political book notes
political book notes The ACLU on Trial. William H. McIlhany. Arlington House, $8.95. As an institution, the American Civil Liberties Union is ripe for discussion these days, because,...
...A collection of recent articles from Political Science Quarterly, most of them by big-name professors and dealing with fairly current matters, like Watergate and the latest versions of congressional reform...
...Pocket Books, $1.50...
...Jack Bass, Walter DeVries...
...The American Judicial Tradition...
...Simon & Schustcr, $12.50...
...Simon & Schuster, $7.95...
...Dayan’s dryly written autobiography, with its wadi-by-wadi accounts of skirmishes and manuevers, marks him down as more tacticiaii than statesman...
...Roger Elwood...
...62 America’s Working Women: A Documentary History, 1600 to the Present...
...the book is a heralding, not an elegy...
...Prentice-Hall, $8.95...
...Joseph Featherstone...
...Howard W. Hallman...
...No Guts, No Glory-How to Fight Dirty Against Management...
...The Transformation of Southern Politics: Social Change and Political Consequence Since 1945...
...Washington Is Leaking...
...Crowell, $10...
...Nobody Speaks for Me...
...Random House, $10...
...The chapter on the Burger court is excellent...
...G. Edward White...
...Fact-filled, if unreflective...
...Thomas J. Cottle...
...Basic, $12.50...
...Another possibility, specifically ruled out in Mcllhany’s analysis of the meaning of conspiracy, is that the “elite” that supports the ACLU is in fact quite willing to support policies that will ultimately undermine its own elitism...
...Marie B. Hecht...
...Beyond the Presidency: The Residues of Power...
...Harcourt Brace, Jovanovich, $17.95...
...Wilson Bryan Key...
...Andrew J. Meltsner...
...Simon W. Gerson...
...Lawrence Welk, Bernice McGeehan...
...Michael Fox...
...As a libertarian, McIlhany believes that he is a truer advocate of liberties than the ACLU...
...New Republic Books, $7.95...
...Dow Jones, $15...
...The Critics...
...Oxford, $15...
...Off the Record...
...Harvard, $15...
...Ashley, $8.95...
...Ethics and Profits: The Crisis of Confidence in American Business...
...Norton, $10.50...
...Reagan here is noble, virtuous, loyal-in short, perfect...
...An excerpt from this book appeared in the July/August issue of The Washington Monthly...
...Moshe Dayan: Story of My Life...
...Ralph Nader, Mark Green, Joel Seligman...
...What Really Happened to the Class of ’65...
...Macmillan, $15.95...
...Richard J. Bernstein...
...As an institution, the American Civil Liberties Union is ripe for discussion these days, because, as McIlhany points out, it has moved in its 50-odd year lifespan away from a “pure” conception of civil liberties to greater and greater approval of government control over individuals-a policy which surely results in a diminution of civil liberties...
...For instance (in discussing the ACLU’s approval of extended government control of the airwaves): “If the ACLU is supported by the wealthy, elite Left of the Council on Foreign Relations and related foundations, why would it favor turning over the captive electronics forums of these establishmentarians to arbitrary bureaucratic control...
...Columbia, $17.50/6.95...
...The President Speaks...
...Milestones...
...Vintage, $6.95...
...It’s written mostly in a style redolent of quarterly journalism...
...talked at length with the arms smuggler out of the Congo, the old missionary from the Zambezi Valley”), but in the end he suc-cumbs to the widespread temptation to immerse his findings in the murky waters of generalization: “What makes a rebel can be quite complicated, or so academic analysis has indicated: relative deprivation or aggression as a result of frustration or societal mimicry of neighboring patterns.: Pete: The Story of Peter V. Cacchione, New York’s First Communist Councilman...
...Columbia, $17.50/6.95...
...The Life and Death of the SLA...
...Faye Levine...
...Basic, $15.95...
...Simon & Schuster, $9.95...
...A hasty, flyweight campaign biography for a campaign that never materialized...
...Nancy Seifer...
...Anchor/Doubleday, $9.95...
...Harper and Row, $12.95...
...McIlhany does little more than expound this paradox, however, because he is also wedded to the orthodoxies of the John Birch Society, which is to say he believes fervently in conspiracies, specifically Communist...
...Answer, because this elite “interlocks” with the agencies in Washington, and so controls both...
...Even her flaws become hidden assets in Elwood’s loving and clumsy hands...
...There is generally no mourning in these pages for what John Egerton calls the Americanization of Dixie...
...A journalist and an academic collaborated on this well put together if uninspired post-civil rights rewrite of V. 0. Key’s Southern Politics...
...Moshe Dayan...
...Prentice-Hall, $7.95...
...Putnam, $8.95...
...Leslie Waller...
...Harold Brayman...
...What Schools Can Do...
...Emergency Employment: A Study in Federalism...
...Bell has done much research and reporting (“I walked the murder mile in Aden...
...Policy Analysts in the Bureaucracy...
...Harry M. Caudill...
...Bruce Mazlish...
...Interhational...
...Nancy Reagan: A Special Kind of Love...
...The Politics of Exclusion...
...200 Years of American Law...
...Among Those Present...
...The kind of gut impression you’d get by driving through any big-city suburb is accurate: the suburbs are richer, whiter, more spacious and faster growing than the inner cities, and the people who live in them are doing well at keeping racial, economic, or commercial diversity inside the city limits...
...Henry Kissinger: The Anguish of Power...
...Media Sexploitation...
...This is a pity, because it surely prevents him from seeing the right answer to interesting questions...
...20th Century Journey: A Memoir of a Life and the Times, Volume I. William L. Shirer...
...Rosalyn Baxandall, Linda Gordon, Susan Reverby, eds...
...Random House, $8.95...
...Morrow, $15...
...Oxford, $19.95...
...Taming the Giant Corporation...
...Macmillan, $10.95...
...Michael N. Danielson...
...Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, $8.95...
...And he may be right, because the ACLU now tends to believe that pure libertarianism permits the “oppression” of one group of citizens by another, and thus the union now favors civil equality more than civil liberty...
...Professor Danielson explores at some length why and how this happens, and generally mourns the loss of an “open society” in America...
...David S, McClellan...
...Les Payne, et al, Ballantine, $1.95...
...We Came to Help...
...for example, only 18 per cent of Americans would prefer to live in cities...
...My America, Your America...
...Art Buchwald...
...America as an Ordinary Country: U. S. Foreign Policy and the Future...
...Dean Acheson: The State Department Years...
...Kissinger: The European Mind in American Policy...
...The Enlightenment in America...
...The Watches of the Night...
...Leonard Silk, David Vogel...
...White’s central theory is that judges moved from being “lawgivers” in the 19th century to “law-makers’’ in the 20th...
...The Culture Barons...
...Atlantic Monthly, $8.95...
...Cornell, $9.75...
...Joseph R. Mancuso...
...Oxford, $18.50...
...Henry F. May...
...If you’re at all familiar with the field you won’t find much new, but for the novice it’s a useful overview...
...J. Bowyer Bell...
...A typically conspiratorial answer, and an unsatisfactory one...
...White, a law professor who also has training as a historian, tries to do for judges what Richard Hofstadter did for politicians in The American Political Tradition-through a series of profiles, trace the broad outlines of 200 years of intellectual history...
...Lehman Engel...
...Jethro K. Lieberman...
...The Vanishing White Man...
...The Restructuring of Social and Political Theory...
...Barred From School: Three Million children...
...What philosophy there is here is sanctimonious stuff about women devoting their every thought and action to their husbands...
...Interesting statistics are scattered throughout...
...Michael Medvcd, David Wallechinsky...
...The aim, well carried out, is to exculpate him from various Cold War sins...
...The Manipulators: America in the Media Age...
...Hide in Plain Sight...
...Norton, $8.95...
...Richard Rosecrance, ed...
...A detailed retelling and reevaluation of the 1954-55 period in American foreign policy, very kind to and reverential of Acheson...
...Delacorte, $8-95...
...Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, $8.95...
...Between Animal and Man: The Key to the Kingdom...
...Nancy Dickerson...
...Stan Steiner...
...Liveright, $8.95...
...Dodd, Mead, $15...
...On Revolt...
...A thorough book on an important subject...
...D e m e t r i o s Caraley, ed...
...Alabama Univ., $9.75...
...American Political Institutions in the 1970s...
...The recurring themes are the dual ascendance of blacks and Republicans on the Southern political scene, both hailed as wonderfully hopeful signs-the first rightly, of course, but the second perhaps not...
...Monika Schwinn, Bernhard Diehl...
...John Stoessinger...
...Robert Sobel...
...Self-portraits of American Working-Class Women...
...California, $10...
...This book doesn’t have the spark and absolute command of Hofstadter’s, but it is meticulously researched and well thought out, if a little too reverential of the majesty of the law...
Vol. 8 • September 1976 • No. 7
