Pathology of Power

In this book, a seasoned commentator on world affairs discusses the way power in government becomes enlarged, exploited, and institutionalized—not just as the result of external dangers, real or contrived, but as the result of the way the arms race spills over into and dominates foreign policy. The clandestine operation that led to the Iran-Contra affair, Norman Cousins observes, is a recent example of dangerous trend with its own momentum. Mr. Cousins returns here to the central theme that dominated the editorial pages of the Saturday Review during the thirty years of his editorship: the challenge to human freedom and safety represented by vast destructive power slipping away from the means of control.