In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

BOOK REVIEWS 241 erroneously frames the issue in terms of the division of income between nations rather than between classes within the advanced industrialized nations. The heart of the matter is this: If free trade continues, overall U.S. income will increase absolutely as a result, although it will decline relative to that of the newly industrialized countries. However, the success of the NiCs will undermine the position of unskilled labor in the United States and other developed nations. In the past this class of workers, through unionization (and in Europe through the establishment of a comprehensive welfare state), won for itself a greater share of the national income than it would have normally enjoyed. Continued free trade will undercut this class and force its political representatives to confront directly the issue ofincome distribution. From the national perspective, protectionism is clearly a "second-best" method of maintaining the distributional status quo, in that it reduces national income below what would prevail under free trade. From the viewpoint of unskilled labor, however, protectionism is the best solution, as it permits labor to sidestep the issue and avoid trying to wrest concessions (probably in the form of more social programs) from the other groups in society. This distributional aspect makes the free-trade/protection issue essentially political in nature. Support for free trade is presently being eroded both by secular trends and by the overvalued dollar. Correction of the present macroeconomic imbalances will eventually reduce or eliminate the trade imbalance, but a lasting consensus in support of free trade will be created only when steps are taken to insure that unskilled workers share in the increased national income that results from greater international specialization. Lyndon Johnson's Dual War: Vietnam and the Press. By Kathleen J. Turner. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985. pp. 358. Reviewed by Philip Geyelin, Editor-in-Residence, Foreign Policy Institute, SAIS. First a confession. As one who has spent a career as a newspaper reporter, editor, and columnist and has written one book about Lyndon B. Johnson's foreign policy and a chapter (for another book) about the performance of the press in the Vietnam War, I have a weakness for anything having to do with the dark as well as the light side of LBJ, and more than a few prejudices about the workings of the so-called media and the play of public opinion in the making of American foreign policy. But one does not have to come to these subjects with quite the same interest as I have to be richly rewarded by Kathleen J. Turner's dogged and wonderfully documented treatment of Lyndon Johnson's communication troubles in his conduct of the Vietnam War. She has stitched together a formidable body of evidence, embroidered by a wealth of anecdotal material, in support of the case that Johnson's war with the press was the root cause of his inability to successfully prosecute the war against the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese. Turner is so dead right about what went wrong in Johnson's relationship with the news business in its various forms that it seems almost churlish to say that the conclusion she finally arrives at is, to my mind, dead wrong. Turner's account of the war between the president and the press is an interesting case history of a particular episode in an adversary relationship that has confounded the conduct of foreign policy from the Republic's first days. 242 SAIS REVIEW Lyndon Johnson's character and personality gave a particular cast to his relations with the press and public. But the root cause ofJohnson's troubles with communication did not lie in his nature any more than it lay in the nature of the press. It lay in the nature of the war strategy—the whole concept of "graduated response" to enemy initiatives, of a struggle for limited objectives by limited means. The lesson of Vietnam is that you cannot conduct that kind of open-ended struggle in a society dedicated to the principle of freedom of expression without having something more to show by way of measuring progress than a body count of dead enemy soldiers or a...

pdf

Share