Political Book Notes
Political Book Notes Aiming for the Jugular in New Orleans. William Hardy Davis. Ashley. All the Livelong Day: The Meaning and Demeaning of Routine Work. Barbara Carson. Doubleday, $7.95. An...
...is practicing for his autobiography...
...This book is enlivened by some entertaining profiles of executives who have made it to the top...
...The China Hands: America’s Foreign Service Officers and What Befell Them...
...The venerable columnist presents observations based on his contacts with wielders of power from FDR to Kissinger...
...Part of the “Problems of American Society” series...
...some agencies receive up to 100 per cent...
...The authors also look with skepticism on the establishment of spending limits for political campaigns (it will protect incumbents), but support restricting the size of individual contributions...
...Harper and Row, $15...
...But the question Middleton asks urgently requires examination by first-rate minds...
...It also contains one significant perception: the power game has become so important in our swollen corporate bureaucracies because there is so little work to do...
...In short, what I am trying to do is to simply tell the story of a father and son moving toward each other,” comments the author in the preface of his book...
...MIT Press, $8.95...
...senator, husband, and father, and Supreme Court justice)-which, we learn, was consumed by a concern for the welfare of the “common man...
...Scribner’s, $8.95...
...The Pocket Book of America...
...It may be easy to guess that we don’t need those aircraft carriers...
...Ellen feck...
...Roger Morgan, ed...
...Their real achievement, however, is devising a voucher system for the public financing of political campaigns which would neither punish third parties nor unduly reward established candidates...
...Scribner’s, $9.95...
...For the past ten years, the subject of military preparedness has been so unfashionable among the intellectuals that it has been left almost entirely to people like Middleton...
...0 A Presidential Nation...
...Michael Korda...
...John Kenneth Galbraith...
...The Family: Vital Force or Outworn Institution...
...Pocket Books, $1.95...
...The Gentlemen’s Club: International Control of Drugs and Alcohol...
...Nuclear holocaust would shortcircuit Middleton’s elaborate conjecture on a rather early page...
...Putnam’s...
...Probably the best recent book on campaign financing and the various well-intentioned, but often naive, efforts to reform it...
...Drew Middleton...
...More often the technique does indeed effectively recapture the sense of growing wonder of those fast-receding times...
...Norton, $9.95...
...Witness to Power...
...New York University, $12...
...A highly readable account of the Justice’s life, it should not be taken as a serious attempt at biography...
...For example, he notes, “Today, all the nation’s voluntary agencies put together receive about half their incomes from the government...
...Fortress Press, $2.75...
...Dial, $8.95...
...And when it comes to absolute power we have seen in this grisly century all too many examples of what that can mean...
...This Hungry World...
...Take, for example, the authors’ sensible comment on the limits of full disclosure: “TO put it directly, would a 1972 voter who favored a hard line in Southeast Asia and on college campuses have cast his ballot for George McGovern because of the way Richard Nixon financed his campaign...
...But what do we need...
...Another entry in the Imperial Presidency sweepstakes, by yyt another former White House aide...
...H. R. Shapiro...
...An American Crime Story...
...A t one remove those of us chronicling the lives of the great and near great may be tainted by this same corruption...
...John Pekkanen...
...Washington Journal: Events of 197S1974...
...His first omnibus volume in three years,” says the publicity for this book, whose author does not choose his latinisms lightly...
...Ann Oakley...
...Prentice-Hall, $7.95...
...Beacon, $9.95/$3.95...
...Houghton Mifflin, $10...
...Johns Hopkins, $11.95...
...John and Sharon Farago, eds...
...Thomas E. Cronin...
...It may not be literally true that all power corrupts, but the more it is exercised the more likely it is for the individual to deceive himself into believing that he is infallible...
...The question is not whether they’re worth preserving between covers for history-they are-but whether they’re all worth re-reading in the here and now...
...He then repeats this uninspiring thesis for the rest of the book, as if democracy alone could solve all the problems of modern unionism...
...There are no absolutes that a complex society can live with in its law,” this chapter concludes...
...Pantheon, %&$3.95...
...There is only the computing principle that Burke spoke of-adding, subtracting, multiplying, dividing...
...he Black Book of American Intervention in Chile...
...We Are All POWs...
...Presidential Style: Some Giants and a Pygmy in the White House...
...Alexander M. Bickel...
...Viking, $12.50...
...The two concluding chapters on Vietnam, unfortunately, devolve into a trite antiAmerican harangue...
...It is also based on an assumption that this next war will involve r weapons, an assumption he does little 3 back up...
...Philip Van Doren Stern, ed...
...The author tends to be maudlin at times (especially in telling of his father’s dying days...
...The chapter on the First Amendment, especially, ‘exposes and exemplifies Bickel’s “balancing” approach to constitutional law...
...My Father: A Remembrance...
...We were players without numbers on our jerseys, arrogating to ourselves a power never contemplated by the men who framed the First Amendment to the Constitution...
...John Sloan Dickey...
...Canada and the American Presence...
...Can America Win the Next War...
...However, it is only inevitable if you believe that any explicitly legal defense inevitably leads you into the world of relativism and the balancing of competing values...
...Better Giving: The New Needs of American Philanthro y. George G. Kirstein...
...But Kirstein neither develops this idea nor provides a source for this sweeping assertion...
...Nelson-Hall, 8.95...
...Edgar Z. Friedenberg...
...Since these were the terms in which he defended the Times, the limiting effect of the Supreme Court’s decision was indeed inevitable...
...journal of Washington during 1973 and 1974 only occasionally seems self-indulgent...
...Roth states in the preface that the international union bureaucracy is out of touch with the workers on the local union level (the two “faces” of his title) and that what is needed is more democracy in the union hierarchy...
...The Morality of Consent...
...Phillip Knightley...
...We have a kind of intimacy based on the premise that we are observers beyond the rules of the game...
...Arnold A. Rogow...
...A Funny Thin Happened on the Way to Equality...
...The First Casualty: From the Crimea to Vietnam: The War Correspondent as Hero, Propagandist and Myth Maker...
...wise statesmanship and skillful diplomacy,” are Dickey’s policy recommendations...
...The topic is a beauty...
...Putnam’s, $9.95...
...Edwin Diamond...
...The pygmy is Warren Harding...
...His attempt is basically successful...
...University of California, $1 2. The Disposal of Liberty and Other Industrial Wastes...
...suffers from an inability to criticize any Democrat to the left of George Meany and an unsophisticated acceptance of interest-group politics as a good thing...
...This book is a welcome change from the recent journalistic overemphasis on charity frauds and deceptive fund-raising practices...
...His conclusion is based on a phantasmagoria of statistics about relative troop, weapon, and materiel strengths, and Middleton’s own assessment of social attitudes in both countries...
...He says this is inevitable whenever a freedom formerly unchallenged must be defended in explicit terms...
...Growing Up in America...
...Mentor, $2.50...
...Joseph A. Califano...
...Marquis Childs...
...Writing in an easy, homespun style, Black relates the main episodes of his father’s life (as lawyer, U.S...
...Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, $12.95...
...Soon after coming to Washington as a correspondent for the St...
...The State of the Presidency...
...This book is not part of the solution...
...Greater understanding...
...Frank J. Parker...
...Mid-Century World...
...His studies of censorship during World War I1 and Korea, and the press’ unreflecting acquiescence in it, are.piquant to the reader of 1975...
...Armando Uribe...
...This is a radical change from the days when government was government and charity was charity and never the twain shall meet...
...Kirstein recognizes that the basic problems of American philanthropy are much deeper than this...
...Labor: America’s Two-Faced Movement...
...If this book doesn’t include literally everything Buckley has committed to paper since 1972, it includes samples from a wide variety of sources: his columns, his magazine, speeches, letters to friends, even letters from friends...
...Putnam’s, $9.95...
...Perhaps the best way to classify it would be as the first of the Watergate nostalgia books...
...Finally, in a few chapters (e.g., “Teenage Days, The Senator’s Son”), we are led to believe that Hugo Black, Jr...
...McGraw-Hill, $1 5. In Prison...
...His views on the power of the Fourth Estate are especially interesting...
...Better to recognize from the first that the computing principle is all there is, ought to be, or can be...
...Fred and Grace Hechinger...
...Pocket, $1.50...
...But the chapters on Franklin Roosevelt and Truman have the advantage of Rosenman’s first-hand knowledge as a presidential adviser during these administrations, and the entire book has the advantage of not being psycho-history, which the title threatened...
...Stephen Schlesinger...
...Execution Eve: And Other Contemporary Ballads...
...In this delightful survey of the history of money, Galbraith abandons his unsatisfying attempts at grand synthesis and settles into his natural role as popularizer and debunker extraordinaire...
...Louis Post-Dispatch, Childs became aware of the “temptation to be a player, not just an observer...
...Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went...
...Random House, $8.95...
...Samuel and Dorothy Rosenman...
...Herrick S. Roth...
...Bickel indicates his awareness that the Pentagon Papers case, in which he helped defend The New York Times, actually narrowed freedom of the press...
...David W. Adamany, George 8. Agree...
...Yet the book suffers from a superficial tone, a lack of original research, and the common tendency to generalize nationally from developments which are unique to the New York metropolitan area...
...E. J. Kahn, Jr...
...The giants are the Roosevelts, Wilson and Truman...
...Elizabeth Drew...
...Political Money: A Strategy for Campaign Financin in America...
...James E. Trupin...
...William F. Buckley, Jr...
...But Korda’s analysis of the rules of the game is conventional and uninspired...
...Chuck Noell, Gary Wood...
...The answer is maybe, but not for ten bucks...
...The Dying of the Light...
...Hugo Black, JT...
...Kirstein does stumble on some truths...
...Newsweek Books, $10...
...For a painless understanding of economic mystifications such as inflation and the Federal Reserve System, this book is highly recommended...
...Random House, $8.95...
...The early chapters fulfill the promise of a swashbuckling tale, and the pedagogical burden (truth, of course, is the first casualty) is not permitted to interfere...
...McGrawHill, $8.95...
...Houghton Mifflin, $ ’3 .95...
...Don’t look to Schlesinger for any second thoughts...
...ia, and the Supreme Court-should be strengthened as “counterpoints” to growing presidential power...
...Little, Brown, $5.95...
...Knightley virtually abandons his main subject matter in the excitement, although he is good on how the war correspondents suddenly remembered after My Lai having witnessed earlier atrocities they hadn’t regarded as newsworthy at the time...
...The subtitle gives some indication of the subtlety of the analysis...
...The easiest Watergate book yet, Drew’s day-by-day “Today we learned...
...Houghton Mifflin, $7.95., Schlesinger’s breathless survey of reform groups within the Democratic Party (women, blacks, Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, gays, etc...
...Samizdat Press, $4.95...
...MasonlCharter, $10...
...A coffee-table book in format, it is meatier than many of this genre...
...Richard L. Sklar...
...This twelfth volume of Newsweek’s “Milestones of History” series summarizes the world from 1950 to the present...
...The Tin Kazoo: Television, Politics, and the News...
...University of Chicago, $12.50...
...sensitivity...
...Califano s thought for today is that the other major institutions of our country-which he lists as the Congress, the states and cities, the -m -e .d...
...Kettil Bruun, et al...
...Ray Vicker...
...The New Reformers: Forces for Change in American Politics...
...The Red I6 t Bandit...
...In addition, he presents “Daddy” in such an idolized fashion that we miss much of Hugo Black‘s bad-and apparently more fascinatingside...
...Ibwer...
...The Bureaucratic State...
...How to Get It, How to Use It...
...Yale, $10...
...Bickel’s last work, completed the week before he died, is very much posthumous in tone...
...The Sociolo of Housework...
...On Growth 11...
...No, concludes The New York Times’ military correspondent...
...Corporate Power in an African State: The Political Impact of Multinational Mining Companies in Zambia...
...Random House, $12.95...
...Are abortion and unionized grapes really the sorts of issues Democrats ought to be debating right now, or do they distract attention from problems, like the economy, that affect all people as human beings instead of members of a caucus...
...Friedenberg’s Big Theory is that the inability of modern societies, however prosperous, to help the underprivileged may be attributed to a bitterness and lack of generosity bred into the members of such societies, which he calls, after Nietzsche, “ressentiment...
...Willem Oltmans...
Vol. 7 • September 1975 • No. 7
