The real David Stockman /

Greenya's book is based on extensive interviews with people who knew Stockman before he became director of the Office of Management and Budget, with people who had official contact with him while he was OMB director, and on public records. The main theme of Stockman's service is the same Stockman himself described in The Triumph of Politics (see below), although viewed from totally different perspective. The fundamental difference between the two books is that Stockman claims he acted in good faith as a supply-side economist (though such action turned out to be foolish because of the reality of politics), while Greenya and Urban conclude that he acted almost entirely on the basis of expediency. Their story is perhaps best summed up in a joke they attribute to Lois Romano: ``White House aides, the joke goes, huddle around his {{Stockman's}} heart during summers to keep cool'' (p. 209). Both books portray the terrible economic price that Americans will pay because of Stockman's manipulation of government in support of Reagan's political goals. Another telling quote is attributed to Robert Greenstein: ``What consistently gets missed, and where Stockman and the Reagan administration REALLY get off the hook, are the things they proposed that didn't get enacted'' (p. 222). The Triumph of Politics and The Real David Stockman are valuable contributions to the field of political science and both should be in all libraries.-H.E. Albert, Clemson University

Intended as a corrective to former federal budget director Stockman's forthcoming memoir, this report from Nader's Presidential Accountability Group depicts the controversial ``super-peddler of Reaganomics'' as an expedient power broker who pointedly fought a ``war on the poor'' in his four years as head of the Office of Management and Budget. Drawing on interviews, the authors trace Stockman's Michigan upbringing, his antiwar activism in college, his growing conservatism as director of the House Republican Conference and as a ``get-tough'' congressman, and finally his work as professed champion of the Reagan administration's ``supply-side'' ideology at OMB. The authors claim that Stockman's ``personal agenda,'' however, was to cut the federal budget, estranging him from supply-siders and having devastating impacts on social programs. Greenya and Urban quote many, including former supporters, who describe Stockman as an arrogant workaholic whose ``ideological fervor and rigidity,'' as the authors put it, led to acts of personal and professional betrayal. Greenya's books include For the Defense (with F. Lee Bailey); Urban is a legislative assistant on Capitol Hill. (June 2) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

This is a book David Stockman will probably not want to read. In it, he is portrayed as a heartless opportunist with no commitment to anyone other than himself. In a larger context, the book also provides a review of the first five years of the Reagan administration. The battles over policy and turf are seen as they swirl around Stockman and Reagan. In dissecting the policies, the authors, who are associated with Nader's Presidential Accountability Group, see an administration based on pro-business, pro-defense, and pro-rich attitutes. Greenya and Urban have a definite point of view to promote, but their book will provide a useful counterweight to Stockman's memoirs and is recommended as such. Richard C. Schiming, Economics Dept., Mankato State Univ., Minn. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Within a matter of weeks/months, Harper & Row will publish The Triumph of Politics: The Failure of the Reagan Revolution by David Alan Stockman, Director of the Office of Management and Budget for the first four and one-half years of Ronald Reagan's presidency. The text at issue here is an all-out ad-hominem assault--and the less useful of two early-bird audits of Stockman's OMB stewardship. By contrast with the measured, analytic appraisal offered by Owen Ullman (below), this report (prepared under the aegis of the Presidential Accountability Group, a Ralph Nader organization) is relentlessly critical and strident. In providing a sketchy account of Stockman's pre-OMB career, Greenya and Urban go to great lengths to put him in the worst possible light, at one point imputing sinister implications to his reported enjoyment of The Grateful Dead, a rock group. An overachiever in high school and at Michigan State, Stockman was briefly involved in the anti-war movement of the late 1960's. He entered Harvard Divinity School, leaving without a degree in 1970, the authors suggest, because a high number in the draft lottery effectively shielded him from the risk of military service in Vietnam. At any rate, the increasingly conservative Stockman wound up on the staff of Representative John Anderson, then a five-term congressman from Illinois and chairman of the House Republican Conference. In 1976, he moved on to run for and win a congressional seat from his safely Republican home district in southwestern Michigan. During four years in the House, Stockman emerged as an articulate party spokesman with a particular interest in financial policy. What brought him to Reagan's attention, though, was his skill in prepping the candidate for a series of debates with erstwhile mentor Anderson. The authors make much of this ""betrayal"" and other examples of their fall guy's ""duplicitous"" behavior. Stockman nonetheless climbed several rungs higher on the ladder, achieving interim glory as a wunderkind budget director and then suffering a nasty fall from grace when that article in The Atlantic Monthly revealed he was actually a supply-side apostate. To the evident disgust of the authors, Stockman survived the flap, applying his admittedly formidable intellect and industry to the thankless task of containing federal deficits. The main fault Greenya and Urban have to find with his efforts is that he did not have a liberal agenda. They lavish a great deal of not always coherent attention on those who deprecated Stockman's role in the budget-making process, unfortunately, without exploring whether he was a genuinely free agent, i.e., independent of White House and Capitol Hill oversight. Eventually, the authors advance an old theory that Stockman deliberately let red ink accumulate so he could later cut social programs which might otherwise have survived. In brief, then, a mean-spirited hatchet job that has the unintended effect of fostering sympathy for its embattled subject. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.