Volume 43, Number 10 · June 6, 1996
What Happened to the Revolution?
By Garry Wills
Showdown: The Struggle Between the Gingrich Congress and the Clinton White House
by Elizabeth Drew
Simon and Schuster, 398 pp., $25.00
Storming the Gates: Protest Politics and the Republican Revival
by Dan Balz, by Ronald Brownstein
Little, Brown, 424 pp., $24.95
'Tell Newt to Shut Up'
by David Maraniss, by Michael Weisskopf
Touchstone, 218 pp., $10.00 (paper)
Dirty Little Secrets: The Persistence of Corruption in American Politics
by Larry J. Sabate, by Glenn R. Simpson
Times Books, 430 pp., $25.00
The System: The American Way of Politics at the Breaking Point
by Haynes Johnson, by David S. Broder
Little, Brown, 668 pp., $25.95
How could it have faded so fast—the joyous delirium with which Republicans only last year took charge of the Congress and (they were certain) of the nation? It was announced that Peggy Noonan, the Reagan-Bush speech writer, would go back to Washington to do a book on the Revolution. The new Speaker of the House was sworn in with the trappings of a presidential installation. His first Hundred Days were finished with a prime-time address on network TV. First-timers in Congress, unlike their predecessors, came to instruct or to shove aside their elders. The President was reduced to claims that he was—not (like Al Haig) 'in charge,' not (like the Supreme Court) important, but (like the weather) 'relevant.' A president does not feel the need to inform us that he is not a crook, or not irrelevant, unless appearances are all to the contrary.
Review, 6474 words
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