Political Booknotes

...In 1945, while FitzGerald was away at war, Marietta embarked on a passionate affair with film director John Huston and “went head over heels...

...Arguing for the maintenance of Washington’s “Cold War” alliances, a high-ranking Pentagon official asked in 1992, “If we pull out, who knows what nervousness will result...

...Can you ignore him and nose around the program to see if it really works, or make calls back to Washington to investigate something else entirely...

...The entire logic of Brzezinski‘s argument rests on the assertion that the indispensable foundation of cooperation and integration among the advanced industrialized countries was-and remains-American hegemony...

...And are they really reacting to the values of the new business, or simply to the ancient demands of politics updated for the information age...

...Stevenson was a Casanova of the billet-doux, and much of his love life was conducted by letter...

...Contracts with individual printers to publish federal laws became a sure method for early American leaders to support the newspapers hewing to their line, but not the only one...

...The common soldiers of previous centuries frequently were illiterate...

...Morris is said to have scorned other White House officials for obsessing about headlines in the “elite media,” preferring polls that showed what most Americans wanted...

...JAMES BENNET is a White House correspondent for The New York Times...

...Until 1914 (the) recording and imagining class had not gone to war much-through the whole of the nineteenth century, for example, no major British writer had any direct experience of battle,” Hynes observes...

...With an emphasis, I would add, on the “momentary...

...Originally, the aiding and abetting was direct...

...Clinton’s somewhat checkered record as a media strategist, I would argue that political considerations, not “news values” propelled that White House policy...

...But these are actions fought by an all-volunteer force, a professional military with little time for ironic detachment...

...their officers were professional soldiers who lacked the detachment that seems necessary to write a first-class memoir...

...and an ability, still under development within the news business, to spot and raise important stories long before the Dick Morrises of the world are prepared to have their candidates face them...

...War Stories by Thomas E. Ricks ONE OF THE THINGS FOR which the 20th century will be remembered is some of the best war writing ever...

...one delighted Clinton aide crowed at me...

...At Groton she created havoc when she appeared in the dining room or at the playing fields, and in her later years she remained the center of attention, pursued and surrounded by admirers and beaux...

...From this point of view, the best situation is the status quo in Korea, which allows for US...

...Marietta and Stevenson developed code names for each other-Mr...

...This "leadership" role, as Brzezinski advocates it, means not only that the United States must dominate wealthy and technologically sophisticated states in Europe and East Asia-America’s “allies”-but also that it must deal with such nuisances as Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosevic, and Kim Jong 11, so that potential great powers (Germany, or a united Europe, and Japan) need not acquire the means to deal with those problems themselves...

...Seebohm’s book, therefore, although extremely well written, is wrongly titled...

...This historical excavation provides a useful backdrop for Cook‘s discussion of how reporters and politicians have come to use each other...

...According to Woodward, the memo laying out The Story said that every day until Clinton announced his plan before Congress, he “should be in the media with an economic event stressing cuts in government and taxes on the rich...

...The great innovator was the Agriculture Department...

...It should have been the stuff of fairy tales, but unfortunately it is not...

...I hope the answer, at least for Washington coverage, will lie in consistent editorial sorting of the official news of the day...

...To avoid reality, Marietta filled her tune with frenzied acuvity, social and political, and when she at last succumbed to cancer in 1991, at the age of 74, she was filled with remorse as she tried to retrieve her relationships and re-spool the threads of her past...

...After a rewarding historical account of the symbiosis between news reporting and governing (of which the saddest recent example was the death of a West Virginia woman killed by a police car engaged in a high-speed chase, with a TV crew in tow), after a solid but more familiar account of how that relationship operates today, Cook delivers himself of this notion: “It may be t:hat newsmaking helps political actors in the short run but pushes them toward particular issues, concerns, and events and away from others, to the point that news values become political values, not only within the news media but within government as well...

...Unlike many of her rich, spoiled friends, Marietta grew up in a strict and frugal household...

...A popular sense that the economy was in deep trouble-not just the media’s interest in that issue-led to the creation of the economic plan...

...He describes Hillary Clinton explaining to aides how, to sustain public support in Arkansas for education reform, the Clintons set out to tell a “story” about reform, complete with beginning, middle, and end, as well as heroes and villains...

...That kind of day-to-day grind notwithstanding, the press corps often does pursue stories outside the White House storyline...

...This means that what Brzezinski is really proposing is that at some point in the future America try to stick its “partners” with more expenses while really granting them no greater authority or independence...

...By trying constantly to make news, are politicians making bad policy...

...The denunciation received widespread coverage...

...It chose the actual issues to be highlighted largely based on the public opinion surveys of Dick Morris...

...Her mother was appalled when a guest once asked for two lumps of sugar...

...It was Teddy Roosevelt, that instinctual photo-opportunist, who set aside a separate room for the White House press corps...

...We may have seen the end of those sorts of books in our military...

...No Regrets, which chronicles Marietta’s life, is packed with famous names, places, parties, and political intrigue and reads like a Who’s Who of the 20th century...

...The problem, of course, is that we can never know...

...But Gifford Pinchot, who became chief‘ of Agriculture’s Forestry Division in 1898, sensed greater potential...

...The White House embraced news values just to set the conditions under which the announcements were made (a backdrop of cops or a Swarm of children...

...This is an oxymoronic formula...

...I think that is backwards, for two reasons...

...Later, McKinley even ordered his secretary to brief reporters every day...

...With Tree’s money behind her, Marietta established an eclectic salon in New York and plunged into Democratic politics, becoming an ardent supporter of presidential contender Adlai Stevenson...

...Then came World War I. The 20th century’s industrial-era wars of attrition required huge numbers of literate, middle-class civilians-turnedsoldiers to fill the junior officer corps and the trenches...

...For reasons that would have been interesting for him to explore, much of the most noteworthy writing out of that war came in the form of fictionJoseph Heller’s Catch22, for example...

...The aides quickly constructed what they called “The Story” to sell the president’s economic strategy - before they had even figured out the plan’s fundamental features...

...And he is persuasive on this subject, though other writers have made the case before...

...In 1905, he assembled a “press bureau” of ex-journalists, and started mailing out summaries of speeches and reports in the form of news stories...

...In The Agenda, Bob Woodward details the formulation and packaging of the plan...

...Eager to push forest conservation and the (creation of forest reserves (which hi...

...Jefferson reacted by encouraging a rival editor, appointing him clerk for foreign languages to support him and his semiweekly...

...Although Stevenson was rumored to be homosexual, the Washington cognoscenti were aware of his involvement with a number of high-profile women...

...Pursuing such a strategy, as Brzezinski inadvertently makes clear, also entails a peculiar and esoteric calculation of the world situation...

...Sure, there have been no big wars...

...NCe Mary Endicott, Marietta was the rebellious only daughter of a reserved Episcopal minister, a parsimonious and austere mother, and most importantly, the granddaughter of the revered Rector of Groton...

...With Regret would be much closer to the truth...

...They simply took different forms: lower postal rates, government support for the telegraph, allocation of the broadcast spectrum, and, in Cook‘s view, the public relations offices that proliferated through the bureaucracy...

...Among the romances that Seebohm details are his dalliances with philanthropist Mary Lasker...

...He was 20 years her senior, antl when they decidcd to tnarry, .Llarietta’s parcnts were horrifiedthcrc had never been a tlivorcc in the Peabody clan...

...News values might then start interfering more in political values, the right way...

...For instance, although most of us would believe that a reunified, democratic Korea would indisputably be in America’s interests, Brzezinski, reflecting the views of the foreign policy elite, repeatedly explains how this development would endanger America’s adultsupervision strategy: It would obviate the ostensible need for US...

...Under Jackson, dozens of editors received political appointments, from customhouse collector to Librarian of Congress...

...police actions, require a leader...

...But it usually does so after those stories, like the campaign finance abuses, have already been thrust onto the public agenda and legitimized by other politicians...

...As a result, saving face and keeping up a good front formed the core of Marietta’s personality and she retreated behind a mask of impervious charm...

...And Jacksonians instituted nationwide pony expresses, Cook writes, partly so that editors in the west and south would be able to print news before the metropolitan papers arrived by mail...

...publisher Alicia Patterson Guggenheim...

...Our “partners” have never cottoned to this formula, and have consistently and reasonably held that if the United States is going to lead, it’s going to have to pay the costs and incur the risks that accompany leadership...

...The rise of the mass-circulation penny press in New York in the 1830s, the use of steam power and cheaper paper, and the establishment of the Government Printing Office in 1860 (no more fat printing contracts), cut the ties between papers and political sponsors and changed the very notion of news...

...and Mrs...

...He focuses instead on freeing politicians from the grip of the news media...

...What Hynes doesn’t note is the lack of post-Vietnam military memoirs...

...In part, he is out to prove that the production of news has always been “centrally aided and abetted’’ by government policy and practice, and he does a nice job of backing up that thesis historically...

...worldwide preponderance is an absolute necessity, he argues-perhaps disingenuously since the subtitle of this book is American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperative-that in the long-term the United States can "share leadership...

...After Stevenson’s death, Marietta’s personal life was in shambles...

...Usually outside beats like mine, the news industry has been trying to elevate issues, like job insecurity or food safety, that politicians were ignoring...

...In an aside, Cook notes that “newspersons are not a reflective bunch...

...At the White House, McKinley, in 1897, first invited reporters in past the gates where they gathered to grill entering and exiting officials...

...and Mrs...

...But throughout his affair with Marietta, Stevenson could not resist the pursuit of other women, artfully seducing them with endearing notes, apologies of neglect, and endless charm...

...She described those years as “a fever of happiness...

...Let’s say the president wanders within earshot...

...There was every political reason for Clinton to stick to simple apple-pie issue in his campaign and not to address a more controversial and complex subject, like the future of Social Securiqor, for that matter, the campaign finance system then collapsing around him...

...But what do we do about all this...

...But of course this system is not working very well-not because of a new encroachment of news values on politics but because of age-old weaknesses in both political and news values...

...Surely the German submarine experience of losing almost 90 percent ratives,” he notes...

...By day, Marietta worked at Life as a fact checker, but at night, she donned her signature black-mesh stockings and went partying with the Astors, Paleys, and Warburgs...

...Through much of the 19th century, under pressure from Congress, the government tried to improve farming techniques by getting farmers the most up to date information, and bulletins distributed through the newspapers presented an obvious means...

...Although the Peabodys were socially supreme, they were not well-off and frequently depended on wealthy relatives...

...Army officers who served in the Gulf War have produced significant worksCol...

...Second, I think politicians already are breaking free of the news media...

...But drive-by social criticism is not substantive policy...

...McMasters’ Dereliction ofDuty, about the failures of the Vietnamera Joint Chiefs of Staff...

...Yes, it is true that reporters, with an hour to file in Wichita, find it easier to judge style than content, and too often take that easy way out...

...Siamese Twins by James Bennet THIS IS A PROVOCATIVE AND often wise but ultimately unsatisfying book that ends just as it is gathering steam...

...He also saved some of his paramours’ love letters, which he called “tender bits...

...BENJAMIN SCHWARZ is executive editor of World Policy Journal and a contributing editor of The Atlantic Monthly...

...The media may be the messenger, but politics is driving the system, and perhaps politics makes good policy...

...Douglas Macgregor’s Bycaking the Phalanx, about the future of the Army, and Maj...

...You have an hour to parse the numbers and regulations and write 800 coherent words before the bus leaves...

...Perhaps he is counting on our common sense to tell us it is true...

...and socialites Brooke Astor, to whom he once proposed, and Ruth Field, the widow of Marshall Field...

...That’s one reason I find his discussion of World War II less illuminating than his examination of World War I. The other reason is his generally spotty selection of World War 11 literature...

...They retained the detachment of outsiders that permitted them to write about war as professional soldiers do not...

...She was later crushed to discover she could enter only by marrying into it...

...But these are both professional studies, holding far more in common with the memoirs of General Grant than with those of Robert Graves or Siegfried Sassoon or Joseph Heller...

...This, of course, was also the thinking behind the Pentagon’s 1992 planning document, which argued that the United States must continue to dominate the international system by "discouraging the advanced industrialized nations from challenging our leadership or even aspiring to a larger global or regional role," (One of its authors characterized this strategy as one of "adult supervision...

...Cook, a political scientist, does not concern himself with improving reportage...

...At 19, Marietta was prescient...

...Thus it’s no surprise that even though Brzezinski sketches the possibility of an eventual trilateral division of “leadership” among the United States, Europe, and Japan, he makes clear that, in fact, Europe and Japan would remain junior partners to a stilldominant America...

...Do you ask him about Social Security-possibly creating an entirely different story but most likely just getting a wave-or do you ask him about welfare, hoping for an interesting comment to improve the piece you’re already doing...

...In just the last year, two U.S...

...How could he write about the air war over Germany, for example, and exclude the poems of Randall Jarrell...

...Conference of Mayors...

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

...He delared: “The newspaper men-publishers, editors, reporters-are just as much public servants as are the men in the government service themselves...

...Now, for a guy who devotes countless pages to proving that the press is an “institwtion,’’ and then to proving that it is moreover a “political institution,” Cook is dismayingly stinting in developing this idea...

...The pair contemplated marriage, but Marietta ditched Huston after meeting Ronald Tree, a bisexual but wealthy and urbane Anglo-American with magnificent homes in England antl Rarbados...

...First, if, as Cook writes, the press has become a branch of government, then we should take advantage of that and use it to push important issues onto the agenda...

...forces to be stationed there indefinitely...

...which could lead to a US...

...Say the President is in Wichita, praising a welfare-to-work program and announcing a drop in the welfare rolls and complex new welfare regulations...

...Headline robbery...

...You have been assigned, properly, to write a story about the event, because the details, while incremental, are still significant elements in the running story of the changing welfare system...

...But Federal subsidies of the news did not end...

...This administration spends a lot of time thinking about the news media, and scores itself by the daily papers as well as by polls (although the LBJ tapes suggest that this obsession is not new...

...Brzezinski admits that global dominance is “difficult, absorbing, and costly,” and he does offer a way out, but his solution contradicts the entire strategy that he has defended...

...Political Booknotes The Dark Side of a Fairy Tale by Sandra McElwaine MARIETTE TREE WAS THE quintessential WASP-a glamorous, freewheeling spirit born into the stern, judgmental Peabody clan, one of Boston’s finest families...

...which would lead to political, military, and economic rivalry among the region’s states...

...You do not need to glamorize addiction to sell clothes,” he said...

...And it is often true, as Cook writes, that “the sine qua non of news is not conflict in and of itself but an endless series of conflicts and momentary conclusions...

...Why the arbitrary exclusion of the submarine memoirs of World War 11-Edward Beach‘s Run Silent, Run Deep, or Eugene Fluckey’s Thunder Below...

...With the Internet and cable television fracturing the audience, wonderfully diversifying the coverage, and providing more opportunities for direct access to audiences, I wonder how the mainstream media can stay relevant...

...Yes, reporters are too reliant on “official” sources, and too quick to define as news that which officials do...

...Although in the short- and midterm Brzezinski asserts that continued U.S...

...He didn’t, and rarely does...

...Maybe, but many newspersons I know chafe at the way politicians set the agenda...

...which could, in turn, lead to Japan “becoming militarily more self-sufficient...

...A day after The New York Times ran a front-page story in May about “heroin chic” in the fashion industry, Clinton criticized the trend in a speech to the US...

...pullback from East Asia...

...agency might supervise), he upped the volume of bulletins and began monitoring the results through clipping services...

...From Hamilton’s redoubt at the Treasury Department, the Federalists let printing contracts to a sympathetic Philadelphia publisher...

...Consider an example of the latter, the creation of Clinton’s economic plan...

...An effervescent, leggy blonde, Marietta was an accomplished flirt and irresistible to men from an early age...

...Of course, this global adult-supervision strategy means that America must spend nearly as much on national security as the rest of the world combined...

...To Brzezinski, stability . in Western Europe and East Asia, guaranteed by American preponderance, was the precondition for cooperation, not vice versa...

...Setting to one side Mrs...

...But there have been several smaller actions, from Beirut and Grenada to the Gulf War to Somalia, Bosnia, and Haiti...

...Johnson, and Mr...

...So, according to this logic, we must always stay...

...The two began a romance in 19S2, which placed Marietta at the pinnacle of power and led to her appointment to the U.N.’s Human Rights Commission...

...Judging from Cook’s account, it was at the turn of the century that the tacit agreement governing today’s news beats was struck: Government officials realized that the press could be an efficient way to get the word out, and the press realized that the officials could make good copy...

...Unable to accompany friends on expensive trips and forced to wear the same evening gown to opulent debutante balls put a crimp in Marietta’s adolescence, but she rarely complained and set her sights on financial freedom and a career in the Foreign Service...

...Richardson-and arranged trysting spots at various friends’ houses that they considered “safe...

...As a result, at Clinton’s campaign-style events, the news is generally more complicit in the politics than vice-versa...

...They had also gone from a rag-tag collection of partisan, fragile journals (when Jefferson resigned as Secretary of State in 1793, his friendly editor lost his job and the paper died), to massive enterprises...

...Therefore, to hold that America can ever safely relinquish its hegemony because the political, economic, and military cooperation arnong the great powers ensures stability and peace is to put the cart before the horse...

...clear and reliable reporting and interpretation of what politicians are doing...

...Hynes is less satisfied with the literary results of World War 11, which may be because he rather arbitrarily excludes most (but not all) novels from his survey...

...And, often, there is every good news reason to let him get away with it...

...What came marching back was an army of memorable novels, poems, and memoirsA Farewell to Arms, the poems of Wilfred Owen, Robert Graves’ Good-bye to All That, Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of an Infantry Officer...

...But stepping outside the official agenda becomes much harder on a beat, because it is a significant and valid part of the job to inform the audience of what your target politician is saying...

...Despite their condemnation, Marietta pressed on, separating herself from her family to attain a stellar role in international society...

...The affair lasted until 1965 when Stevenson collapsed and died on a London street corner with Marietta at his side...

...To keep Marietta on edge, he frequently disclosed his other amorous encounters, and stockpiled in a drawer by his bed a number of poems and meditations of love that he would send, and receive, from various females...

...With access to family and close friends, letters, diaries, and engagement books, author Caroline Seebohni pierces the mystique surrounding Marietta to reveal a troubled woman who led a hidden life: clandestine love affairs, estrangement from her four brothers and two daughters, guilt and anxiety over a loveless childhood, emotional isolation, and two failed marriages...

...Responding to their own polling, the network news shows have virtually become health and safety reports, regardless of what official Washington is up to...

...troops on the peninsula...

...Paid for by advertising, newspapers no longer aimed so much at readers as voters, but at readers as consumers...

...Brzezinski’s book reveals the logic that has governed American national security strategy since the Cold War, but it also makes clear that this logic inevitably involves an imperial project that is perforce open-ended and permanent...

...She was alienated from her daughters, model Penelope Tree and author Frances ponderance, whose “three grand imperatives,” he explains, are “to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to prevent the barbarians from coming together...

...Cook, who has a complex understanding of the relationship between governing and the news, provides a fascinating account of the origins of this complicity...

...Multilateral enterprises, from juries to U.N...

...When asked to predict her own future, she wrote down, “Parties, people, and politics...

...The Story was just the means to enacting it by playing not only to the news media, but also to a perceived public desire for a compelling storyline to make sense of policy...

...But how true is it...

...In The Soldiers’ Tnle, Samuel Hynes, a World War I1 Marine pilot turned Princeton professor of literature, explains why...

...There is no reason to believe that, without this guarantor, stability will take on a life of its own...

...As that namby-pamby “may be” suggests, Cook handles this interesting thought gingerly...

...Her first husband, Desmond FitzGerald, a proper New York lawyer, introduced the beautiful aristocrat to Manhattan’s haute monde and she discovered the world she craved...

...To be sure, it is a military that does produce important books...

...Again leaving himself an out, he warns later that “to the extent” that the press (does organize politics, it directs attention “toward episodic outcroppings rather than continuing conditions” and “away from abstract complexity toward simple if not simplistic renderings of problems, policies, and alternatives...

...It is a source of enormous aggravation to beat reporters that media critics, blessed with more time to reflect, so rarely suggest any solutions for the press that have meaning in the real world...