|
|
|
|
|
|
Resources |
|
|
|
A Rosy Scenario
| Article
# : |
14855 |
|
|
Section : |
BOOK WORLD
|
| Issue
Date : |
10 / 1988 |
3,836 Words |
| Author
: |
David Brooks
David Brooks is book editor of The Wall Street Journal. |
THINKING ABOUT AMERICA
The United States in the 1990s
Annelise Anderson and Dennis Bark, editors
Stanford, California: Hoover Institution Press
590 pp., $19.95
Is the West mopping up?
Annelise Anderson and Dennis Bark of the Hoover Institution have compiled forty-nine essays on the United States in the 1990s Scenario, the grand dame of the 1980s. With a few exceptions, the contributors seem convinced that America has done pretty well in the 1980s and laid the ground-work for another round of the Gay Nineties.
The present volume is a sequel to a 1980 Hoover Institution Press book, The United States in the 1980s. That book had a youthful tone. It was filled with high purpose and grand plans. It was also filled with grievances about the way the nation was being managed, and it confidently delivered a new path. Of the thirty-seven contributors to that volume, seventeen subsequently served full or part time in the Reagan administration. As to the book's influence, Mikhail Gorbachev himself is the most reliable witness. On one of George Shultz's visits to Moscow, the Soviet leader told him, "We know what you think. We have read this book and watched all its programs become adopted by the Reagan administration."
So the programs were adopted, and on the whole they worked. This current collection reads like the work of a contented middle-aged Horatio
... (1996 of 22860 Characters)
Read Full Article
|
|
