Fort Dix Stockade: Our Prison Camp Next Door, by Joan Crowell. New York: Links Books. 250 pp. Joan Crowell reports in conscientious detail on the history of the June 1969 uprising in the Fort Dix stockade. She writes of the …
The Great School Wars: New York City, 1805-1973, by Diane Ravitch. New York: Basic Books. 449 pp. The importance of Diane Ravitch’s The Great School Wars is, I think, best illustrated by turning for a moment to Christopher Jencks’s assessment …
A footnote appears, at first sight a trivial thing, and easily understood. But in the pages of the new Social Sciences Citation Index, these scholarly creations step forth as independent beings, endowed with a life of their own. The Citation …
In Hemingway’s story “The Killers,” two anonymous gray men walked into a lunchroom and said they were going to murder a prize fighter named Ole Andreson. Just what Andreson had done to deserve his fate was not clear. But he …
Dirty Tricks or, Nick Noxin’s Natural Nobility, by John Seelye. New York: Liveright. 152 pp. Of all American myths “rags to riches” has been the most stubbornly enduring. Time may be right for a parting glimpse of our cherished national fiction. …
Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography, 1888-1938, by Stephen F. Cohen. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 495 pp. Among the fathers of the Great October Revolution, the brilliant and incisive L. D. Trotsky has long held the attention …
Among the many contrasts between the 1960s and the 1970s, perhaps the most politically fateful has been a massive shift in attitudes toward our national institutions— the presidency, Congress, the courts, business, the military, the unions, the media, and the …
The Feminist Papers: From Adams to de Beauvoir, by Alice S. Rossi. New York: Columbia University Press. 716 pp. Guineas and locks, wrote Virginia Woolf, were two essential ingredients for creativity, and conditions virtually unobtainable for women. Alice Rossi’s anthology …
“Right now, they have a great big Band-Aid holding them together—Watergate. When it gets ripped off, watch out.”—Anne Armstrong, then White House counselor, speaking about the Democrats, July 16, 1974 The jockeying for the 1976 Democratic presidential nomination has already …
Sometimes, Emile Durkheim once remarked, a society develops a collective sadness. That is obviously the case with America today. The Harris poll, showing a pervasive uneasiness in this country, only confirms what all of us instinctively know. An optimistic and …
One of the questions which we have to ask ourselves as a country is what, in the name of God, is strategic superiority? What is the significance of it, politically, militarily, operationally, at these levels of numbers? What do you …
One day last July my wife Tanya and I were discussing our latest everyday problems. I don’t know why we chose the lobby of the Associated Press building as the site for our debate, but suddenly a young man in …
As George Meany grows heavy and sprightlier with years, it is strange to observe that in the summer of 1974 open talk about a successor seems to have abated. This may be because of the irrefutable fact that “he is …
On July 9, 1974, Senator Henry M. Jackson, known affectionately but until then unaccountably as Scoop, finally justified his sobriquet. Scoop-watchers realized then that their man might be more than the deadwood of which most presidential timber is made. If …
By now Watergate stands not merely for the illegal and unethical acts of a President and his men but for the intensifying response of Congress, party leaders, and the public. The crisis has illuminated so many areas of American government …
