New Year

Table of Contents

In Essence

PERIODICALS
Reviews of articles from periodicals and specialized journals here and abroad

POLITICS & GOVERNMENT
11
 
RELIGION & PHILOSOPHY
30

FOREIGN POLICY & DEFENSE
15
 
SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
32

ECONOMICS, LABOR, & BUSINESS
20
RESOURCES & ENVIRONMENT
35

SOCIETY
24
 
ARTS & LETTERS
37
 

PRESS...

Paul C. 1-ight, in The Ã?â?¡rooking Review (Summer 1984), Brookings Insti-
Vice President? tution, 1775 Massachusetts Ave. N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036.
"Hardly worth a pitcher of warm spit " was U.S. Vice President (1933-41) John Nance Garner's estimation of his job. Were Garner around today, he would probably take a kindlier view, suggests Light, a National Academy of Public Administration researcher. During the last 10 years, the Vice Presidency has become an office...

Alice M.
Ply pets Rivlin, in Journal of Policy Analysis and
Management (Fall 1984), John Wiley and
Are Not Enough Sons. 605 Third Ave., New York. N.Y.
Making public policy was once part politics, part eenie, meenie, minie, mo.
During the last 20 years, however, computer-equipped policy analysts
have inundated elected officials with data intended to take the guesswork
out of the process. Have they improved the quality of legislation?
Not much, says Rivlin, founder and for eight years...

specialists, many written in maddeningly arcane jargon, simply overload legislators. Moreover, such analyses often reveal just how complicated a problem really is. And analysts' prescriptions are always subject to error. It all adds up to frustration for the recipients. Too often, Rivlin says, they either succumb to paralysis or, going to the opposite extreme, plump for unrealistically simple solutions.
In her view, that is how Congress and the White House got the nation into today's budgetary...

Sey-
mour Weiss, in Commentary (Nov. 1984),
165 East 65th St., New York, N.Y. 10022.
Most Americans believe that accords with the Soviets on nuclear arms control are, in general, good and necessary. Weiss, a retired U.S. diplo- mat, emphatically disagrees.
"Just what evidence exists," he asks, "that recent nuclear arms limi- tations agreements with the USSR have actually contributed to U.S. se- curity?" In his view, none. The United States enjoyed clear nuclear superiority...

1,500 US.-backed anti- Castro Cuban exiles was a fiasco that looms large in recent American history. Within days, every invader was either killed or captured.
In an editorial, the New York Times set the tone of future interpreta- tions when it wrote that "basic and inexcusable miscalculations were made the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) [which] presumably
Coming only three months after his inauguration, the Bay of Pigs failure was partic- ularly embarrassing to President John F. Kennedy.
The...

doubting Thomases." Moreover, the President steadily "whittled away" at the CIA'S plan, fearful of unfavorable public reaction to a large-scale inva- sion, especially if its U.S. sponsorship were revealed.
To minimize publicity, Kennedy shifted the landing site from the coastal town of Trinidad to the more remote Bay of Pigs. What he did not seem to realize was that a quiet landing would cut the chances of sparking a popular uprising and that the Bay of Pigs, surrounded swamps, offered...

enemy fire; another 100 were temporarily knocked out of action.
The Syrian forces did most of the damage, effectively employing in- fantry and antitank missiles against the outmaneuvered Israelis. The IDF, Gabriel says, should have responded sending its foot soldiers ahead to clear the way for the tank forces. The PLO's guerrilla tactics seemed to stymie the IDF: The Israelis resorted to artillery barrages and air strikes to counter guerrilla harassment.
The outcome of the conflict was never much...

Sidney D. Drell, Philip J. Parley,
'Star Wars' and David Holloway, in International Se-
curity (Fall 1984), MIT Press (Journals),
28 Carleton St., Cambridge, Mass. 02142.
In 1972, the United States and the Soviet Union signed the Antiballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty sharply limiting their defenses against nuclear missiles. Both sides judged such defenses "to be futile, destabilizing, and costly," recall Stanford researchers Drell, Farley, and Holloway.
That logic still holds, they...

Peter F.
After Ma Bell Drucker, in ThePublic Interest (Fall 1984), 20th & Northampton Sts., Easton, Pa. 18042.
When Ma Bell passed away in January 1984, with the breakup of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T), hardly anybody grieved. Drucker, a noted management expert who teaches at the Clare- mont Graduate School, believes that Americans may yet sorely regret the demise of the giant telecommunications monopoly.
Its splintering was the result of a federal antitrust suit...

Peter L. Bernstein and
Theodore H. Silbert, in Harvard Business To Oracles? Review (Sept.-Oct. 1984), P.O. Box 3010,
Woburn, Mass. 01888-9975.
If you like having egg on your face, economic forecasting may be the profession for you.
Despite its many spectacular failures, write Bernstein and Silbert, New York financial consultant and banker, respectively, the art of read- ing tea leaves is indispensable to business. An executive who makes no effort to anticipate the future will find himself out...

Stephen McNees and John Ries, both economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, showed that the most accurate forecaster in any one year had little hope of repeating his success the next. But, based on a study of 44 "blue-chip" forecasters' performances from 1977 through 1983, Bern- stein and Silbert argue that an average of many auguries may be useful.
The group went wrong more than once. In 1978, for example, the "consensus" forecasts for both inflation and change in...

Big Labor view (Fall 1984, Heritage Foundation,
214 Massachusetts Ave. N.E., Washing-
ton, D.C. 20002.
Leftists have long criticized the American labor movement for its polit- ical conservatism. Now, says Green, a former labor union official, they have less room for complaint.
He contends that the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), which includes 96 labor unions representing 13.7 million workers, is veering sharply to the left.
There was some truth...

"Public Attitudes about Health-CareControlling U.S. Costs: A Lesson in National Schizophre- nia" Robert J. Blendon and Drew E.Medical Costs Altman, in The New England Journal of Medicine (Aug. 30, 1984), 1440 Main St.,
P.O. Box 9140, Waltham, Mass. 02254.
Faced with a hefty and fast-growing national bill for medical care, Americans are telling public-opinion pollsters that they would wel- come an overhaul of the U.S. health-care system-as long as no one asks them to make any sacrifices.
In...

H. Roy Kaplan, in The
Annals of the American Academy of Politi-
cal and Social Science (July 1984), Sage
Publications, 275 South Beverly Dr., Bev-
erly Hills, Calif. 90212.
State governments are gambling that lotteries will provide a painless way to increase revenues. But to H. Roy Kaplan, a sociologist at the Florida Institute of Technology, lotteries are a poor substitute for "de- pendable, equitable, and responsible methods of revenue generation."
Using games of chance to finance...

as little as one quarter of one percent would raise the same amount. Lotteries are not only less efficient than taxes, they are less fair. The poor spend a larger proportion of their income on such games of chance than do the well off. Finally, the hope that legalized gambling would hurt orga- nized crime has proved to be an illusion.
Above all, Kaplan is critical of state governments that encourage their citizens to hinge "their aspirations for better lives on the ephem- eral possibility...

David Skylar, Post-Mortem for in The Quill (July-Aug. 1984), 840 North Newspapers Lake Shore Dr., Ste. 801W, Chicago, 111.
6061 1.
During the past 35 years, 253 U.S. daily newspapers have ceased publi- cation, and 145 have merged with other papers. During 1982 alone, the presses stopped at three major dailies-the Philadelphia Bulletin, the Cleveland Press, and the Buffalo Courier-Express.
"Television is killing newspapers," lament failing publishers. Non- sense, says Skylar, a consultant...

First Tabloids Alexander Saxton, in American Quarterly

(Summer 1984), 307 College Hall, Univer-
sity of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pa.
19104.
In 1830, the United States could claim only 65 daily newspapers, all of them published and for the urban gentry. Within just a few years, says Saxton, a University of California, Los Angeles, historian, a "favor- able coincidence of technology, flush times, and politics" paved the way for a new breed of popular mass-circulation tabloids.
The pre...

Alice Gold- farb ~ar~uis,
in Journal of ~ontem~orary History (July 1984), Sage Publications, 28 Banner St., London EC1 8QE, England.
Radio's golden age occurred during the 1930s in both Great Britain and the United States. Apart from that coincidence, virtually all that radio broadcasts in the two lands had in common was the English language.
So argues Marquis, a California historian. In America, both the Na- tional Broadcasting Corporation (NBC), founded in 1926, and the Co- lumbia Broadcasting...

1928, industry giant NBC was taking in $10 mil-
lion annually from advertisers. Meanwhile, intellectuals regularly
flailed the networks for pandering to low tastesÃ?â??Uth tastes of the .
mentally deficient," as literary critic Henry Volkening put it.
The BBC faced no such accusations. In fact, it was frequently taken to task for ignoring the preferences of its mostly working-class audi- ence. Directed until 1940 the dour and opinionated John C. W. Reith, the BBC was a rather...

stripping him of his profes- sorship in Catholic theology. Yet, Sheehan believes that the new theolo- gians, undermining the Vatican's claim to infallibility in theological matters, are having an effect. The Catholic Church's growing involve- ment in secular issues, such as nuclear war and abortion, he lays to a retreat from the theological arena.
Sheehan believes that any effort by the Vatican to quash the theolo- gians' revolt is doomed to fail. Yet, it also seems unlikely that a church that...

the year 2076. The Ortho- dox, with their far higher birthrate, hope to prevent that.
But above all, Gittelson concludes, the return of some Jews to "old- time religion" is a personal quest for spiritual meaning. And the new Orthodox, in their strict practices and deep faith, "seem to feel con- stantly exhilarated that they are carrying out God's plan."

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
Missing: Most "The Invisible Universe" John D. Bar-row and Joseph Silk, in New Scientist (Au...

Dan-
Competition iel Simberloff, in The Sciences (July-Aug.
1984), The New York Academy of Sci-
And Evolution ences, 2 East 63rd St., New York, N.Y.
10021.
Competition among species is now commonly accepted as one of the chief forces in evolution. But according to Simberloff, a biologist at Florida State University, its impact has been exaggerated.
Simberloff does not challenge Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. But Darwin's notion of natural selection concerned competition within particular...

Dan-
Competition iel Simberloff, in The Sciences (July-Aug.
1984), The New York Academy of Sci-
And Evolution ences, 2 East 63rd St., New York, N.Y.
10021.
Competition among species is now commonly accepted as one of the chief forces in evolution. But according to Simberloff, a biologist at Florida State University, its impact has been exaggerated.
Simberloff does not challenge Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. But Darwin's notion of natural selection concerned competition within particular...

the Bu- reau of the Census in 1890. then, thanks to population build-up on the Pacific coast, it was no longer possible to draw the traditional na- tional "frontier line" beyond which there were fewer than two people per square mile. Yet, many pockets of land where population density was below that level remained-and most have survived for a century. Today, about one-quarter (949,500 square miles) of the United States is still technically "frontier."
About half of this territory,...

it. Seven generations later, Popper observes, Jefferson's predictions seem surprisingly close to the mark.
"After 'Voluntary' Liability: The EPA's Cleaning Up Implementation of Superfund' Carol
L. ~orge,in Boston College Environmental
The Superfund Affairs Law Review (vol. 11, no. 3, 1984), 885 Centre St., Newton Centre, Mass. 02159.
In 1980, Congress passed "Superfund" legislation aimed at cleaning up the nation's toxic-waste dumps. Since then, argues Dorge, a Chicago lawyer,...

Nicholas Lemann, in The Washing-ton Monthly (Oct. 1984), 1711 Connecticut Ave. N.W., Washington, D.C. 20009.
Fifty years ago, documentary photographs the likes of Walker Evans and Margaret Bourke-White captured the national imagination and en- riched Life, Look, and a rackful of lesser popular picture magazines. To- day, writes Lemann, a Washington Monthly contributing editor, that kind of photography is moribund, and the nation is poorer for it.
Photojournalism became a powerful social and political...

the early 1960s, however, photojournalism was on the way out. Once-popular illustrated magazines began to lose readers to TV compe- tition, and Washington had long since lost interest in FSA-like projects. Photographers themselves, meanwhile, began to regard their work as art and their business as self-expression. They began trying to "convey what was behind the lens, rather than what was in front of it," argues Lemann. A leader in the new "art" photography was Diane Arbus (1924-71),...

everyone, used every- one in the daily conduct of life, and something which, moreover, carries most subtly and yet measurably within itself, its vocabulary and syn- tax, the governing assumptions of a society's social, political, and eco- nomic arrangements."
Tragedy for "What Is Happening to Tragedy Today?"
--. bv James Mark. in Journal of Eurooean studies (June 1984), Alpha '~cadernic, Our Times Halfpenny Furze, Mill Lane, Chalfont St.
Giles, Bucks HP8 4NR, England.
Tragedies...

How Hitler Istvan Deak. in The New York Review of Books (~ay31, 1984), P.O. Box 940,Rose to Power Farmingdale, N.Y. 11737.
The dry facts of Adolf Hitler's life (1889-1945) document his rise to power, but explaining how an entire nation could embrace insanity is another matter. According to Deak, a Columbia historian, new schol- arly studies are beginning to provide some answers.
The conventional view is that Germany's tradesmen, shopkeepers, and farmers-all hit hard Germany's economic troubles...

"The French Population Debate" byA French Richard Tomlinson. in The Public Interest
(Summer 1984), 2'0th & NorthamptonPopulation 'Bust'? Sts., Easton, Pa. 18042.
Throughout the Third World, many governments are trying desper- ately to curb population growth. In France, however, national leaders are urging their countrymen to have bigger families.
The French are not alone in facing a population "implosion." Among the nations of noncommunist Europe, only Greece, Ireland,...

"The French Population Debate" byA French Richard Tomlinson. in The Public Interest
(Summer 1984), 2'0th & NorthamptonPopulation 'Bust'? Sts., Easton, Pa. 18042.
Throughout the Third World, many governments are trying desper- ately to curb population growth. In France, however, national leaders are urging their countrymen to have bigger families.
The French are not alone in facing a population "implosion." Among the nations of noncommunist Europe, only Greece, Ireland,...

making possible the wide dissemination of ideas and information after the mid-15th century, the tsarist government claimed a near monopoly of Russian presses until the early 19th century, reserving the machines to publish official documents.
At first glance, Starr concedes, today's pattern appears similar. The Kremlin views computers as "the last best hope" to make the Soviet Union's creaky centralized economy work. Manufactured or imported the state and for the state, computers have...

Book Reviews

Reinhold Heller
Univ. of Chicago, 1984
240 pp. $39.95
r
I '-
1,

Contemporary Affairs
CITIES AND THE WEALTH OF NATIONS: Mnciples of Economic Life
Jane Jacobs Random, 1984 257 pp. $17.95
"I do not believe," said Norway's greatest painter, Edvard Munch (1863-19441, "in an art which is not forced into existence by a hu- man being's desire to open his heart." Com- ing from most people, the utterance would sound melodramatic. From Munch, whose devotion to his art helped him...

Essays

One decade ago, little Portugal was front-page news in America. Would this NATO ally, in the aftermath of a surprise coup against Western Europe's oldest dictatorship, succumb to the Portuguese Communist Party's drive for power? Would it be- come "the Bulgaria of the West"? Washington feared the worst. Happily, Portuguese democrats prevailed. But the people whom dictator Antonio de Oliveira Salazar had long isolated from change could not go back to old ways and old dreams. Since 1974,...

May 20, 1498. Ten and a half months out of Lisbon, two vessels commanded by Vasco da Gama, a Portuguese nobleman, anchor off Calicut, a port on India's Malabar Coast. When the seamen go ashore, history records, the first question asked of them is, "What the devil has brought you here?"
The reply: "We have come to seek Christians and spices."
The Portuguese were the first Europeans to follow the Afri- can coast around the Cape of Good Hope and then to cross the Indian Ocean....

Kenneth Maxwell

Thomas C.
Shortly after midnight on April 25, 1974, Lisbon's Radio Renascensa played "Grandola vila morena," an old ballad that was an anthem of the Portuguese Left. For a few listeners, most of them middle-ranking Army officers waiting in barracks up and down the country, the spirited lyrics had special meaning. The end of 48 years of dictatorship was at hand.
The ballad was the signal for rebel units to take up positions in six cities. As people were going to work in Lisbon that Thurs-...

Thomas C. Bruneau

the same hunters who roamed France and northern Spain after the Ice Age. The first settlers appear to have come from Andalusia after 4000 B.C.
Sailing west out of the Mediterra- nean, Phoenician traders set foot on Portugal's shores after 1000 B.C. Later, Celtic farmers and herders moved south from France to the green northwest. They turned some of the hilltop castros (forts) they built, or found, into walled cities.
When the Romans, having bested the Carthaginians in Africa and Spain, entered...

Everyone knows Murphy's Law: If anything can go wrong, it will. Most of us, most of the time, do not take it seriously. It merely expresses our sense of the perversity of inanimate ob- jects, the ironies and frustrations of everyday life.
Scientists and engineers, however, take Murphy's Law seri- ously, though not literally, in building a nuclear power station or planning a space flight. The stakes are too great not to. In a similar way, many thoughtful persons take Murphy's Law seri- ously,...

Paul Schroeder

In "Old Age," an essay that he wrote in 1870, Ralph Waldo Emerson, 67, lamented that "America is a country of young men, and too full of work hitherto for leisure and tranquillity."
Emerson thought that Americans ignored the "particular benefits" of age, especially the value of experience. For youth, he said, "every object glitters and attracts," and life is apt to be "a heap of beginnings" with little result. The elderly are different: "Age...

In "Old Age," an essay that he wrote in 1870, Ralph Waldo Emerson, 67, lamented that "America is a country of young men, and too full of work hitherto for leisure and tranquillity."
Emerson thought that Americans ignored the "particular benefits" of age, especially the value of experience. For youth, he said, "every object glitters and attracts," and life is apt to be "a heap of beginnings" with little result. The elderly are different: "Age...

Albert Rosenfeld

"There is a fullness of time when men should go, and not oc- cupy too long the ground to which others have a right to ad- vance."
So wrote Thomas Jefferson after he had finished his second term at the White House and returned to Monticello, his Vir- ginia estate. At 68, the third president had put public life far be- hind him. He was now engaged in other interests-science, architecture, even the study of Greek and (with "great avidity") of mathematics.
As usual, Jefferson...

Timothy M. James

by W. Andrew Achenbaurn
Last April, more than 3,000 members of the National Coun-
cil on the Aging gathered in Washington to discuss "1984 and
Beyond: Options for an Aging Society." They heard prideful ac-
counts of the strides made in improving the elderly's quality of
life-but also some worries that options for further advances
were narrowing. "One fact stands unchallenged," observed Sen-
ator John Heinz (R.-Penn.), who chairs the Senate Special Com-
mittee on Aging....

W. Andrew Achenbaum

many of the world's great re- ligions." The Old Testament authors rewarded men of virtue with long lives. The New Testament promises followers of Christ a hereafter: "He that believeth on me," said the Lord, according to Saint John, "hath ever- lasting life."
In the Eastern philosophy-religions, the path to eternal life may be rather less exalted. Chinese Tao- ists, for instance, aim to reach hsien (immortality) through an austere diet, various unusual sexual prac- tices...

p~~blic
ageizcies and private instit~ttions
I I

ispanics: Challenges an Opportunities."
Ford Foundation, Office of Reports, 320 East 43rd St., New York, N.Y. 10017.

66 PP.
Author: William A. Diaz
America's large and growing Hispanic
population is perhaps its most diverse
"minority group."
The nation's 14.6 million Hispanics (their number as of 1980) are black, brown, and white. Only one-third are foreign-born. Sixty percent of all His- panics in the 50 states are Mexi...

In June 1932, a discouraged month and year in the history of the United States, John Roderigo DOS Passos sat down in his Province- town, Massachusetts, house at the end of Commercial Street to write a new preface to his antiwar novel of 1921, Three Soldiers, published when he was 25.
Three Soldiers was being reissued by the Modern Library, a reprint series so inclusively "modern" in its taste that Petronius's Satyricon was in it along with Ernest Renan's Life of Jesus and John Reed's...

Alfred Kazin

In 194 1, as the undeclared war in the Hitler has often protested that his plans Atlantic escalated, President Roose- for conquest do not extend across the At- velt grew increasingly bold in his lantic Ocean. I have in my possession a campaign to undercut his isolation- secret map, made in Germany by Hitler's
ist foes in Congress. In a nationally government-by planners of the new
world order. . . . It is a map of South broadcast address delivered at the America and a part of Central America...

John F. Bratzel & Leslie B. Rout, Jr.

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