Stealing from America: A History of Corruption from Jamestown to Reagan

Miller ( Spying in America ) argues mischievously that the graft-taking politician, the fleecing business tycoon, and the crooked labor baron each ``played a vital role in the development of modern American society.'' In this appalling, sometimes painfully amusing chronicle of greed, he spends little time judging the guilty, preferring to describe in colorful, lively prose how a gallery of rascals perpetrated grand larcency on the national and big-city levels and, for the most part, got away with it. One who didn't, however, was William Marcy ``Boss'' Tweed, who siphoned millions from New York City coffers. Miller comments on the irony of Tweed's imprisonment: ``Here he was behind bars while Astor, Vanderbilt, Gould and others whose thefts were greater than his were regarded as wizards of finance to be praised and emulated.'' The author nominates the Reagan administration as perhaps the most corrupt in U.S. history, one that, he claims, combined the old-fashioned graft of the Grant and Harding eras with an undisguised grabbing for power ``that would have done credit to Richard Nixon.'' (Aug.)