Alfred Kazin on
Muriel Spark

Alistair Cooke on
the Churchill years

John Simon on
Camus' notebooks

BOOKWEEK

OCTOBER 17, 1965

The Sunday

Herald
Tribune

VOL. 3, NO. 6

Published weekly by New York Herald Tribune Inc., 230 West 41st St., New York, N.Y., 10036. $7.00 per year, foreign countries $8.00. Second class postage paid at New York, N.Y.

GOOD WILL AND BEYOND

Abstract and excessive moralism is seen to have clouded Eisenhower's world-view

By Henry A. Kissinger

WAGING PEACE: The White House Years, Vol. II, 1956-1961.
By Dwight D. Eisenhower. Illustrated. Doubleday. 741 pp.
$6.95.

How much the memoirs of a former President contribute to our understanding of his term in office depends on the purpose the reader expects them to serve. They can attempt to describe the events as seen by the man who had the final responsibility. They can seek to explain the motivations behind his actions and the philosophy which guided decisions. They can provide an insight into the workings of the government and draw lessons with the advantage of hindsight.

Waging Peace is especially valuable on the first level, that of pure narrative. The account of the Eisenhower era is fair, full and interesting. There are many fascinating and new sidelights. For example, President Eisenhower reveals that American U-2 flights had spotted the Israeli concentrations prior to the attack on Suez. American outrage was thus caused not by surprise but by not having been officially informed. The Khrushchev visit to the United States in 1959, according to Eisenhower, resulted from a State Department misunderstanding of the President's instructions. We learn that President Eisenhower was prepared to use tactical nuclear weapons against Communist China during the crisis over Quemoy and Matsu in 1958. It is also apparent that in the last decade France and the United States have exchanged roles. President Eisenhower recounts at least five episodes from the late Fifties when either President de Gaulle or his Prime Minister proposed a unified global strategy, only to be rebuffed by the United States. (It is significant that President Eisenhower dismisses these overtures in a sentence or two.) Eisenhower explains that the United States could not give up its freedom of action in the former colonial areas—an attitude similar to that of President de Gaulle with respect to American involvement in Viet Nam in the Sixties. From Waging Peace, President Eisenhower emerges as a man of enormous good will, great dignity and considerable patience, an efficient chief Executive, dedicated to achieve a peaceful world and making his decisions free of petty partisan considerations.

When one goes beyond the narrative of events, however, the book is much less satisfactory—especially regarding foreign policy, which is its major concern.

In one thing, the historical dimension so prominent in the memoirs of such leaders as Churchill or de Gaulle is almost completely lacking. To be sure, events are introduced with a brief description of the background. But this information is not enough and highly anecdotal. The focus is

on the crisis at hand and the personality in the limelight. Poland's plight in 1956 is seen not as a historical tragedy but in terms of Gomulka's ups and downs in the Fifties; the description of the reaction of the Federal Republic to the division of Germany includes the innuendo that Adenauer had little enthusiasm for ending Germany's partition because unification would jeopardize the electoral prospects of his party. Tension is almost invariably seen as the result of shortsightedness, lack of balance, or Communist machinations. Conflicts are most frequently described in such terms as "emotional," "militant," "incomprehensible sensitivity." American policy-makers are viewed as impartial arbiters without interests save the maintenance of peace; without passions save the upholding of law; conducting affairs by the ad hoc analysis of particular events. Thus President Eisenhower asserts that one cannot speak of a United States foreign policy except for general professions of good-will such as "live and let live" and measures tailored to the specific requirements of some hundred sovereign nations.

This combination of abstract moralism and extreme pragmatism, for all its good will, may contain the seeds of America's eventual alienation from the rest of the world. The detachment on which Eisenhower prides himself may make us appear unpredictable. Slogans like "upholding the will of the United Nations" are small comfort to hard-pressed leaders aware of what confused motives and accidents form the shifting majorities in that body. When war risks the lives of tens of millions, commitment to the "rule of law" as the primary objective of American policy may seem an insufficient basis of cooperation to nations whose domestic experience is different from ours—and they are the vast majority. Perhaps unfairly, countries whose margin of survival is narrow would be more reassured if America committed itself to specific interests rather than to legal abstractions. President Eisenhower could imagine that stationing a ship in the Mediterranean with arms for whoever the victim of aggression might be would help stabilize the situation in the Middle East. But, for the nations concerned, our definition of aggression was as important as the availability of arms. And here American policy was silent or, what amounts to the same thing, reserved the right to define aggression in the light of the circumstances of the moment.

Throughout Waging Peace, President Eisenhower gives short shrift to the claims of our allies in the Fifties—especially the French—that the Western Alliance should share global responsibilities. Perhaps the European argu- (Continued on page 16)

## IN THIS ISSUE

**Waging Peace: The White House Years, Vol. II, 1956-1961** by Dwight D. Eisenhower 1

Reviewed by Henry A. Kissinger, formerly advisor to the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the National Security Council, now executive director of the international seminar at Harvard University's Center for International Affairs.

**The Mandelbaum Gate** by Muriel Spark 2
Reviewed by Alfred Kazin, critic and author, most recently, of "Starting Out in the Thirties."

**The Painted Bird** by Jerzy Kosinski 2
Reviewed by Andrew Field, who edited "Pages from Tarusa" and is now writing a critical biography of Vladimir Nabokov.

**Notebooks: 1942-1951** by Albert Camus 4
Reviewed by John Simon, author of "Acid Test," a collection of his literary criticism.

**The Origins of Form in Art** by Herbert Read 4
Reviewed by Wylie Sypher, author of "Four Stages of Renaissance Style" and "Loss of the Self in Modern Literature and Art."

**The Churchill Years, 1874-1965** by the Editors of the Viking Press, text by The Times of London 5

Reviewed by Alistair Cooke, chief American correspondent for The Guardian of Manchester since 1948.

**SIMILES & METAPHORS** 6

**The Myth and the Powerhouse: Essays on Literature and Ideas** by Philip Rahv 8

Reviewed by Robert Alter, assistant professor of English at Columbia and author of "Rogue's Progress: Studies in the Picaresque Novel."

**The Fashionable Savages** by John Fairchild; **The Wheels of Fashion** by Phyllis Lee Levin 10
Reviewed by Gloria Steinem, a contributing editor to Glamour magazine.

**Wandering Through Winter** by Edwin Way Teale 14
Reviewed by Lewis Gannett, editor of The Mainstream of America series and author of "Sweet Land" and "Cream Hill."

**The Creative Organization** edited by Gary A. Steiner; **The Creative Imagination** edited by Hendrik M. Ruinenbeek 18
Reviewed by Eric Larrabee, former managing editor of Horizon and American Heritage.

**The Decision to Drop the Bomb** by Len Giovanniitti and Fred Freed 27

Reviewed by Michael Amrine, former managing editor of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists.

**PAPERBACKS: The College Student's Handbook** by Abraham H. Lass and Eugene S. Wilson 30

Reviewed by Edward Tenner, a graduate student at the University of Chicago.

**East Asia: The Modern Transformation** by John K. Fairbank, Edwin O. Reischauer and Albert M. Craig; Mao and the Chinese Revolution by Jerome Ch'en; Communist China's Crusade by Guy Wint; The Two Red Giants by Alberto Ronchey; China and the Bomb by Morton H. Halperin; The United States and Japan by Edwin O. Reischauer; The Kimono Mind by Bernard Rudofsky 31

Reviewed by Mark Mancall, assistant professor of history at Stanford University.

**NEW FICTION: My Sweet Charlie** by David Westheimer; **The Mighty Distance** by Georgia McKinley; **The Gentleman from California** by Niven Busch; **Electra** by Gladys Schmitt; **Cork Street, Next to the Hatter's** by Pamela Hansford Johnson 34

Reviewed by Kenneth Lamott, an editor for Contact magazine.

**The Young Visitors** by John Wain 35
Reviewed by David Pryce-Jones, whose books include a novel, "The Sands of Summer," and "Next Generation: Travels in Israel."

**WHAT PEOPLE ARE READING** 36

**BOOKS FOR BOYS & GIRLS** 37

**MYSTERY & SUSPENSE** 39

## Dispassionate pilgrimage

By Alfred Kazin

**THE MANDELBAUM GATE.** By Muriel Spark. Knopf. 369 pp. $5.95.

You stand on a parapet in the Israel part of Jerusalem and look across to "enemy" territory in Jordan, which is also Jerusalem. Immediately below you are ramshackle white Arab houses that, from here, are accessible through the Mandelbaum Gate only if you are not a Jew and can show a baptismal certificate. So you look and look. There on the horizon, visible and unvisible, is the Mount of Olives, holiest of Jewish burying places, where Jesus sat after prophesying the destruction of the Temple. Down there, somewhere behind armed patrols and the sentries hiding behind sandbags on roofs, are the last stones of the Temple—the Wailing Wall. Down there are the holy places of Jew and Christian alike, the shrines of the martyrs, the tombs of the patriarchs, the stony hills and exalted valleys whose every name reminds you of Pius XI's saying—"spiritually we are all Semites."

Nowhere else on earth are neighboring peoples so ferocious and so farcically divided, so self-righteous, so full of their own (carefully cultivated) political feelings. To those Arabs down below, this is not "Israel" but "occupied Palestine," "Israel, so-called," and the people here are "ex-Jews." Among the Israelis, many of whom are happy to forget certain natural regrets and doubts under the pressure of the hysterical hatred that surrounds them, the very violence of their own inner conflicts betrays the unnaturalness of the situation—an unnaturalness that anyone on the spot with the slightest, the most momentary detachment, can recognize. But detachment is about as likely hereabouts as a silky low-necked dress in the ultra-Orthodox section of Jerusalem, where proclamations hung over the roadway warn "Jewish daughters" to go in respectable garb. The Holy Land is fierce—and, God knows, it always was.

Yet to Muriel Spark the situation has its humors. Humors are not comedy-humors are the static charac-

teristics of the human type, puckish and intellectual. I am pretty sure that humors can't do dramatic justice to the heights and depths of this situation—and even humors can't sustain a light novel about the Near East today. This is the kind of would-be Waugh that needs a Colonel Blimp in Jerusalem to make it believable. Miss Spark's novel, though expert, is lifeless, cold, worked-up. It doesn't exist at all as a work of art. It is just very intelligent. The Middle East is a seething pot, and Miss Sparks is an acute novelist of manners, with a passion for plots, to whom the tinderbox of Arab nationalism, Jewish nationalism, English stuffiness, Greek Orthodox and Roman Catholic rivalries definitely presents its unexpected side. Nothing less like the patriotism-to-order of *Exodus* could be imagined. That fellow can't write, and Muriel Spark writes with such fluent expertness about everything and anything that she has become as untouchable as the Foreign Office. This is the kind of novel that no American ever writes, for it is entirely a serving-up of those comically assorted social types whose collision can be imagined only by a brightly ironic observer from a very old society. Yet brightness, when not put in motion by the subject directly, merely calls attention to itself.

Miss Spark is extraordinarily able, but she will seem just as able when she comes to write about the Eskimos. My guess is that this subject interests her because she is interested beyond everything else in social types, in the variety of the human species; surely nowhere else on earth is there such a mixed-up human garden as is to be found in Israel, Jordan, and at the Mandelbaum Gate—the break in a street which tacitly but somehow unofficially supplies the only legal passageway between Israel and Jordan, which does not recognize the existence of Israel.

Miss Spark begins her novel with a British diplomat, one Freddy Hamilton, who is attached to the Embassy in Israel but spends weekends with British friends and fellow-diplomats in Jordan. Thanks to his diplomatic status, Freddy can pass easily through the gate which is named after a Mr. Mandelbaum who once had a house on this street. But while there are many Christian pilgrims going from their holy places in Jordan to their holy places in Israel, it is more difficult for pilgrims to pass from Israel to Jordan—and it is forbidden, it is mostly highly dangerous, for a Jewish visitor to Israel to cross the gate into Jordan.

There hangs the plot, for Miss Barbara Vaughan,

## The butcher's helpers

By Andrew Field

**THE PAINTED BIRD.** By Jerzy Kosinski. Houghton Mifflin. 272 pp. $4.95.

This semi-autobiographical account of a small Polish boy who was separated from his parents at the beginning of World War II traces his wartime wandering from village to village, horror to horror. *The Painted Bird* is unique among such chronicles in that scarcely any Nazis figure in it, nor are there any descriptions of concentration camps; nonetheless no book has delved so deeply into the "Nazi mentality" in its truest sense—which is to say, not confined to the narrow limits" of a uniform or even a nationality.

So awful (in the gravest meaning of that word) is this book that I can scarcely "recommend" it to anyone,

and yet, because there is enlightenment to be gained from its flame-dark pages, it deserves as wide a readership as possible. It is, however, highly unlikely that *The Painted Bird* will be translated and read in Poland in the foreseeable future, for the book is an unrelentingly harsh portrait of the Poles as willing and even energetic functionaries for the Germans in rounding up and handing over Polish Jews and Gypsies, even though they themselves were the objects of Nazi contempt and marked for extermination.

The title refers to the birds colored with bright, stinking paints by a peasant and released into the air: "The painted bird circled from one end of the flock to the other, vainly trying to convince its kin that it was one of them. But, dazzled by its brilliant colors, they flew around it unconvinced.... We saw soon afterwards how one bird after another would peel off in a fierce attack." Similarly, the dark-complexed boy narrator, whose religious and racial background is never specified, treks over the rural regions of Poland where the peasants cannot understand his educated, urban speech and assume that he must be a "Jew Gyp-bastard."

The succession of bestialities the boy endures observes are smaller only in scale, not in kind,

Page 2

BOOK WEEK October 17

## Good will and beyond

*(Continued from page 1)*

ments were self-serving; probably the Anglo-French adventure at Suez was quixotic. The fact remains that even in retrospect President Eisenhower finds little compassion for the views of our closest allies nor does he see any relationship between the psychological uncertainties of contemporary Britain, the excessive assertiveness of Gaullist France and the humiliation which American policy helped impose on them a decade ago. At the very least, Suez proved that the vital concerns of members of the Western Alliance might clash and that they might find themselves on opposite sides when their profoundest convictions of national interest were at stake. This was the real tragedy of Suez. It was far more crucial than the issues that formed the headlines of the day, and it could not be repaired by formal declarations of amity.

President Eisenhower does not even mention that problem because like most Americans he sees each event as discrete and capable of being dealt with "on its merits." A corollary is a refusal to believe that there are objective forces which, once liberated, gather their own momentum. Nasser's success in the Suez crisis established the precedent that ambitious demagogues could use Communist arms for

largely anti-Western purposes. Sukarno and even Castro were the ultimate beneficiaries. The Anglo-American pressures on Adenauer during the Berlin crisis to be more "flexible" toward Eastern Germany—described by Eisenhower—contributed to the distrust which made it easier for De Gaulle to exclude Britain from the Common Market. There seems little recognition of the fact that in foreign policy the price for an action—though inevitable—may not have to be paid for a decade or more and that the relationship then may be far from self-evident.

Another aspect of President Eisenhower's thought is to see the global turmoil entirely in terms of the East-West conflict. The new nations are treated as factors in a world-wide security system with little interest in how they might view their priorities. Pakistan becomes part of two alliances because of its "traditional anti-Communism" — at a time when the state was only seven years old; after American action in the Suez crisis had exalted Nasser's influence, United States policy turns to King Saud to fill the resulting vacuum because "he at least professed anti-Communism."

There is no doubt that Communist policy has exacerbated many stresses. But the upheaval

in the former colonial areas is not caused by Communism, though it is often exploited by it. Rather, vast territories, containing a population of hundreds of millions, are striving for a sense of identity in a situation lacking many of the conditions that formed the nations of the West. States which follow the boundaries of Empire and comprise widely diverse groups often can find a tenuous unity only by

the repetitive evocation of the experience of foreign rule. Anti-imperialism is a source of identity, and after the decline of Britain and France the United States became its natural focus. Intractable domestic problems combine with a weak sense of cohesion to provide constant temptations for foreign adventures. A form of National-Socialism—of the type of Sukarno—almost inevitably directed against the West is an ever-present danger. To see this problem entirely in terms of Communist military aggression may cause us to deal with marginal

issues. For many of their members, the alliances formed so assiduously by Secretary Dulles served the purpose of acquiring arms not to repel Communist military moves but for conflicts with neighbors—often also armed by the United States. The Indo-Pakistan conflict is a striking example.

Perhaps because the philosophical basis of his actions never becomes clear, the personality of Eisenhower emerges as curiously opaque from Waging Peace. He describes his action in detail and very fairly. What kind of a man he is and why he acted as he did are much less clear. There is, for example, the famous episode of the abortive—and, as it turned out, slightly ludicrous—attempt by Harold Stassen to thwart Richard Nixon for second place on the Republican ticket in 1956. According to Eisenhower's account, Nixon was his preferred choice. Indeed he had told him: "If you want the post, it is yours so far as it is in my power to make it so." Yet, when shortly before the convention Harold Stassen urged Nixon's replacement he replied, "You are an American citizen and free to follow your judgment in such matters." One would like to know how Eisenhower reconciles both statements, how he could fail to perceive that the

comment to Stassen might encourage what, in effect, took place: a movement to dump Nixon. Did Eisenhower believe that it was improper to advise Stassen to desist from his course? If so, why? Can the distinction between an official's private and public role—of which Eisenhower makes so much—really be valid when the participants are the President and a close associate? Even giving Stassen a leave of absence for the purpose of defeating Nixon had ambiguous implications.

Still, when all is said, one is left with a residue of good will, dedication, efficiency—of an honorable and decent man striving devotedly for peace in the world with only the welfare of mankind, as he saw it, as his aim. It is easy to understand the hold President Eisenhower has had on the nation's affections, for he epitomizes much that is best in America. But as in Greek tragedy these same qualities also produce the flaw which could, in time, undermine America's role in world affairs: a good will which does not necessarily produce understanding for the dilemmas of other societies; and a dedication which occasionally turns into righteousness. Whichever America remains relevant to the rest of the world depends on the solution—perhaps even the recognition—of this problem.

## Nationwide praise for the new bestseller

> "...an extremely readable, informal, through-the-office-door portrait of the man. It is a remarkable job—exciting, spirited, personally frank."
> 
> —New York Times

> "...filled with remembrances of the human side of her boss, JFK—from hot temper to ready wit."
> 
> —Atlanta Constitution

> "Of all the Kennedy memorabilia gathered since November of 1963, this book may well be one of the most important."
> 
> —Wilmington (Del.) Morning News

> "She alone can tell us of the man at work... her book gives the reader a clear view of the intricacies of the Presidency."
> 
> —Los Angeles Times

> "...gives new and interesting insights into the character of President Kennedy and recounts hitherto unrevealed events and incidents."
> 
> —Chicago Tribune

> "With warmth, dignity and a true sense of history, Evelyn Lincoln, for 12 years personal secretary to President Kennedy, has recorded her experiences in this exacting and exciting job."
> 
> —Worcester (Mass.) Sunday Telegram

> "...warm, human... presents a picture of the late President from a different standpoint."
> 
> —Minneapolis Tribune

4th Large Printing • $5.50

# My Twelve Years with John F. Kennedy

By EVELYN LINCOLN, Personal Secretary to the President

At all bookstores • DAVID MCKAY

MCKAY

COMPANY, Inc. • New York 10017

Page 16

BOOK WEEK October 17, 1965

137 1/2 Saturn Street
San Francisco
October 19

OCT 25 1965

Professor Henry A. Kissinger
Center for International Affairs
Harvard University
Cambridge, Massachusetts

Dear Professor Kissinger:

Your excellent review of Eisenhower's second volume has cleared
up some of our questions on the man. Like a good review should but
too seldom does, it suggests to readers further questions they might
ask of books, authors and politicians.

It appears, from what you say there, and from numerous hints
over the past five years, that not much has been done to change the
general approach to foreign policy described by George Kennan in
American Foreign Policy, 1900 - 1950.

Is there no attempt by any administration to effect a change,
or is the necessity to quiet criticism among national political
parties (four or five shades, within Republican and Democratic
camps) going to compel us to repeat errors until no one on earth
will look at us except to laugh, or cry in sheer frustration?

I'd like to ask two specific questions, and expect no direct
answer from your busy schedule. Do you feel, as Kennan must by
now, that Congress' ability to play State Department is the prime
cause of our grief?

Is the President unwilling or unable to explain the world to
the electorate; does the great public always expect to be served
a villain and a convenient hero to dispatch him?

We want to thank you for indicating, in a short review, the
sort of thing we can expect in the conduct of foreign affairs.

Joan Blanchard
Secretary

Dear Mr. and Mrs. Apfel:

San Francisco, California
131st Saturn Street
Mr. and Mrs. Reed Apfel