Political Booknotes
Meisler, Walter Shapiro,Mark Feldstein,Robert Dallek,Gareth Cook,Matthew Dallek,Stanley
Political Booknotes Master of the Obvious by Walter Shapiro SELF-AWARENESS IS OFTEN AN exaggerated virtue for successful authors. A few years ago when I was profiling Tom Clancy, I...
...Whatever It Takes (even the title is derivative of Richard Ben Cramer’s epic character study of the 1988 presidential contenders, What It Takes) is Drew’s third book about the Clinton-Gingrich years, and it crystallizes the stylistic and conceptual limitations of her approach...
...his prose can be overly earnest and wooden, filled with accurate but sometimes grating self-prornotion for his leadership on these issues...
...Historians Townsend Hoopes and Douglas Brinkley have put together a solid analysis of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s vision of four (the British persuaded him to add France and make it five) policemen ordering the world as permanent members of the Security Council, in a new global organization called the United Nations...
...The two authors do not go in much for personality portraits, not even of FDR, but they do a good job in their descriptions of Hull and his frustration over working for a president who belittled him...
...The final verdict on Whatever It Takes: right topic, wrong author...
...They hire the finest minds to devise encryption system and provide the complex accounting procedures any multibillion dollar empire requires...
...Say You Want a Devolution...
...These are good ideas, but easier proposed than established...
...And to ignore the rhetoric is to lose the argument...
...Written by John Donahue, an associate professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School who served as a top lieutenant in the Reich Labor Department, Disunited States is a timely and evenhanded reminder that devolution has a downside...
...GARETH COOK is news editor of The Boston Phoenix...
...But it would be as wrong to dismiss Kerry now as it was to challenge his warnings about Manuel Noriega before 1989...
...The investigation was in its sixth year, had cost over $30 million, and had been the source of many restless nights for the special prosecutor in charge, Lawrence Walsh...
...The fetid campaign scandals of 1996 were nothing short of an indictment of the entire Washington political culture...
...The showdown between Clinton and Gingrich was the predicate for the 1996 congressional as well as presidential elections...
...Similarly, in order to lure high-’ income residents, states have made their tax policies increasingly regressive...
...Purged by Tina Brown (just thinking about it has me humming “Rule Britannia”), Drew rebounded by continuing her dispatches from the conventional-wisdom front in hardcover form...
...One important answer to this question is a bit of common sense familiar to Monthly readers: Government needs to create an environment in which good ideas flourish and bad ones die quickly...
...And for all of his soaring war rhetoric, he ducks the really hard question of whether the U.S...
...the Canadians were preparing to lead a U.N...
...bank, at a time when other Democrats deferred to its hired gun, Democrat Clark Clifford...
...Born in 1909, Ball saw the lessons of the century’s two world wars as the need to transform Europe from a group of antagonistic national states into a continent served by a multilateral force and common economic goals promoting international prosperity...
...Of course, multinational corporations provide jobs and products we all use, while multinational criminal gangs are strictly parasites feeding off the violence and destruction they create...
...The Judge, as many colleagues called Walsh, could have responded to the pardons with a simple statement declaring that his investigation was over...
...Now, Kerry has written a book connecting the dots of these and other seemingly unrelated international scandals, in a call-to-arms titled The New War...
...The President, Walsh contends, was in the thick of Iran-Contra from the get-go, and when word of the scandal leaked, the President’s men held high-level cabinet meetings in which they decided to blame North and other subordinates, effectively erecting a “firewall” around Reagan...
...Kerry also led the charge against the corrupt B.C.C.I...
...And with more and more money going to tax cuts, state governments can’t afford to be as activist, no matter what their intentions...
...the middle class falters...
...Having decided to spend the 1996 campaign as a House-keteer, Drew covered the 100 hotly contested House races like a Vietnam War correspondent who never strayed far from the comforts of Saigon...
...After the Persian Gulf War, U.N...
...Political Booknotes Master of the Obvious by Walter Shapiro SELF-AWARENESS IS OFTEN AN exaggerated virtue for successful authors...
...Under the law Walsh‘s prosecutors are still allowed to try the colonel...
...culpability for creating the demand for drugs in the first place...
...A midwestern Stevenson Democrat who served as undersecretary of state in the Kennedy-Johnson administrations, Ball is best remembered as a consistent opponent of the war in Vietnam and an effective advocate of European union...
...Winston Churchill did not feel much like talking utopia while caught in terrible battle, but he did not want to offend his rich and powerful source of supplies and troops...
...While there are no easy measures to determine whether the bidding war between states also encourages regressive spending policies, it’s not hard to imagine that the same forces that skew tax policy in favor of the rich apply here as well...
...The writing is at times dry and academic and, more seriously, the overall emphasis is muddled-a product, I imagine, of the book’s origins in the author’s research on state competition for business investment...
...But then came Somalia, Bosnia, and the Clinton administration’s decision to drastically downgrade the U.N...
...WALTER SHAPIRO, a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly, is a political columnist for USA Today...
...was organized along the lines set down by American bureaucrats...
...Aside from one trip to the Seattle area and visits to Massachusetts (always a hardship post) and Pennsylvania, Drew seemingly never ventured more than a cab ride away from the Washington TV studios during the entire 1996 campaign...
...Perhaps what we really need is another trustbuster like Teddy Roosevelt to take on both the criminal and the corporate cartels...
...Perhaps the United Nations could push them through, expanding its portfolio in a way that even Jesse Helms could support...
...Kerry is careful not to minimize U.S...
...So instead of charging North & Co...
...Donahue does provide some rhetorical correctives to devolution chic...
...At its extreme then, national devolution threatens to become a kind of national dissolution...
...Walsh devotes several chapters to the president’s men-chief of staff Donald Regan, Secretary of State George Shultz, Attorney General Ed Meese, and Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger-detailing what each man knew about the arms shipments and when he knew it...
...nonpolitical “issue advocacy” ad budget...
...State Department planners filled in the details of Roosevelt’s sketchy ideas, and this book makes it clear that the U.N...
...He could have just declared victory and gone home...
...John Kerry-war hero, millionaire Yankee liberal, selfpromoting iconoclastic thinkerwould seem the logical heir of TRs swashbuckling legacy, the man who would like to lead the charge up the next century’s San Juan Hill...
...According to Bill, Ball’s decision not to break with LBJ rested on five considerations: A resignation in protest would have been “an empty and ineffective gesture...
...That is a topic in which politicians should be much more interested...
...Judging by his new book Firewall: The IranContra Conspiracy and Cover- Up, the octogenarian Republican prosecutor is not terribly well-suited to the change of venue, a fact he seems to acknowledge in the book‘s early pages...
...should use military force to tackle these global gangs...
...He had only a 30 percent approval rating...
...The inevitable result of Drew’s outside-the-Beltway phobia is a narrative studded with Washington talking heads and little else...
...Bill uses this material to pose the central questions that historians will forever debate about Ball and Vietnam: Because he was so prescient about the consequences of involvement in the war, why didn’t he make his views public, especially in 1966 after he left the administration...
...She details how the AFL-CIO, for example, has the same person targeting both its PAC contributions and its supposedly (ha...
...A few years ago when I was profiling Tom Clancy, I discovered that the bard of the technothriller seriously believed he was a far better writer than John le CarrC...
...Important themes are missed...
...Walsh has now spent a decade pouring over documents, deposing witnesses, and thinking and writing about the Iran-Contra affair...
...Like the protagonist in the movie Afer Dark, Walsh is thwarted at every turn, his goals-in this case truth, justice, and trial datesobstructed by oftentimes sinister forces beyond his control...
...We glimpse the Judge doggedly pursuing the higher-ups, discovering juicy notes of meetings between the President and his cabinet while negotiating plea agreements with a few CIA and State Department officials, most notably Alan Fiers and Elliot Abrams...
...At times she veers dangerously close to a Bob Woodward parody as in this mock-dramatic passage: “In early September, Tom O’Donnell, Dick Gephardt’s chief of staff, was optimistic, but cautiously so, about the Democrats’ chances of retaking the House...
...STANLEY MEISLER, a foreign affairs writer with the Los Angeles Times, is the author of United Nations: The First Fifty Years...
...This insight is the book’s greatest contribution...
...States tend to rely more on consumption taxes, which disproportionately hurt those on modest incomes...
...The U.N...
...The decision made another trial all but impossible, and Walsh had little choice but to dismiss the case...
...When Richard Nixon continued the war for four years after becoming president in 1969, Ball did not hesitate “to frontally and publicly attack the administration...
...For years, the nation’s governors (especially the Republicans) have insisted that if the federal government would just give them responsibility for big programs like welfare, they could do a much better job...
...Still, Kerry deserves credit for thinking big, and once again getting ahead of the curve, particularly since these issues have largely been cornered by conservatives...
...By 1992, South Carolina was offering BMW a package worth upwards of $65,000 per job...
...Their genie came in the form of the 1994 Republican Congress, elected on a surge of animus toward the federal government...
...For all the talk about the dangers of Big Government, we may be entering an era when government is the only antidote to the newfound power of both global gangs and global corporations...
...Okay, she also deigned to attend the conventions, which she obligingly recounts in two non-reflective, emptyyournotebooks chapters...
...Intransigent bureaucracies, arrogant senators, bumptious defense attorneys, and right-wing judges could drive insane even the most hardened prosecutors, yet Walsh perseveres...
...Yet all prosecutors need to construct clear, compelling cases...
...The Too Quiet Man by Robert Dallek IN THIS AGE OF POLITICAL sleaziness, when the most memo~ rable events of our late 20th-century public life seem to be sex and money scandals that reach into the White House and Congress, it is well to remember that we have done better in the past...
...She hits the right note in identifying the central affront to democracy in the way Clinton funded his moneytalks re-election campaign: “One of the most precious commodities in America, if not the world-the President’s time-was parceled to the White House meetings with prospective or recent large donors, and the people they brought along!’ But Drew’s wanderings down the political money trail were episodic, and only marginally compensate for the haven’t-I-read-this-before quality of the rest of her book...
...The metaphor of war permeates Kerry’s writing...
...At first blush, Kerry’s slender and dryly sober book seems little more than a compendium of ethnic crimes encircling the globe, a kind of international edition of Reefer Madness...
...that would use military power to put down aggression...
...He practiced a special prudence that enabled him to make the link between ideals and realities with a moral context...
...but “crime today is not simply random or local...
...As a result of the organization's present weakness, a reader comes to this account of the U.N.'s origins with a strong taste of regret...
...As the federal government steps back, states fight increasingly damaging bidding wars with each other...
...But Drew devotes only half a paragraph to Norquist’s born-again career as a lobbyist, totally missing the ideological backflip inherent in his representation of the Seychelles...
...But Disunited States is not without its flaws...
...If FDR's five policemen cannot even keep order in Zaire, where can they...
...He reminds us that states are not necessarily more efficient, or even “closer to the people,” than the federal government...
...Clancy, whose uncritical self-confidence must help him churn out the bestsellers, couldn’t understand how a reader might prefer le Carrcs dense, atmospheric plots to his own gleefully uncomplicated us-vs.-them shoot-em-ups...
...States are often given the “laboratories of democracy” moniker, but, as Donahue mentions, states are slow to learn from the successes and failures of one another...
...Colombia’s drug cartel is now working hand-in-hand with criminal groups from four continents, costing the United States an estimated $200 billion per year-roughly equal to our entire defense budget...
...He had helped Clinton restore his political fortunes...
...And it is state and local government, not the federal government, that has been getting truly biE...
...The Making of Ronald Reagan, will be published by the Free Press...
...As always, Drew’s prose style makes Congressional Quarterly seem lively in comparison...
...Instead, Ball consistently defended Johnson and his Vietnam policy in public...
...Take this pivotal paragraph that sets up the thesis of Whatever It Takes: By early 1996, Gingrich was the most unpopular national politician...
...a coherent discussion of the ways conservatives argue their case- and why liberals are sometimes afraid to disagreewould have served the reader better...
...The documents are eventually produced, but-no surprise-the information had already been made public...
...Oliver North, John Poindexter, and other administration officials, and how President Reagan’s top aides hid diaries and feigned ignorance to protect their boss...
...For example: In England, cyberterrorists extorted tens of millions of pounds from British banks and defense companies after gaining access to their computers and threatening havoc...
...After all, now that the cold war is over, a new enemy must be invented to replace the Soviets...
...There is not much use in experimenting if the lessons are not applied...
...Kerry is onto something important and serious in his frightening tale about the growing sophistication and ruthlessness of international criminal cartels, which threaten our national security in ways previously never dreamed of...
...For just as technology and the economy have gone global, so, too, has crime...
...If the book had been published four or five years ago, we would have had a sense of this vision fulfilled...
...did nothing to protect the Hutu refugees in its care from slaughter by Tutsi soldiers...
...Under such systems, the more work states are asked to do, the heavier the burden will become on those least able to pay...
...Take the case of the incentive packages states offer corporations...
...Small wonder that The New Republic profile ends with Norquist proudly hosting a book party for his devoted Boswell, Elizabeth Drew...
...He pushed his idea on his allies throughout World War II...
...The Russian mafia are not only vying for nuclear stockpiles, they are hiring unemployed Russian scientists to create new and deadly synthetic drugs to export...
...And with that, the rhetoric of devolutionsending authority back to the states-has been turning into reality...
...Many of the statutes at issue, including Boland, are loosely worded and, Walsh decides, not the best grounds for criminal prosecution...
...As late as 1971, for example, after the publication of the Pentagon Papers, “Ball argued that the Johnson administration never deliberately deceived the American public about the war...
...more often it is purposeful and global...
...Disunited States would also have been a stronger (and more useful) book if Donahue had tried to address the question it naturally raises: How can government do a better job as states behave more and more like a pack of dogs with not enough bones to go around...
...Even now, as he prepares for a possible presidential bid, John Kerry is perhaps less known for his genuine accomplishments than for his recent marriage to millionaire heiress Theresa Heinz, widow of the ketchup magnate...
...They engage the ablest lawyers...
...But his story inevitably winds back to Vietnam and the illfated discussions that shaped policy in the 1960s...
...Kerry is a better senator than author...
...The difference between the theory of devolution-beloved mantra of the GOP, slogan of New Democrats, and widely popular with the publicand its application in reality is the topic of Disunited States...
...Even a wire-service reporter, facing tight deadlines, would have found a few adjectives to garnish these insipid sentences...
...Bush has] played the final card...
...Already the bidding war has developed into a race to the bottom...
...Kerry’s prescription: ‘knerica must lead an international crusade...
...To her credit, Drew did make the astute decision that her mission in 1996 would be to cover the struggle for control of the House of Representatives...
...and it would have foreclosed the possibility of shaping future international events in another administration, where he hoped he might become secretary of state...
...In 1980, for example, Ohio offered Honda a package worth about $20 million to attract a new plant...
...So little of its vision has been fulfilled...
...From the NRA to the beer wholesalers (they don’t want Big Government levying sin taxes), Drew adroitly identifies the groups with the most to lose if the Democrats reclaimed the house...
...What neither the left nor the right seem to appreciate is the ironic parallel between the two...
...Take, for example, the criminal trial of Col...
...Along with Senators Mike Mansfield and Wayne Morse, Ball accurately foresaw the cost in blood, treasure, and domestic tranquillity to be paid as a result of the greatest U.S...
...That’s a shame, for John Kerry has been one of the few truly originaleven heroic-members of Congress, consistently ahead of his time...
...Whatever It Takes begins with sketches of a handful of the 70 rightwing activists who convene each Wednesday morning in the Dupont Circle offices of Gingrich acolyte and conservative impresario Grover Norquist, who heads Americans for Tax Reform...
...It demonstrates,” Walsh lamented, “that powerful people with powerful allies can commit serious crimes in high officedeliberately abusing the public trust-without consequence...
...George Ball is one of those “lifelines...
...diplomats and bureaucrats felt that the Security Council could, in fact, order the world...
...French defeat in Vietnam and the lessons of Korea convinced Ball that an expanding American commitment against communism in Vietnam was a grave error...
...That’s why Pataki and friends, the governors who will get stuck paying more-or explaining to their constituents why legal immigrants shouldn’t be eligible-are having second thoughts...
...Though not a conventional biography tracing Ball’s life from birth to death in the rich detail common to the genre, this book provides enough personal background and attention to the principal actions of Ball’s public career to qualify as the best biography of the man to date...
...Likewise, Stalin was far more concerned with battle than postwar planning, but he could see nothing wrong with Five Policemen, so long as he was one of them...
...No one writing about politics during the dispiriting 1996 campaign, myself included, ever figured that one out...
...Yet the left has largely ignored this issue, focusing instead on the rise of another new international actor, the niultinational corporation...
...America’s security apparatus is in search of a new mission to justify its swollen budget...
...Roosevelt, mindful of the humiliation of the League of Nations in the 1930s, wanted a strong U.N...
...And Drew remains too entwined with that world to look beyond her notebook and the smiling faces of her carefully cultivated sources...
...Law enforcement officials believe it is only a matter of time before airlines, communication satellites, or even missile systems are similarly penetrated...
...Drawing on what must be gigantic stacks of government memos, trial transcripts, and depositions, Walsh accuses Reagan of authorizing arms shipments to Iran in exchange for hostages (thus violating the Arms Export Control Act) and allowing the proceeds from the arms sales to fund the Nicaraguan Contras, or “freedom fighters,” in violation of the Boland Amendment...
...Neither have any genuine accountability to the communities whose fates they control...
...When, under the banner of “new federalism,” Reagan consolidated scores of programs into state block grants, the end result was less funding...
...The warning helps, but for only so long...
...James A. Bill, director of the Reves Center for International Studies at the College of William and Mary, warmly makes the case for Ball’s virtues in a “behind the scenes” study of his role in American diplomacy...
...Today’s transnational criminal cartels use high-speed modems and encrypted faxes,” Kerry points out: They buy jet airplanes three or four at a time and even have stealth-like submersibles in their armadas...
...and Firewall, Walsh’s attempted coup de grace, at times reads so much like a rambling legal brief that the charges are difficult to decipher, and the conclusions murky...
...Unable to try his case in a court of law, Walsh turned to the more mercurial court of public opinion...
...Even as a moralist, Drew is a disappointment because she insists on taking hustlers like Grover Norquist at face value...
...A future biography that looks in greater detail at Ball’s career may help us take a surer measure of the man and his important career...
...Carlson calls Norquist’s flackery “a remarkably cynical reversal, even by Washington standards...
...Like other U.N...
...the national security bureaucracy should loosen its often exaggerated stranglehold on “secret documents...
...Only nine states have top income tax brackets above $50,000, and state tax revenue raised from corporations has fallen by a third since 1980...
...Serves the rest of us right for deciding in late October that Bob Dole was certain to be the next president...
...foreign policy error in the country’s history...
...As she declares elsewhere in the book in what may be an inadvertent self-portrait, “Washington is filled with driven, humorless people...
...The problems begin with Congress, which grants North immunity in exchange for his testimony...
...MARK FELDSTEIN is an investigative correspondent for CNN's IMPACT...
...More unsettling is the banality of Drew’s central conceit: that only a reporter of her vast experience could have gleaned the hidden truth that in 1996 The Real Strugglefor Political Power in America (that’s what it promises on the book’s dust jacket) was between Clinton and Gingrich...
...But Walsh, a prosecutor by training and temperament, decided to go down fighting...
...In that time he has accumulated some powerful evidence supporting his claim that at the heart of Iran-Contra lay not a few rogue superpatriots shipping arms to Iran, but rather a massive cover-up by powerful G-men...
...Behind the plodding prose, however, is a sincere effort by Walsh to recount, memo by memo, why he decided to prosecute Col...
...The Next World War by Mark Feldstein FOR YEARS, JOHN KERRY HAS been known as the “other” senator, overshadowed by his more famous Massachusetts colleague Edward Kennedy, or confused with Nebraska’s senatorial war hero Bob Kerrey...
...Can there be any more pitiful example of U.N...
...That worked out to around $3,800 per job...
...This narrative attempts to limit the repetition of facts to that which is necessary to an evaluation of my developing views and the actions of others as well as myself, but even so, extensive repetition is at times inevitable...
...When men by the name of Ledeen start “meet[ing] with Gorbanifar, Kimche, Schwimmer, and Nimrodi during September, October, and November,” don’t be surprised if your eyes glaze over and you start wondering why anyone but the most gungho IranContra buff would want to tackle this 531-page tome...
...Walsh is on firmer ground when he reminds us that independent counsels are faced with enormous, sometimes insuperable and unnecessary problems...
...Particularly unsavory is Norquist’s current status as a paid lobbyist for his one-time foe, Albert Rene, the left-wing dictator of the Seychelles...
...Not only is much of the violence on America’s streets a direct outgrowth of global gangsters, Kerry writes, crack-cocaine was itself created and disseminated as a deliberate marketing decision by the Colombian cartel seeking to penetrate a new, less affluent American market...
...A Dream Deferred by Stanley Meisler IN A SAD WAY, THE DRAMA OF this book has been snuffed out by current events...
...and politicians should be very careful about attacking independent counsels and turning legal investigations into political crusades...
...by Gareth Cook CALL IT THE ALADDIN PRINCIple: Be careful what you wish for-you just might get it...
...From 1961 to 1966, his was the only voice in the decision-making councils to warn consistently against the tragic policies in southeast Asia...
...Perhaps...
...Sound advice for the nation from someone who knows...
...As the war between the states intensifies, more and more money flows from state treasuries (where it could be used to build schools, maintain parks, or lift families out of poverty) to the profit lines of the companies...
...After a painstaking investigation, Walsh concludes that only Weinberger, who according to Walsh withheld notes and lied to Congress, is worth indicting...
...Although Hoopes and Brinkley come up with only a few revelations about the U.N.’s origins-I did not know, for example, that FDR wanted the Security Council to be headquartered on an island in the Azores-all the essential sources are mined in this readable account...
...Oliver North...
...Almost five years later, he is still at it...
...Disunited States begins with a simple, if daunting, question: How will American government change as authority is moved away from Washington, D.C., to the 50 states...
...Walsh suggests several remedies: Congress should think long and hard before granting immunity to those facing indictment...
...Kerry offers a number of solutions: beefing up U.S...
...Ball’s actions suggest a measure of self-serving political calculation that diminishes his stature as a statesman and make him comparable more to a Robert McNamara than a George Marshall...
...But Drew suffers from the Faustian bargain implicit in access journalism: the inability to be skeptical about her sources...
...force into Zaire to proiect the refugees, but US...
...ROBERT DALLEK is a history professor at Boston University...
...The authors describe all the contentious issues: a veto for the Big Five on everything except a Security Council decision to discuss a matter, seats for the Ukraine and White Russia even though they were then no more independent of Moscow than New York and California were of Washington, a seat for Argentina despite its embrace of Hider, the charter’s inclusion of the right of countries or organizations like the PanAmerican Union to defend themselves...
...One example: Donahue fails to explain clearly the political rhetoric which surrounds the devolution debate...
...Much of what Bill describes is familiar-the meetings with JFK and LBJ, Rusk, McNamara, the two Bundys, Rostow, Clifford, the Joint Chiefs, the wise men, and a host of secondary characters who struggled to define a sensible response to the challenge in southeast Asia...
...historians, Hoopes and Brinkley assign major roles to Secretary of State Cordell Hull and his little-known aide, Leo Pasvolsky...
...Regressive policies are the natural winners...
...Both can undermine a nation’s stability-whether by force and terror or by exporting jobs...
...At the heart of all this is the fundamental fact that we must redefine what threatens our “national securityl‘ It is no longer communism or a single antagonistic superpower like the Soviet Union, but numerous threats of lesser but equally lethal enemies: terrorists with access to conventional and nuclear weapons, ozone depletion or other environmental destruction that endangers the entire planet, food and water shortages that create refugees and destabilize governments, and, of course, the criminal cartels on which Kerry focuses...
...The rich get richer, the poor more hopeless...
...Walsh‘s team finally gets its day in court, convicting the colonel of lying to Congress, shredding documents, and accepting a home security system from a crony...
...law enforcement abroad, expanding laws for extradition and asset forfeiture, cracking down on money laundering centers like the Cayman Islands, establishing transnational courts to try global gangsters, and creating sorely needed minimum standards in international law...
...as an instrument of foreign policy...
...After haggling unsuccessfully with Weinberger’s defense attorneys, Walsh starts preparing for trial, only to have Bush issue his Christmas Eve pardons...
...Bill’s book has much to tell us about how and why we conducted our foreign affairs toward Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America during the cold war years...
...Vietnam represented only a small part of his duties, perhaps as little as 10 percent...
...officials undermined the mission by insisting that almost all the refugees had already returned to Rwanda...
...That’s unfortunate, because as Kerry realizes the dangers posed by global gangs should not be a matter of ideology but simply of coninion sense...
...So the irony was rich several months ago, when the National Governors Association, including top Republicans like New York‘s George Pataki, complained that the states were being left holding the bag on welfare...
...Or take welfare reform, the most important example thus far of devolution: It’s clear that a good number of the people who talked the talk of “helping people help themselves” were actually more interested in helping themselves balance the budget on the backs of the poor...
...MATTHEW DALLEK's first book...
...it would have destroyed his ability to put some restraints on Vietnam actions and influence foreign policy initiatives in other parts of the world...
...the craftiest spin doctors...
...But both now exercise enormous power world-wide, often dwarfing-sometimes controllingthe increasingly weak governments that are supposed to be in charge...
...Having exhausted our rhetoric on everything from wars on poverty to wars on drugs, we may not think it’s an all-out war, but thy do,” he writes “They know exactly what it is: War of a new kind, the whole globe its theater of operations...
...So long as the Big Five of the United States, Russia, Britain, France, and China agreed, the council could do anything...
...Bill acknowledges that Ball’s explanation of his decision not to take public issue with the Vietnam policy was flawed...
...Walsh's Last Stand by Matthew Dallek ON DECEMBER 24, 1992, SEVEN weeks after losing a hard-fought re-election campaign, President George Bush pardoned six men indicted in the Iran-Contra affair...
...If the thing were held today, I think we’d take it back,’ he told me...
...with a broad conspiracy to defraud the government, Walsh pursues more mundane, though still felonious, crimeslike lying to Congress...
...That same myopia, that same uncomprehending failure to view her own work as others might, afflicts Elizabeth Drew in her inexhaustible zeal to keep chronicling modern politics with a tendentious literalness that she clearly views as high art...
...Yet 14 months later, in the summer of 1990, an appellate court ruled by a 2-to-1 vote that the judge in the first trial had not looked hard enough into whether North’s congressional testimony had been used against him...
...Drew’s dogged earnestness does serve her well in striking the proper tone of moral outrage over the softmoney scandals that besmirched both the 1996 presidential and congressional campaigns...
...Even this is no easy task...
...But these points, too, are made only in passing...
...the most persistent-and generous-lobbyists...
...Indeed, one of the driving forces behind “sending power to the states” is not a judgment that states can serve the people betterbut a cynical calculation that talk of empowering the states is good cover for downsizing government, especially social services...
...The answer, quite simply, is that states will have more leeway to lower their taxes and decrease their spending on social services in the already heated competition to attract well off residents (who consume few services) and large corporations (which bring jobs...
...Appearing before a gaggle of reporters and cameras in Oklahoma City, Walsh blasted Bush’s pardons as a “signal that if you work for the government, you are above the law...
...Not only is Drew serving up the spin of the day as if it were an exclusive, but the tepid quote is also indicative of the way that nobody seems to use colorful metaphors or vivid language in her presence...
...Relief workers protested this claim, but by the time the evidence proved the official American contention wrong, all enthusiasm for a Canadianled intervention had dissipated...
...His thesis is simple: In the aftermath of the cold war, the new enemy has become global crime-from Colombia’s Cali cartel to the Russian mafia, from Chinese triads to Japanese yakuza, from respectable banks that launder dirty money to the politicians on the take world-wide that make it all possible...
...impotence than its recent performance in Zaire...
...In spite of George Ball’s blemishes,” Bill concludes, “his career stands on balance as an enduring model of excellence in statesmanship...
...He made similar charges on CNN, Nightline, and PBS, telling Robert MacNeil that the presidential pardon was “the last card in the cover-up...
...just as we led the world in the fight against” communism and “rogue” states like Iraq...
...Nonetheless, the history makes for an interesting read...
...I have been baffled by Drew’s appeal to serious readers ever since the days when she was filling the pages of the old New Yorker with her oddly uninflected recounting of the news that we all had just read from Washington...
...Kerry investigated the secret world of Oliver North well before the IranContra scandal went public, and took on Manuel Noriega’s drug dealing when Panama’s dictator was still a darling of the C.I.A...
...In the last months of 1996...
...but to do so they must avoid all mention of North’s congressional testimony, a constraint that forces these high-profile lawyers to flee the room any time Ollie appears on TK As the case is about to begin, North’s defense team requests thousands of classified government documents, delaying the trial for months...
...In a recent devastating profile of Norquist in The New Republic, Tucker Carlson portrays this purported ideological purist as behaving no differently than “any other cashaddled, morally malleable lobbyist in Washington...
...In times of change and danger,” John Dos Passos said, “a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present...
...it would have been an inexcusable act of disloyalty to colleagues who were doing their best for the country...
...Then again, if politicians were to spend as much time talking about how to fi government as they do talking about how to break it down, we wouldn’t need to be waiting for genies...
...So the federal government should take improving state government as a core mission: gathering useful information about what is working well, and making sure word gets around...
...With cold war animosities gone, agreement could be reached more often than not...
Vol. 29 • July 1997 • No. 7
