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MAKING WAR

THE 200-YEAR-OLD BATTLE BETWEEN PRESIDENT AND CONGRESS OVER THE WAY AMERICA GOES TO WAR

Drawing heavily on his extensive government experience, Lehman, Secretary of the Navy under Ronald Reagan, offers a highly polemical analysis of the tension between the legislative and executive branches in America's decisions to go to war. Lehman makes his own position clear from the outset—that the Presidency is uniquely suited to exercise the war-making power, and Congress suited only to exercise the power of the purse. To Lehman, the express constitutional power to declare war is a formality only: ``the real power of Congress was not one of declaration but of the purse,'' since ``a war could occur without a declaration...but it could not be fought if Congress refused to supply the funds for it.'' The author contends that, because of its inefficiency, inability to keep secrets, and political pusillanimity, Congress cannot be trusted with national-security decision-making. Using examples drawn mostly from cold-war history, Lehman points out that Congress ratifies military action taken unilaterally by the President (even actions in apparent violation of the War Powers Act) when such action is successful, while asserting its prerogative to make war only when, as in Vietnam, military action is both unsuccessful and unpopular. Lehman lobbies vigorously for executive privilege, citing examples far removed from the war-making issue (for instance, he decries Congress's treatment of Reagan's EPA administrator, Anne Burford, who was held in contempt of Congress for asserting the Reagan Administration's right to withhold documents relating to the Administration's alleged preferential enforcement of environmental statutes). Ultimately, Lehman argues persuasively that the text of the Constitution does not clearly resolve the tension between the branches on the war-making power, and that the answer to the question of who makes war must be resolved by the vicissitudes of politics. An articulate presentation of the case that the Presidency has primacy in military and national-security affairs.

Pub Date: June 1, 1992

ISBN: 0-684-19239-5

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Scribner

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1992

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IN MY PLACE

From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)

Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992

ISBN: 0-374-17563-2

Page Count: 192

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992

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THE ELEMENTS OF STYLE

50TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION

Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...

Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.

Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").

Pub Date: May 15, 1972

ISBN: 0205632645

Page Count: 105

Publisher: Macmillan

Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972

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