Tilting at Windmills.

• Author: PETERS, CHARLES

Royal Credentialism * Rebates for the Rich * Blockbuster Legal Fees Dangerous Police Games * Jackie's Cynicism

FOR BETTER OR FOR WORSE--I suspect mostly the latter--the expense account rip-off has become an American tradition. It is so embedded in our culture that few people seem embarrassed about participating in it. Southwest Airlines magazine recently revealed how an airline had once used an expense-account ripoff to its own profit. In 1973, Southwest's then-bigger competitor, Braniff, cut the fare for the Dallas-to-Houston trip to $13. Southwest countered with an offer of the same fare or a bottle of liquor for those who paid the full fare. Business travellers quickly saw the wisdom of taking the booze and letting their companies pay the full fare. The promotion was so successful that for the two months it was in effect, Southwest became the state's largest distributor of Chivas scotch, Crown Royal whiskey, and Smirnoff vodka.

WHY DOES PAUL O'NEILL WANT to protect tax cheats? He opposes a crackdown on tax havens like those in the Caribbean supported by--get this--seven former IRS commissioners from the Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Clinton administrations.

"BLOCKBUSTER SETTLES SUIT ON Late Fees" was the headline in the business section of The New York Times. Blockbuster was acknowledging that it should not have charged late fees that cost much more than the movies' original rental price. I thought, "That's nice, a little triumph for the consumer." But when I read the rest of the story, I realized that the consumers aren't the real winners. The only cash beneficiaries are the lawyers. They'll get up to $9.25 million in fees.

IN HIS REVIEW IN THE NEW York Times of Bruce J. Schulman's The Seventies, George Packer dismisses as "a kind of reductio ad absurdum" Schulman's assertion that Jackie Kennedy's decision to marry Aristotle Onassis "signaled the end of the optimistic, liberal 1960s" At first I nodded my head in agreement with Packer, but the more I thought about it and let my mind go back to the time of the marriage--October 1968--the more I thought Schulman, even if guilty of overstatement, could still be on to something. One thing I'm practically certain of is that the marriage cost Hubert Humphrey the election and put Richard Nixon in the White House. Although the country was ultimately more forgiving of Jackie's second marriage, at the time it seemed a shockingly cynical betrayal of the idealism of Camelot. If the leading lady was cynical enough to marry a rich old man who was infamous for his highly devious, if not downright crooked, business practices, what did that say about Camelot?

It took the wind out of the sails of a good number of those who had been devoted followers of Robert and John Kennedy. If it hadn't happened, I'm convinced that the emotion aroused by the assassination of Robert Kennedy would have helped Humphrey in the same way that similar feelings about John Kennedy's murder helped Lyndon Johnson in 1964.

Of course, poor Hubert's candidacy was unfairly sabotaged in other ways. Gene McCarthy was too late and too tepid in supporting Humphrey that fall. And the infamous alliance between Anna Chennault and Richard Nixon resulted in the South Vietnamese torpedoing the Paris peace talks on the eve of the election, which, as a blow to optimism and hope, had an effect not unlike the Onassis wedding. And you have to remember that after the Kennedy and King assassinations that same year, optimism and hope were definitely not in excess supply.

ON THE WHOLE, THE COUNTRY has become more meritocratic, but money still makes a difference. For example, at Duke University, just 15 percent of the students come from families earning less than $50,000 a year, even though such families make up half of the nation, according to...