”The room, festooned with pictures of the Kennedy family and other souvenirs of a life in public service, reeked of the D.A.`s cheap cigars.”
That sentence is from the first paragraph of ”False Profits: The Inside Story of BCCI, the World`s Most Corrupt Financial Empire,” by Peter Truell and Larry Gurwin. Because I love good stories about con men (this surely is one), I had trouble putting the book aside for the morning newspapers.
But then again, what newspapers! In recent weeks, the looming Clinton presidency is taking on some of the aspects of the first Roosevelt
administration. That is to say, it is full of characters.
What might they want for the holidays?
For Bob Rubin, appointed to the new post of National Economic Security Adviser: I`d suggest ”The New Palgrave Dictionary of Money and Finance,”
edited by Peter Newman, Murray Millgate and John Eatwell. At $595, three volumes and 2,621 pages, it`s not for light of purse or faint of heart. Rubin knows most of it, too. And though the new project somehow doesn`t have the oomph of the ”Palgrave Economics Dictionary” of a few years back, it is still a vivid symbol of why a man who made his mark in the international capital markets has snared the top economic job on Clinton`s team.
For Alan Greenspan, the Fed chairman Clinton is inheriting from George Bush: ”Money of the Mind: Borrowing and Lending in America from the Civil War to Michael Milken,” by Jim Grant. This graceful and incisive history of credit displays what bankers say is an uncanny feel for the moments in which the dreary bonds of common sense were slipped in favor of the urge to boogie. It is just the thing to restore Greenspan after the Federal Open Market Committee meeting four days before Christmas, at which the chairman must lead 19 members to consensus about whether the recent reports of economic strength are for real or not, and act accordingly.
For Treasury Secretary-designate Lloyd Bentsen: ”Days of Obligation: An Argument With My Mexican Father,” by Richard Rodriguez. This book of essays on the decline of faith in individualism, set in the cultural context of the West Coast, would help focus Bentsen`s thinking. Bentsen`s Texas will do fine, as will New York, thanks to Daniel Patrick Moynihan`s accession to Bentsen`s position as chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. Likewise for Illinois, if Richie Daley`s brother Bill is named Transportation secretary. What`s wanted is a way to remind the courtly Texan-”loophole Lloyd” to his critics- that the Treasury secretary`s job is to be watchdog of the U.S. tax code.
For Leon Panetta, tapped to head the Office of Management and Budget:”
Liberation Management: Necessary Disorganization for the Nanosecond Nineties” by Tom Peters. The California congressman is about to enter one kind of cult world as head of the $1.5 trillion U.S. budget, so a glimpse of a parallel universe, that of the myriad companies striving to keep up with changing times, might be in order. The sprawling compendium by the co-author of one of the books that ushered in the 1980s (”In Search of Excellence”)
counsels attention to markets in all their freewheeling forms as an antidote to bureaucracy and sluggishness. It`s an unwieldy book, but then so is the budget.
For Labor Secretary-designate Robert Reich: To this point, there has been something vaguely reminiscent of Bernard Baruch about the Kennedy School author and longtime Clinton crony. Franklin Roosevelt never trusted Baruch, the financial speculator and Democratic Party stalwart who offered him so much advice, and he never appointed him to anything in government, though he occasionally traveled to the great sage`s South Carolina estate-”the Barony of Hobcaw,” he called it. Now Clinton has given Reich and his friends a barony at the Labor Department. Nights, however, Reich might turn to
”Nationalism,” by Liah Greenfeld. At $49.95, it`s a superbly readable, yet deeply grounded, account by a Harvard sociologist of how a sense of national identity developed over many centuries in five countries. It would provide perspective on Reich`s conviction that nations don`t mean much of anything any more.
For Laura Tyson, nominated to head the Council of Economic Advisers:
”Mariners and Markets,” by Charles P. Kindleberger. This splendid and offbeat little book about the life of fishing fleets, merchant marines and navies can be read at nearly any level-as a witty compendium of lore or as a sophisticated critique of the doctrine that the unfettered interplay of supply and demand is enough to explain nearly everything, everywhere. For the woman who plans to diagnose the tricks of such strategic traders as Japan, a little tour of such age-old ”market imperfections” as shanghaiing, marooning and press gangs could be a tonic.
For Vice President-elect Al Gore: ”Striking the Mother Lode in Science:
The Importance of Age, Place and Time,” by Paul Stephan and Sharon Levin is a little too empirically rigorous to make it pleasant bedtime reading for the science policy buff. But it conclusively makes a crucial point: Because science doesn`t proceed smoothly across a broad frontier, but rather by leaps and bounds in pockets of opportunity, it doesn`t make sense to fund it evenly. The crucial explanatory variable known to scientists as RPRT (right place right time) has a host of applications in good science policy.
For Clinton: ”Simplicity and Complexity in Games of the Intellect,” by Lawrence B. Slobodkin. This may the best of the lengthening shelf of books about the newly emerging concepts in science of complexity and chaos, and though the style and subject matter of the meditation are far removed from the day-to-day routine of presidential decision-making, there are lessons worth pondering for any thoughtful person with a curiosity about life. Slobodkin writes of the complexity of packing a suitcase: Such a multiplicity of items inside, such a variety of modes of travel to anticipate, so many purposes to accomplish: socks and shirts; books and papers; cars, trains and airplanes.
Yet once the lid snaps shut, the suitcase becomes a simple, cherished box. ”The hectic and complicated mental and physical activity of packing has permitted enormous simplification of the trip itself.” So it is with picking a team before beginning a journey. Good luck and happy holidays to them all.
