A thorough, admiring, and not uncritical study of a political lion whose roar is much needed these days.
The second volume of the author’s fluent account of Edward Kennedy’s political career in the face of the government’s shift from New Deal liberalism to the beginnings of our current “deep crisis for democracy.”
The liberal consensus, writes Gabler, “had once been the prevailing American ideology.” When Kennedy entered the Senate in 1962 while his brother was president, that was certainly true. Yet, almost immediately, America began a rightward shift, hastened by Richard Nixon and his “fierce Kennedy hatred” and Ronald Reagan, who surrounded himself with hatchet men bent on undoing the administrative state. Yet as the author shows, even the intervening Jimmy Carter, a Democrat now being nominated, it seems, for sainthood, was no ally: Kennedy believed that Carter was “a man without convictions” who tried to play to the middle while running away from fights with conservatives, “whom Carter seemed to fear much more than he feared liberals.” So it was with other centrist Democrats, including Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, who caved in to conservative demands while wondering how they were so often outmaneuvered. The stalwart Kennedy’s efforts at comprehensive legislation on national health care and a higher minimum wage were thus stifled or frittered away. On immigration reform, for instance, amendment after amendment was added to kill Kennedy’s bill, and years of negotiations died with them. “The ‘voices of fear,’ as Ted had called them, those on talk radio and in nativist circles, had won,” writes Gabler. The voices of fear have grown louder since then, and Kennedy’s liberalism is nearly unimaginable. The rightward line the author draws runs through Kennedy not as a prime mover but instead as someone whose longevity in the Senate was such that few had such a ringside seat to history only to watch the right prevail against a brand of politics that “might remind us of our better selves.”
A thorough, admiring, and not uncritical study of a political lion whose roar is much needed these days.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-23862-2
Page Count: 1280
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2022
Sure to generate debate, and of special interest to adherents of free market capitalism.
A book-length assertion that capitalism’s woes can be traced to government interventionism.
Sharma, an investments manager, financial journalist, and author of The 10 Rules of Successful Nations, The Rise and Fall of Nations, and other books, opens with the case of his native India. The author argues that it should be in a better position in the global marketplace, possessing an entrepreneurial culture and endless human capital. The culprit was “India’s lingering attachment to a state that overpromises and under-delivers,” one that privileged social welfare over infrastructure development. Much the same is true in the U.S., where today “President Joe Biden is promising to fix the crises of capitalism by enlarging a government that never shrank.” Refreshingly, Sharma places just as much blame on Ronald Reagan for the swollen state that introduced distortions into the market. Moreover, “flaws that economists blame on ‘market failures,’ including wealth inequality and inordinate corporate power, often flow more from government excesses.” One distortion is the government’s bloated debt, as it continues to fund itself by borrowing in order to pay for “the perennial deficit.” As any household budget manager would tell you, debt is ultimately unsustainable. Wealth concentration is another outcome of government tinkering that has, whether by design or not, concentrated wealth into the hands of a very small number of people, “a critical symptom of capitalism gone wrong, both inefficient and grossly unfair.” Perhaps surprisingly, Sharma notes that in quasi-socialist economies such as the Scandinavian nations, such interventions are fewer and shallower, while autocratic command economies are doomed to fail. “[T]oday every large developed country is a full-fledged democracy,” he writes, and the more freedom the better—but that freedom, he argues, is undermined by the U.S. government, which has accrued “the widest budget deficit in the developed world.”
Sure to generate debate, and of special interest to adherents of free market capitalism.Pub Date: June 11, 2024
ISBN: 9781668008263
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Less a sequel than an addendum, the book offers a close-up view of the Oval Office in its darkest hour.
Four decades after Watergate shook America, journalist Woodward (The Price of Politics, 2012, etc.) returns to the scandal to profile Alexander Butterfield, the Richard Nixon aide who revealed the existence of the Oval Office tapes and effectively toppled the presidency.
Of all the candidates to work in the White House, Butterfield was a bizarre choice. He was an Air Force colonel and wanted to serve in Vietnam. By happenstance, his colleague H.R. Haldeman helped Butterfield land a job in the Nixon administration. For three years, Butterfield worked closely with the president, taking on high-level tasks and even supervising the installation of Nixon’s infamous recording system. The writing here is pure Woodward: a visual, dialogue-heavy, blow-by-blow account of Butterfield’s tenure. The author uses his long interviews with Butterfield to re-create detailed scenes, which reveal the petty power plays of America’s most powerful men. Yet the book is a surprisingly funny read. Butterfield is passive, sensitive, and dutiful, the very opposite of Nixon, who lets loose a constant stream of curses, insults, and nonsensical bluster. Years later, Butterfield seems conflicted about his role in such an eccentric presidency. “I’m not trying to be a Boy Scout and tell you I did it because it was the right thing to do,” Butterfield concedes. It is curious to see Woodward revisit an affair that now feels distantly historical, but the author does his best to make the story feel urgent and suspenseful. When Butterfield admitted to the Senate Select Committee that he knew about the listening devices, he felt its significance. “It seemed to Butterfield there was absolute silence and no one moved,” writes Woodward. “They were still and quiet as if they were witnessing a hinge of history slowly swinging open….It was as if a bare 10,000 volt cable was running through the room, and suddenly everyone touched it at once.”
Less a sequel than an addendum, the book offers a close-up view of the Oval Office in its darkest hour.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5011-1644-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2015
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