poltical book notes
political booknotes Aiken: Senate Diary, January 1972-January 1975. George D. Aiken. Stephen Greene, $12. The Alms Race: The Impact of American Voluntary Aid Abroad. Eugene Linden....
...George W. Ball...
...William Appleman Williams...
...The Futile System John J. Rhodes, EPM Publications, $8.95...
...Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, $12.95...
...SO, too, Larry Grathwohl is keeping on the alert: ‘‘I am still working against Weathermen and other radicd conspiracies,” he writes Ft the end of the book...
...Houghton Mifflin, $12.50...
...William Manners...
...Bobbs-Merrill, $8.95...
...Weybright & Talley, $1 5. Forces of Order: Police Behavior in Japan and the United States...
...Bringing Down America...
...To govern is to choose,’ M. Mendes-France used to say-or, in other words, it is the duty of a chief of government to exercise his options while he can, not seek to preserve them...
...One impression these letters give is that the immaturity of our erstwhile radical leaders, disguised at the time because of the passionate response to the Vietnam War, is now clearly manifest in their personal lives...
...Satellite Spies: “he Frightening Impact of a New Technology...
...He liquidated the war in ninety days...
...John Rhodes is a conservative Republican but don't let that scare you...
...Bobbs-Merrill, $8.95...
...Putnam’s, $12.95...
...Doris Kearns...
...All of these goodies, and more, were received by grateful Members who did not have to cast an embarrassing vote in order to get them...
...Univ...
...Options had to be preserved...
...In his capacity as Chairman of the House Administration Committee, Hays is arrogant, argumentative, partisan and utterly ruthless...
...So, too, the Weathermen are prepared to wait...
...One of the better Nader books...
...of California, $10.95...
...Robert Brandon, Jonathan Rowe, Thomas Stanton...
...The Drugging of the Americas: How Multinational Drug Companies Say One Thing about Their Products to Physicians in the United States, and Another Thing to Physicians in Latin America...
...In Our Time...
...David H. Bayley...
...Stonehill, $9.95/$3.95...
...but not that brave...
...The idea is excellent-to evaluate CARE, America’s foremost foreign aid charity, by visiting what it considers to be its best program...
...Atheneum, $15...
...Elliot Richardson...
...The freshmen, most of whom would be facing stiff challenges in the next election, may have felt brave at the start of the 94th Congress...
...Dick Dabney...
...Holt, Rinehart & Winston, $12.95...
...Kenneth Michael Robinson...
...Hubert H. Humphrey...
...Sveral months later he became a fugitive rather than face a possibly long prison term, and for the next year he and his wife, Anita, undertook a clandestine correspondence...
...The Great American Mail-Fraud Trial...
...QuadranglelNew York Times...
...I’m such an egomaniac I figure if I’m an egominiac then it’s a good quality...
...Ellen Gibson Wilson...
...Chairman Hays is-and there is really no other way to put it-a bully...
...The Dark Side of Camelot...
...Harper & Row, $7.95...
...Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders...
...Nelson Thompson...
...Little, Brown, $12.95...
...The Loyal Blacks...
...Joseph C. Goulden...
...Diplomacy in a Crowded World: An American Foreign Policy...
...Clark Mollenhoff, forward...
...The Exploring Spirit: America and the World, Then and Now...
...Here’s a brief excerpt that is typical of the kind of insight Ball brings to bear on foreign policy: “. . .the policy drift which led us into the swamps and jungles in the first instance was encouraged by a dogmatic pragmatism fashionable in political science circles in the early 1960s...
...In 1973 Abbie Hoffman was arrested and charged with selling cocaine to a police undercover agent...
...That it was a false wisdom has been repeatedly shown by experience...
...Avon, $2.45...
...Unfortunately, however, the book is marred by an excess of zealotry and an almost certainly misplaced belief that the Weathermen still represent an on-going threat to American society...
...It is well known that the author wants to be Secretary of State...
...Putnam’s, $7.95...
...It’s hard to keep taxes from being dull, but this book succeeds about as well as one can reasonably hope...
...It discouraged efforts to examine long-range objectives rigorously or to measure dangers and costs over the long pull or to decide how far we should pursue a given course if success did not come as hoped...
...If a President fails or refuses to make a clear-cut decision on long-term policy, he will have less rather than more freedom to maneuver as events alter the facts and compel further action...
...A testimony to Wayne Hays’ strength is the fact that the 75 freshman Democrats who came to Washington determined to smash the seniority system, ousted three committee chajrmen but left Hays alone...
...Lies, Damn Iies, and Statistics: The Manipulation of Public Opinion in America...
...If you can bear another Rockefeller book, this is a solid effort by two able reporters...
...In return, he gets their support...
...Scribner’s, $8.95...
...David Lavender...
...Therein lies the key to his immense power...
...Norton, $16.95...
...in this fast-paced modern age, time relentlessly destroys unexercised options...
...Playboy, $1.75...
...Basic, $12.50...
...That, in essence, was the story of Vietnam from the beginning...
...This book suggests that he would be a good one...
...I am certain that President Kennedy never believed, in the fall of 1961, that cleaning the Viet Cong out of South Vietnam would be worth the deployment of American combat forces on the Asian mainland...
...Random House, $10...
...But the book is marred by Linden’s somewhat naive, militantly anti-development bias that seem to indiscriminantly deplore all roads, schools, and clinics...
...Thomas E. Patterson, Robert D. McClure...
...Harper & Row, $6.95...
...Perhaps that is why so many of them seem to have given up on reforming society and have become more interested in outlandish methods of reforming the psyche...
...The Radical Soap Opera...
...Larry Grathwohl, Frank Reagan...
...Michael Wheeler...
...The Voices of Guns...
...David Zane Mdowitz...
...Frank Riessman...
...Few men in either chamber understand political power as well as Wayne Hays...
...Political Terrorism: The Offer You Can Refuse...
...He knows how to get it and once he has it, he knows what to do with it...
...Morrow, $8.95...
...Daniel Boorstin...
...Milton Silverman...
...Elmo R. Zumwalt...
...Hays, in his role as Chairman of the Democratic congressional committee, oversees the allocation of party funds to Democratic congressional candidates...
...Donn B. Parker...
...David Lewis...
...The Voice: Life at The Village Voice...
...Norton, $10...
...An exceptionally literate and readable account of how Larry Grathwohl infiltrated the Weathermen in 1969-1970, and then testified against them...
...Ellen Frankfort...
...The impression one gets from Ellen Frankfort’s carelessly written and under-edited book is that The Village Voice is a newspaper crawling with egotistical writers who spend most of their time monitoring each others’ paychecks, being offended when anyone cuts a word out of their copy, and trying to outdo one another in the radicalness of their cheek...
...Morrow, $8.95...
...How’s that...
...Successive administrations followed a Micawberish course, hoping that by abjuring long-range plans they could avoid irreversible decisions...
...The Education of a Public Man: My Life and Politics...
...Norton, $7.95...
...Many of Linden’s comments about the country’s problems are insightful: “My biggest difficulty in seeing people in the Lesothan government was that many of them were not there, but in Washington, London, Brussels-anywhere but home.’’ Equally convincing was Linden’s indictment of CARE as a public relations-conscious, inept organization that rarely perceives the long-term implications of the programs it is funding...
...Quantitative Economic Policy and Planning: Theory and Models of Economic Control...
...In 1954, while briefly assisting a French Prime Minister, I encountered a competing principle that seemed more valid...
...But this account makes it clear why she didn’t...
...After all, when Mendes-France found his country saddled with an endless struggle in Vietnam, he did not raise the ante and hope for a better hand...
...Nicolas Spulber, Ira Horowitz...
...Putnam’s, $12.95...
...Sexpionage: The Exploitation of Sex by Soviet Intelligence...
...General Maxwell D. Taylor...
...it was the received wisdom...
...Norton, $8.95...
...thesis, but mostly it is perceptive and engrossing...
...Well, however untidy that might have been, the book that emerged is a very tidy job, indeed...
...Nash, $8.95...
...Parts of it are dull reading, recalling its origins as a Ph.D...
...Ellen Frankfort appears to have been one of the worst of the lot, perennially grumbling about why she never quite made it up the status ladder to the prized position of staff writer...
...Liveright, $9.95...
...Univ...
...I Never Wanted to be Vice-President of Anything” An Investigative Biography of Nelson Rockefeller...
...An example: "Wayne L. Hays is a paradox...
...Three Perspectives on Ethnicity in America: Blacks, Chicanos, and Native Americans...
...Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, $7.95...
...America Confronts a Revolutionary World: 17761976...
...Michael Kramer, Sam Roberts...
...An excerpt from this book appeared in the April issue of The Washington Monthly...
...These have resulted in a 116% increase in the number of trips a Member can make to his District and back, an 85% increase in a Member's stationery allowance, a 300% increase for optional travel and a 75% increase in the funds available for District office rentals...
...Moreover, although Linden’s writing has its engaging moments, too much of the book is devoted to long digressions on arcane aspects of African history and local politics...
...The Unseeing Eye: The Myth of Television Power in National Politics...
...Doubleday, $1 2.95...
...Anita Hoffman replies: “As I write this it occurs to me that the psychosexual revolution may be the ultimate one, destined to complete itself only after imperialism is defeated...
...The Best Years...
...With his congressional seat relatively safe, Hays willingly takes the heat for his colleagues...
...Anita and Abbie Hoffman...
...Kearns, and her husband, Richard Goodwin...
...of California, $8.50...
...The authors owe a considerable, unacknowledged, debt to Edward Jay Epstein, but their book is nevertheless well worth reading...
...Eric Hoffer...
...Anyways, I told them in the New Land people will grow via gestalt expansion instead of linearly...
...The Creative Balance: Government, Politics, and the Individual in America’s Third Century...
...To ”America with Love: Letters from the Unclkrground...
...A very good book about a very good man...
...ExpresSed in slogan form, it taught that an American President should, so far as possible, ‘preserve his options.’ What this most often meant in practice was an ad hoc approach to the individual steps in an evolving situation...
...Wayne Hays does for Members that which most of them want done but would never dare do for themselves...
...His book is consistently interesting and his comments about his colleagues are frank and insightful...
...Precarious Security...
...Since that time, the Hays committee has issued at least 23 such orders...
...Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream...
...Patience and Fortitude: Fiorello La Guardia...
...Luce, $10...
...People will go around getting acquainted by asking ‘Who are you?’ rather that ‘What do you do...
...Hoffman writes...
...After all,” he writel, “Lenin, Castro, and Mao Tse-tung had to wait many years before history was ripe for their successful revolutions...
...The War That Never Was...
...Yet, to my knowledge, John F. Kennedy never faced or made the explicit decision that we would not commit such forces, nor did he define the outside limits of our effort...
...in fact, when I told him that this was where I thought a limited intervention would inevitably lead, he replied with an explosive denial...
...In 1971, he succeeded in pushing through a bill giving the House Administration Committee authority to issue orders adjusting Members' office allowances and personal benefits without a ratifying vote by the full House...
...The Inner-City Child...
...Harper & Row, $12.50...
...Random House, $6.95...
...Carlos E. Cortes, et al., eds...
...Yet, because they failed to make the irreversible decisionor, in other words, to exercise the option to extricate America when it was easy-escape became increasingly costly...
...The Financiers: Michael C. Jensen...
...A Good Man: The Life of Sam J. Ervin...
...Putnam’s, $10.95...
...Bradley Earl Ayers...
...Francis M. Watson...
...Frank Church, introduction...
...Arlington House, $7.95...
...Remember all the squabbling between publishers, editors, Ms...
...Pantheon...
...During the middle 1960s I suggested to my colleagues that the aphorism might be a sound guiding rule for an American President...
...Tax Politics: How They Make You Pay and What You Can Do About It...
...Crime by Computer...
...On Watch: A Memoir...
...California: A Bicentennial History...
...Vin McLellan, Paul Avery...
...The country selected was Lesotho, a small, impoverished, independent black enclave within the Union of South Africa...
...Sandra Hochman, Sybil Wong...
Vol. 8 • June 1976 • No. 4
