Inever knew anyone quite like my father, but then I never really knew
my father either. He was a man
without a single vice, but with a
hundred foibles. He was a "de-
voted" husband in a miserably un- happy marriage. He was embarrassingly proud of me and advertised my small aca- demic triumphs by stopping fellow Tul- sans on the street to show them newspaper clippings, and he thermofaxed my letters home to give to passing acquaintances. Yet he never once praised me to my face: Wh...
two percent annually through the early 1980s. The
U.S. Central Intelligence Agency estimates that the So- viet military now consumes a staggering 15 to 17 percent of the Soviet gross national prod- uct. (US. military spending amounts to six percent of GNP.) Yet, Aslund notes, "it is difficult to find any informed Soviet citizen who believes in earnest that it is less than . . .22 to 30 percent."
Looking back at the Soviet's last major attempt at economic reform, in 1965, Aslund says...
Joseph W. Alsop with Adam Platt, in The New York Review of Books (Nov. 9, 1989), 250 W. 57th St., New York, N.Y. 10107.
For 300 years, this country was ruled, if not always governed, a small White An- glo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) elite. George Bush notwithstanding, the WASPs as a group have not enjoyed an organized po- litical victory since the upright ladies of Mrs. Charles H. Sabin's Woman's Organi- zation for National Prohibition Reform helped put martinis back on the nation's tables in 1933.
Alsop, a...
Patrick Anderson, in Regardie's (Nov. 1989), 1010 Wisconsin Ave. N.W., Ste. 600, Washington,
Points of Bite D.C. 20007.
Patrick Anderson says he must have been "temporarily insane" when he first agreed to write a speech for a politician. He wrote it in the spring of 1976 for Jimmy Carter, then a candidate for the Democratic presi- dential nomination. Carter introduced this new "Kennedyesque" marvel woodenly informing an audience, "Now I'm going to read a statement my s...
Di-nah Wisenberg of the States News Service, in Common Cause Magazine (Sept.-Oct. 1989).
In the heat of [the 19881 presidential cam-paign, George Bush attacked Michael Duka- kis for espousing liberal policies "born in Harvard Yard's boutique." And he boasted to a Houston audience last June, "when I wanted to learn the ways of the world, I didn't go to the Kennedy School [at Harvard]. I came to Texas."
One year later, President Bush's Harvard- bashing days seem to be behind...
PERIODICALS
technological sophistication of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and federal prosecutors since the 1980 Abscam inves- tigation. In Mississippi, for example, 60 county supervisors went to jail recently for taking kickbacks after the FBI mounted a sophisticated "sting" operation. The FBI used high-tech "body wires" to build air- tight cases-the supervisors' own words- on tape.
Still, Witt concedes, new laws and tech- nology are not entirely to blame. Corrup-...
circumstance; welfare states, sheltered some are not. The ones most favored go first. Others follow. protectionism and other And as the pool is exhausted, the hard cases remain-not special arrangements. This only because of the misfortunes and misdeeds of history, but was a compromise Wash- because, for all manner of internal reasons, they do not take ington made when the out- to. . .new ways. They don't like them; they don't want them;
they are discouraged from learning them; if they learn them,...
Western business has shrunk, but commercial loans and sub- sidized loans from institu- tions like the World Bank have not. Overall, a re-markable $1.8 trillion in capital flowed into the Third World between 1956 and 1986. The only plausi- ble explanation, Eberstadt notes, is that Third World governments "are being held to a lower standard of economic performance than those facing their own citizens, international busi- nesses, or the governments of Western countries." That allows the govern-...
PERIODICALS
glorification of war, "which few of us would be willing to stomach."
Other critics have faulted Fukuyama for ignoring continuing threats to the liberal idea. True, he says, the communist world could abandon reform. But communism can never regain the moral authority that made it a worldwide challenge to liberal- ism. What about Islamic fundamentalism? "For all of Islam's pretensions of being a universal religion, fundamentalism has had virtually no appeal outside o...
three to one. Its research laboratories in both industry and the uni- versities are second to none.
Where the United States falls on its face, he argues, is in quickly translating basic research into "products and processes for designing, manufacturing, marketing and distributing such products." Experience seems to bear this out. American scientists invented the transistor, but in 1953 West- ern Electric licensed the technology to Sony. The rest is history. In 1968, another
U.S. firm,...