Tilting Archives - About C.P. - Respond

April 1999 - Volume 31 Issue 4

" Troops to Teachers... Lawmakers to Lobbyists... Ivy League Cops... Precocious Campaign Contributors... Remembering Sir Anthony..."

Sounds pretty good, doesn't it? Yet when Bill Clinton on Jan. 21 honored a retired sergeant who has participated in the program and announced a plan to commit $18 million to it, The New York Times didn't come close to dealing with the matter until the 22nd paragraph of its White House story. And even then it didn't get very close. The only hint came with these words: "Introduced by Arthur Moore, a soldier turned teacher, Mr. Clinton " Not another word about the program. The first 21 paragraphs of the article described and analyzed Clinton's political strategy "of a free- swinging legal defense and daily policy announcements."

This is what has happened to Washington journalism. It's all about inside skinny on tactics, strategy, and process without enough substance for the reader to know what the substance is.

West Virginia state lottery officials are, reports The Charleston Gazette, setting up "an outreach program for players whose gambling gets out of control." Wouldn't it be better for the state not to sponsor the lottery that contributes to the problem?

One of the craziest aspects of the present economic boom is that it seems to be dependent on consumer overspending. Instead of saving, as our mother and father taught us to do, we've got to max out our credit cards. "Low personal saving is an essential catalyst of the present boom," writes Robert J. Samuelson. "If saving somehow were to rise, the American and world economies would face even greater peril." Much of the wealth we're spending is based on the price of stocks, whose value may be less intrinsic than a product of short supply, with too much money chasing too few available shares in the same companies. As long as the stock market keeps rising, our wealth increases so that we have more money to spend even though we haven't been saving. Doesn't this make you feel just a tad queasy?

Is there a danger that a government agency, in an effort to reinvent itself, will lose sight of its essential function? In the case of the Internal Revenue Service, at least, the answer appears to be yes. Faced with criticism of its occasionally harsh treatment of taxpayers, the agency recently issued a new mission statement that emphasizes fairness and service but does not even mention collecting taxes.

Sir Anthony Nutting's recent death reminded me of one of the most painful moments in English history--Britain's involvement in the 1956 attack on Suez. This shameful event occurred just as the world was rallying around Hungary's effort to free itself from Soviet domination and gave the Russians an excuse to reinvade Hungary. After all, they were merely asserting their imperial rights just as the Brits were doing by trying to retake Suez.

But it ruined Sir Anthony's life. He opposed the attack and resigned from the government in which he had been serving as deputy foreign secretary. The resignation ended a career that had been so promising that Harold Macmillan had told him "You will lead the party one day."

He did not explain his resignation at the time, believing that to do so would be disloyal to his colleagues. He later wrote, according to his obituary in The Times, of feeling "bereft of friends, a castaway adrift on a sea of anger and recrimination, an object of distrust, torn between loyalty to principle and loyalty to friends and associates." I wish he had gone public with his misgivings, as I wish our own in-government dissenters had done during the Vietnam War. If people like George Ball, Bill Moyers, and Robert McNamara had expressed their misgivings about the war when they left the Johnson administration I'm convinced that the war would have ended sooner. Similarly, public discussion of the wisdom of the Suez invasion before it occurred would surely have exposed the lunacy of that misbegotten venture.

More evidence that we need not less but smarter, tougher regulation comes from the case of the Ball Park frankfurters. Last summer 11 people were killed by Ball Park franks tainted with listeria. The government requires that meat be free of listeria. The problem is that the Department of Agriculture conducts what The Los Angeles Times describes as "only limited random testing for the bacteria." The result is that Ball Park franks not only killed 11 people but sickened 70 others and caused five miscarriages. And these were only the people the Center for Disease Control and Prevention were able to track down.

Did you see the story in The New York Times about the Ivy Leaguers who had chosen to work in the New York City Police Department? They weren't at the bottom of the class, either. One, Adam Kasanof, had an SAT score of 1410; another, Christopher Schmidt, had a 3.4 grade point average. Both, I'm delighted to say, attended my alma mater, Columbia. A plainclothes officer in the Bronx went to Harvard. A 67th precinct detective has a masters degree from New York University. The famous whistle-blowing lieutenant, David Durk, was an Amherst graduate.

These men are not bored with their jobs. They don't feel the work is beneath them. Actually they have found, according to the Times, "that they were often envied by their college classmates as people of action who are not shackled to a desk." I hope more of their classmates will join them not only in the interest of better police work but for their own sake. The police need bright people. And more of our intellectual elite need to discover the rewards of jobs that count.

I found a soulmate in the Maryland legislature. He is Del. John S. Arnick, who has introduced a bill to ban the use of hand-held cell phones by motorists. He noted that on a recent auto trip from Baltimore to Annapolis he had counted more than 30 drivers talking into these infernal devices. "It is a risk and it causes a danger." Amen.

The judges who tell the rest of us we must obey the rules seem to have difficulty following them themselves, at least when it comes to hiring clerks. Two thousand federal judges annually bend rules to the point of outright cheating in their rush to get top law school graduates. The judges are supposed to wait until March 1 to hire next year's graduates. But the rule was rescinded because it was being so widely flouted. Offers were being made to top students who were barely beginning their second year of law school. Earlier attempts to get judges to behave had also failed. Back in 1990 there was an effort to prevent offers before noon on May 1. But, reports The Washington Post's Michael Grunwald, a judge who called a candidate promptly at noon found that he had already accepted a take-it-or-leave-it offer from another judge with a faster watch.

8,876 students made campaign contributions from 1991 to 1998. Is this a heartening proof of American youth's commitment to participation in public life? Perhaps, but when one learns from The Los Angeles Times that 163 gave more than $5,000 and that the thousand dollar contributors included Skye Stolnitz (age 10), Asher Simon and Benjamin Lipman (both age 9), and Elizabeth Heyman (age 7), suspicion begins to stir. Are these children that precocious or is there the faintest possibility that their parents are using them to evade contribution limits? Mommy and Daddy have given all they can give, so junior finds himself with a substantial boost in allowance accompanied by a warm parental endorsement of a deserving candidate, and a stamped envelop addressed to the campaign treasurer.

The Marine Corps is an exception to the current decline in military recruiting. Although the Air Force, Army, and Navy continue to have shortfalls, the Marines have met or exceeded their goals for 43 consecutive months, according to Rowan Scarborough of The Washington Times. Marine spokesmen attribute the success to their reliance on traditional values, "patriotism, professionalism, and dedication to country." My own guess is that it's the corps' reputation for testing for the right stuff and certifying that you've got what it takes.

More than 125 former members of Congress are now lobbyists, according to The Hill. Those who retired in January are being courted by trade associations, corporations, interest groups, and influence-peddling law firms. Gerard Solomon says he received six offers with "unbelievable salaries." According to The Hill, high-profile members expect to at least double their salary. One can't help wondering whether some members, while serving in Congress, allow their stands on issues to be affected by the desire to curry favor with those who might lighten their retirement with these lucrative lobbying jobs.

Between 1900 and 1975 this country had an average of 110 prison inmates for every 100,000 people. Today the figure is 445 per 100,000. In other words, it has quadrupled in just slightly more than twenty years. The $35 billion a year we spend on prisons has produced what Eric Schlosser of The Atlantic Monthly calls "the Prison-Industrial Complex." Aficionados of the military-industrial complex will be interested to learn that one of its leading players during the Vietnam War, Brown & Root, is a big winner in the new game, building prisons instead of military bases. Mandatory sentencing laws could turn out to be the prisons' Gulf of Tonkin resolution.

O.J. Simpson verdicts are increasing. There's an emerging pattern of jury defiance, reports The Washington Post, with jurors choosing to send a message instead of basing their verdict on the facts and the law. The most convincing evidence of this trend is the increase in the number of hung juries. For many years, hung juries ran around 5 percent of all verdicts. But in federal criminal cases in Washington, D.C., that figure rose to 15 percent between 1991 and 1996. There are courts in California where the figure is more than 20 percent.

There is, to be sure, a measure of poetic justice in all this. Many of today's examples of juror defiance involve blacks siding with blacks, and, of course, the last great era of juror nullification was in the South when white jurors sided with whites against blacks. But, however understandable history may make it, jury nullification is not a trend to be welcomed. I wrote in our last issue about how the jury system had been one of the bedrocks of my faith in democracy, along with the democratic schools in my hometown and the democratically drafted army in which I served in World War II. Now that we don't have a democratic draft or in many cases democratic schools, preservation of the great tradition of the democratic jury is all the more important. In the dozen or so cases in which I was involved as a lawyer, the jury always came up with the right verdict. My father, who practiced law for almost fifty years, had a similar experience.

One reason juries worked was that they represented a broad cross-section of the community. They were not dominated by one group, as southern juries were by whites and the District of Columbia's are by blacks. What I most admired about them was the dedication to doing the right thing and the conscientiousness they brought to their deliberations. Thank goodness most of my friends who have been on jury duty recently report that those qualities are still present.

But the nullification trend is dangerous enough that we should think long and hard about redrawing the boundaries of the districts from which jurors are selected to increase the probability that each jury will be a democratic cross-section. Lawyers who appeal to racism should be cited for contempt. Most of all it's crucial that the people who form our attitudes--from school teachers to screenwriters--rekindle the idealism, the dedication to doing the right thing that has made jury service an ennobling expression of citizenship.

If you share my lack of enthusiasm for Latin American military organizations and for U.S. aid to them, you will not be surprised by the Historical Clarification Commission's finding that 93 percent of the 42,000 civilian killings during the long Guatemalan civil war were committed by the Guatemalan government's military forces and that these forces were aided by the CIA.

Republicans suspect that Bill Clinton is trying to sneak national health care in piecemeal. I hope they're right. But my fear is that he and Hillary want to forget about their great failure. Whatever the reason, the nation's shame remains: 43.4 million of us have no health insurance. But the press largely ignores the story. How I would love to see a Maureen Dowd devote her talents to skewering the bad guys on a life and death issue like this! Even more, I would like to see her legions of imitators spend less effort on being flashy and more on mastering substance--on conveying to their readers in a lively and interesting way the information they need to make informed decisions on critical issues such as health care.

In February The Washington Post revealed that "dozens and dozens" of phone calls made by its reporters to the D.C. city government went unanswered with not even a recording or voice mail "no matter what the hour of the morning or the afternoon" or, when the phone was picked up produced unhelpful ("I have no idea") or wrong answers. The Post also reported in February that city council members had the gall to accept 15 percent salary raises. Washington may rank 21st in population among American cities but its council salaries rank higher than four of the nation's five biggest cities, higher than New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Houston.

Why should Greenwich, Conn., one of our most advantaged communities, have one of the nation's highest percentage of learning-disabled students? Nearly 30 percent of its high school students are enrolled in special education. This is more than double the national average.

I'm indebted to ABC's Michele Norris for the solution to this mystery. It seems that once a student is classified as learning disabled, he or she becomes entitled to such goodies as one-on-one tutoring, untimed tests, and additional time to complete assignments. They also, and this could be the greatest inducement of all, get to take untimed SAT's.

These kids have parents smart enough and cynical enough to manipulate the system to their advantage. Where does this leave the kids who really need help and who don't have such parents?

Republican senators and congressmen took $3.2 million in "soft-money" campaign contributions from the gambling industry in 1997-98, according to Common Cause. The president of the American Gaming Association, which innocents should know is not concerned with croquet, is Frank J. Fahrenkopf Jr., a former chairman of the Republican National Committee. Shouldn't the Moral Majority and the Christian right repudiate these sinners?

Here's a story about a flop. The Washington Monthly has sponsored three conferences in its 30-year history. (They were spaced about 10 years apart because it takes that long to forget the headaches involved in putting one on.) Each of the first two was a success, attended by roughly 350 people. But the third only managed to attract 50. Why was it such a failure?

It was called "Common Ground" and represented an effort to bring liberals and conservatives together to see where they could agree. But the timing was less than fortuitous. It was April, 1995. The Gingrich Revolution had just come to town. Common ground was out. Polarization was in--and continued to be, culminating in the last year's orgy of partisanship.

The middle way is, of course, not always the right way. Sometimes compromise is wrong. But listening to one another and trying to find points of conscientious agreement are essential to making democracy work. So I'm grateful the tide seems to be turning. Among the hopeful signs: a kind word for "Compassionate Conservatism" on, of all places, the op-ed page of The Wall Street Journal; a headline in The Washington Post reading "GOP Lawmakers Signal a New Desire for Common Ground"; and the House and Senate's speedy passage last month of the bipartisan Frist-Wyden bill designed to liberate public schools from bureaucratic red tape while making them more accountable.

Although fixing Social Security and Medicare poses the peril of the wrong kind of compromise, the need to do something about them before the next election is an incentive for the parties to get together. Another moderating factor will be a presidential race between Al Gore and George W. Bush. Neither comes close to being a raging extremist.

Most heartening of all to me was the Senate's reaction to Dale Bumpers when he came back to the chamber to speak at the impeachment trial of Bill Clinton. By fully conceding the weaknesses of his case and reaching out to the common sense and humanity of the other side, he spoke in the great tradition of political moderation. Members of the Senate responded with unusual warmth and enthusiasm, lining up to shake Bumpers' hand even though they knew they were risking the wrath of their far-right constituents watching on C-SPAN. It may have been the senators' way of saying we're fed up with self-righteous polarization.

~Charles Peters