Political Book Notes
political book notes Cancer Crusade. Richard N. Rettig. Princeton Univ. Press, $15. When this crusade was launched by the federal government in 1971, House Concurrent Resolution 526...
...Randall Bridwell, Ralph U. Whitten...
...Polity and Theatre in Historical Perspective...
...Occasionally, at least, the power of a good idea did...
...It was of no concern to him that this proposal vitiated the entire thrust of his Moynihan-based education policy...
...Yet Finn was a keen observer of education policy-making as well as an earnest participant...
...Chester E. Finn, Jr...
...At the same time, though, researchers were beginning to find that the new compensatory education programs like Head Start were having almost no effect at all on students’ abilities...
...Marine Policy for America: The United States at Sea...
...The Gun and the Olive Branch: The Roots of Violence in the Middle East...
...Jimmy Carter and American Fantasy: Psychohistorical Explorations...
...Actual shooting wars . . . begin when two nations, in a slow, deadly dance, match group-fantasy cycles, wave for wave...
...David Hirst...
...is to be accomplished by 1976...
...As we repeat these experiences symbolically in our national behavior, we choose leaders who match the current mood and who will resonate to subsequent ones...
...For a field in search of intellectual acceptance nothing is more damaging than an advocate who strains for attention with sensational statements flimsily supported...
...Lexington, $19...
...4.95...
...What Moynihan ended up proposing to Nixon was that the growth in spending for current, apparently useless education programs be decelerated and that a National Institute of Education be established to find out what approaches to education did work, before a new wave of spending began...
...This study of the problems of eliminating chromosome-linked diseases (sickle-cell anemia, for instance) by a lawyer-geneticist is rough sledding at times -it’s an issue of the utmost complexity-but generally worth the effort of reading it...
...Interest-group liberalism,” as political scientist Theodore Lowi has described it, was a philosophy of government that saw the public sector as a large pie to be divided up among those powerful groups most directly affected by its various activities...
...Education and the Presidency...
...Lexington, $15...
...Federal outlays had tripled from $3 billion to $9 billion by the end of Johnson’s term...
...The moods or behavior patterns (“group fantasies”) of a nation, says deMause, run in cyclical patterns that repeat themselves every three or four years...
...As a result, Nixon’s 1970 message to Congress on education not only rejected the stepped-up spending increases that the educational establishment wanted, but took a few swipes at educators to boot...
...The problem it addresses is: is wiping out genetic disease, which is likely to involve sterilization and abortion, a worthy public health cause or a Hitlerian exercise in eugenics...
...Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, $12.95...
...Chester E. Finn, Jr...
...Karen Hermassi...
...Rejection,” say the authors, “seems to run as a persistent thread throughout the Carter -Leonard Reed family’s history...
...Schocken, $24.50...
...she is a “distancing” mother, leaving Jimmy in the care of mammies while she goes off to work...
...Norton, $12.50...
...The Roots of Inflation...
...after all, if money was to be thrown at a problem, they would be the ones to catch it...
...When this crusade was launched by the federal government in 1971, House Concurrent Resolution 526 declared: “It is sense of Congress that the conquest of cancer...
...So however great the appeal of a new approach to learning, the opportunity to play on popular fears about busing in an election year appealed to him more...
...Small Comforts for Hard Times: Humanists on Public Policy...
...Hyde we came to know so well would reappear, sweeping all that was good before him...
...Still worse, there was little concern for measuring the success of the programs...
...Putnam, $15...
...Hans Toch...
...Not, however, sole responsibility...
...It was the Prime Minister of Turkey complaining that a Greek armada steaming toward the embattled island of Cyprus was, perfidiously, flying Turkish flags to deceive Turkish aircraft...
...phone rang in Secretary of State Kissinger’s home...
...They have their unconscious origins in four stages of biological birth that each of us experiences, from the first fetal stage, where the womb is intact and secure and we are frabjously felicitous fetuses, to the fourth, or “upheaval,” stage, in which we must fight our way out of the choking womb...
...Here’s a book that, because of its title and the way it’s written, has to be a strong contender for the Sominex Award...
...and agree to grapple through a birth together...
...But the idea behind it-tying together the Navy, the Merchant Marine, water pollution, and undersea resources into one intellectual fabric-is so interesting and the research so thorough that it doesn’t deserve to be dismissed...
...There was no federal education policy as such . . . , ” Finn notes, “simply pieces of policies that never came together...
...The “good Nixon” was open to bold new ideas that challenged interest-group liberalism for the sake of the national interest...
...Lillian Carter comes in for a rough time...
...Thus we end up with a dual portrait of Richard Nixon as President...
...Columbia Univ...
...Harvard, $15...
...Lloyd deMause, Henry Ebel, eds...
...Nixon challenged this philosophy, though less strenuously when it applied to military and business triangles...
...Leonard Reed...
...This is an unusual thesis, to be sure, but how else to explain the guaranteed income proposal and the trip to China...
...Kenneth Evan Sharpe...
...Human Resources and Income Distribution: Issues and Policies...
...of California Press, $14.95...
...In the small hours of the morning, the teleputs...
...Gerald J. Mangone...
...As a result of what Stern considers the failure of American policy, that part of the world is more than ever a bundle of uptight nationalistic and political tensions waiting to explode...
...If the State Department is Stern’s villain in the piece (and he damns it not only for its interventions on behalf of the black hats but for its failures to intervene on behalf of the white ones), Congress is his golden boy...
...Historians and journalists generally take Presidents on their own terms, concentrating their attention on the issues that the President under study concentrated his attention on...
...What Finn has done is take an important area of policy that Presidents are responsible for, and then look at how this particular President handled it...
...Decade of Decisions: American Policy Toward the Arab-Israeli Confict, 1967-1976...
...Johns Hopkins Univ...
...The result was a 1972 speech calling for $1.5 billion in aid to predominantly black schools, a belated effort to make them “equal” while keeping them separate...
...Nixon 60 bought the idea in its entirety...
...What filled the void, then...
...Lawyers who know Erie Railroad v. Tompkins and the case it overruled, Swift v. l))son, may find this an easy book to get into...
...Furnas...
...was a minor figure in the Nixon White House, a staff aide on education to thenpresidential counselor Daniel P. Moynihan and later to John Ehrlichman...
...Lexington, $18...
...Policy” was perhaps too strong a word for federal activity in education in 1969...
...MIT Press, $1 5. A very politicaly-sciencey study of why good city government is well-nigh impossible...
...The Ungovernable City...
...as a technique for distancing himself from his family...
...Nixon’s rejection of interest-triangle influence was, in effect, a rejection of the entire thrust of New Deal politics and all that has followed...
...And it is precisely upon such pretension that this book makes its case...
...More power to him, then, for having put together a coherent and interesting interpretation of the foreign policy bureaucracy’s thinking toward one of the world’s trouble spots...
...Trading Off Environment, Economics, and Energy : EPA’s Strategic Environmental Assessment System...
...Lexington, $25...
...Philip Reilly...
...John M. Blair, ed...
...Alas, Nixon was no philosopher-king...
...Times Books, $10...
...And perhaps because education was such a minor concern to Nixon, it provides a useful example of how he handled the greater part of his responsibilities as President...
...of California Press, $12...
...Columbia Univ...
...Based on such solid contributions as the work of Erik Erikson on Gandhi and Luther, John Demos on the psychology of the American Puritans, and Peter Loewenberg on Nazi youth, psychohistory has just begun to prove its bona fides as an instrument for interpreting political history...
...Both the fact and the method of his doing so reveal a lot about how Richard Nixon went about making decisions as President...
...Yet no single agency controlled even half that money, and no coherent set of goals and strategies governed the multiple agencies that did spend it...
...That is deMause’s theory in a nutshell, which may be where it belongs...
...This was an assumption that educational interest groups were perfectly comfortable with...
...This book is based on Finn’s doctoral dissertation...
...The Constitution and the Common Law...
...The “wrong horse” of the title refers to the Greek military dictatorship the United States supported throughout the Johnson and Nixon administrations, a support always accompanied by the expressed hope that the dictatorship would move toward restoring democratic government...
...Peter W. House...
...His benediction makes no distinction between Congress’ leadership in our disengagement from Vietnam, in which it was reflecting the rising public restiveness, and its role in the Greek-Turkish-Cypriot scenario, where its policy has frequently reflected the fact that American voters with ties to Greece vastly outnumber those with ties to Turkey, not always the soundest basis for foreign policy formulation...
...But let an opportunity arise to appeal to the worst instincts of American public opinion-its race hatreds, class resentments of college students, and so on-and the Mr...
...Free Press, $12.95...
...Douglas Yates...
...7.95...
...What the Greek dictatorship eventually moved toward was the annexation of Cyprus, a boneheaded course that precipitated a Turkish invasion of the island and the humiliation and demise of the Greek mPitary government...
...Michael Mooney, Florian Stuber, eds...
...For the layman, however, it is a difficult, though ultimately rather persuasive, argument about how our law and its historians have misread the past, particularly the period up to 1860...
...Nancy Kissinger,” Stern says, “grumbled sleepily to her husband, ‘Why don’t you tell him to shut up and sink the goddamn things?’ ” Well, the Turks did just that, only to discover too late that the ships were flying Turkish flags because they were Turkish ships...
...And Jimmy himself chose the Navy (and the presidency...
...Peasant Politics: Struggle in a Dominican Village...
...For first among his criteria in decision-making was public opinion or, more accurately, popular prejudices...
...Lowest on his ladder of priorities were the opinions of the interest triangles, at least those concerned with social policies...
...Police Revitalization...
...Michael Nelson Genetics, Law and Social Policy...
...The authors do have a couple of interesting, if perhaps a little dubious, things to say...
...Both of Jimmy’s sisters absented themselves for lengthy periods from their households to embrace the more abstract intimacy of religion...
...One can hardly blame Nancy for wondering how all this became our problem but, in Stern’s view, her husband’s policies bear a heavy responsibility for the recurrent crises in Greece and Cyprus...
...Nixon had not stayed afloat politically by appealing to the best in Americans, but to their darker side...
...Press, $14.95...
...Laurence Stern...
...As a result, the other two points on the education “interest t~iangle’~-congres~men on education committees and bureaucrats in HEWS Office of Education and elsewheresaw to it that the education porkbarrel continued to grow...
...Nora Levin...
...Throughout The Wrong Horse the reader is aware of another struggle-the difficulties of the author in obtaining access to specific State Department cables and memoranda...
...Saad Z. Nagi...
...To Stem, who is the national editor of The Washington Post, the increasing assertion of congressional authority in foreign policy decisions is all to the good...
...The Wrong Horse: The Politics of Intervention and the Failure of American Diplomacy...
...Living in Prison: The Ecology of Survival...
...The confusion of that event, rather than its buffoonish aspect, is the hallmark of the Cyprus problem: an island rife with inflamed ethnic passions, elevated to nationhood by the big powers, on which the Turkish minority is protected from the specter of massacre only by the fact that the island lies within actual sight of the Turkish mainland...
...Education was an area of policy that concerned Nixon little, and occupied even less of his time...
...Drawing mostly on evidence from New York and New Haven, Yates concludes that there’s an untenable degree of “fragmentation” of “inputs” and “outWhile Messiah Tarried: Jewish Socialist Movements, 1871-1917...
...Stern indicts American policymakers not only for forcing Greece and Turkey into a poorly conceived and unnatural alliance with each other, but alsp for fostering an arms race between them...
...Lexington, $16...
...Its least tenable ground, however, is its pretension as a predictive tool...
...Two Continents, $8.95...
...That is the disservice Lloyd deMause renders c psycho hi story^' with his prediction that Jimmy Carter, “for reasons rooted both in his own personality and in the powerful emotional demands of American fantasy,” is very likely to lead us into war by 1979...
...Burt Franklin, $15...
...the $1.5 billion was to be spent on precisely the kinds of programs that had been shown to have no effect on learning...
...In 1965, President Johnson had broken through years of entrenched opposition to the very idea of federal aid to education and had gotten Congress to pass the Higher Education Act and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act...
...Cold war attitudes that- predated Kissinger’s tenure put American policy in conflict with independent political leaders in Greece and elsewhere...
...Indeed, while the public “fantasizes the Carter family as the American ideal,” the Carters are in fact at great pains to get as far away from each other as possible...
...Moynihan’s working group on education had been closed to “outsiders,” both congressmen and powerful educational groups like the National Education Association...
...Child Maltreatment in the United States: A Challenge to Social Institutions...
...Gerald E. Caiden...
...The Coleman Report was even more striking: it found that learning had little to do with alterations in per-pupil expenditures, class size, and teacher training...
...A thoughtful review of the efforts during the last ten years to make police departments more effective in performing their work...
...the assumption seemed to be that more “inputs”-teachers, buildings, equipment, and so on-would inevitably lead to more and better “outputs”educated students...
...Stormy Weather: Crosslights on the Nineteen Thirties: An Informal Social History of the United States, 1929-1941...
...Q e debacles of Vietnam and Watergate deflated the grandeur of the executive branch and spurred Congress to a more active role in the formulation of foreign as wep as domestic policy...
...Press, $8...
...That combination is not, at first blush, a promising one...
...The billions of American dollars that poured into the military sectors of those countries bent their political development’ toward conservative, hawkish leaders out of tune with popular demands for change and redistribution of wealth...
...This is a thorough and balanced telling of the story of the war against cancer and why its results have been so disappointing...
...But in 1977 the chairman of the President’s Cancer Panel writes that what has been learned ‘‘only underlies how vast are the areas of ignorance that remain...
...William B. Quandt...
...Barry R. Chiswick, June O’Neill, eds...
Vol. 9 • December 1977 • No. 10
