Tilting at Windmills

Washington Monthly, April, 1999 by Charles Peters

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

TROOPS TO TEACHERS IS A PENTAGON program begun in 1994 to encourage military retirees to become public school teachers. It has put more than 3,000 former servicemen into classrooms in 800 school districts in every state but Iowa. Research by the National Center for Education Information shows that the military veterans are doing a good job. According to Lisa Hoffman of Scripps Howard News Service, they are "motivated by a sense of public service and possessed of positive, can-do attitudes [with] expertise in math and science--areas for which there has been a chronic shortage of teachers."

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 freeswinging 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.