It is the smallest independent state on earth. Its ruler, last of the absolute monarchs by divine right, is also its only permanent citizen. It boasts no natural resources. It must import all of its energy, labor, food, and building materials. It lacks a Times Square, on moral grounds, but it has its own Wall Street and Fleet Street, its own license plates, currency, postage stamps, and passports; it could charter its own airline and has run a merchant marine under its own flag. There is no government...
Dennis J. Dunn
John Paul 11, the pope from Poland, broke with precedent and shunned the imperial tiara at his consecration in 1978, but like each of his 263 predecessors he still wears two hats. As pastor of the Holy See, he guides the spiritual life of six million Oceanians, 50 million Africans, 55 million Asians, 15 1 million North Americans, 199 million Latin Americans, and 263 million Europeans. Because his vast flock, a sixth of mankind, is dis- persed across national boundaries-and because...
emi- nent clerics, art historians, and jour- nalists, the book surveys the city-state's history and organization.
The volume does have one real flaw: Bearing the Vatican's own im- primatur, it is, not surprisingly, short on analysis and self-criticism. A good antidote is Peter Nichols's The Poli- tics of the Vatican (Praeger, 1968).
Nichols, a British journalist long based in Rome, provides memorable sketches of Popes John XXIII and Paul VI. When John (born Angelo Roncalli) worried at night about...
public agencies and private institutions
"Plant Closings: Public or Private Choices?"
Cato Institute, 224 Second St., S.E., Washington, D.C. 20003. 164 pp. $5.00
Editor: Richard B. McKenzie.
In recent years, Congress and more and 1975, 112 new plants began hiring than 20 states have contemplated for every 100 that closed. In the "plant closing" laws to discourage Frostbelt, only 70 percent of closed migration of industries from the plants were replaced. "Frostbelt" t...
Richard L. McCormick, presented at a seminar sponsored the Wil- son Center's Program on American Society and Politics, Feb. 3, 1982.
Michael J. ace; moderator.
Among historians, interest in the American Progressives of the early 1900s has waned. One reason, suggests McCormick, a Rutgers historian, may be a disillusionment among scholars with liberal reform movements in general-from the Progressives' ef- forts to minister to (i.e., mold in their own image) poor immigrants to later excesses of t...
ish emigre poet Czeslaw Milosz recently observed that the popular myth of America, like all such myths, "is kept alive by what it chooses not to say; it selects only the attractive elements from a complex reality." The same could be said of the work of
J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur (1735-1813). His Letters from an American Farmer created a minor sensation when it first ap- peared in Europe, and passages from this book are still cited in our college texts. His panegyrics to the New...
SPECTIVES
Twenty years ago this autumn, halfway through the 1962 foot- ball season, Americans learned from their President, John F. Kennedy, that Nikita Khrushchev had secretly placed nuclear missiles in Castro's Cuba and that an unprecedented U.S. show- down with Moscow was at hand. Did this mean World War III? The stock market dropped sharply. Here and there, housewives stampeded the supermarkets to stock up on canned goods. A handful of protesters, including socialist Norman Thomas, urged the...
Thomas S. Engeman, in Re-the Constitution view of Politics (Apr. 1982), Box B, Notre
Dame, Ind. 46556.
The secession crisis of 1861 forced Abraham Lincoln to choose whether to seize unconstitutional powers or to stand helpless as the union col- lapsed. He took the former course, raising troops and monies and sus- pending habeas corpus without congressional approval. But he was concerned the dilemma: "Is there in all republics this inherent and fatal weakness? Must a government.of necessity...
sanctioning a usually forbidden concentration of power. But balanced against each other, these two perilous powers secure America's future as a republic.
om Does "The Calculus of Representation: A Con-gressional Perspective" bv Thomas eavanagh, in western political Quarterly
Congress Serve? (Mar. 1982), 258 Orson Spenser Hall, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah 84112.
Do members of Congress believe their primary responsibility is to their home district or to the nation as a...
IODICALS
POLITICS & GOVERNMENT
ThankYou, "Harry S. Truman and the Multifarious Ex-Presidencv" bv James Gielio. in Presi-A/~Y&-dential studies Quarterly (spring 1982),
PYOcid'ow f --
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Center for the Study of the Presidency, 208 East 75th St., New York, N.Y. 10021.
"No former President more extended the authority and privileges of the ex-Presidency than President Truman," observes Giglio, a Sou...