political booknotes
political book notes American Political Institutions in the 1970s: A Political Science Quarterly Reader. Columbia, $17.50/6.95. The- Collapse of Democracy. Robert Moss. Arlington House, $8.95....
...Successful communist infiltration, leftist manipulation, and subversive techniques in Chile, Portugal, and elsewhere are laboriously analyzed by MOSS, who, we are told, “viewed radical activities first hand...
...Policy Analysts in the Bureaucracy...
...Gerald de Villiers...
...His reason for the collapse of free societies...
...Morrow, $8.95...
...Sanford, managing editor of Z?ze New Republic, just hates Ralph Nader, but is unable in this hysterical, padded, and repetitive book, ever to explain why...
...Dilemmas of Masculinity: A Study of College Youth...
...The Conscience of a Young Conservative...
...Sanford’s book is not so much a pungent political commentary (as he seems to imagine it is) as an excursion across the undulating landscape of his own frustrated ambitions...
...For example, a thorough and cynical examination of the much-vaunted Kaiser Permanente Health Maintenance Organization ends on this outofthe-blue note: “Ultimately health care will be delivered full force into the age of corporate capitalism...
...Society, Freedom, and Conscience: The Coming Revolution in Virginia, Massachusetts, and New York Jack P. Greene, Richard L. Bushman, Michael Kammen, eds...
...Here he is on the Democratic nominee: “Truman, in a white Palm Beach suit and wearing a gaudy convention badge, followed immediately...
...A gloomy text by Foreign Policy editor Robert Moss, who predicts totalitarian takeovers in Great Britain, the Continent, and, yes, even the United States, beginning only a year after Orwell’s own vision...
...Parties and Party Systems: A Framework for Analysis...
...Disaster by Decree: The Supreme Court Decisions on Race and the Schools...
...They are rehabilitated by getting older...
...He looked very cocky, and talked accordingly...
...Norton, $9.95...
...But mostly they don’t seem to stand up very well today...
...This chronicle of British politics in the 1960s will be stiff going for many American readers, but worth the trouble of groping through references to names and events you’ve never heard of...
...Richard Crossman...
...The burden of his remarks is reported by able and reliable colleauges...
...Harper and Row, $8.95...
...But not by prisons...
...Power and the Presidency: The Men, the Policies, and the Office...
...The only answer, they say, is a system wholly controlled by the public-the complications of which they discuss not at all...
...Every so often a cry of longing for Mencken is heard in the land, the point always being that he, uniquely, would have been able to see through our contemporary idiocies...
...His campaign has not been that of a statesman, nor even that of the wiser and decenter sort of politician;it has been that of a third rate rabble rouser...
...Cornell, $13.50...
...With this exception...
...Arnold J. Meltsner...
...Aggregating the figures for crimes included in the FBI’s crime index-murder, manslaughter, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny, and auto theft-84 per cent of all arrests involve people 29 or younger...
...Joseph C. Goulden, ed...
...The Imperial Shah: An Informal Biography...
...Prognosis Negative: orisis in the Health Care System Health/PAC, David Kotelchuck, eds...
...Richard B. Mancke...
...Prisoners are older when tHey get out than when they went in...
...Cambridge, $32.50/10.95...
...The crimes I have in mind are murder, forceable rape, robbery, aggravated assault, and arson...
...He has appealed, not to the common Sense of the people as a whole, but to the itch for advantage of vicious racketeers and prehensile and mainly highly devious minorities...
...The explanation must be sought in a creeping paralysis of will,” he writes...
...It is folly to expect any significant numbers of prisoners to come out better or less dangerous than they went in...
...Now that Harrison is out and feuding with the new management, Sanford portrays him as a three-fourths senile Nader groupie...
...Crime and Punishment: A Radical Solution...
...Vintage, $2.95...
...There is much tehous material on delegates, not much in the way of perceptive description...
...The New England States: People, Politics and Power in the Six New England States...
...the most memorable is a small newspaper clipping about a 70-year-old man who robbed a bank 45 minutes after the George Washington University hospital turned him away for lack of funds...
...Here is his report, fded a few days before the 1948 election: “Truman...
...Presidential Power and the Constitution...
...This book is a terrible embarrassment to The New Republic press...
...It’s thin stuff, by today’s standards...
...But the sad fact is that if these dispatches by Mencken had not been adorned by the famous by-line, no one would have thought it worthwhile to reprint them...
...The propensity to commit crimes declines precipitously with maturity...
...The clearest indication that this is a useful and important book is that the civil service bureaucracy in Whitehall has been trying for two years to prevent its publication...
...New Republic, $7.95...
...Convicts are not all as saintly as Victdr Hugo’s Jean Valjean...
...Me and Ralph: Is Nader Unsafe for America...
...Some people who have committed very serious crimes of violence should be given incapacitating sentences to protect everyone else...
...Squeaking By: U. S. Energy Policy Since the Embargo...
...Norton, $12.95...
...The Unseen Revolution: How Pension Socialism Came to America...
...Some of them deserve to be in prison, but for our good and not for their own good...
...Columbia, $8.95...
...Peter F. Bucker...
...across the globe” and so should know...
...Mirra Komarovsky...
...William Worthy...
...Giovanni Sartori...
...Mencken’s Last Campaign: H.L...
...It is the facts which stand out in this collection of articles...
...I grow daily to honor facts more and more, and theory less and less,” he wrote 140 years ago...
...Whether the criminal ages inside a prison cell or at liberty, after the passage of years he is less dangerous...
...What results, at least in this volume, is a thoughtful, thorough examination of the New England region, with hardly a tinge of academic prose...
...California, $10.00...
...Stein and Day, $8.95...
...Atlantic-Little, Brown, $8.95...
...The fact is overlaid, almost casually, by a neo-Marxist ideology, which is pronounced rather than proved...
...Here’s an example of his ability to free himself from the usual solutions and see some ways out that make practical sense: “The failure of planned and organized rehabilitation doesn’t mean prisons serve no purpose...
...Persons 62 34 or younger account for 89.1 per cent of all arrests for these crimes...
...Holt, Rinehart and Winston...
...The Rape of our Neighborhoods...
...New Republic, $8.95...
...The Diaries of a Cabinet Minister...
...Scribners, $12.50...
...Like Nader, Harrison was helpful to Sanford early in his career, and the book describes scenes of Sanford’s fawning sycophancy while Harrison was at the helm of The New Republic...
...Donald Lambro...
...Neal R. Peirce...
...This is the seventh in a series of regional volumes which look at the United States in the ’70s...
...The executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union has written a book that is refreshing in its departure from the conventional formulas of the Left...
...David Sanford...
...Mencken’s reputation undoubtedly derives from the fact that by comparison with his colleagues, most of whom were nev& allowed to stray beyond the hardest of b r d news, Mencken had strong opinions, and was not restrained by editors from expressing them vigorously...
...Allan P. Sindler...
...Norton, $9.95...
...Mencken on the 1948 Election...
...Cornell, $11.50...
...Using the case study method, the author examines the changing attitudes of males towards their “self-identity” and “role behavior” in an age when traditional roles are being questioned...
...For some reason, Mencken’s prowess as political commentator has been greatly exaggerated over the years...
...By holding people in prison until they are in their thirties, then, some people are rehabilitated...
...The authors are skeptical about nearly every proposal for national health insurance, arguing that all are public subsidies of a wasteful private system...
...Edward S. Corwin...
...Unchosen Presidents: The Vice President and Other Frustrations of Presidential Succession...
...Unfortunately, the case studies consisted of interviews with only 62 college seniors at an aU-male Ivy League university in 1969-70, when everything for this age group was distorted by the Vietnam war and the draft...
...California, $5.95...
...Arlington House, $6.95...
...b o A. Graglia...
...Aryeh Neier...
...Philip C. Dolce, George H. Skau...
...Like his previous books, this one is based on a year-and-a-half of travel across the country, 1,500 interviews with the natives (out-doing you-know-who), and perusal of a myriad of books, articles, newspaper clippings...
...And age makes a big difference...
...has failed ingloriously...
...Its most revealing part deals with Sanford’s treatment of his former boss Gil Harrison...
...The late author was one of Britain’s cleverest and most acerbic political personalities, and his diaries draw a striking picture of the role of bureaucracy and petty ambition in affairs of state that will be familiar indeed to Washington Monthly readers...
...Thomas Carlyle had the line on this book...
Vol. 8 • July 1976 • No. 5
