Political Booknotes

...But she is still with us...

...interests...

...Juan Williams is the author of a forthcoming buography of Justice Thurgood Marshall...

...RICHARD NORTON SMITH is the author of The Colonel: The Life and Legend of Robert R. McCormick...

...In fact, Shipler was a foreign correspondent for The New York Times and won the Pulitzer Prize for his previous book, Arab and 3ew: Wounded Spirits in a Promised Land...

...Given the dazzling array, policy generalization would appear to be both futile and misguided...

...As the majority race, they too often allow themselves to pretend that racial issues don’t exist - thereby forcing the burden of dealing with them onto minorities...

...Still, everything in this book stands well above the current, permissively silly academic standards for the discussion of pop culture...

...Mexico Border...

...They were rich, newsy, and generally uplifting days on a once-sleepy but awakening 2,000-mile-long divide between the First and Third Worlds...

...They were the years of the rise of “narco-politics” in Mexico and in Baja California in Rotella tells the story of those years through a series of chapters, each focused on one of these defining events, with the storytelling ability and eye for detail of the award-winning reporter he is...

...Talking Across the Color Line by Juan Williams DAVID SHIPLER HAS A SENSITIVE ear, and he has found and ably presented a wide range of bright and compelling people talking about how race affects their lives...

...But there is enough sameness to justify them...

...The Wonderful World od Disney by Clifford Doerksen FOUR YEARS AGO, WHEN THE Walt Disnev CorD...

...Immigration, too, had turned ugly, especially in California...

...In light of recent events, it’s tempting to fault Bush and his advisers for not “finishing the job” - except that the job as defined by the United Nations was finished in early 1991...

...Here is a Bush we have rarely seen, and almost never heard...

...Elite Disneyphiles in the 1930s included Gilbert Seldes, Sergei Eisenstein, Mark Van Doren, and Arturo Toscanini...

...And toward the end of the decade, economic dreams rose on growing talk of a North American free-trade accord that would erase borders, weaken the push and pull of immigration, and bring everybody closer together...

...The years of his assignment to this region are significant, because they correspond to the advent of illegal immigration as a global issue - with Chinese, and not just southern Mexicans and Central Americans, arriving in Tijuana to cross into America...

...Urban and industrial pollution had worsened, and the much-heralded free-trade agreement, which took effect in January 1994 as NAFTA, was under attack even by some of its erstwhile supporters for destroying jobs in the United States and dampening wages on both sides of the border...

...or Baja California’s (and Mexico’s) first opposition governor, Ernest0 Ruffo, saying, “Baja California is full of people who made a decision to search for better life...

...Examining the historical record demonstrates that during the past three decades, actual US...

...Second, while the U.S...

...Bush‘s fondness for pork rinds and the Gatlin Brothers made him a traitor to his class, while his background as a moderate on social issues like abortion did nothing to endear him to the religious right and other cultural conservatives...

...The political explication of the later Disney products of the Cold War era is similarly spot-on...

...Parmet, the highly regarded biographer of Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Nixon, gained unprecedented access to the former president’s personal diaries and other papers...

...George Bush earned the nickname “Rubbers” for his staunch support of Planned Parenthood...

...We have everything here, the best and the worst...

...The world is now at the tail end of the third great wave of state fragmentation during this cenlxry...

...has a standard array of policy tools to predict, prevent, and resolve the conflicts...

...Ode to the Gipper by Matthew Dallek IN EARLY 1987 DINESH D'SOUZA, just 26 years old and already an upandcomer in the conservative movement with a flair for controversy, took a job as a senior domestic policy adviser in the Reagan White House...

...Why, why, why...

...For example, white Americans fear physical violence and crime from blacks, despite the fact that most crimes perpetrated by blacks are committed against other blacks...

...In other places Watts is simply too much of a historian and not enough of a critic, as when his discussion of Disney’s status as an Artist ends in stalemate, with some of Watts’ grandest claims for Disney the auteur suddenly dampened into nothingness by the following disclaimer: In many ways, of course, such highfalutin aesthetic maneuvering was at best incidental, and at worst unintended or unconscious...

...interests...

...I much prefer foreign affairs...

...But by the...

...but occasionally from as far west as the San DiegoTijuana line...

...Yet the senior Bush, no less than Taft before him, appears a historical figure at odds with the prevailing culture...

...He was “tired” of being in the spotlight, the president wrote in March 1991...

...We can’t touch her, and yet we can feel her...

...It is also the birthplace of Mexico’s strengthening democracy, the national land of economic opportunity for a more backward southern Mexico, a bubbling soup pot simmering a hybrid culture, a Texas-Mexico border very different in history and experience from its California counterpart...

...But, the author argues, Reagan was a great visionary, a shrewd and calculating chief executive who cured inflation, jump-started the stagnant economy, vanquished malaise, spread democracy to nations in need, and won the Cold War...

...The bulk of the book surveys the historical record to illustrate the way the tools have been employed in the past 30 years by this nation in order to show what works and what doesn’t...

...no conflict of interest...

...First, ethnic conflict is an age-old problem...

...D’Souza concedes that the president was not perfect, remaining aloof from policy minutiae and the day-to-day operations of his staff...

...of politics and immigrant smuggling rings...

...Indeed, duting the Cold War,ethnic conflict often exploded with unspeakable levels of inhumanity in places like Biafra, Burundi, East Pakistan, and Lebanon...

...To the extent that these efforts have been disproportionate, the most common mistake has been an under-commitment of resources, especially at the early stages...

...The full reversal of Disney’s critical fortunes was marked by the 1968 publication of Richard Schickel’s scathing The Disney firsion, which took Disney’s measure in relation to the values of the counterculture and pronounced him vulgar, sentimental, and dehumanized, an assessment which has since become more or less entrenched as an upper-middlebrow shibboleth...

...I’ve tried to serve with no taint or dishonor...

...in 1933 had something to do with the Depression...

...In the introduction Shipler claims his book is not about statistics or public policy...

...of San Diego’s Logan Heights Chicano gang, some of whose members ended up hired guns for the Arellano Felix brothers...

...Compared to fighting fascism or containing communism, there is little glamour or excitement in getting involved in these unwinnable wars...

...What John Sununu dubbed “the ‘Hundred Hour War” became a catch phrase on the order of “Read My Lips” - policy neatly packaged for the very media machine the president affected to despise...

...Driven, mercurial, domineering, manipulative, hard drinking, puritanical about sex but fond of grade-school potty humor, this Disney stands in stark contrast to Uncle Walt, the sunny television presence who warms the memory of anyone who grew up in the ’50s...

...That he should thrive at all in so hostile a political environment makes Bush‘s story interesting - all the more so because it is told, vividly and authoritatively, by Herbert Parmet, an academic who blessedly does not write for other academics...

...They were the years of the Sanctuary movement, when Americans opposed to the U.S...

...The most persuasive political analyses here are often also the most obvious ones...

...Of course, no undertaking is more fraught with potential for intellectual pratfalls than the deep reading of popular culture (a point that Watts gamely acknowledges with a pre-emptive epigram from Walt Disney: ‘We just try to make a good picture...

...Long before he accused Bush and the GOP of attempting to disrupt his daughter’s wedding, Perot was investigating the vice president’s private finances and trying unsuccessfully to link two Bush sons to the Iran-Contra scandal...

...There is nothing wrong with revising history, but D’Souza’s book is too long on rhetoric and too short on facts to alter the verdict on Reagan’s presidency...

...Second, the number of ethnic conflicts in the future will be limited...

...MATTHEW DALLEK, a Visiting Scholar at U.C...

...Callahan begins his study by noting two important, but often overlooked, facts...

...Solid metal fences had gone up where friendship and cooperation were supposed to bloom...

...I’ve tried to keep it...

...No one - not even the president - seemed to be in charge,” D’Souza confesses in his new book...

...The border of promise had in many places become a border of peril...

...Tribal Warfare by Lawrence J. Korb FEW WOULD DENY THAT ETHnic stife is part and parcel of geopolitics, or that the United States needs a sensible, consistent policy on how to deal with these ethnic conflicts...

...Most of the time Walt Disney simply followed his instincts in utilizing humor, comedy, and music in pursuit of mass entertainment, and any explicit thoughts about art lay deep in the shadows...

...policy toward these conflicts involves a “dazzling array of calculations!’ Policy makers must make judgments about the merits of particular nationality movements, their chances of creating viable states, and the available alternatives to statehood...

...He also played, it seems fair to say, a role in ending the Cold War, helped lead the American right out of the political wilderness, and set the parameters for much of the current debate over welfare, taxes, and entitlements...

...Except in Lebanon, the expenditure of diplomatic encrgy, financial resources, and human life has generally matched the degree of secondary U.S...

...As long as people respond to it, I’m okay...

...Watts may be reaching a bit, however, with the observation that Mickey Mouse’s eclipse in popularity by the more belligerent Donald Duck in the late ’30s subtly reflected a gradual rethinking of America’s global situation...

...It is not a book about the US.-Mexico border, as even the book‘s logo, which traces the distinctive “line” of the border from San Diego to Brownsville, would have the reader believe...

...The drug war was still focused on the Caribbean and not yet 011 the Colombian cartels’ Mexican connections...

...D’Souza responds to such lessthan-rosy portraits of the Reagan presidency by drubbing disgruntled White House aides as perfidious “ingrates,” assailing critics as liberal naysayers, and glossing over serious questions about the costs of Reagan’s policies...

...For the duration of Reagan’s tenure, Bush played the good soldier, a model vice president whose biggest offense, in Parmet’s view, was excessive loyalty to his chief...

...Yet the book shortchanges the “best” even as it offers the important and gripping story of the “worst...

...Perhaps if the Ramada Hotel chain or Donald Trump had been behind the attempt to annex Manassas the outcome would have been the same, but the fact that it was Disney lent a particular color to the rhetoric of highbrow dissent...

...f h e result is a loose mix of perspectives that does not include the best challenges to affirmative action or even to controversial political figures like Washington D.C.’s mayor, Marion Barry...

...But the notion that Reagan was a brilliant statesman with a set of nationsaving policies - a 20th-century titan who revitalized America and made the world safe for democracy - contradicts much of what is known about the man and his administration...

...The immigration issue, always an up-and-down concern in the U.S., was on the up, but casual crossing outside federal government checkpoints (to shop, visit family, or earn dollars) was still widespread...

...It’s a compelling read - as far as it goes...

...Watts defines that aesthetic here as the depiction of people, objects, and scenes in which dark or messy dimensions have been wiped away...

...And Watts succeeds admirably in generating an understanding of how a young nobody from the Midwest named Walter Elias Disney became a major mogul of movies and television and eponymous ruler of a theme-park kingdom...

...border to refuge...

...Mayor,” Reagan was only showing his disdain for the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which he deemed a "rat hole of public policy...

...The day is now long past, but as Steven Watts reminds us in his valuable if uneven study, Walt Disney and his works once received adoring hosannas from the intelligentsia...

...1980 elections Bush had embraced the anti-abortion language of the GOP, as if hoping to obliterate the tensions between his heritage of moderation and the fiercely ideological party he yet hoped to inherit...

...This is not all the two have in common...

...By the time one finishes this book, the tableau of a violent, corrupt, frightening border is quite complete...

...Among Bush’s less savory responsibilities was the courtship of Ross Perot, who in his eagerness to rescue missing American POWs offered to pay $1 million per prisoner to the government in Hanoi...

...Ronald Reagan: How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinav Leader reads like a long mea culpa...

...Rotella calls the border a “magical place,” but he just doesn’t give the reader enough to know what he means...

...Now the Los Angeles Times bureau chief for South America, Rotella was from 199196 the Times’ correspondent covering the San Diego-Tijuana border...

...We had one once - she’d fight and cry and play and make her way just like the rest...

...A decade later, when I returned to reporting on the border, this time from a correspondent’s desk in Mexico City, I was shocked and saddened by what I found...

...It is not because they don’t know each other, Shipler contends, but because their minds are filled with myths about each other...

...HOWARD LAFRANCHI is the Christian Science Monitor's Latin America correspondent in Mexico City...

...The result is Lone Star Yankee, a fitting metaphor for an unconventional leader who declared early in his career that “labels are for cans...

...Shipler has done a service simply by showing blacks and whites how seldom they have any idea what is going on in each others’ heads...

...In place of the tongue-tied orator is a grieving parent who writes, in eloquent recollection of his long-lost daughter, Robin, “We need a girl...

...It is a place where the United States is learning about its own future, like it or not...

...He also displays an uncanny ability to turn Reagan’s warts and blunders into great triumphs...

...He praises Bush‘s tour de force in building the international coalition against Saddam Hussein as “about as fine an example of presidential crisis management that can be found in the 20th century...

...In similar stories full of telling descriptions and observations from a wide range of people, we enter the world of San Diegok Balboa Park boys, mostly homeless migrants from south of the border who sniff glue and sell their bodies to wealthy San Diegans...

...After losing a bitter three-way contest for re-election in 1912, Taft joked that no American had ever been elected ex-president by such an overwhelming majority...

...Political Booknotes The Dark Side of the Border by Howard LaFranchi AS A NEWSPAPER CORRESPONdent in Texas in the 1980s, I covered the U.S.-Mexico bordermostly from Brownsville, the Eo Grande Vallev...

...We need her and yet we have her...

...Her peace made me feel strong, and so very important...

...Never very comfortable with the business of politics, Parmet notes, as a presidential candidate Bush often seemed to pull his punches...

...It was, of course, the U.S...

...This is essentially a book about the rise of the Mexican drug cartels and their effect on Mexican politics - especially in Baja California...

...The author gives Bush high scores for his international efforts, crediting the president and a superb diplomaticmilitary team with managing the breakup of the Soviet empire and launching fresh peace initiatives in the Middle East...

...confirmed Disney lovers will profit from the book‘s wealth of anecdotes concerning Walt Disney and the Disney studios...

...Those in between can benefit from a new perspective on a man whose influence on global popular culture has yet to wane, three decades after his death...

...intervention in ethnic conflicts has been proportionate to U.S...

...Shipler’s final insight is that whites need help in opening their eyes to the persistence of racism, and that help has to come from black Americans because blacks are attuned to “the nuances of bias, which must be discerned if we are to move toward racial justice...

...It is about people and the way they think and their images of one another, about what happens when their paths intersect - It is a journey along the crucial fault line of America...

...They were also the years marked by the rise of the Arellano Fdix brothers and their Tijuana-based drug-trafficking empire, considered the most treacherous in Mexico...

...The Gipper inspired intense loyalty in his aides and possessed, in addition to his much-ballyhooed PR skills, an uncanny ability to make popular seemingly simplistic and antiquated conservative beliefs...

...He went on to redeem himself as chief justice of the United States, in which position he could at last exercise the judicial temperament that had proven so ill-suited to the political arena...

...Was it not universally understood, after all, that the name “Disney” signified everything sentimental, false, and Philistine in American culture...

...Why do we do it all...

...Parmet gives us a portrait of the 41st president that is often surprising and occasionally poignant, as its protagonist mulls the cost of his ambitions, a hostile press, the inevitable trimming, and various indignities inflicted upon his loved ones...

...Disney died shortky before rhe Schickel book appeared, but he had long before adopted a defensive populist posture in relation to his many detractors...

...There is just the potential for steady progress toward a world with less killing...

...The record suggests that the common argument against limited interaction - that it will inevitably lead to excessive commitments, or “mission creep” - is exaggerated...

...and ProDosition 209...

...Disney himself affected an aw-shucks indifference to this kind of attention while it lasted, but the steady decline of his cultural reputation after 1940 was clearly galling to his mammoth ego...

...After Saddam, Parmet detects a loss, if not of nerve, of Bush‘s characteristic ebullience...

...It is stunning when he introduces us to Tijuana’s reformminded police chief, Federico Benitez, lays out the growing dangers the honest but inexperienced commander faced, then tells us how he was assassinated: “The federal police carried out the ambush with textbook precision...

...In attempting to draw out the deeper political and aesthetic meanings of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, Snow White, Pinocchio, Dumbo, and Bambi, Watts registers some hits and some misses...

...Perot’s blatant violation of the Logan Act went overlooked by an administration reluctant to offend the prickly Texas billionaire...

...Bush often appeared a leader for whom politics kept getting in the way of statecraft...

...And that’s too bad...

...The author claims, for example, that Reagan’s decision to storm the tiny Caribbean island of Granada in 1983 marked a watershed in American diplomatic history, not only saving American medical students from bloodthirsty Cuban communists but also “helpting] to exorcise the ghost of Vietnam from the American psyche...

...But the Middle East book was written for an audience of Americans who don’t know the reality of the day-to-day ArabIsraeli struggle, while this book on race relations is being presented to people who have lived through O.J., Willie Horton...

...Scholars and journalists have told a different though equally grim tale of ballooning deficits, expanding poverty rates, urban decay, and rampant corruption...

...Despite the claims of the foreign policy establishment, it has not been caused by the end of the Cold War...

...But too often there seems to be no point to the succession of stories and confessions in this book...

...Even at the New Jersey flag factory that became synonymous with his campaign’s exploitation of patriotic symbols - and his attack on Dukakis for being soft on flag burning - the kinder, gentler Bush lacked the stomach to stick to his script and launched instead into a description of how he was “haunted” by urban kids who were victims of violence...

...To the end, he resisted the role of braggadocio he had been warned against since childhood by his formidable mother...

...To Parmet, Bush is “a Burkean conservative with the heart and soul of a moderate,” a leader who cared less for ideology than for personality...

...But by the end, with its emphasis on whites who are blind to the advantage of being white, it seems clear that what Shipler is really offering in these pages is an argument for affirmative action...

...D'Souza further informs us that Reagan didn't care whether his secretary of the treasury and chief of staff swapped jobs because he had larger, more important matters to worry about...

...Barry’s story, for example, comes across in these pages as a biblical resurrection: a black man victimized by drugs and forced to jail before finally being reborn...

...when the shocking assassination of a Catholic cardinal in Guadalajara was traced back to Tijuana and San Diego street gangs (1993...

...Finally, in a strange twist of logic, D'Souza touts Reagan's multibillion-dollar budget deficit as a stroke of brilliance that helped run the Soviets into the ground and limit the growth of evil entitlement programs like welfare and Medicare...

...when Mexican criminal justice officials in Tijuana, from the local police chief to state prosecutors and federal investigators, were murdered either because of the side they pledged their allegiance to in the drug lords’ turf war, or because they were actually clean and were therefore everybody’s enemy (1994,1995,1996...

...He was quickly disappointed...

...And then the professors come along and tell us what we do...

...It was in caring for her dying daughter that Barbara Bush‘s hair turned prematurely gray...

...Parmet makes clear that Manuel Noriega was a bipartisan embarrassment, deserving of a worse fate than the Miami jail cell he presently inhabits...

...Before leaving the White House Bush described the “wonder and majesty” he had always felt about the presidency...

...For example, it seems safe to hazard that the national mania for Disney’s “Three Little Pigs” and its hit theme song “Who7s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf...

...The border is a unique place in the world - where else do the developed and developing worlds come together with such energy and confrontation...

...Berkeley, is at work on a book, to be published by the Free Press, entitled The Making of Ronald Reagan...

...I liked Reagan as a person, but like many other conservatives, I worried that he lacked the intellectual temperament and administrative skills to give new direction to the countryl’ Now a research scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and author of best-selling screeds on multiculturalism and American race relations, D’Souza has changed his mind about his former boss...

...Although a confessed Disneyphile and the beneficiary of unprecedented cooperation from both the Disney Archive and the Disney family, Watts has produced an admirably even-handed work that should hold considerable interest even for those cvnical souls who find themselves congenitally out of sympathy with the Disney aesthetic...

...All ethnic conflicts pass through these stages: rising tensions, onset of violence, and lulls or stalemates...

...must develop the capacity to predict, prevent, and intervene with military force when necessary in these “unwinnable wars...

...The result is that Shipler comes across less as a guiding intelligence through his concatenation of voices than as an accidental tourist or a foreign correspondent, sending letters back home from a strange land...

...Well, I am corny...

...That may be a good idea in principle...

...With The Magic Kingdom, Professor Steven Watts, hitherto a cultural historian of the early American Republic, presents us with a fresh opportunity to evaluate the life and work of this architect of modern American culture...

...Drastically...

...Hardbitten Disneyphobes will come away from The Magic fingdom fortified with the knowledge that the first movie tie-in merchandising campaign was for Disney’s Snow white all the way back in 1937...

...In the 1960s then-Rep...

...I must say I hate this dealing with Congress and these budget matters,” Bush complained...

...But then, Bush had always been better at holding office than seeking it...

...Then they must assess how the struggle can affect global stability, and finally, determine what national interests are at stake and find the appropriate policy instruments...

...D’Souza discovered an administration riven by turf wars and petty personnel conflicts and a well-meaning but ineffectual president hardly up to the task of running the country...

...It is this globalized border of the 1990s that Sebastian Rotella brings alive with sometimes chilling storytelling in Twilight on the Line: Underuorlds and Politics at the US...

...D’Souza is convincing on one point: Reagan was a more sophisticated operator than many critics have acknowledged...

...There is no analysis of his corrupt hold on power in the city, or of the damage he did to the nationwide struggle for black political power...

...involvement in ethnic conflicts, excluding military action, carries no guarantee of success...

...He said as much in the midst of the 1990 budget negotiations...

...He argues that when the president mistakenly addressed his secretary of housing as “Mr...

...He may yet enjoy the ultimate vindication should his namesake son, currently Texas’ popular governor, attain the White House in 2000...

...This eminently readable, but well-documented (430 footnotes) study discusses how the US...

...They were the years when Asian vessels, packed like slave ships with illegal Chinese immigrants, were found to be unloading their US.-bound cargo on the Pacific shore near Tijuana (1993...

...And it is much more than the corrosive mix of violence, drugs, and illegal immigration explored here...

...On the other side of the racial divide, Shipler has blacks testify about white brutality, committed by vicious cops and lynch mobs, offered as justification for many blacks’ belief that whites are the really violent race...

...But that doesn’t keep him from exploring those same dimensions of Disney’s own character...

...At each stage, the U.S...

...I’ve been at the head table for many years, and now I wonder what else is out there.’’ His themeless 1992 campaign offered scant alternative to the brilliantly honed empathy of Bill Clinton...

...But U.S...

...With few exceptions, our narrator removes any critical judgment from his telling of their tales...

...Perot conceived a grudge against Bush anyway...

...Equally boggling is information, woven neatly into the story, such as: At one point in the early 1990s three brothers held the command posts of federal police units in three contiguous states in northwest Mexico, creating what one young state prosecutor (himself brutally murdered) called “a triangle of control” for drug trafficking...

...Similarly, there are no voices speaking out about the virtues of racial integration and assimilation, despite their value to many white ethnic immigrants as well as most blacks...

...comparisons to Leonardo, Hogarth, Daumier, and Matisse were routinely proferred, except by those critics who saw in Disney something entirely new and unprecedented in art...

...An establishmentarian in a country suspicious of elites, a patrician in an incresingly populist party, a gentleman in an ungracious era, Bush’s efforts to square the circle of his own contradictions at times approached cognitive dissonance...

...Most striking of all was the rise of the Mexican drug cartels and the violence that accompanied their growing power...

...We do not converse across the racial line...

...Wanting more than anything else to free his own nation from the Vietnam syndrome, Bush concluded offensive operations in hopes of maintaining his domestic coalition...

...Callahan notes correctly that formulating U.S...

...Based on the evidence of this deeply researched, scrupulously balanced volume, Bush’s modesty may be misplaced...

...nothing to sully this beautiful place and this job I’ve been privileged to hold...

...Third, U.S...

...CLIFFORD DOERKSEN is a Woodrow Wilson Fellow in History at Princeton University...

...Contrary to popular impressions at the time, on the issue of Iraq the president’s backbone needed no stiffening by Margaret Thatcher or anyone else...

...role in Central America’s conflicts clandestinely helped Guatemalans and Salvadorans north and across the US...

...Instead, supporters of such programs or people get a free pass to tell their side of the story...

...when the Mexican ruling party’s presidential candidate was gunned down in a Tijuana slum (1994...

...The Reluctant Pol by Richard Norton Smith GEORGE BUSH IS THE FIRST healthy ex-president since William Howard Taft to forego writing a White House memoir...

...should not blindly become engaged in conflicts that are peripheral to the country’s core interests, such conflicts can be relevant to America’s interests...

...This alone was enough to ensure suspicions among movement conservatives for whom government is not an honorable calling, as Bush asserted, but the enemy within...

...Few white Americans,” Shipler writes, “have much grasp of how they are seen by African-Americans because few whites ask the question and if they did most blacks would probably be more polite than honest...

...In a sense, the world that for centuries had left the border pretty much alone roared in like an occupying army in the globalizing OS, bringing with it international mafias, the transnational flow of the desperately poor, and booming global trade...

...Reared in a family tradition of public service, subsequently polished at Yale, each man capably filled several appointive positions before being elevated to the presidency by a legendary sponsor whose shadow he could never quite escape...

...This is reason enough to read Callahan’s book carefully LAWRENCE J. KORB, a former assistant secretary of defense, is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution...

...The real subject of The Magic Kingdom, however, is not Disney’s psychology but his work and its underlying cultural significance...

...and El Paso...

...There are hints of this in Twilight on the Line: the Tijuana graffiti artist who wonders, “What do I have to do with Mexico City or Sinaloa, if I spent my life shopping here in San Ysidro [California] at Ralph‘s and Safeway...

...Nonetheless, one can disagree with that prescription and still find the book well worth reading...

...It’s the other painting, the one of a border that draws people - especially on the Mexican side - for the opportunity, the freshness, the freedoms and futuristic gaze it offers, that remains little more than a sketch...

...Callahan’s prescription involves three interrelated components: First, the U.S...

...he muses during his unsuccessful 1980 campaign...

...Nor did the Bush White House ever believe that economic sanctions alone could eject Saddam from Kuwait...

...Having allowed a cast of blacks and whites to explore several areas of mutual misconception, Shipler concludes that whites have the greater responsibility for distorting reality and exacerbating the racial divide...

...The new book has the feel of a writer who has brought the foreign correspondent’s detached perspective back home and applied it to the racial divide...

...can develop such a policy...

...Perhaps people were simply tired of the mouse and ready for a new cartoon character...

...government’s squeeze on the Caribbean that rechanneled the drug flow through Mexico...

...made a bid to , I transform the Manassas National Battlefield Park into a theme park, intellectuals reared up in protest and ultimately defeated the project, even though it enjoyed the strong support of local businesses and politicians...

...Bush, too, seems a man at peace with himself, having demonstrated through his recent skydiving exploits and November dedication of his presidential library that life begins at 72...

...In book after book Reagan aides have charted, in often painful detail, the president’s disturbing lack of interest in and lessthanstellar grasp of vital national issues...

...The first wave was triggered by the breakup of the Austro-Hungxian and Ottoman Empires, the second by the dissolution of the great colonial empires, and the third by the collapse of communism...

...When Shipler does inject his voice, in the introduction to the book and the concluding chapter, he offers the simple but profound insight that black and white Americans live as strangers...

...credibility will suffer far more if the United States fails to try military action in the face of unchecked barbarism than if it tries and fails, as it did in Lebanon and Somalia...

...The critics think I’m corny,” he told his studio associates...