New Year

Table of Contents

In Essence

PERIODICALS

William W. Lammers and David Klingman, in Publius: The Journal of Federalism (Spring 1986), Institute for Public Affairs, North Tex. State Univ., Denton, Tex. 76203-5338.
The presidency is the top U.S. elective office, but most governors can do one thing that a chief executive cannot: serve more than two terms.
Nelson Rockefeller's 14-year reign in New York, the modem record for continuous gubernatorial service, easily exceeded the record 12-year presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The mark...

Governors Who Last

William W. Lammers and David Klingman, in Publius: The Journal of Federalism (Spring 1986), Institute for Public Affairs, North Tex. State Univ., Denton, Tex. 76203-5338.
The presidency is the top U.S. elective office, but most governors can do one thing that a chief executive cannot: serve more than two terms.
Nelson Rockefeller's 14-year reign in New York, the modem record for continuous gubernatorial service, easily exceeded the record 12-year presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The mark...

Party Hoppers

in The National Journal (Oct. 25, 1986). 1730 M St. N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036.
"Switching political parties can be embarrassing," said the narrator of a television pitch used Nevada Democrat Harry M. Reid in his 1986 campaign for the U.S. Senate. "Just ask Jim Santini."
Ex-Democrat Santini had switched to the G.O.P. in 1985. Reid re- minded voters of the old days, when Santini's new Republican friends denounced him. (Reid won last November's election handily.)
Party switching...

Battered Lives

notes, "warfare relies increasingly" on smart weapons. A
US-made, $15,000 TOW or a $40,000 Hellfire missile can destroy a $3
million tank. The U.S. Standoff Tactical Missile, which deploys warheads
that attack many tanks, is one of several new weapons being developed.
These weapons' abilities are proven-as during the 1982 Falkland
Islands War, where British and Argentine missiles sank ships and downed
more than 100 planes. Such technology, Bamaargues, would allow
NATO to create...

Taxes: VAT Next?

Malcolm Gillis, in Policy Sciences (Sept. 1986), Martinus Nijhoff, c/o Kluwer Academic Publishers Group, PO. Box 322,3300 AH Dordrecht, The Netherlands.
West Germany has one. So do Britain, France, and five other Common Market nations. In fact, notes Gillis, professor of public policy and econom- ics at Duke University, the United States and Canada are among "the few industrial countries without a national sales tax."
U.S. critics of taxes on consumption (i.e. purchases)-rather than...

Mortgaged Future?

? Wrought?" Gerald Epstein, in Challenge (~u~.1986),
80 ~usiness Park Dr., ~rmonk,
N.Y. 10504.
The news about the U.S. economy, as Reagan administration spokesmen
-
observe, has been pretty good. The inflation rate, which hit 13.3 percent during the Carter years, averaged only 1.8 percent during 1986. Economic expansion continues. Polls find Americans confident of the future.
But Epstein, an economist at the New School for Social Research, is unimpressed. A broad look at the Reagan record,...

Greeley's Greatness

35 percent since 1981. Reason: The Reagan tax cuts. They have raised the cost of donations reducing the amount of income that gifts can offset.
Charities are most perplexed by the stinginess of the big baby-boom generation. Yankelovich, et al. found that those aged 30 to 35 gave only
1.7 percent of their incomes, versus 2.6 percent for the 35-49 group and three percent for 50- to 64-year-olds. The acquisitive boomers may be financially strapped. But Edrnondson sides with Yankelovich partner Ar-thur...

Britain's Pirates

publisher Henry Luce and educator Robert M. Hutchins, warned that editors do not -16enjoy the privilege" of being "deaf to ideas," and emphasized faimess. Today's Op Ed pages reflect that concern.
The 18th-century French writer, Voltaire, reportedly said: "I disap- prove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." Greeley too took that view-but, of course, considered others.

Britain 's Pit-ates "Pirate Radio in Britk~A Programming Alter-
-....

Houdini's Magic

Daniel Mark Epstein, in The New Criterion, 850 Seventh Ave., New York, N.Y. 10019.
It has been 60 years since Hungarian magician Harry Houdini, born Erik Weisz in Budapest in 1874, escaped from manacles inside a lead-weighted packing case-nailed shut and dropped into Manhattan's East River. But this and many of his other spectacular feats remain unexplained. And, notes Epstein, a poet, those feats were not exaggerated: Houdini's escapes were "more public than the proceedings of Congress, and...

The Grand Pianist

Daniel Mark Epstein, in The New Criterion, 850 Seventh Ave., New York, N.Y. 10019.
It has been 60 years since Hungarian magician Harry Houdini, born Erik Weisz in Budapest in 1874, escaped from manacles inside a lead-weighted packing case-nailed shut and dropped into Manhattan's East River. But this and many of his other spectacular feats remain unexplained. And, notes Epstein, a poet, those feats were not exaggerated: Houdini's escapes were "more public than the proceedings of Congress, and...

RESEARCH REPORTS

public agencies and private institutions

"Playing God in Yellowstone."
Atlantic Monthly Press, 8 Arlington St., Boston, Mass. 02116. 446 pp. $24.95. Author: Alston Chase
-Yellowstone National Park, which Theo-

dore Roosevelt called "a natural breeding-
ground" for wild animals, faces a peculiar
crisis. Indeed, wildlife that Roosevelt saw
in Yellowstone in 1903 has vanished. Gone
are the wolf, coyote, and white-tailed deer,
and formerly flourishing beaver, bighorn
sheep, an...

Book Reviews

Essays

Oman

i children celebrating National Day (November 18). Omanis have rarely
failed to charm foreign guests. Writing in 1982, Norwegian anthropologist Unni Wikan noted their "delicate style of grace, tact, and humility, the quietness and control in manner and speech, the calm and gentle integrity that distinguish them, be they girls or boys, women or men."
WQ NEW YEAR'S 1987
48

Oman
- When Oman's English-educated Sultan Qabus visited the White
House in April 1983, President Reagan genia...

A NEW DAWN?

's Musandam Peninsula, a fissured mass of black rock. Deep fiords cut into the land, their sheer sides rising out of the water as high as 5,000 feet. Largely devoid of shrubs or trees, the peninsula's interior consists of rows of wind-worn ridges, interrupted only by jagged peaks.
Sovereignty over the Musandam, barren as it may be, has made Oman a nation of paramount importance. On a clear day, the peninsu- la's Shihuh tribesmen, herding goats near their stone huts, can gaze across the Strait of...

BACKGROUND BOOKS

"The people of Muscat seemed to me to be the cleanest, neatest, best-dressed, and most gentlemanly of all the Arabs that I had ever yet seen," recalled J. S. Buckingham, a British traveler, after a visit in 1816.
Buckingham's observations are pre- served in historian J. B. Kelly's Britain and the Persian Gulf (Oxford, 1968), a survey of British involvement in the region from 1795 to 1880. As Kelly makes clear, Britain's ever-growing commercial and political interests in the Gulf ensured t...

Jennifer L. Howard
BETWEEN THE WARS

Europe, 1940. In a stunning blitzkrieg, German troops invaded Denmark and Norway in April, the Netherlands, Belgium, and France in May. The British force in France, cut off from its French allies, was evacuated from Dunkirk, leaving most of its equipment behind.
As Hitler's Panzers drove toward Paris, Winston Churchill, the new British prime minister, made a desperate plea. He secretly asked President Franklin D. Roosevelt to declare an emergency and lend warships, aircraft, and other arms to...

Robert Woito
A LONG MARCH

On June 12, 1982, between 500,000 and a million Americans rallied in New York City's Central Park in support of a "nuclear freezev-a ban on all further increases in nuclear weaponry. The New York Times editorialized the next day that "hundreds of thou- sands of demonstrators. . . can't be wrong." Conservative columnist Joseph Sobran saw the great "freeze" demonstration rather differ- ently: "The rally was actually a broad coalition of people who hate the West and...

George Weigel
BACKGROUND BOOKS

George C. Beckwith of the American Peace Society, is "a sort of Delos, whither the best spirits of every party, creed and clime gather to blend in sweet and hallowed sympathy."
In making the case against war, the authors of the 64 essays invoke such au- thorities as Seneca (who found that, in conflict, "avarice and cruelty know no bounds") and Napoleon (warfare is "the business of barbarians"). One author protests that the military received 80 percent of the average...

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