THE REAL DAVID STOCKMAN

by John & Anne Urban Greenya ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 2, 1986

Within a matter of weeks/months, Harper & Row will publish The Triumph of Politics: The Failure of the Reagan Revolution by David Alan Stockman, Director of the Office of Management and Budget for the first four and one-half years of Ronald Reagan's presidency. The text at issue here is an all-out ad-hominem assault--and the less useful of two early-bird audits of Stockman's OMB stewardship. By contrast with the measured, analytic appraisal offered by Owen Ullman (below), this report (prepared under the aegis of the Presidential Accountability Group, a Ralph Nader organization) is relentlessly critical and strident. In providing a sketchy account of Stockman's pre-OMB career, Greenya and Urban go to great lengths to put him in the worst possible light, at one point imputing sinister implications to his reported enjoyment of The Grateful Dead, a rock group. An overachiever in high school and at Michigan State, Stockman was briefly involved in the anti-war movement of the late 1960's. He entered Harvard Divinity School, leaving without a degree in 1970, the authors suggest, because a high number in the draft lottery effectively shielded him from the risk of military service in Vietnam. At any rate, the increasingly conservative Stockman wound up on the staff of Representative John Anderson, then a five-term congressman from Illinois and chairman of the House Republican Conference. In 1976, he moved on to run for and win a congressional seat from his safely Republican home district in southwestern Michigan. During four years in the House, Stockman emerged as an articulate party spokesman with a particular interest in financial policy. What brought him to Reagan's attention, though, was his skill in prepping the candidate for a series of debates with erstwhile mentor Anderson. The authors make much of this ""betrayal"" and other examples of their fall guy's ""duplicitous"" behavior. Stockman nonetheless climbed several rungs higher on the ladder, achieving interim glory as a wunderkind budget director and then suffering a nasty fall from grace when that article in The Atlantic Monthly revealed he was actually a supply-side apostate. To the evident disgust of the authors, Stockman survived the flap, applying his admittedly formidable intellect and industry to the thankless task of containing federal deficits. The main fault Greenya and Urban have to find with his efforts is that he did not have a liberal agenda. They lavish a great deal of not always coherent attention on those who deprecated Stockman's role in the budget-making process, unfortunately, without exploring whether he was a genuinely free agent, i.e., independent of White House and Capitol Hill oversight. Eventually, the authors advance an old theory that Stockman deliberately let red ink accumulate so he could later cut social programs which might otherwise have survived. In brief, then, a mean-spirited hatchet job that has the unintended effect of fostering sympathy for its embattled subject.

Pub Date: June 2, 1986

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1986

Categories: NONFICTION