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Making Government Work | 
 enlarge | Authors: Ernest F. "fritz" Hollings, Fritz Hollings
Creator: Kirk Victor
Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
Category: Book
List Price: $29.95
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Rating:  4 reviews
Sales Rank: 89118
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 360
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.4
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.2 x 1.3
ISBN: 1570037604
Dewey Decimal Number: 328.73092
EAN: 9781570037603
ASIN: 1570037604
Publication Date: June 16, 2008
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Book Description
"Performance is better than promise" has long been the motto of Ernest F. "Fritz" Hollings, a former Governor of South Carolina and six-term U.S. Senator who has distinguished himself as a stalwart advocate of fiscally responsible progressive programs. In this political memoir, Hollings takes aim at our increasingly flawed political system and a government that has gone "into the ditch." As remedy he pulls antidotes from anecdotes about his personal experiences in making government work in spite of itself for the past half century. Hollings's long political career speaks volumes about the untapped potential of the elected and the electorate to use government for the good of all. As South Carolina's Governor in the early 1960s, Hollings oversaw the social transition of the state into the civil rights era and from an agriculture-based economy to an industry-based system with international partnerships. In the U.S. Senate from 1966 to 2005, he took point on shepherding new policies to address hunger, environmental conservation, energy consumption, communications, international trade, campaign finance, the federal budget, space exploration, and national defense. Hollings's instructive recollections of these efforts form a user's manual for our representative democracy as he shares compelling--and often candidly colorful--accounts of the smart stewardship of resources and authority needed to enact policies that make positive differences in the lives of Americans. Confrontational at times toward those issues and institutions he cites as responsible for knocking government off course, Hollings lays out clearly his deep commitment to improving our system of government, strengthening regulations on free trade, countering dependence on campaign contributions, and enhancing our communications and education programs to compete better in an information-driven global marketplace. This prescriptive compendium of sound thinking from an experienced agent of change serves as a call to action for those who would lead well and those who would be well led to reinvigorate a floundering system and call good people and good ideas back into the service of America's bright future.
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Making Government Work August 6, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
That's the title of the most practical "political" book you'll ever read. It is a user's manual for representative democratic government, written by former Senator Ernest F. (Fritz) Hollings of South Carolina, who spent six impressively productive decades in public service.As a reporter and campaign worker, I've known Fritz Hollings since he was the movie star-handsome "boy governor" of South Carolina in 1960 and JFK's invaluable ally in rounding up southern votes to gain the presidency. "Fritz" is a master politician; even more, he is a tireles public servant who truly tries to make government work for everyone he represents. Hollings has a razor sharp wit and a natural gift for memorable story-telling. He takes the reader behind backroom closed doors and into dark corners of political intrigue and describes how vitally important things get done. Hollings, who has been called "a visionary workhorse," focused throughout his career on putting government on a sound financial basis and promoting economic development and job creation. In a half century in Washington, he sponsored legislation on the budget, telecommunications, defense, trade, the environment and space exploration. In 1975, he pushed through the Automobile Fuel Economy Act and tried to launch an energy conservation revolution. In his presidential campaign a decade later, he sounded the earliest warnings against "outsourcing" and the loss of essential American manufacturing jobs overseas. Americans need to read and embrace his practical messages in this remarkable book and follow Fritz's lead. Richard J. Whalen www.richardwhalen.com
The Last Senator July 28, 2008
8 out of 8 found this review helpful
Every so often while reading Fritz Hollings' autobiography I had to stop and ask myself a question: Was there really ever such a person in American politics? Someone who actually ran for office with the intention of making his city, state and country better places? Someone who would admit to mistakes -- and even to a little political expediency -- and who then tried to make up for it? Someone unafraid to make fun of Sam Donaldson to his face on national television?
This book should have been published by a mass market imprint and renamed to sell to a larger audience. But it's part of Hollings' charm that he hides the fascinating and candid narrative of his political life behind a practical and well-meaning title. He really wanted government to work for the people -- as a state senator, governor and U.S. Senator -- and often he succeeded. Unfortunately, he never made it to the White House, but that's an American political story best told by a historian of our locked-up, frequently suffocating two-party duopoly. There isn't quite room for a Fritz Hollings in a system that requires the president to be the leader of his party before he is the leader of his country.
I first met Senator Hollings when I was writing a book about NAFTA and there is no more intelligent, or acerbic critic of "free trade" dogma than he. But Hollings' book is replete with other engrossing stories where his honest differences with the mainstream of his constituency and of the Democratic Party placed him in the role of dissident. From racial integration in the early 1950s to Iraq in the early 20th century, we get the always forthright account -- sometimes first-hand -- of how political reality in America conflicts with political honesty. And through it all shines Hollings' utter lack of cynicism -- his determination to make the system work, no matter how corrupt it may be.
Making Government Work ought to be read by anyone who wants to know more about Brown V. Board of Education (the little known story of the Summerton 60 was particularly enlightening for me), trade politics, campaign finance, and the Senate vote to authorize the invasion of Iraq. But even if you're not a student of recent American history, or if you disagree with Hollings on his positions, you'll enjoy his sense of humor. A great politician tries to inspire, of course, but a truly effective politician knows just when to make his audience laugh. Along with Robert Dole, Hollings is the best I've ever heard, with or without a script.
Wise, well-written, and consistently absorbing July 17, 2008
16 out of 17 found this review helpful
Rarely has Senator Fritz Hollings used his renowned wit to more devastating effect than when he was interviewed in 1990 on the ABC program, This Week with David Brinkley. Some weeks earlier he had reportedly bought a bargain-priced Korean-made suit on a field trip to Seoul. Given his role as a leading critic of Korean dumping in the American textile market, the alleged purchase was the sort of trivia that passed for news in some quarters. Although Hollings had arrived at the ABC studio expecting to talk about the federal government's worsening budget deficits, the interviewer Sam Donaldson lost no time in getting to the nub of the matter: whether or not Hollings was at that moment wearing the notorious suit.
"Senator," Donaldson said, "you're from the great textile-producing state of South Carolina. Is it true you have a Korean tailor." Before Hollings could respond, Donaldson pressed on: "Let's see the label in there. What is the label in there?"
"I bought it," Hollings replied, "the same place right down the street where, if you want to personalize this thing, you got that wig, Sam."
The entire studio erupted. The blustery -- and bewigged -- Donaldson had had, if not his head handed to him, at least his tonsorial codpiece. But he was to exact a terrible revenge. Although Hollings had previously been a favorite on the program, Donaldson made sure that the courtly Southern Senator (and a man who still sports a full head of hair -- all evidently securely attached to its owner) was never invited back. Hollings had insulted a vain and not overly intelligent member of the new aristocracy of Big Foot media interviewers and for punishment he would be cast into outer darkness.
In "Making Government Work," an autobiographical account of the steadily worsening problems that have engulfed the American political system in the last six decades, Hollings tells this anecdote as an illustration of how America has lost its way. Politicians, he writes, "are failing people because journalists too often are in the business of pursuing sideshows and not looking at the big picture." His point is, of course, irrefutable. But there is a deeper moral here that Hollings is too polite to state explicitly: while, by the standards of his trivia-obsessed profession, Donaldson might claim to have been within his rights in bringing up the alleged purchase, his insulting tone was utterly inexcusable. No decent person should have been addressed in such a way. That a member of the U.S. Senate should be so addressed bespeaks a degree of decay in the American body politic that bodes ill for the entire future of American democracy.
In dissecting what has really happened to the American empire since its zenith in 1945, Hollings enjoys an unrivalled command of his material. Few if any political actors have played at such a high level for so long. A life-long Democrat, he was elected to the South Carolina legislature in 1948, became governor in 1958, and entered the U.S. Senate in 1966.
Hollings's place in history rests on his leadership role in addressing three of the most serious policy problems of the era -- the federal budget deficits, the trade deficits, and the depradations of the K Street lobbying system. Readers of this book will not be disappointed in the space he allocates to each.
Hollings is perhaps best known for his efforts to rein in the U.S. budget deficits. He had been a budget hawk since his days as governor of South Carolina and in the U.S. Senate in 1974 he hit the theme hard. He returned it to again in partnering two Republican Senators Phil Gramm and Warren Rudman in pushing through the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings balanced budget legislation of the 1980s. The legislation was severely weakened by a constitutional challenge in the Supreme Court. Remedial efforts have not worked because, in Hollings's account, successive presidential administrations -- Bush I, Clinton, and Bush II -- have "brazenly violated the law."
The soaring budget deficits have been a contributory factor in an even bigger and less tractable problem, the trade deficits, but the main cause of the trade deficits, as Hollings shows, is a fundamentally wrong-headed American trade policy. He identifies fellow Democrat Jimmy Carter as the President who did most to put the United States on the the course to industrial emasculation and ever-increasing foreign indebtedness. The basic problem is that the present policy is merely "one-way free trade." America may open its markets all its wants but if other nations do not reciprocate, the net effect is that American industries bleed to death. With the American current account deficit now running consistently at around 5 percent of gross domestic product or more, the Bush administration has daily to go hat in hand to other nations, most notably China, to scrounge the finance to make ends meet. For somebody who remembers as clearly as Hollings does how things used to be, America's predicament is truly unbelievable. In 1966, the year Hollings entered the Senate, America enjoyed a _surplus_ of 0.4 percent of gross domestic product. Indeed the United States did not incur a single deficit in the 1960s and trade deficits did not become "baked in" to the American economic structure until the Carter era.
Underlying the budget and trade problems is the lobbying problem. The Supreme Court again has much to answer for because, in the Buckley v. Valeo decision of 1976, it vitiated a major Congressional effort to stop dirty money polluting American democracy. Hollings is undoubtedly right that this ruling has not only utterly corrupted the American political process but has undermined the collegiality that once characterized the Senate. As Hollings points out, in earlier times when money played a less important role, Senators frequently spent the weekends in Washington and socialized with one another. That helped encourage a spirit of bipartisan cooperation in which Senators worked together -- much of the time at least -- in the national interest. These days they have no time anymore. They are on the road every weekend scrounging funds for their next campaign -- and in any case they are too busy outdoing one another's soundbites to focus on the sober task of legislating wisely.
While the policy issues provide the meat in this important book, many readers will particularly relish Hollings's recollections of the fascinating personalities he has known over the years. He devotes a chapter, for instance, to the Kennedy family. Having met Robert Kennedy as far back as 1954, he forged a close relationship with the Kennedys that among other things resulted in his delivering his crucial anti-Catholic state to John F. Kennedy in 1960. Such was the degree of intimacy he enjoyed in the Kennedy circle that, as he records in this book, he more than once was treated to the off-color side of JFK's wit.
He also has much to say about Robert Kennedy, whom he refers to throughout as Bob rather than Bobby. (Although that may seem slightly strange to the younger generation, Robert Kennedy generally styled himself as "Bob" in notes to friends. The press's preference for "Bobby" appears to have been inspired by JFK.) The Fritz-Bob relationship was evidently generally very cordial. But JFK's all-elbows younger brother more than once got Hollings's dander up. One telling episode concerns Robert Kennedy's run for the presidency in 1968. As a preparatory move, Kennedy decided to go on a tour of the nation publicizing some of the worst slums. One destination he planned to hit was in South Carolina -- at least it was until word reached Hollings's ears.
Hollings writes:
"As soon as I heard of Kennedy's plans, I picked up the telephone and told Kennedy I was working to do something about hunger in South Carolina.....He responded that everything had been arranged. I didn't understand the problem, he added....At that point I had had enough. 'Now look here,' I shouted. 'You go down there there, and I am going to get on a plane and go straight up to Harlem [in New York state, which Kennedy represented]. I am going to call every TV station, and then I am going to walk right through Harlem for four or five days, everywhere I can, and find every rat eating every child's eye out. And everywhere I go, I'm going to say why isn't Kennedy here? I am going to have a New York hunger expose at the very time you have yours in South Carolina.'"
South Carolina was dropped from Kennedy's itinerary.
Kennedy had learned what Sam Donaldson was to discover in 1990 -- that Fritz Hollings is not someone to tangle with lightly.
"Making Government Work" is a wise, well written, and consistently absorbing analysis of the epochal crisis now facing the American nation.
A Smart and Saucy Book July 5, 2008
21 out of 23 found this review helpful
For almost four decades, Ernest F. "Fritz" Hollings had the quickest mind and sharpest wit of anyone in the U.S. Senate, which sometimes caused him troubles with the media and his political colleagues. Retiring in 2005, Senator Hollings has written a political memoir that is instantly a classic history of progressive politics during the last half of the 20th Century, much of which he helped shape.
Hollings, a native South Carolinian and Citadel graduate, returned to Charleston in late 1945 after three years of combat in Africa and Europe. Eager to get on with his life, Hollings got a law degree in record time and joined a law firm, where his uncle was a partner. To give him some local visibility, the senior partners encouraged him to run for a seat in the South Carolina State Legislature, which he admits they thought he would surely lose.
In 1948, segregation dominated work and life in the state. During that campaign, the daily paper in Charleston publicly questioned the several candidates, "Do you or do you not solicit the Negro vote." Hollings one-line written response was, "Do you or do you not solicit Negro subscribers and advertisers to your newspaper?" Hollings claims that the paper stayed angry with him for 20 years. Nonetheless, Hollings won.
The day of his inauguration, the county superintendent of education asked the freshman legislator to go look at something with him. The next morning they went to the local elementary school for black children. It was a single room holding 80 children in two grades, all taught by one teacher. The school had no bus, forcing the children to walk as much as nine miles and back every day. It deeply impressed the young war veteran who had fought besides and commanded black troops during the war.
Hollings' first action when he got to the South Carolina Legislature was to champion a 3 percent sales tax whose proceeds would be dedicated to improving education in the state and making the black schools equal to those for white children. It was a radical idea at the time, but Hollings prevailed.
Over the next 14 years, his legislative colleagues elevated him to the position of Speaker Pro Tem and then the voters elected him Lt. Governor and Governor. Unlike as happened in other Southern states such as Mississippi, Alabama and Arkansas, Governor Hollings in the early 1960s guided the state's transition from segregation to integration without riots or a single death and the state's economy from agriculture to industry.
Relying on a "pay as you go" budgetary approach, Hollings helped the state get a three star rating from the national credit agencies, built the nation's finest adult technical training centers and attracted hundreds of new factories and hundreds of thousands of new jobs to the state.
The theme of this book is "making government work," which Hollings did. A friend and supporter of Jack, Bobby and Ted Kennedy, Fritz Hollings was one of the progressive politicians who created what became known as the "New South" which overcame the problems of race, bitter prejudice and deep poverty that had prevailed since the Civil War.
Entering the U.S. Senate in 1966, Fritz Hollings made hunger in America, and then elsewhere, a national issue. He wrote a popular book on the topic -- The Case Against Hunger and championed the creation of dozens of progressive programs, including those to help women, infants and children. He held the first hearings on climate change and helped enact legislation to prohibit dumping in the oceans.
An advocate of fiscal discipline, Hollings fought a decades-long battle against the "supply side" borrow and spend policies pushed by Ronald Reagan and his GOP successors. As a defense "hawk," he also fought the Carter Administration's efforts to weaken the national defense.
With the biting wit for which he is famous, Hollings describes the trade and ideological battles he had with every President from Lyndon Johnson to George W. Bush.
In 1984, Hollings sought the Democratic nomination for President. Following the failed Presidency of fellow Southern Jimmy Carter, the candidate with his distinctly South Carolina accent was unable to overcome the doubts of Iowa and New Hampshire voters about electing another Southern and he soon ended his race. More is the pity, because no Democrat since FDR was better qualified by education, experience, temperament, and outlook to be the U.S. President.
In the last chapter, Hollings identifies 14 actions that will enable the U.S. to protect our prosperity and once again make it profitable for corporations to invest in the United States and create good-paying jobs with benefits here.
He also argues that we must change the existing way that we finance our political campaigns. In its 1974 decision Buckley v Valeo, the Supreme Court equated free speech with money. In a political world now dominated by expensive television ads, a candidate can spend an unlimited amount of their own money in a campaign while individual contributors are limited as to the amount they can give to their opponents. Thus, the rich have unlimited "free speech" when running for office, while those without wealth have as much free speech as the money they can raise in small chunks. The Court's decision created a Congress increasingly dominated by the superrich and a race for campaign money that is destroying our representative democracy.
As a solution, Hollings proposes the adoption of a Constitutional Amendment that would allow Congress to impose limits on political contributions. His goal is to make our elections competitive and democratic.
Making Government Work is lively, accessible and well written. It captures the wit and wisdom of one of America's most experienced and accomplished public servants and it offers sensible, politically feasible solutions that truly can make government work. John McCain, Barack Obama and their advisors would benefit from reading this book.
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