LETTERS TO THE NEXT PRESIDENT by...

LETTERS TO THE NEXT PRESIDENT by Sen. Richard G. Lugar (Simon & Schuster: $19.95) Politics, alluring as the art of the possible, also can be discouraging as the realm of the practical. Its limitations are perhaps most apparent during a campaign, when many legislators silence deeply felt ideas and ideals, speaking in phrases based on political polling and designed by Madison Avenue. Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), a member and former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee who is up for reelection this year, stands apart from the cynical crowd in these pages. Straying from the safety of ambiguous, sound-bite-size phrases, he advances a specific, usually well-reasoned foreign policy agenda that will be valuable to either George Bush or Michael Dukakis.

Lugar is an optimist, convinced that presidents can assure America’s security without resorting to the underhanded tactics of Iran-Contra and can preserve international human rights without undermining the strength of free market economies. One of few conservatives to do so, Lugar openly acknowledges that our shaky support of the Contras cannot be blamed on an obdurate Congress; only a third of Americans back the Contras, he admits, and nearly all Americans oppose “imperialism” carried out by their government. Lugar is convinced, however, that Americans will support a President’s decision to intervene if he is honest with the American people (President Reagan, Lugar admits, has not always been so).

Unfortunately, Lugar’s discussion of Third World policy in later chapters is unlikely to forge significant bipartisan agreement. Conservatives will applaud his sanguine appraisal of Guatemala’s emerging democracy, for instance, while liberals will question his portrayal of Guatemalan military leaders like General Rios-Montt as friends of democracy and, more generally, his emphasis on military aid over economic aid as the principle way of discouraging communist insurgencies.

THE DESTRUCTIVE ACHIEVER Power and Ethics in the American Corporation by Charles M. Kelly (Addison-Wesley: $19.95) Business ethics books are timeless in theme, often culling wisdom from classical and biblical philosophy; business deals, on the other hand, are made and broken in seconds. Business ethics books often celebrate the unique contribution individuals can make if they are given the chance; most business traders follow the herd. Given these stark contrasts, it’s no wonder that business ethics books carry so little clout on Wall Street. To reach the people who have the power to make a difference, authors like Charles Perry, who believe the recent insider trading scandals have more to do with moral decline than with increasingly efficient investigations, must show how ethics can benefit the bottom line. Kelly--a management consultant based in Charlotte, N.C.--succeeds to a point, persuasively arguing that unethical but charismatic managers (“destructive achievers”) can disrupt a company’s social harmony and damage its power base in the long-term. Kelly does not offer real-life examples, however, to substantiate his thesis that long-term planning is the key to providing “the classic motivational environment.” “The Destructive Achiever,” as a result, will generate interest for its insights into personnel, but will be dismissed for its management strategies by executives who see long-term planning as authoritarian and unresponsive to economic vicissitudes.

LOVING RACHEL A Family’s Journey From Grief by Jane Bernstein (Little, Brown: $17.95) This bittersweet story reaches out to parents of disabled children, sharing the author’s experience of healthfully, if not always happily, rearing a mentally retarded, epileptic, partially blind child. “Loving Rachel” has a much broader appeal, however, as a probing meditation on why we care for our kin. Jane Bernstein (“Departures”) belongs to a new generation of women who traveled through young adulthood without even thinking of children. As she writes in the first chapter, “The unending cycles of caring and cleaning, the sentences that never got finished, the poor, worn women who had buried their dreams and stayed home making sandwiches while the men and children played--not me, no way.” By the middle of this chapter, though, Bernstein has given in to a growing maternal urge, becoming pregnant with Charlotte. And by chapter’s end, she has come to feel “that Charlotte was not just my first born, but the first child ever born.”

With Rachel, Bernstein’s second child, this pattern repeats itself, only to be torn asunder when Bernstein comes to believe that Rachel is blind and deaf: “Life isn’t worth living deprived of so much,” she tells her husband; “If it’s true, we’ll let her die,” he responds, “I’ll do it myself, I swear to God.” The pace of emotional change in the rest of “Loving Rachel” is slower, chronicling the gradual return of Bernstein’s faith in Rachel’s future. Bernstein writes with honesty and urgency, so much so that this book reads like a diary--very open in spirit, sometimes awkward in style. It is the most introspective of diaries, though, helping Bernstein recognize love as more than an attachment between caring moms and cute babies: “My love for (Rachel) is not the dumb, gut love of mother for her baby rat, though that is part of it. I love her because she is warm, charming, and responsive, because she loves in return . . . because when I ask Charlotte what she wants to eat, Rachel, three rooms away, calls out, ‘Ummm cream cheese olive onion mustard fish sticks apple juice’ . . . . I love her because she is mine.”

WHO’S IN CHARGE? How the Media Shape News and Politicians Win Votes by Philip Seib (Taylor Publishing: $14.95) How bold should the press be in leading public opinion by investigating politicians and interpreting the news? What are the boundaries for fair play in political advertising? Do political contributions pressure candidates to take “prescribed positions”? Philip Seib, a journalism professor who once worked as a journalist and political consultant, asks these important questions, but conducts only a cursory search for the answers. Seib, for example, suggests that Dan Rather should not have introduced a story about President Reagan by saying, “It was another day filled with photo opportunities.” Rather than addressing the important issue of whether photo opportunities should take up valuable air time at all, however, Seib misses the point and suggests that clips of Reagan smiling and waving should be introduced without editorial comment. News consumers, he writes, are intelligent enough to “figure things out for themselves.”

Several pages later, the author is still letting the networks off the hook too easily: “Just as politics suffers because too many persons consider it foreign to their own experience, so too does news coverage suffer because its audience is too undemanding.” Here, Seib doesn’t explore more constructive questions, such as how to convey issues with the kind of zest necessary to capture the attention of an audience accustomed to snappy “sound bites.” “Who’s in Charge” is well-intentioned and often good-humored, offering a few original sections, most notably a cogent review of political ad campaigns since the dawn of television. Too much of the book, however, merely reviews journalism techniques that will be familiar to anyone who has seen the nightly news.

SOUL IN EXILE Lives of a Palestinian Revolutionary by Fawaz Turki (Monthly Review Press: $10) This autobiography of a poet and essayist won’t solve any political quagmires; the author is as determined that Israel must give up some of its land as when he wrote “The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile,” a book widely acclaimed for explaining the shame, anger and humiliation that drive young Palestinians to violence. Here, Fawaz Turki eloquently describes his search for identity, both personal and national, as a struggle to “repudiate the sense of otherness that is thrust upon us.” “Soul in Exile” won’t convert many, but it does show why Palestinians such as Turki continue to “carry bricks to a Babel that never seems to get completed.” “People who die for the freedom of others,” Turki writes, “are, like women who die in childbirth, difficult to explain except to those for whom they died.”