Washington Post Book Reviews
For You
Monday February 14, 2011
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NEVER SAY DIE: The Myth and Marketing of the New Old Age
Susan Jacoby
Pantheon
ISBN 978-0307377944
332 pages
$27.95
Reviewed by Judith Viorst
If old age isn't for sissies, then neither is Susan Jacoby's tough-minded, painful-to-read and important book, which demolishes popular myths that we can "cure" the "disease" of aging and knocks the "g" right out of the golden years. Forget about those dreams of dropping dead on the tennis court, or in a lover's arms, at age 95. Such happy endings could happen to us, but the odds are great that they won't, in spite of how frisky we currently feel and in spite of our dedication to a vegetable-eating, nonsmoking, moderate-drinking, daily-exercising life style.
Instead, if we live long enough to join the ranks of what are called the "old old"-- the late 80s and the 90s and beyond -- we are likely to become (choose several of the following) socially useless, financially strapped, physically disabled, mentally impaired, desperately lonely and demeaningly dependent. But even if we have already previewed the miseries lying ahead by having seen our parents' sorry decline, we might be tempted to tell ourselves that their fate need not be ours, tempted to believe that by the time we reach their age, 90 will be "the new fifty."
Jacoby, who tended her lover through Alzheimer's disease and watched her spunky grandmother, almost 100, grieve because she could no longer do "most of the things that had given her life meaning," has no illusions about what she regards as the dubious blessings of longevity. Indeed, she is enraged by the self-help gurus and the drug companies who merrily market an age-defying old age, where octo- and nonagenarians are touted as flourishing teachers, composers, skydivers, or as richly blessed with the "wisdom of old age." These exceptions can be admired, but they aren't how most stories will end.
Jacoby grants that, in the past, older women and men were the victims of negative stereotypes and too readily devalued and dismissed. But she sees the reversal in attitude over the last 40 years as a misleading and damaging correction, with the "hucksters of longevity" purveying the untruth that no one need fear growing old anymore because science -- any day now -- is going to fix whatever it is that ails us.
Not so, says Jacoby, supporting her arguments eloquently and persuasively with historical, sociological, scientific and economic research. For, contrary to all the media hype, age is not just a number. Almost half of Americans living past age 85 will suffer from Alzheimer's. Fifty percent will wind up in a nursing home. And only 25 percent of Americans living past age 65 have annual incomes of over $33,667. Furthermore, by the year 2030 some 70 million Americans will be older than 65, making up 20 percent of the population, compared with 13 percent today. And among that 70 million will be 8.5 million people over age 85, the over-85ers being the fastest growing part of our population.
Thanks to advances in medicine, we are living longer and better -- up to a point. But unless we are genetically blessed, we cannot expect to indefinitely escape the degenerative, chronic and irreversible diseases of advanced old age. And unless we are economically blessed, we may not be able to afford it, either.
Jacoby is well aware that some -- many, I suspect -- will object to her grim view and will question why she so passionately insists on debunking the myth of a healthier, happier, vastly improved "new old age." In response, she cites the late, great gerontologist Robert Butler, first director of the Institute on Aging, who cautioned, "I'd love nothing more than to wake up one morning and read a newspaper article announcing a cure for Alzheimer's. But we have to plan for aging as it is -- not as it might be if a magic potion appears. ..." Jacoby adds, "Only when we abandon the fantasy of beating old age ... will we be able to develop more humane ways of caring" for the oldest members of our society.
Jacoby recommends a number of social policy changes -- more accessible and affordable housing for old people, public subsidies for home-care services that would allow many more of them to remain in their homes -- that could significantly improve the life of the elderly. She also has some words of advice for those who are, or will be, the old old. Don't retire to one of those car-dependent resort communities; live instead in a city where you can get where you want to go even via a wheelchair or a walker. Do some kind of useful work -- paid or volunteer -- as long as you can. Don't feel that aging successfully requires you to be a serene, above-it-all, smiley-faced optimist. If what you really are is a "discontented work in progress," go for it. And, if you can do so, find some pleasure in the world as it actually is, without counting on the imminent triumphs of science to allow you to be skydiving in your 90s.
Judith Viorst's most recent book is "Unexpectedly Eighty and Other Adaptations."
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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UNWARRANTED INFLUENCE: Dwight D. Eisenhower and the Military-Industrial Complex
James Ledbetter
Yale Univ
ISBN 978-0300153057
268 pages
$26
Reviewed by Josiah Bunting III
The history of the Victorian age, wrote Lytton Strachey, can never be written: We know too much about it. The wise historian ought rather to examine specimens characteristic of an age and its culture. For example, if a 22nd-century citizen were to puzzle over the phrase "military-industrial complex," which recurs in virtually all political and military histories of the 20th and early 21st centuries, he would be well-advised to examine one of the largest and most powerful participants in this "complex," Lockheed Martin, subject of William Hartung's careful, meticulously documented book "Prophets of War."
President Dwight Eisenhower, not one celebrated for memorable phrases, coined this one. It refers, of course, to the production of armaments -- missiles, drones, submarines, etc. -- regardless of whether they may be needed. Those who favor their production are likely to do so for reasons that may or may not have anything to do with their efficacy. And, as Eisenhower recognized, challenging any of these new weapons systems is guaranteed to stir rancorous debate. No subject lends itself more easily to demagoguery.
In "Prophets of War," Hartung examines several of Lockheed Martin's major projects and how the company has -- usually -- succeeded in persuading various agencies to fund them. Only rarely has the company been thwarted in getting what it wants, most recently in its failure to persuade the Senate to continue support of the F-22 Raptor fighter. In 1999 the "plan was to buy 339 planes for a projected cost of over $62 billion -- up from an initial proposal to buy 750 planes for a total price of $25 billion."
Hartung explores the escalation of this project. He shows how 9/11 boosted military spending and was the salvation of many prospective military systems. Overnight the temper of congressional debates changed. "To give a sense of the magnitude of the shift, the increase in American military spending from 2001 through 2003 was more than the entire military budget of most countries, including major powers like the United Kingdom and China. In this new climate, no major weapon system was likely to be cut, no matter how irrelevant it may have been to fighting Al Qaeda." Jobs were paramount, particularly in congressional districts represented by powerful members, who, unhinged from their regular affiliations and ideologies, made gross arguments on behalf of weapons systems they would ordinarily have opposed.
The phrase "military-industrial complex" has stuck. Eisenhower himself remains indistinct in the public memory, framed at different times in his life by the photographer Richard Avedon as an amiable, distrait old duffer and by biographers who portray him as a clever politician. His campaigns and policies represented a form of Republicanism no longer recognizable to his successors:
There was a fierce independent streak in him, as James Ledbetter demonstrates in "Unwarranted Influence."
He had always been something of a stealth thinker, even in the army, when he kept his own counsel on opinions that his superiors might have regarded as unorthodox.
Few commentators on the 34th president's mind and methods have more rigorously considered the evolution of Eisenhower's preoccupations than Ledbetter has.
The author describes Eisenhower's unlikely relationship with Saturday Review editor Norman Cousins, who passionately opposed a defense policy founded on the threat of nuclear war. "The two men maintained a serious and respectful, if occasionally contentious, correspondence," Ledbetter writes. In today's politically polarized climate, "the idea of a meaningful connection between a leftist advocate of nuclear disarmament and a Republican military president might seem preposterous," the author adds, but it was Eisenhower, after all, who told Secretary of War Henry Stimson that he feared that use of the atomic bomb could erode America's moral authority.
Yet he had agreed to the new strategic rationale of the mid 1950s: a lower-cost, more efficient military -- bolstered by the bomb -- that could withstand a $5-billion cut in the 1955 defense budget. The threat of "massive retaliation" would discourage communist military ventures that threatened American interests, and would allow a cut of half-a-million troops. Soon after Stalin's death, however, when the Soviet leadership talked of "peaceful coexistence," Eisenhower denounced the wasteful, protracted costs of the Cold War to a national audience: "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed." And he raged against a Defense Department culture that imputed the basest motives to anyone who disagreed with the military establishment. No one, it seemed to Eisenhower, the retired five-star general, was capable of independent, disinterested consideration of proposed weapons. In more recent days, Hartung writes, the effort to save the Raptor, which proved ultimately unsuccessful, verged, according to a former congressional staffer, on "an ugly food fight."
Eisenhower's advice to his countrymen shortly before leaving the White House in 1961 seems just as relevant today: "In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist."
Josiah Bunting III is president of the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation in New York.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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