THE RIGHT BOOKS

The notion of a $2-trillion deficit by the year 2000 is already as much a part of the national heritage as California or Bust, we do our part, and the Sixteenth Amendment. It is also an evitable part, according to J. Peter Grace, chief executive officer, since 1945, of W. R. Grace & Co., chairman of President Reagan’s Private Sector Survey on Cost Control, and author of Burning Money: The Waste of Your Tax Dollars (Macmillan, $14.95).

Grace, a registered Democrat, accepted at once the President’s offer, made unexpectedly by telephone, to chair the new cost-study commission, because (as William Faulkner remarked upon being requested by President Eisenhower to undertake a goodwill mission to the Far East) “when your President asks you to do something, you do it.” He did have qualms, however: Reagan had made it clear on the phone that the project was to be entirely a volunteer effort to which the government would contribute not a penny, and Grace was sensitive to the risk of presumptuousness in asking the cream of the American executive class to contribute its time and money to researching and preparing a report that might well immediately afterward be put up on the shelf. Nevertheless, the scheme had already been successfully tested (by Governor Reagan, in the state of California) a while back, and Grace had himself been keeping a weather eye on the federal budget for years. By June of 1^82 he was at work with a staff of two thousand corporate volunteers.

CW

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Chilton Williamson Jr.

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The notion of a $2-trillion deficit by the year 2000 is already as much a part of the national heritage as California or Bust, we do our part, and the Sixteenth Amendment. It is also an evitable part, according to J. Peter Grace, chief executive officer, since 1945, of W. R. Grace & Co., chairman of President Reagan’s Private Sector Survey on Cost Control, and author of Burning Money: The Waste of Your Tax Dollars (Macmillan, $14.95).

Grace, a registered Democrat, accepted at once the President’s offer, made unexpectedly by telephone, to chair the new cost-study commission, because (as William Faulkner remarked upon being requested by President Eisenhower to undertake a goodwill mission to the Far East) “when your President asks you to do something, you do it.” He did have qualms, however: Reagan had made it clear on the phone that the project was to be entirely a volunteer effort to which the government would contribute not a penny, and Grace was sensitive to the risk of presumptuousness in asking the cream of the American executive class to contribute its time and money to researching and preparing a report that might well immediately afterward be put up on the shelf. Nevertheless, the scheme had already been successfully tested (by Governor Reagan, in the state of California) a while back, and Grace had himself been keeping a weather eye on the federal budget for years. By June of 1^82 he was at work with a staff of two thousand corporate volunteers.