BACKGROUND BOOKS
"The art of war is of vital importance to the state," Chinese strategist Sun- tzu wrote 2,500 years ago. "It is a matter of life and death, a road either to safety or to ruin. Hence un- der no circumstances can it be ne- glected.'
Anyone hoping to build a library on U.S. defense policy should be- ware: Most books on the subject are out-of-date before they reach print, and few make for easy bedtime read- ing. "Policy intellectuals" tend to chase headlines-nuclear...
public agencies and private institutions
"The Costs of Protectionism:
Estimates of the Hidden Tax of Trade Restraint."
Center for the Study of American Business, Washington University, St. Louis,
Mo. 63130. 39 pp.
Author: Michael C. Munger
The United States champions free trade in international markets, but Washington has been busily erecting some protectionist barriers of its own.
Munger, a researcher at the Center for the Study of American Business, contends that the cost to...
The Rise of American
Advertising
The first advertising specialists in America, eager to distance themselves from patent-medicine vendors and confidence men, strove to write prose that was simple and factual. That ap- proach proved short-lived, as admen, beginning at the turn of the century, started to develop more indirect, "psychological" techniques, using strategies that have since been vastly ex- tended to promote politicians as well as to sell cars, perfume, and low-calorie beer....
Pity the poor bore. He stands among us as a creature formidable and fa- miliar yet in essence unknowable. We can read of the ten infallible signs whereby he may be recognized and of the seven tested methods whereby he may be rebuffed. Valu- able monographs exist upon his dress and diet; the study of his mat- ing habits and migrational routes is well past the speculative stage; and statistical studies abound. One out of 312 Americans is a bore, for instance, and a healthy male adult bore consumes...
Alan Ehrenhalt, in Congressional Quarterly Weekly Report (Sept. 3,1983), 1414 22nd St. N.W., Wash-
the Statehouses ington, 0.020037.
Being a member of the state legislature may seem about as glamorous as running a laundry. Yet the statehouses are currently in ferment, re- ports Ehrenhalt, a Congressional Quarterly editor.
Unobtrusively, state governments have extended their reach in re- cent years, as Washington has delegated more responsibility for federal-state programs-e.g., health, welfare, e...
public opinion surveys. [For evidence of a possible recent turnabout, see WQ Autumn 1983,
p.10.1 Between 1958 and 1964, for example, the percentage of respon- dents who believed that Washington could not be trusted "to do what is right" remained steady at about 22 percent. 1970, amid America's Vietnam involvement, the percentage had doubled. It was up to 63 per- cent in 1976 and 73 percent by 1980.
Such attitudes do not stem from political apathy, the authors argue. If anything, Americans...
Stephen Gillers, in The Nation (Sept. 17, 1983), P.O. Box 1953, Marion, Ohio 43305.
The nine-member U.S. Supreme Court is now dominated-at least, nu- merically-the appointees of conservative Republican presidents. Yet, for years now, the Court has confounded predictions that it would take a sharp Right turn.
The days of the liberal Warren Court nominally ended when Chief Justice Earl Warren retired in 1969 and was replaced by Warren Bur- ger, a Nixon appointee. President Nixon later named three...
William C. Adams, in Public Opinion (Aug.-Sept. 1983), American En- And the Public terprise Institute for Public Policy Re- search, 1150 17th St. N.W., Washington,
D.C. 20036.
For all his talents as a "Great Communicator," Ronald Reagan has had difficulty rallying support for his stoutly anticommunist foreign policy.
Conservatives blame the lukewarm popular response on the influ- ence of the liberal national news media or the public's "post-Vietnam syndrome." Actually, writes...
John Lewis Gaddis, in Diplomatic History Cold War Ashes (Summer 1983), Scholarly Resources
Inc., 104 Greenhill Ave., ~ilmin~ton,
Del. 19805.
Among American historians, the debate over the causes of the Cold War is still a hot topic.
Until the late 1960s, the orthodox view was that Josef Stalin's aggres- sive stance forced America into the Cold War during the late 1940s. Then, New Left "revisionist" historians, such as Oregon State's Wil- liam Appleman Williams and York University's...
Kenneth Adelman and Marc Seriously Plattner, in Atlantic Quarterly (Spring1983), Longman Group Limited, Sub-
scriptions Dept., Fourth Ave., Harlow, Es-
sex CM19 5AA England.
To many Americans, the glass-walled United Nations headquarters in New York is both a symbol of hope for international cooperation and a source of chronic irritation.
Simple arithmetic makes a certain amount of U.S. frustration inevi- table, note Adelman and Plattner, former member of the U.S. delega- tion at the UN (now...