THE RELATIONS EXPLOSION

Mr. Safire is ""a practising public relations man making a living in this field and frankly proud of what he does."" So there. The reader may boggle a bit, but he will not be bored; and some anecdotes, as for example how the author precipitated the famous Nixon-Khrushchev debate, for the simple, pristine purpose of getting his client's model American home publicized, are surely classics, however one may feel about the points they are meant to illustrate. Mr. Safire's main contention seems to be that the trend of American business is away from compartmentalized relations--consumer, stockholder, labor, government, and so forth--and towards the fusion of all of them in one department or agency. His intended public, he says, is the ""maverick manager"", by which he means a rising (he says) new class of anti-Organization Man executives. His manner of getting his points across veers weirdly from the crudest barker tactics, to much glib discussion of things like Gestalt-psychologie and Moby Dick, to some very hoary chestnuts indeed; but nevertheless those points come across, because he really is a practising public relations man.