The Twilight of the Presidency: From Johnson...

The Twilight of the Presidency: From Johnson to Reagan, George E. Reedy (New American Library: $24.95; revised hardcover edition). With the recent publication of “Defiant Patriot: The Life and Exploits of Lt. Colonel Oliver North” (St Martin’s: $4.95), we’ve seen the beginning of a predictable gush of instant books reporting on a scandal that’s bound to rival the inevitable motion picture in color and drama. None of these accounts, however, is likely to be as relevant to the issues underlying the Iran-Contra affair as this updated edition of a 1970 book. Presaging Watergate, “The Twilight of the Presidency” was equally timely on its original publication. “Below the President,” Reedy warned, “is a mass of intrigue, posturing, strutting, cringing and pious ‘commitment’ to irrelevant windbaggery.”

The sentence, of course, could have been written by a curmudgeon, but George Reedy, the former special assistant to President Johnson and currently the Nieman Professor of Journalism at Marquette University, backs it up later with a largely well-reasoned argument which should have some impact in Washington. Unelected, unaccountable cabinet officials have come to command bureaucracies so huge that they are well out of control of the White House, Reedy argues. “The bureaucracy has a life of its own and, without constant prodding, will set a course that bears no relationship whatsoever to the political imperatives of the president.” We haven’t always seen this transition clearly because cabinet officers are still technically mere servants of the president. “But the U.S. is remarkable in it capacity to change substance without changing forms.”

There are some problems “The Twilight of the Presidency,” which was received warmly when it first appeared. Many will disagree with Reedy’s (premature) assertion that Reagan was oblivious to the Iran-Contra affair, that this obliviousness was due to “bureaucracy,” and that North’s agenda conflicted with the President’s “political imperatives.” Moreover, clumping Nixon, Ford, Carter and Reagan together as “caretaker” presidents “who have done little for their country” dismisses Nixon and Carter’s accomplishments in establishing closer relations with China, or Carter’s clarion call to human rights, or Reagan’s ideological appointees to the Supreme Court and dismantling of social programs. Much of this work is on target, however, from Reedy’s assertion, in an introduction written at the outset of the Iran-Contra affair, that Reagan will continue to the end of his term, “still liked but no longer the unchallenged leader of American polity,” to his recognition that more checks and balances are needed.

Mutuwhenua, The Moon Sleeps, Patricia Grace (Penguin: $4.95). Young, mobile Westerners have grown used to relinquishing the family tie as another is established through marriage. In this stylish, sensitive, vivid novel, however, the conflict between marriage and family threatens to overwhelm Ripeka, the needy, though ultimately strong Maori narrator. Ripeka’s tiny, traditional New Zealand village has been largely isolated from the frenzy of the city. Now, though, change is encroaching. A boy spots a remarkable green rock and tries to sell it in the village. Natives living near where the rock was found also stake their claims, however, and soon, a village grandfather is forced to intervene, reminding all that the stone belongs only to the “hands of the earth.” Initially, Ripeka’s run-in with modernity is far more benign: She meets Graeme, a white schoolteacher and, ignoring her grandmother’s wish that she marry a Maori, moves to the city with him. She’s amazed at how people on the street “lean into each headlong step, knowing where they’re going,” but eventually alienated when she fears that these urbanites--Graeme included--do not understand the “reciprocity between the people and the land.”

Ripeka’s vulnerability in the city is not as involving as it could have been, for early in the novel we see that she has enough inner strength and direction to overcome the problem. “Because of my belief in the rightness of what had been done with the stone,” she realizes in chapter two, “I can never move away from who I am . . . There was part of me that could never be given and that would not change.” Ripeka’s final resolution is still surprising, though, for it is altogether sanguine, discovering happiness in both her heritage and her new home. While little known in the West, Grace, a Maori teacher and writer living in New Zealand’s King Country, has the visual acuity of American Indian storytellers (a white owl swoops, merging with a white rock and becoming a woman, one of many vignettes emphasizing man’s proximity to nature), the character depth of contemporary American novelists, the sensitivity of feminist writers and a hope for the harmonious co-existence of tradition and change that has few antecedents.

Here at the New Yorker, Brendan Gill (Carroll & Graf: $12.95). Brendan Gill composed these portraits of veteran staffers in 1975, after nearly 40 years at the magazine, and so many of them have come to serve as obituaries. That Gill waited so long wasn’t a matter of tact (for the barbs he throws at colleagues merely tickle--they’re really accolades in disguise), but of historical significance. The magazine celebrated its 50th anniversary in 1975, and 1987 marked the transition from shadowy William Shawn to the more congenial Robert Gottleib (a change about which Gill has little to say in his new introduction, though his lavish, redundant praise of Shawn--”the leading magazine editor in this country”--is telling). Gill forwards some genuine criticism (“prolixity” and digression in Pauline Kael’s reviews), but most of the niggling in these pages exists only to distract us from the author’s pride about the place--in much the same way that many pieces in the magazine balance audacity with gentility. The magazine’s (few) critics have contended that the latter outweighs the former, arguing that social and political commentary should be unmistakable and direct, rather than implicit, as in a rambling essay about rural life in Central America. But change would be unadvisable, of course, for the magazine has remained relevant by holding on to values which some might say are growing obsolescent: elegant, sensitive prose and an acute sensitivity to art, politics and people.

The Big Room, Michael Herr, Guy Peellaert (Simon & Schuster: $14.95). The reality might be that both cities are sprawling suburbias in search of themselves, but in the New Journalism at least, Las Vegas represents hope fading just as Hollywood represents hope found. Both places promise dreams and sometimes deliver, but in Las Vegas their ephemerality is more apparent, for the slot machine is more tangible than the movie screen. Taken to excess, the symbolism can be hackneyed, but even the city’s geography seems to ask for it (the town is situated between Paradise and Death valleys) and so writers have obliged, including Michael Herr: “For a speedy town like Vegas,” he hyperbolizes, “having no time on the walls can only accelerate the process by which jellyfish turn into barracuda.”

The author’s forays into fiction aside, this work, well-received when it first appeared last year, is often insightful. Herr, best known for “Dispatches,” his book on the Vietnam War, envisions the city as a sort of confessional, a place where people realize that “inside every straight citizen lies a degenerate gambler,” and then go on to live in greater awareness. Herr’s implication that the city inspires epiphany recalls Simone Weil’s maxim: “All the passions produce prodigies. A gambler is capable of watching and fasting, almost like a saint.” And yet, where religion glorifies tradition, Las Vegas celebrates the lack of it: “People sought out Las Vegas,” Herr writes, “not for roots but for their guaranteed absence, to institutionalize drift as a right and principal.” Unfortunately, Herr’s text is also rootless; initially a bright rumination on the city, “The Big Room” becomes a series of short, disconnected portraits of people who have performed in the city and, then, of entertainers whose connections with the town are more tenuous (Richard Nixon, Orson Welles, John F. Kennedy). The paintings, moreover, are uninspired, their depiction of the stars too sketchy and their attempt to mystify familiar environments largely unsuccessful.