TILTING AT WINDMILLS
Peters, Charles
Tilting at Windmills BY CHARLES PETERS Remembering Allen The Ambassador's Secret Lawyers to the Stars Looney Libertarians BOB DOLE REMINDS ME OF Hillary Clinton. Or to be precise, his new...
...NIY SON, CHRISTIANW,H O now lives among all the free spirits in California, recently returned to Washington for a visit...
...We had both attended Columbia two decades earlier, so our conversation soon turned to a discussion of the teachers and students who had been around during our era...
...THOSWEH O DETEST SHOPPING malls even half as much as I do will be thrilled to hear that their day may have passed...
...Unfortunately, here, because of opposition from doctors who don’t want competition, they handle only about 1 in 20 deliveries...
...Not only that, most of the cars would have to be called dull looking...
...Good news, there are too many driversmy wife says I’m onewho take a yellow light as an invitation to accelerate...
...I think the explanation is that Washington is a city of bureaucrats and politicians and those who want to influence them...
...What he didwhich is to impose this great nanny state on America-was a great niistakel’ Pat Robertson compared the recent volunteer summit to the Hitler Youth movement...
...I had to report that I failed...
...It’s not that Kraft was wrong...
...A recent story by Viki Reath of The Washington Times describes a trend among retailers in Georgetown to desert the mall in favor of storefronts along Georgetown's charming, if narrow, brick sidewalks...
...This is the essence of evil...
...It makes me uncomfortable knowing we spent $600 million and don’t know the impact,” says the state’s budget director, Bob Bradley...
...incuriosity, his indifference to what the agencies under hiin are doing every day...
...It was from Allen that I first learned about the FBI’s hideous Cointelpro, a shameful effort to besmirch the reputations of innocent leftists...
...I had thought I had to appear cool, knowing, and in control to impress the world...
...Just as her partners did not have to advertise to potential clients that they had someone who could ease the firm’s access to the governor, Dole’s new associates at Verner, Liipfert, Bernhard, McPherson, and Hand have the comfort of knowing that their potential clients, as well as practically everyone else in Washington, are aware that the Speaker of the House’s principal benefactor is on their team...
...One company, Comtrad Industries, is now advertising a device that can be put to only such uses...
...The only time an attorney is truly obligated to represent bad guys is when he is appointed to do so by the court...
...This wasn’t easy, since a fundamental tenet of the right is that all economic controls are bad...
...Readers had to turn to page 12 to find an objective report of the summit’s final day...
...IN THE LATE 1960s I RAN INTO the columnist Joseph Kraft at a Washington party...
...KIES IS EMPLOYED BY A COMMITtee controlled by the Republicans...
...got the Legislature to agree to pay for the damage...
...The Wnshizgton Post’s Katherine Shaver reports that similar experiments have also proved to be money-making in New York, California, and Arizona...
...There weren’t any Porsches or Ferraris or Corvettes...
...I started snioking because I thought it made me seem sophisticated and attractive...
...Some 30-odd years ago while serving as ambassador in India, I discovered that if I did no work my staff could do as well or better, I could finish everything in not over three hours a day, the occasional crisis excepted...
...JOHN KENNETHG ALBRAITIHN ,A recent book review in The Wnshiizgton Post, revealed the dirty secret of ambassadors: They don’t have much to do...
...Downtown building has increased," Reath quotes a vicepresident of the National Retail Federation, "and mall building is greatly reduced...
...IF YOU’RE IN DOUBT ABOUT WHO is benefiting froin Medicaid the most, consider these figures from Virginia supplied by Joseph Teefey of the state’s Department of Medical Assistance Services: The amount spent on children is $854 per child...
...FEMA said, “NO-you guys should have bought insurancel’ But according to Tyler Bridges of The Miami Herald, “Monty’s, which had long hosted fund-raisers for favored elected officials...
...There the freeway damaged in the 1989 earthquake took years to rebuild instead of the months that were required in Santa Monica...
...Roger Rosenblatt of the University of Washington, “that leads to excellent outcomes with less use of medical resources...
...Only one Miata...
...It’s about radar, which was essential to the allied victory in World War 11...
...I then kept trying to stop, and failing...
...How then could he also have been a con man...
...Allen said not to worry, Eugene was getting him out by agreeing to commit him to a psychiatric clinic...
...Likewise, Tom DeLay and Bud Shuster, whose misdeeds are described by Nurith Aizenman in an article beginning on page 8 of this issue, are Republicans...
...I’m sure this argument will comfort his employers, decent people who, I suspect, sometimes have difficulty sleeping because of the tobacco advertising money they have taken over the years...
...At a fine of up to $100, one can see the bonanza that will flood the county’s coffers...
...I count it as one of the great blessings of my life that somehow at age 19, when I first encountered Allen-talking about William Blake’s Songs of Innocence in Lionel Trilling’s Humanities 3 class-I had enough sense to know that this young man had something to teach me and that what was wrong with him should not keep me froin learning...
...Those who detest shopping malls as much as I do will be thrilled to hear that their day may have passed...
...Voluntary servitude is still servitude.,’ The conservative Wnshington Tinles put this story on the front page and headlined it, “Individualists assail volunteerism ‘hype’: ‘Sacrifice’ for Society called ‘servitude...
...Not the legislature, not the governor’s office...
...One of his former associates explained to Hitt the value of the Kies connection to the firm: “People think, ‘Well, Baker & Hostetler ought to have a direct pipeline into Ken...
...Knowing him helped keep me aware of the pitfalls and perils of that respectable world, which I joined when I went to law school and began a life in public affairs...
...But the others, particularly those you know you know but whose name you just can’t for the life of you recall, inspire panic...
...I mentioned my friend Allen Ginsberg...
...But he would also be gentle and open in a way that was extremely rare among the ambitious young Columbia students who were getting ready to don gray flannel suits and live lives of respectable desperation...
...As an experiment, it installed cameras at two intersections expecting to catch a dozen or so red-light runners a day...
...KENNETH KIES IS THE chief of staff of the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation...
...But the point is that they should have...
...I finally succeeded in quitting after 25 years, but only because I had pneumonia and was sick enough for long enough to get over the chemical dependency...
...Ironically, at the same time he was saving me from the excesses of respectability, I think Allen saw me as a link to the respectable world...
...COLUMNISRTO BERTJ . SAMUELson has come up with a new protobacco argument: Since smoking kills so many people prematurely, it actually saves the government money on health care...
...The exception, of course, is when the poor client is involved in a high-profile case that can enhance the celebrityhood of the star...
...Or to be precise, his new law firm reminds me of her Rose Law Firm during the Clintons’ time in Little Rock...
...For example, see the case for environmental self audits beginning on page 28...
...AL D'AMATO PROVIDES ANOTHER glimpse of the conservative mind at work in his attempt to explain to Republican state legislators why they should not end rent control...
...Since the government’s first anti-smoking report in 1964, almost everyone has known that cigarettes are dangerous...
...But underneath, Jack and Neal were tormented...
...They understood his potential as a poet-they gave him their highest award for poetry in 1948but you knew in their hearts they wanted him to take a bath and be a little bit more like them...
...How can anyone still believe that the states always do a better job than the federal government...
...What was that if not addiction...
...1 BELIEVE LIBERALS SHOULD LEAN over backward to acknowledge the good ideas from the conservative and libertarian right...
...We’ve argued in the past that midwives can lower the cost of medical care without impairing the quality of the care...
...He concedes the point is “freakish and awkward” but contends that’s “no reason to ignore it...
...Jack and Neal were always interesting and could be engagingly natural...
...For FDR, acquiring inforination was central to running the government...
...And the trend does not appear to be limited to the Washington area...
...Could the explanation lie in the more prominent and influential people who used the Santa Monica Freeway and who were able to bring a publicity spotlight to bear on it, thus hastening the process of rebuilding...
...All of those trips were made while Kies was supposed to be working for the government...
...Although his staff was small, his curiosity was unlimited, as was the imagination he employed in satisfying it...
...Two or three books emerged...
...Before joining the committee staff, Kies worked as a lobbyist for the large Cleveland law firm, Baker & Hostetler...
...A few of them you have met often enough to recognize and remember their names immediately...
...After being hit by Hurricane Andrew, it sought a bailout from FElLlA (the Federal Emergency Management Agency...
...Now the evidence is that they actually improve the quality...
...But soinetiines these guys are just plain nuts...
...superstar lawyers rarely seem to be available for poor clients...
...And, if Herbert could be as fascinating as Allen portrayed him, I never saw even a hint of it-except perhaps in his erotic writing...
...MONTY’S RESTAURANT IN Coconut Grove, Fla., had not bothered to carry hurricane insurance...
...The key appears to be personal attention...
...HOWARDC OUNTYM, D., HAS discovered an easy way to make money for the public treasury and at the same time punish a dangerous traffic violation...
...So Allen was in a sense a PR man for the Beats...
...Clinton has no system for finding out what’s going on down below...
...I suspect he scared them...
...Nurse-midwives establish a relationship with their patients,” says Dr...
...What a charlatan...
...IF YOU’VEL IVED IN WASHINGton for as long as I have-36 years-you’ve met a pretty large percentage of the population at least once...
...That was just months after I started smoking...
...Herbert Huncke, he depicted as the essence of Beat...
...It found that low-risk patients-generally those between 18 and 34 and without complications-are more likely to have healthy babies, without expensive medical interventions such as Cesarean sections, when they choose a inidwife instead of an obstetrician...
...He made a legend out of Bill Burroughs...
...underlies every dictatorship...
...As we were driving downtown, he asked if I had noticed how few sports cars we encountered along the way...
...If only he would learn from a president he seems to admire, Franklin Delano Roosevelt...
...ALTHOUGH I’M USUALLY SKEPTIcal about the need for military expenditure, the one exception I always make is research...
...1 HAVE ALWAYS SCORNED THE lawyer who argues that he is only doing his professional duty when he represents well-heeled criminals like those murdering perjurers who run our tobacco companies...
...Allen came closer to being a saint than anyone I knew...
...Can you possibly deny that the ads had nothing to do with that...
...The result is that, as you walk down a main thoroughfare such as Connecticut Avenue, you encounter one person after another who looks vaguely familiar...
...THE OTHER SIDE OF THE SANTA Monica Freeway story we told in our last issue comes from Oakland...
...for the elderly, the sum is $6,770 per recipient...
...The most recent study of FDR’s factual acquisitiveness, Bitter Harvest by Matthew Dickinson, finds that subsequent presidents have enjoyed ever-larger staffs and ever-less information...
...Eugene, by the way, deserves credit for saving Allen at a critical moment, credit that he has not received...
...Maybe that’s why they are permitted to handle the inajority of births in many other countries...
...Allen came closer to being a saint than anyone I knew...
...AI dealt with the problem by saying he was against “forced deregulation...
...He cannot be accused of forgetting his old friends...
...Sam, I knew cigarettes were dangerous way back in 1945, thanks to a courageous journalist named George Seldes...
...Doesn’t all this suggest that the GOP has scandals that are as worthy of congressional probing as the Democrats’ are...
...The Washington Post recently ran an article about this problem for which I want to congratulate the editor on both the choice of title, “Hi Anxiety,” and the author’s name, “Um...
...Why not require every new car to have one...
...He knew more, for example, about what was going wrong in the early days of the WPA than his severest critics...
...I was offended and found little more to say to Kraft then or when our paths crossed at subsequent Washington events...
...But they have one undeniable virtue: the potential to save your life or someone else’s in the event an accident happens or a crime is witnessed or appears imminent...
...I’ve been around Washington for a long time but I’ve never heard it put quite that blatantly before...
...None of these people wants to risk the appearance of conspicuous consumption...
...I spent the time writing instead...
...Kraft exclaimed...
...He has taken trips, paid for by the firm, to Orlando, Houston, Cleveland, and Columbus where he, according to The Wall Street JonvnnPs Greg Hitt, “spoke to the firm’s clients and prospective clients...
...To the argument that “Smokers are supposedly seduced by the industry’s advertising and once they start puffing they can’t stop,” he says “Come on...
...And we’re talking about Medicaid, not Medicare...
...The restaurant was paid $820,000 from a $600 million fund set up by the state that no one, until reporter Bridges came along, seemed to have any idea what had happened to...
...He is a Washington lawyer named Ronald Goldfarb, who recently wrote in The Wnshiiigton Post, “I can’t help wondering why so many poor clients don’t have lawyers and so many rich scoundrels do...
...And the success that senior members of the profession somehow achieve in avoiding such appointments is truly amazing...
...Instead they caught 90 a day...
...He loved to create images of his friends that would make them (and him) seem interesting, even romantic...
...So he was able to fix most of the problems and run an agency that made an immense contribution to defeating the Depression...
...Trying to tell the truth about yourself, Allen taught me, is a better idea...
...When Allen was arrested in 1949 for having stolen goods in his apartment-stolen not by him but by Herbert and their friend Little Jack Melody_Allen Asked me to enlist a prominent Columbia professor, Mark Van Doren, in the cause of getting him out of jail...
...And he again brought his father by the Monthly's office in the early '70s...
...Recently, for example, Ed Crane, the president of the Cato Institute, told The Wnshzngton Post, “I think Franklin Roosevelt was a lousy president...
...He was also among my sources for the misdeeds of the CIA...
...We want to be sure, if war does come again, that we, not the other guys, have the next radar...
...Years later, Allen liked to tell the story of how distinguished professors had come to his rescue...
...What troubled me was that he didn’t understand the rest of Allen, which was mostly quite wonderful...
...I’m happy to report that I have an ally...
...How then could he also have been a con-man...
...Ironically, the most crucial lesson that Allen, usually so concerned with creating images of his group, taught me was the necessity of stripping away images of yourself that keep you from truly talking with others...
...Now there was some truth in all of this...
...He was right...
...And it was the Republican party in the form of its National Policy Forum think tank that was the beneficiary of $2.2 million in loan guarantees from a Hong Kong business, according to a report last month in Tznze magazine...
...Tilting at Windmills BY CHARLES PETERS Remembering Allen The Ambassador's Secret Lawyers to the Stars Looney Libertarians BOB DOLE REMINDS ME OF Hillary Clinton...
...Peter Schwartz of the Ayn Rand Institute said, “The idea that individuals must sacrifice themselves for the society...
...An explanation can be found in Robert Buderi’s new book, The Inveztzon that Chnngecl the World...
...He convinced me and many others that Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady were modern Huck Finns...
...In the ’40s he made a point of having me meet his father, step--mother, and lawyer brother Eugene...
...There were, to be sure, a good many Mercedes and BMWs, but they all seemed to be colored gray...
...MIDWIFERY, ANOTHER ancient cause of this magazine, received a boost recently from a study conducted by the University of Washington...
...AS YOU KNOW, I’M NOT A big fan of car phones...
...That was his charlatan side...
...Herbert did look beat-as if he had just gotten out of jail, which indeed was sometimes the case...
Vol. 29 • June 1997 • No. 6
