political book notes
political book notes The American Co mmonweaith- 1976. Nathan Glazer, Irving Kristol, eds. Basic, $10. In an introduction, Daniel P. Moynihan explains the former liberals (more...
...An excerpt appears in this issue of Tlze Washington Monthly...
...Univ...
...Victor Reuther...
...to record that he was a hawk...
...One’s enjoyment is marred slightly by the author’s considerable ego and his firm’s greed...
...The distinctive characteristic of more recent activist courts has been to extend the role of what government could do, even when the government did not want to do it...
...Frank Smallwood...
...Gerald M. Stern...
...Isaac Don Levine, ed...
...Ivan Illich...
...This is the story of a law suit brought against the company by 600 of the survivors...
...Robert Sommer...
...David Ferrie and Clay Sliaw in New Orleans) and the CIA, in a plot to assassinate the President...
...The list of acknowledgements (foundations, councils, institutes, graduate schools, not to say editors, lawyers, students, typists) is as long as your arm, and the book itself, an exhaustive review of the broadcasting “fairness,” is appropriately judicious both in its tone and in its conclusion...
...The End of Imprisonment...
...Stephen Greene Press, $10.50...
...of Pittsburgh, $9.95...
...While the case doesn’t reach the trial stage which usually provides the only excitement in legal narratives, this account of negotiation and settlement just happens to be totally absorbingone of the best reads of the year...
...Bayard Rustin...
...University of Indiana, $10...
...Yale, $20/$8.95...
...It published some of the first articles on the Soviet Gulag penal camps...
...Arnold and Porter took $3 million of the $13-million settlement, whch is of course no rnore than we have come to expect from our legal brethren but does seem a bit much when it is extracted from poor people you color yourself noble for representing...
...Jan G. Deutsch...
...Pantheon, $8.95...
...Arlington House, $12.95...
...In other words, Kennedy, at the crucial moment, acted as a dove but then wanted his friend, Bartlett the journalist...
...Cahners, $13 S O . The du Ponts: Portrait of a Dynasty...
...Brown seems to feel that the system “is threatened most seriously by the unreasoned attacks of simplistic self-servers who pander to the lowest urges that plague our troubled people...
...Praeger, $6.95...
...Some thought that “the thing to do was to do even more of what wouldn’t work...
...Awakening from the American Dream...
...Saturday Review, $12.95...
...Fred W. Friendly...
...FairneSs Broadcasting...
...Here we have one more contribution to assassinology, this one rather more obviously a work of fantasy than is normal...
...Clark Mollenhoff...
...Oxford, $8.95...
...Selling the People’s Cadillac: The Edsel and Corporate Responsibility...
...The Buffalo Creek Disaster: The Story of the Survivors’ Unprecedented Lawsuit...
...West View Press, $12.50...
...McKay, $9.95/$4.95...
...Alonzo Hamby...
...Isaac Don Levine appears to have devoted almost all his time to warning Americans about the “deadly dangers threatening ciiilization from Communist ideology and influence,” and a good many of his articles are included here, as well as others by Margaret Mitchell, Bertrand Russell (in his anti-Communist phase) and Ayn Rand...
...Universe, $12.50/$4.95...
...In an introduction, Daniel P. Moynihan explains the former liberals (more recently “neoconservatives”), whose contributions to this book were published in a special issue of The Public hterest last year (among their number are Uaniel Bell, James Q. Wilson, Seymour Ma, i n Lipset, as well as Glazer and Kristol...
...Reagan: The Political Chameleon...
...This detailed memoir tells the story of the Reuther family from Valentine Reuther’s arrival in West Virginia from Germany to the important roles played by his four sons in the establishment of the United Automobile Workers, one of whom dictated this account...
...V Was for Victory: Politics and American Culture During World War 11...
...One looks forward to Pat’s book on Jerry...
...And at this point the liberals of The Public Interest discovered that they were libertarians also, and, indeed, libertarians first...
...Paul Dickson...
...Mark Duke...
...Free and Independent...
...Simon and Schuster, $9.95...
...Michael Harrington...
...The ImDerial Years: The U.S...
...Plain Talk, a quarterly magazine, was published between 1946 and 1950, and it was entirely devoted to “alerting Americans to the dangers of communism...
...In general, this is a mean-spirited and very biased book, and Brown’s attempt to depict Reagan as a political chameleon-who is not a conservative at heart but only opportunistically so-seems to be wide of the mark...
...He proceeds to “implicate” these people (e.g...
...Barry Commoner...
...The Hidden Job Market: A System to Beat the System...
...Ronald Reagan’s eight-year rule of California greatly irritated his predecessor on the job, Pat Brown, whom Reagan had defeated in the 1966 gubernatorial race...
...The author has read all the sources but he lacks the understanding of one who participated in the events or even talked to those who did...
...Columbia, $5.95...
...The distinguished Yale historian tries his hand at popular history (no footnotes...
...Regnery, $8.95...
...A rebuttal, therefore, is unlikely, but this book should be read as fictional nonetheless...
...Friendly believes that the fairness doctrine is unwonted government interference with freedom of the press, but that broadcasters have a moral obligation to provide access voluntarily for opposing viewpoints...
...Since he quit CBS News in 1965 over its refusal to carry the Fulbright Vietnam hearings, Friendly has been languishing in the world of foundations...
...Congress Oversees the Bureaucracy: Studies in Legislative Supervision...
...The Brothers Reuther and the Story of the UAW...
...The Good Guys, the Bad Guys and the First Amendment: Free Speech vs...
...Plain Talk: An Anthology from the Leading Anti-Communist Magazine of the 40s...
...Brown has already written one book about Reagan, dealing with his first term as governor, and now he has weighed in with a second volume, this one designed to warn us against Reagan’s presidential candidacy...
...In the particular areas that come under discussion, the point about the increasingly coercive tendency of public policy is made repeatedly...
...Drucker: The Man Who Invented the Corporate Society...
...Medical Nemesis: The Expropriation of Health...
...Robert D. Morrow...
...Strategies for Freedom: The Changing Pattern of Black Protest...
...The Founding Finaglers...
...Knopf, $8.95...
...Mayday at Yale...
...In sum, this volume constitutes an excellent introduction to “neoconservatism...
...Since 1939...
...The one new point is that high energy consumption is one of the villains in the breakdown of family and neighborhood...
...The Twilight of Capitalism: A Marxian Epitaph...
...The programs probably wouldn’t work...
...Houghton Mifflin, $1 6.95...
...The Electronic Battlefield...
...The response...
...Bruce Miroff...
...John J. Tarrant...
...Edmund G. (Pat) Brown...
...The Dos Passos scattershot technique occasionally seems a little strained, but the professor is a fine writer, and his sure sense of mood shows that he has taken full advantage of writing about a period he has actually lived through...
...The book is likely to appeal mostly to those already converted to the cause...
...Betrayal...
...Nathan Miller...
...McKay, $12.50...
...He just can’t seem to get over the fact that the notions of “big government” he himself was nurtured on have now gone out of style, nor does he tell us that his own son, Jerry Brown, Reagan’s successor, has mounted attacks on big government that are almost identical to Reagan’s...
...some of it, e, g. Wilson’s essay on ‘“fie Rise of the Bureaucratic State” will be familiar territory for Washington Monthly readers...
...Random House, $10...
...A solid but academic indictment of the presidency of John Kennedy...
...Despite the impenetrability of its prose and its frequently over-stated conclusions, this is an extremely exhilarating challenge to current theories of health, as different from those of the AMA as from Edward Kennedy’s...
...Tom Jackson, Davidyne Mayleas, Quadrangle/New York Times, $12...
...The Pittston Company was responsible for the dam that broke with a resulting flood that cost the lives of 125 people who lived along Buffalo Creek in West Virginia...
...Building on what may be genuine memoirs, he extends the scope of his tale by bringing into it a number of people whose names have appeared in the newspapers in the past decade in connection with the Kennedy assassination...
...For instance, in his essay, “Towards An Imperial Judiciary,” Nathan Glazer writes: “In the past the role of activist courts was to restrict the executive and legislature in what they could do...
...John Taft...
...A crucial example is his treatment of the Cuban missile crisis, where he could have found out from Ted Sorensen that Bobby really gave Dobrynin confidential assurances that we were going to pull our missiles out of Turkey and from Charles Bartlett that President Kennedy denounced Stevenson for suggesting the same thing...
...Pragmatic lllusions: The Presidential Politics of John F. Kennedy...
...Random House, $8.95...
...John Morton Blum...
...The Poverty of Power...
...At this point an element almost of coercion entered not only the discourse about public policy, but increasingly public policy itself...
...Martins, $8.95...
...Rufus E. Miles, Jr...
...The people Morrow “implicates” share one thing in common: they are all dead...
...The author describes himself as having been “a contract employee of the Central Intelligence Agency” in the late fifties and early sixties...
...It is a plodding, plank-by-plank story, but an important contribution to the history of the U. S. labor movement...
...Familiar but still persuasive argument from the limits to growth school...
...Weybright and Talley, $14.95/$6.9 5. The Man Who Pardoned Nixon...
...Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, $12.95...
...In the middle of the 1960s a number of social science findings dealt an unprecedented blow to the operating assumptions on which liberal social programs were then being devised,” Moynlhan writes...
...Morris Ogul...
Vol. 8 • May 1976 • No. 3
