with Charles Peters

At last a victory, albeit a small one, in our campaign against cell phones. Amtrak has begun to offer "quiet cars" on some of its trains, a practice that has become customary in England, as one of our readers pointed out in a letter to the editor a few months ago. But so far, only a few Amtrak trains have a quiet car. The number of trains and cars should be expanded immediately so that most cars on all trains are quiet. In fact, why not put all cell-phone users in one car so that the only people they annoy will be each other? ******* What a blow for us seniors! I'm talking about the revelation by The Wall Street Journal that during the legendary run for the 1951 National League pennant, during which they came from 13 games behind with just 53 days left in the season, the New York Giants were stealing their opponents' signals. A Giant equipped with a small telescope and stationed at a window in the team's center-field clubhouse was spying on the opposition's catcher as he flashed his hand signals to his pitcher. Why was this news so disturbing? Because the Giants' victory, capped by the legendary three-run homer by Bobby Thomson in the bottom of the ninth inning of the last game, proved that miracles could happen and for those of us who came of age in the 1950s era that was especially important. By and large, we were people who felt we had to accept a life of limited possibility, trading a chance to achieve the improbable for the security of a regular job and a gray-flannel uniform. But for many of us, the 1951 Giants etched in the back of our minds the possibility that we could achieve the improbable. I'm not sure I would have taken the gamble of starting this magazine had it not been for the lesson the Giants taught me. So you can see why we're upset---upset enough to want to argue that it isn't so. Here's my case that the Giants would have won anyway. Remember that they could only have spied during their home games, but they won 14 of their last 18 away games. Bobby Thomson hit 13 of his last 15 home runs on the road. And the Giants were a better-rounded team than the Dodgers were that year: They had better pitching and the Dodgers had only one left-handed hitter in their regular lineup. This was essentially the same Giants team that won the championship in 1954. Well, you ask, if they were so good, why didn't they win in 1952 and 1953? The answer is that their best player, Willie Mays, was in the army. The day after I wrote the foregoing, I read an article with a similar thesis in The New York Times of March 4. Written by Stan Jacoby, it contained a striking statistic: During the final 48 games, the Giants scored 4.95 runs as a visiting team; during the same period at home they scored only 4.27 runs. If the spy made a difference, it was to make the Giants worse not better hitters. The lesson of all this is not that cheating is forgivable, but that miracles can and really did happen. ******* Will the lobby still love you when your party loses power? Not if you're Roy Neel. Until the Supreme Court's decision in Bush v. Gore undid Gore's half-million popular-vote victory, Neel had been the $600,000-a-year president of the United States Telephone Association, a job he had been given early in the Clinton-Gore administration. It appears he was asked to resign in 2001 for the same reason he had been hired in 1993. He had been a close associate of Al Gore's for more than 30 years and had served the Clinton White House as deputy chief of staff. ******* The submarine USS Greenville went to sea on February 9 only because the Navy did not want to disappoint a group of civilians who had been invited as a public-relations gesture. This shocking fact, revealed by Steven Lee Myers and James Dao of The New York Times, means that it is the Navy itself that is primarily responsible for the disaster that occurred that day. Commander Scott D. Waddle still needs to explain why he chose to demonstrate the rapid surfacing procedure in crowded waters. And, of course, that enlisted man who had been tracking the Ehime Maru needs to explain why he stopped and didn't inform Waddle of his decision to do so. But the essential lesson remains: An operational decision by the armed forces should never be made for the sake of P.R. I remember more than 40 years ago, my father was among a dozen or so West Virginians who were flown to Norfolk by the Navy and wined and dined with an admiral-escorted tour of a great carrier as the centerpiece of the weekend. One wonders how much money the Navy has spent on such excursions? How is it hidden in the budget? How much of a sailor's duty-time is devoted to public relations? A hint: For just the submarines in the Pacific fleet, far from all the vessels in the entire Navy, AP reports that there were 21 sea tours for a total of 307 guests last year alone. The three admirals presiding over the hearing into the Maru sinking have all hosted civilians on Navy ships, according to The Washington Post's Rene Sanchez. One described the hosting duty as "part of who we are as a Navy." ******* Behind the media hype for a recession mentioned in our last issue, The Washington Post's Peter Carlson explains, is the fact that "being an economics reporter during the longest peacetime expansion in American history is like being a weatherman in Southern California: You get tired of talking about sunny days and blue skies and highs of 72." ******* During the government downsizing that was in vogue during the 1990s, there was a tendency to replace government workers with contractors and consultants. That this practice might not always save money is suggested by a recent audit in West Virginia. It found that four consultants hired by the state's Workers' Compensation Commission managed to spend $2,185 on food and drink at one "working" dinner at a Charleston restaurant. For just a week's worth of work, one of them billed the state $10,141. For the seven hours and 54 minutes two of them spent talking to each other on the phone, the state was charged $3,002. ******* In Bush v. Gore, the Supreme Court expressed new ardor for the constitutional right to equal protection of the law. Assuming that the court will now consistently manifest that position in its other decisions, we commend to it the case of Curtis Reed. He is a District of Columbia police officer who was suspended for 75 days because he believed in equal enforcement of the law. His offense was that he gave a traffic ticket to another policeman. Aren't policeman supposed to apply the law the same way to everyone? Apparently not when another cop is involved. Listen to the words of a police judge at a department hearing of Reed's case who, after Reed said he would ticket a fellow officer who ran a red light, even if he was a friend, remarked: "That's the letter of the law. But we know ... there's professional courtesy extended. You're probably the only officer I know who conducts himself this way with other members of the department." ******* Sleeping sickness, a disease spread by the bite of the African tsetse fly, has an especially unpleasant characteristic: it drives people mad before it kills them. Around 300,000 people are infected annually. A drug exists that can treat the disease. It's called eflornithine, but it's been in short supply because it had no other uses and the drug industry is infamous for not making drugs that can only be sold in Africa. But now there's a good chance that a generous supply of the drug will become available soon. Why? It's been discovered to be effective in removing facial hair. But this happy outcome does not solve the underlying problem. We need a world health system to make sure that enough needed drugs are available to fight, if not all disease, at least those that are life-threatening to large populations. This is a problem that the market economy has failed to meet. ******* In January, "60 Minutes" revealed that an Army officer, Lt. Col. Odin F. Leberman, had apparently told his maintenance teams to lie to keep the Osprey's readiness record from looking bad. Now comes Mary Pat Flaherty and Thomas E. Ricks of The Washington Post with the news that the colonel may have been responding to pressure from higher-ups. The Post reporters found evidence that both Maj. Gen. Dennis T. Krupp and Brig. Gen. James F. Amos had strongly hinted to subordinates that it would be wiser to make the Osprey's readiness records look better. And a general they do not name is quoted as asking an Osprey squadron to "figure out how to manage and minimize the impact" of records that showed poor Osprey readiness. To anyone who has worked in government, this pressure to fudge figures to make a program look good is a sadly familiar tale. If you recall Michael Grunwald's exposé of the Army Corps of Engineers in The Washington Post, similar pressures were at the heart of the story. Perhaps the most infamous example were the lies and misdeeds in Vietnam that resulted from Robert McNamara's pressure for body counts and other quantifiable results. This problem is not confined to government by the way. It is also common in other organizations. The solution is that the leader of any organization must have a way of finding out what's really going on down below and a determination to face the true facts even when they show that his subordinates are lying in an effort to please him. Colin Powell is one member of the new administration who shows some signs of understanding what a leader must do to get bad news. "I want to know when you're mad," he's telling his staff, according to Paul Bedard of U.S. News & World Report, who adds that Powell is trying to reach below his top advisers to seek facts from working-level State Department employees. Before Bush's trip to Mexico, Powell was briefed by four mid-level foreign service officers from State's Mexico desk. That hadn't happened at Foggy Bottom since the Kennedy administration. ******* What sells books these days? Well, Random House is promoting The Barefoot Contessa Parties! with a fancy brochure headlined "Party, Hamptons Style." What is scary is that an expensive piece like this has usually been thoroughly tested by direct-mail experts who must have found that "Hamptons style" were words that sold. An anthropologist of the future will surely look back on this as an early warning of cultural decline at the beginning of the third millennium. ******* Mad Cow disease makes me nervous. I've read every article I've seen about the possibility of its spread to the United States. In most of them, the conclusion seems to be not to worry or at least not to worry too much. But stray facts in otherwise comforting stories cause my anxiety to persist. For example, according to The Washington Post's Marc Kaufman, "Scientists believe [the disease] was spread in Europe by farmers feeding brains and spinal cords from infected cows and sheep to cattle as a protein supplement." As a result, the FDA in 1997 halted the practice of feeding bits of cows and sheep to American cattle. But here's the catch. The FDA announced last month, writes Kaufman, "that 28 percent of the rendering plants that grind cattle parts into bits were not able to entirely prevent Œcommingling' of those bits with cattle feed." ******* The FDA is underfunded, as this magazine has pointed out, especially in its ability to follow up on new drugs to determine if there are dangerous side effects and adequate warnings to patients if there are. The FDA is also underauthorized, meaning there are some things it should be doing but Congress doesn't let it do. Prominent among them is the regulation of dietary supplements like St. John's wort and ephedra. These supplements are now a $15.7 billion industry. Ephedra is an example of the harm they can do and of the powerful forces the industry can deploy to fend off regulators. It is an herbal stimulant that has been, according to The Washington Post's Guy Gugliotta, "linked by federal and state officials to heart and nervous system damage." It also appears to have killed. Yet when a proposal to prohibit anyone under 18 from buying it was introduced in the New Jersey legislature, only one witness appeared in favor of the bill. He was a father whose son had dropped dead after taking ephedra. This industry is opposing such efforts, reports Gugliotta, with a combination of weapons, including high-profile ads to sway public opinion, high-paid lobbyists, and "increasing campaign contributions to influence and support friendly politicians." ******* Before we rush to cut taxes, one thing we should consider is the state of the nation's infrastructure. Bridges, for example, are in terrible shape. Federal highway investigators have found that 37,800 are "basically intolerable, requiring high priority of replacement." This news comes not from some liberal advocacy group but from the conservative Washington Times, which recently published another story saying that the total infrastructure needs of the country will require spending $1.3 trillion in the next five years. One hopes that the implications of these stories will sink into the minds of the paper's editorial writers who have been some of the most consistent cheerleaders for Bush's tax cut. ******* Now the latest on drivers with cell phones. Incredibly, "85 percent of the nation's 110 million cell-phone users use them in some form while driving," according to the National Highway Transportation Safety Board study reported by The New York Times. And according to another study, this one by the University of Montreal's Transportation Safety Laboratory, "cell-phone users had a 38 percent higher risk of accident." The Monthly has two solutions. Either allow only no-hand speakerphones in cars, or better still, forbid all cell-phone use, except for 911 calls, by drivers of moving vehicles. ******* When I went to school, the only beverage available was milk. Today, schools are filled with rows of vending machines containing a large variety of sugared and caffeinated drinks. Many of the schools have contracts with Coca-Cola and similar companies requiring them to sell a certain quantity. For instance, according to The Washington Post's David Nakamura, High Point High School in Beltsville, Md., must sell 4,500 cases of soda a year. That's 50 cans per student. Candy vending machines are often next to the soda machines. At one Maryland school, Nakamura observed one student assembling a lunch consisting of a 20-ounce Pepsi, a honey bun, and a Twix candy bar. Another chose a Dr. Pepper, a bag of Cheetos, and a pack of peanut M&Ms. Why are the schools doing this? To raise money for various projects that the school system won't pay for. To the extent that the projects are worthy, I can't believe that taxpaying parents wouldn't prefer to have the school system pay for the projects and throw the vending machines out. ******* Although we're generally not excited by the new Bush administration, there have been a few good signs. One is EPA Administrator Christie Whitman's support of the Clinton administration's recent rules designed to reduce the amount of pollution from trucks and buses by 95 percent. Another is Bush's greater emphasis on reading at Head Start Centers, which we hope will be accompanied by a major effort to upgrade the overall quality of Head Start. Finally, on defense matters, we admire Bush's effort to unilaterally decrease the number of nuclear warheads and missiles. We don't need a treaty to tell us that we have far too many. And the administration's selection of Andrew Marshall to lead a Pentagon review of our weapons and how they relate to real needs is another good sign. He has had the courage to question the F-22 as well as our over-reliance on dinosaurs like heavy tanks and aircraft carriers. ******* As the story of the Marc Rich pardon unfolds, what stands out for me is that the White House staff thought the pardon was dead until Ehud Barak called late on Clinton's last night at the White House. Why would Barak's call have such influence? My best guess is that it's because Clinton owed him big time. Clinton had hoped his Middle East peace plan would be the crowning achievement of his administration. Barak had gone out on a limb to support the Clinton plan---so far out that he cut himself off from most of the Israeli electorate. He had in effect sacrificed his career for peace---and for the president of the United States. In my experience, there's no debt a conscientious leader feels more acutely than the guilt occasioned by leading his troops into an ambush. It's not a good feeling to have led those who have supported you down a path that costs them---in Barak's case, his political life. Clinton knew he couldn't grant Barak's other request, a pardon for Jonathan Pollard, so to at least do something to repay his and this country's debt, he gave him Rich. A bonus was that this would please a former aide, Jack Quinn, in addition to two dedicated contributors. And nothing is more richly satisfying to a politician than a sense that he has done the right thing while also taking care of his political debts. Add the factor of fatigue. Newsweek's Debra Rosenberg reported how little sleep Clinton got during his final days in the White House. The fatigue was in large part the product of still another factor, this reported by Stephen Braun and Richard Serrano of The New York Times: Clinton was convinced that compared to presidents like Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter, he had pardoned too few people. He worried that the Justice Department was too slow and too spare in its recommendations for clemency. So he was pushing the White House staff and himself to handle more of the work. As the word got out that the White House was playing a larger role in the granting of pardons, applications poured in. Too much work and too little time produced fatigue and bad judgment. Clinton's self-pity was, I suspect, the final factor. His view of himself as the victim of prosecutorial excess made him ripe for Quinn's argument that Rich was a similar victim, particularly since Quinn was able to cite respected law professors and Republican lawyers to support his case. Much of Clinton's self-pity is justified---he was a victim of overzealous prosecutors---but so is the self-pity of most sane people. There is often good reason to feel sorry for yourself. But if we give into the self-pity, the result is usually behavior that is unattractive or unwise---or, as in the case of the Rich pardon, both. "Unattractive" and "unwise" are, by the way, better words for Clinton's understandable behavior---a lot better than "criminal," "outrageous," or "corrupt," the adjectives favored by most of his critics. ******* For women who are not content with giving parties like the ones in the Hamptons, but want to live there themselves, help is at hand. Ginie Sayles, the author of How to Meet the Rich is now conducting a seminar on "How to Marry the Rich." ******* Andrew Marshall may find that persuading the Pentagon to reduce its reliance on heavy tanks will not be easy. I realized this when I discovered in the last paragraph of a long story in The New York Times that Donald Rumsfeld is an old friend of Frank Carlucci whose firm, the Carlyle Group, is a leading financial backer of the Crusader heavy tank, a $13.7 billion Pentagon program. Carlucci told the Times this about his relationship with the Secretary of Defense: "I know Rumsfeld extremely well. ... We've been close friends throughout the years. We were college classmates." Even if appeals to alumni collegiality fail, the Carlyle Group has another managing director whose advice might be heard by the new administration: James A. Baker, George Bush senior's secretary of state and leader of W.'s effort to prevent a recount in Florida. If Baker can't do the job, Poppy Bush himself is a senior advisor to the Carlyle Group. ******* Have you noticed how local television stations hype the danger of bad weather? One night, Channel 4 in Washington ran a teaser at 10:30 p.m. for the 11 p.m. news that said, "Temperature Plummeting, Snow Coming." The next day the temperature dropped three degrees and there was the faintest dusting of snow. Actually, if you'd stayed tuned through the 11 o'clock news, you would have guessed that. But the point of the teaser was to ensure you didn't switch channels and that the station's ratings stayed high as they always do when viewers are led to believe snow is coming.