The American Spectator

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Christmas Books 2007, Part II

12.12.07 @ 12:07AM

(Page 2 of 2)

Grover G. Norquist
Americans are blessed with short and shallow political memories -- unlike, say, the Serbs and the Albanians. But this has its downsides, as a handful of self-appointed "historians" have been allowed to create our memories. Arthur Schlesinger's 1949 The Vital Center explained the Depression and the New Deal. Later, his 1965 A Thousand Days congealed the myth of Camelot.

The antidote to these two myths, central to the power of the modern Democrat party, is only now at hand.
The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression by Amity Shlaes will forever change how America understands the causes of the Depression and FDR's policies that prolonged it for a decade. The title alone is worth the price of admission: FDR used the phrase to suggest the average American had been forgotten by the government that should take control of his life to "help" him. He stole the phrase from Yale philosopher William Graham Sumner, who first used it to describe the person forgotten when the government plays philanthropist or social reformer -- the taxpayer forced to pay the bill.
It was not until the 1980s that conservative book writers rallied in time to accurately portray a decade, in this case the times and presidency of Ronald Reagan.

Martin Anderson's 1988 Revolution, Bruce Bartlett's 1983 The Supply-Side Solution, and Kiron K. Skinner, Annelise Anderson, and Martin Anderson's 2001 Reagan, In His Own Hand: The Writings of Ronald Reagan That Reveal His Revolutionary Vision for America put the nail in the coffin on the efforts of the left to claim Reagan was "sleepwalking through history" as "an amiable dunce." Peter Schweizer's definitive work, Victory: The Reagan Administration's Secret Strategy that Hastened the Collapse of Soviet Union, outlined how Reagan deliberately set about destroying the Soviet Empire.

Conservatives understandably focus on criticizing government for doing poorly what it ought not to do at all: running health care or playing philanthropist with other people's money. But there are some things a constitutional republic should do. A new book highlighting the damage done by one spy, Jonathan Pollard, reminds us that we would do well to focus as much on getting government to do its limited legitimate functions well (the ones mentioned in the Constitution) as we do trying to cull back the sprawling and destructive, metastasized powers of the State.

Special Agent Ronald J. Olive was the counterintelligence officer who broke the case and has now written the sadly true story, Capturing Jonathan Pollard. (The book had a chilling resonance for this writer as Pollard was a drinking buddy.) Pollard should have been fired several times and was instead awarded security clearances despite every warning that he was not stable. It is truly frightening how this flawed character got into a position in Naval Intelligence to sift through our nation's most sensitive secrets -- in departments and agencies across the government -- and cart them out to be photocopied by Israeli government agents. In 18 months, Pollard, aided by his wife, carried out and gave Israel enough stolen material that would stand six feet by six feet by ten feet solid -- more than one million pages of secrets. (While the Israelis got most of the goodies, he gave or sold classified material to more than a dozen foreign individuals or countries.)

Pollard was caught by a fluke when a concerned fellow worker saw him walk out of the office with classified documents that were never to leave the building and he reluctantly reported this to his superiors. Once alerted, counter intelligence worked well and quickly and Pollard is serving a well-deserved life sentence. But where were they on the front end? If the government weren't busy running a national Endowment for the Arts, it might be able to focus on keeping our nation's secrets and capturing spies earlier in their careers.

Grover G. Norquist is president of Americans for Tax Reform and author of the forthcoming book Leave Us Alone (HarperCollins).

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These Christmas Book recommendations appear in the December 2007-January 2008 issue of The American Spectator. Part III of this year's recommendations will appear tomorrow. To read yesterday's Part I, click
here.

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