes to Victor Kamber, veteran Democratic campaign consultant, to provide some valuable lessons about what has gone wrong in our electoral process...
...Ryan offers a thoughtful critique of both the operational and intelligencegathering aspects of the U.S...
...But Watkins brings more than research to this project...
...She neglects to point out the extent to which Strauss and his disciples have been philhellenes who emphasized the ancient Greek heritage, which was less important to the American founders than the heritage of Republican and Imperial Rome...
...But to synopsize this case is to trivialize not only Watkins’ book, but also the monumental work of Warren and his co-counsel, Barry Goldstein, making the day-to-day course of the litigation seem mundane and its eventual conclusion pre-ordained...
...Also worth considering are Kamber’s reform proposals for partial public financing of congressional elections, a ban on new ads during the last week of an election, and extensive disclaimers in independent expenditure ads...
...Early on the decision was made to keep the direct U.S...
...Of Kristol, Drury writes: “He is so convinced of the political utility of religion that he is blind to the immoerate nature of groups such as the Moral Majority of Jerry Falwell or the Christian Coalition of Pat Robertson nad Ralph Reed...
...If Mutual Contempt makes the entire eight-year period prior to March 1968 seem a prelude to Robert Kennedy’s campaign against Lyndon Johnson for the presidential nomination, it is a conflict without a climax...
...candidate in American History at Columbia University...
...Brain Drain by Matthew Miller A BOOK CALLED How the Mind Works by an acclaimed science writer has to be important, so I'm a little ashamed that I had such a hard time reading it...
...lot of folks got them who didn’t even need them-they just wanted to be on the distribution lisi...
...Steven Pinker is the energetic cognitive scientist at MIT whose previous work, The Language Instinct, was a much- hailed bestseller...
...He also makes the intriguing suggestion that RFK’s suspicion of bureaucracies and iconoclasm presaged Bill Clinton’s “New Democrats...
...The insecurity people had there, their defensiveness and addiction to perks and perceived power, never ceased to amaze me...
...the reader is assumed to know already the general arc of the civil rights movement...
...forces in southeast Asia...
...At the time, Warren wasn’t looking to take on any major cases, but the Elliotts’ story intrigued him enough to investigate further...
...President RenC Barrientos Ortuno is a major player in the story Ryan tells, but we learn nothing about his background that might shed light on his actions, despite the fact that he was a larger-than-life character, an embodiment of Latin American machismo and Bolivia’s best pilot...
...A talented writer, Shesol demonstrates the rarls gift for clarity without sacrificing complexity...
...For instance, one of her suggestions is to undertake a major national project called the Human Intervention Mapping Project, an effort to track, in minute detail, what works to alleviate poverty It would run alongside its human genome prototype...
...Strauss understood both Weimar and America in terms of Plato’s analysis of how democracy gives way to tyranny,” Drury writes...
...And there is this truism: The Clinton White House can be a casually cruel place...
...In 1992, Warren won the largest settlement ever entered in such a case: $132.5 million, the bulk of which was distributed to more than 20,000 victims of the company’s discrimination...
...Straussian thought is hard to wrap your mind around, in part because Strauss and his disciples write in a highly abstract style that keeps trespassers out...
...Not many people can claim to have been outclassed by the Nixon administration...
...The specter of Vietnam was everywhere...
...To the architects of the new order, she will seem like a military theorist saying to the developer of the tank, ‘Wait, I have some smart new srrategies to improve the horse cavalryl’ But Common Pzirpose is still highly relevant...
...And he set out on a journey back to East Germany in hopes of answering it...
...Washington had responded to the Cuban Revolution by creating the Army’s so-called Green Berets to fight low-intensity conflicts...
...The narrative ends rather abruptly with the departure of its principals from po1ii:ical life...
...More than a million and a half welfare recipients have left the rolls in the past year...
...Kamber, in fits and starts, advances two main points: First, that cei-tain despicable campaign practices have soured the public on politics...
...The informants included people with whom he had only a passing acquaintance as well as his good friends...
...But after reading this entertaining diary you'll agree...
...They merely, in his words, “appeal to emotion instead of reason...
...The real strength of the book is the story...
...history, at times it reads like an old-fashioned detective story...
...Unfortunately Drury’s account of Strauss’ thought is far better informed than her discussion of American politics...
...SANDEEP PURI is a management consultant living in New York City...
...He worked as a clandestine journalist, he studied, he made friends, he roamed around the country, and he thought hard about life in a communist country...
...The original idea was to use it as a staging area and supply center for insurgencies in adjacent copntries...
...Coming soon: Noah‘s Ark and the Shroud of Turin...
...Political Booknotes A Win for the Good Guys by John L. Parker Jr...
...Other reviewers have already hailed Pinker’s latest as “always sparkling,” calling Pinker himself “a top -rate writer” who “deserves the superlatives that are lavished on him...
...The result is a case study of perhaps the most successful counterinsurgency effort ever launched by the U.S...
...STEVEN E. SCHIER teaches political science at Carleton College in Northfield Minn, and directs the Carleton College Washington program...
...As a campaign consultant, he seems to gain great satisfaction from rhetoric alone...
...The Viet Cong’s use of weapons captured froin U.S...
...He was eventually banned from visiting East Germany because of the journalistic accounts of his experiences that he published in West Germany...
...He mentions the case of one person who had been imprisoned for five years under the communist regime for attempting to escape...
...Ken Chitester was one of those campaign types...
...MATTHEW MILLER is a senior writer at U.S...
...Furthermore, in ferreting out the elements of successful programs, the author has pinpointed precisely the areas where the current social strategies are most vulnerable...
...The book’s scope is far broader than just welfare...
...The White House was determined not to let the conflict in Bolivia escalate and become Americanized...
...Shesol acknowledges the former attorney general’s flaws but leaves little doubt as to where his sympathies lie in the Johnson-Kennedy feud...
...When three airmen were killed in a parachute jump at an air show while he was commander in chief of the air force, the press suggested the accident was caused by faulty equipment...
...This person, upon reading her file, discovered that it was the man with whom she was currently living who had denounced her to the STASI...
...KEVIN A. SWOPE is a PH.D...
...Kamber also argues that negative ads are not manipulative...
...Republicans are guilty of "greedy Puritanism" and "grinch economics...
...His goal was to trigger an armed conflict that would convert South America into another Vietnam, and he chose mountainous Bolivia because of its strategic location...
...The Republican party is but a chimera in the book, emerging from the mists to claim victory in the 1966 elecctions before vanishing again...
...But that was when I was awake...
...Aide Memoire by Matthew Cooper THEY’RE ON EVERY CAMPAIGNThe fresh-faced twenty- and thirty-somethings who herd the press from.one event to another, who make sure the motorcade gets where it’s going, who make sure the candidate has his beloved Diet Coke by his side...
...I’ On the contrary, the contemporary GOP, based on an alliance of big business with Protestant churches, is hardly distinguishable from the Republican Party that existed in the 1920s, when Leo Strauss was still teaching Plato in Germany...
...It’s like eavesdropping on a conversation between people who you suddenly feel certain know you better than you know yourself, as they parse what you presumed were your unfathomable (and charming) mysteries...
...On one level, this is a likable tale about an unpretentious guy-while in Tokyo a homesick Chitester eats at Denny’s-who makes it to the Big Show...
...While the dramatic decrease in welfare recipients is wonderful news, we don’t, in fact, know what is going on in the families and communities of people most affected by the new policies, nor do we know the fate of many of the people dropping off the rolls...
...and while his discussion of the Vietnam War is strong, his failure to mention that the American media is now judged to have fumbled in its coverage of the Tet Offensive (see Peter Braestrup’s The Big Stoyy) is an oversight worth noting...
...Some of Kamber’s points about campaign ads, however, are questionable...
...government...
...From Willmoore Kendall in the 1950s to Irving Kristol today, American conservative thinkers have invoked Strauss’ name in arguing for an American public orthodoxy, which (mirabile dictu) just happens to coincide with the orthodoxy of the conservative movement and right-wing churches...
...Though Pinker’s sprawling inventory of today’s science is often compelling, the more interesting thing may be the eerie feeling you get from using your mind to read all this cold detail about, well, your mind...
...Strauss and his followers tend to blame both communist and fascist totalitarianism for the undermining of traditional belief systems by intellectuals...
...intervention against the Cuban intervention in Bolivia...
...The first argument is easier to define and sustain than the second...
...Still, it’s amazing to be reminded that the leader of the free world greets people by saying: “Hey, man, how’s it goin...
...It is a bit of a reach to believe that Bobby Kennedy is what Sam Nunn and LBJ son-in-law Chuck Robb had in mind when they founded the Democratic Leadership Committee...
...It’s hard to tell, but Kamber’s choice of examples nicely fits the strong ideological spin of the book...
...Johnson’s withdrawail from the race two weeks later and Sirhan Sirhan ensured that neither would be the party’s standard bearer in 1968...
...Their enemies have accused Straussians of forming a cult, a charge that is risible when it comes from disciples of Marx, Freud, or Derrida...
...Department of Housing and Urban Development...
...What we do know, however, is that the old system was horrible, and that the effort to move poor families off the dole and into jobs-if in fact that is what’s happening-is a step in the right direction...
...Second, that Republicans have poisoned electoral politics and public policy since 1980...
...The informant would reply no, and the conversation would begin...
...Although it is actually a painstakingly researched account of the largest private civil rights case in U.S...
...She reports that she tried to tell as many harmless details as possible and that she hoped that this cooperation would make it easier to enjoy privileges like foreign travel...
...What is one to make of a man who not only questioned the propriety of burying the younger Kennedy in Arlington National Cemetery, but also left it to his successor to appropriate money for the memorial’s upkeep...
...An Indiana native working in Arkansas, he signed on to the Clinton campaign in 1992...
...Do away with welfare, they argued, and the problems will gradually, if painfully, be cured...
...JOHN L. PARKEJRR ., a f i n n e r attorney, is an editor and publisher in Tallahassee, Florida...
...Drury writes: “The 1996 presidential campaign of Bob Dole and Jack Kemp is a model of the neoconservative philosophy...
...Ash also becomes uncomfortable during his confrontations, at times wondering whether he is justified in disrupting someone’s life...
...and so forth...
...Isn’t that a central characteristic of manipulation...
...Unfortunately, in the current climate many of Schorr’s ideas may go ignored...
...To begin with, it deals with the grave problems in the nation’s child protective services, in schools, and in disadvantaged communities in general...
...He makes excellent use of both published and archival sources, including recently released dictabelt tapes of Johnson’s White House telephone conversations...
...Two other points: Chiltester's book is also an important reminder that politics and campaigns remain a pretty meritocratic endeavor where kids from modest backgrounds and state colleges can find themselves in exciting positions...
...MATTHEW COOPER, a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly, is a national correspondent for Newsweek...
...If you ever entertained the notion that practicing civil rights law against the likes of Danner, Powell and their various toadies might be an easy way to make a lot of money, this book would quickly disabuse you of that fantasy...
...Those on left will encounter an echo chamber of their own thoughts...
...Even as John Kennedy’s star has dimmed over the years, there still remains the glimmer of possibility about Robert...
...I don’t think it’s that I’m a lazy anti-science philistinefor example, I devoured a book that covered some of Pinker’s ground more grippingly, Robert Wright’s The Moral Animal...
...In it you’ll meet Ray Danner, an animated, banty rooster of a man who became the 266th richest person in America building the multi-million dollar Shoney’s restaurant empire...
...But he is not alone in wonderinglike many of those who care for Democratic ideals-whether Robert Kennedy could have succeeded where Hubert Humphrey and George McGovern failed, leading a unified party into the 1970s...
...While the animosity was hardly one-sided and the President would have been foolish to ignore Kennedy’s potential as an opponent, Shesol’s use of the term “paranoid” to describe some of Johnson’s actions is not out of order...
...These accounts suggest that the agency may be able to perform informationgathering tasks more effectively than high-profile action projects whose covertness can easily be shed, hence the book is relevant to the current debate over the proper role of the CIA in the post-Cold War era...
...For instance, no conservative author of the welfare overhaul could be more trenchant about the bureaucracy that strangles social service offices than Schorr...
...In his new book, Jeff Shesol makes a strong argument that it is impossible to “fully comprehend either [man] without considering his relationship with the other...
...Her analysis of the flaws and the reason for the failures of past efforts could not be more pertinent to what is now under way...
...Yet for the most part, it is difficult to fault Shesol's judgment as he relates instance after welldocumented instance of Johnson's pettiness and insecurity rgarding the Kennedys...
...intervention in Latin America...
...The mind-numbing procession of 4:30 a.m...
...A blackened “0”i n the word Shoney’s on an employment application signified to managers that the applicant was black...
...That the party proceeded to self-destruct at its August convention demonstrates that the fissures within the Democratic party ran much deeper than the competing ambitions of these two men...
...When he meets Frau R., someone whom Ash had considered a friend, he tells her of his discovery of her cooperation with the secret police...
...As he read through the contents of the file, Ash was struck by a simple question: What makes one person loyal and another a snitch...
...Later, the plan shifted and Bolivia itself became the target...
...Not only would this lessen the "money chase," but it would also channel more political communication through the parties, helping to curb our current riot of candidate individualism...
...To judge from the irrelevance of the Straussians and other conservative intellectuals to the actual agenda of the Republican party, he was wrong...
...When he decided to leave the White House, he tried to resign-but couldn’t get anyone to return his calls...
...The alliance between neoconservative intellectuals and anti-intellectuals fundamentals took a surprising turn recently when Kristol, Bork, and other right-wing intellectuals bravely declared their opposition in public to-Darwinism...
...Ryan enlivens his narrative with vivid portraits of the two American officials who played key parts in the hunt for Guevara: Ambassador Douglas Henderson, whose sang-froid helped keep the U.S...
...In theory, it’s important for the president to get out of Washington...
...Just about every example involves Republicans attacking Democrats...
...She recounts the story of Leticia Johnson, a homeless drug addict who couldn’t take a vacant bed in a detoxification unit because she didn’t have proof of an address and couldn’t get emergency treatment for a bad infection because she only had a temporary Medicaid card...
...Strauss, a German Jewish professor of philosophy, taught political science at the University of Chicago after fleeing Nazi Germany...
...A Famous Feud by Kevin A. Swope THE RIFT BETWEEN ROBERT F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson was the central fault line running down the center of the Y Democratic party at the time of the party’s greatest influence since the 1930s...
...And yet it’s hard not to feel deep nostalgia for the Truman era when the aides were fewer and when the president crossed the street to Blair House he did it by himself without a bevy of sycophants...
...But it’s also a depressing reminder that much of the presidency has become a giant road productiona cavalcade of showy trips designed to get good press...
...News & World Report and a syndicated columnist...
...Foreign Service Officer Henry Ryan, peers through the lenses of Guevara’s pursuers-American diplomats, military men, and intelligence operatives, and to a lesser extent their Bolivian counterparts...
...After spreading successfully from New York to Boston, from San Francisco to Cleveland, Tdlahassee, and Gary, all the while achieving 85 percent attendance and 67 percent completion rates, YouthBuild applied for funds from the U.S...
...For most pundits, the question was not whether RFK would seek the presidency, but when...
...MICHAEL LIND is the author of Up From Conservatism...
...It is a welcome addition to the literature on both Che Guevara and U.S...
...It is a development so extraordinary and unexpected that no one knows quite what to make of it...
...The book does provide some thoughtful proposals .for the hot topic of campaign finance reform...
Vol. 29 • November 1997 • No. 11
