Progression is everlastingly lifting the standards that marked the end of the world's march yesterday and planting them on new and advanced heights today."

Andrew Sinclair, an English novelist and historian who has written a brilliant book on American Prohibition, has here given us not a "definitive" biography—he modestly defers to works in progress by no less than three authors, any one of which might qualify for that title—but an interpretive essay on Harding's life, a trial balance based on access to Harding papers recently opened. Wisely or not, he has shown extraordinary reticence in making merely passing reference to the gossipy side of Harding's life as a subject fit only for voyeurs, and has concentrated on an estimation of Harding as a political careerist and as a cultural figure. Harding, as a symbol of political folly, has sunk so low that the only interesting thing one can do with him is to raise him a notch, and this is what Sinclair has done. Inevitably, and perhaps quite rightly, he sees his man with a certain sympathy. (This was, after all, the President who pardoned Debs, of whom only he would have said: "Personally he is of a very clean and lovable character.")

Sinclair's main point is that Harding could not have been quite the helpless idiot we take him for, and I think he argues it with some success. It has often been assumed that Harding was managed by his wife, a formidable battle-axe out of the comic strips who did nothing to counter this impression. She was reported to have said to him on one occasion: "Well, Warren Harding, I have got you the Presidency; what are you going to do with it?" Sinclair has evidence that Harding's Independence of his wife was not confined to the arena of amour, and that he kept

his own counsel. He suggests, among other things, that Harding often used his wife's reputation for meanness as an excuse not to do things he had no intention of doing. He confronts the similar notion that Harding was run by his corrupt friend, Harry Daugherty, with evidence that Harding picked his own way through the mazes of American politics, using or disregarding Daugherty when it suited him. Harding's statement of the strategy by which he played the dark horse role to take the Republican nomination in 1920 shows an eminently sound grasp of politics, and Mr. Sinclair reproduces most of a long, lucidly written, and even moving letter to Harding's friend Malcolm Jennings, in which he candidly expounded his reactions to his office. "Responsibility," he testified, "has a strange effect," and he went on to say: "I do not believe that anyone could come to the Presidency without being imbued with the desire to serve above and beyond most selfish aims."

Harding's tragedy was that he had learned well the devices by which to arrive at power, but that he had not a clue as to what to do with it. What he lacked was neither good will nor a certain rudimentary political skill but, as he became pathetically aware, the qualities of intellect and temperament which might have given him the sense of direction that he suddenly found he needed. Woodrow Wilson hit upon the rub of his difficulty when he asked, after Harding's election: "How can he lead when he does not know where he is going?" But the definitive comment on Harding as President was made by the man himself when he said in the Senate three years before his election, by way of disavowing his own ambitions: "I think too well of my country to wish one of such incapacity in so exalted a position." ☐

## Misalliance

### After Twenty Years

by Marcus G. Raskin and
Richard J. Barnet.
Random House, 243 pp., $5.95

### The Troubled Partnership

by Henry A. Kissinger.
McGraw-Hill, 259 pp., $5.95

George Lichtheim

Next to organizing an alliance of nominally equal members, formulating its aims in convincing language is the most difficult test of statesmanship. In a sense of course both matters come to the same thing. Alliances after all are held together by shared beliefs as much as by anything else. Ideally it should be possible to arrive at an acceptable statement of aims, simply by generalizing the common interest of all concerned. Yet experience shows that alliances break down just over the definition of what constitutes their raison d'être. If the partners are equal, they will tend to quarrel. If one of them achieves hegemony over the rest, the term "ally" becomes a euphemism for "auxiliary." If a hegemoniac relationship is avoided, it may still be difficult to elude the choice between a confederacy with fixed rules, and an ad hoc relationship which leaves the partners free to rat on each other. In the best

of circumstances, material will always be at hand for a polemicist determined to denounce the conduct of the allies as a mixture of blind egoism and base perfidy.

In appearance things are greatly simplified if the original purpose of the alliance is the defense of a transcendental good, such as religion, freedom, or Our Way of Life. An appeal can then be made from private or national selfishness to a common purpose which is really perceived as such by all who are committed to the common cause. Historically, alliances have generally worked best when they were cemented by what is vulgarly called an "ideology," meaning a common faith. Examples that come to mind are the Wars of Religion, or the wars provoked by the French Revolution. The trouble is that in these cases the normal political process tends to collapse. Politics after all is a matter of resolving conflicting interest, war (as Hegel and Clausewitz pointed out) a mere means to this end. If this is forgotten or lost sight of, armed conflicts may drag on beyond the point where they still serve a rational end. In order to get rid of the irrational element, an appeal must then be made to the cynicism of the professionals. This happened conspicuously during the later stages of the Thirty Years War—originally a religious dispute stemming from the Refor-

June 3, 1965

## Local Government in Japan

Kurt Steiner

The first full-length study of Japanese local government in a Western language, this volume has two chief aims: to provide a general view of the institutions and processes—legal, administrative, political, sociological, and historical—of Japanese local government, and to examine the degree of local autonomy which exists in law and in actual practice. A Summary appraises the success of the postwar reforms, and outlines the prerequisites for increased local autonomy.
$12.50

## Ancient China in Transition

AN ANALYSIS OF SOCIAL MOBILITY, 722-222 B.C.

Cho-yun Hsu

Extending from the beginning of the Ch'un Ch'iu period to the unification of China under the first Emperor of Ch'in, this general social history covers a period of the greatest possible significance. It was in this period, and more particularly in its last two centuries, that the political institutions, the social relationships, and the world view of the Chinese were determined for centuries to come. Illustrated.
$6.50

At your bookstore.

Stanford University Press

A novel set in
Southeast Asia

THE
BRINKMAN
by Desmond Meiring

proves once more that fiction can
come closer to the bone than report-
age. A frightening book by "a demoni-
cally clever writer."

— Chicago Tribune

"Mr. Meiring's book
should be read."

N.Y. Times Book Review

At all bookstores • $5.95

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY, Publishers

13

McGraw-Hill Book Co.

JUN 28 REC'D

June 25, 1965

Dear Dr. Kissinger:

I'm enclosing a copy of a letter I sent
to Mr. Henderson, along with his quote.

I thought you would also like to see
these reviews.

SONIA LEVINTHAL

the United States became directly involved on the spot in
maintaining the security of free Europe against any further
aggressive Soviet expansion. That was a development of
momentous significance.

The outstanding achievement of NATO has been that it
has ensured the absence of war in Europe throughout the
subsequent years; contributed to the development of the
policy of peaceful co-existence; and at the same time,
enabled practical steps to be taken in the direction of
European unity.

But, as Dr. Kissinger makes abundantly clear, there
Page.4. have been adverse results as well. "Increasingly sharp
disputes among the Allies" have developed. Unity within
the Atlantic Alliance has been seriously strained. Problems
that may be structural in origin have emerged as policy
Page.3. issues. Thus", we read, "...within the Atlantic Alliance
disagreements about the future organisation of NATO and the
relative roles of its members have multiplied. The chief
protagonists have been the United States and France."

(The author)

5.

it is a myth that Britain enjoys a "preferential relationship" at the expense of other NATO partners.

Two informative chapters deal with "The Nature of the Strategic Debate" and "The Issue of Nuclear Control" on which agreement has not yet been found possible. Here it is vital that there should be unity of view point and political aim.

The alternative to real and effective interdependence is surely the proliferation of nuclear weapons, and the "... road towards nuclear proliferation has no logical ending."

Page.101.

It is relevant to mention here the view expressed by the British Prime Minister at the NATO Ministerial meeting in London, in May, 1965:

"The sheer facts of thermo-nuclear weaponry, to say nothing of the hard lessons of economics, mean that outside the two major nations, the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R. there cannot be a genuinely independent nuclear Power capable of sustaining thermo-nuclear war or of providing a globally credible nuclear deterrent."

The Prime Minister went on to say that:

"The effects of modern nuclear warfare, no less than the realisation that isolation is impossible even for the most powerful, mean that no nation, however great, can think in terms of going it alone, without allies and without regard to world opinion."

(It is, of course,

»BOOKS·ARTS·MANNERS«

Is There an Enemy?

M. STANTON EVANS

Henry Kissinger's third book on the Cold War confirms his already substantial reputation as a major commentator on international strategy and politics. Like its predecessors, it displays Kissinger's rare ability to examine and make clear a class of issues peculiar to our age—that half-political, half-technical thicket of obscurity which has sprung up at the confluence of nuclear sophistication and the forward rush of Communist aggression.

The partnership in Kissinger's title is the NATO alliance. Its trouble is an accelerating tendency towards disintegration, brought on by a number of causes among which Kissinger rates transformation of nuclear technology and abrupt shifts in American nuclear strategy as foremost. He sets out to analyze these causes, to isolate correctable problems from those mandated by the nature of things, and to suggest a program for putting the former right and getting the alliance back on its feet.

The chief difficulty, Kissinger argues, is a radical disjunction between the nuclear strategy the United States has for almost two decades been preparing itself to follow, and the non-nuclear strategy it is today talking about following and urging its allies to adopt. We have staked Free World prospects for survival on a program of nuclear deterrence, equipped our air force with nuclear payloads, tipped our missiles with nuclear warheads, and stuffed Europe with tactical nuclear weapons. Now

The Troubled Partnership, by Henry A. Kissinger. McGraw-Hill, $5.95

we suddenly take to promoting a non-nuclear strategy, cut back on our strategic arsenal, declare our reluctance to use even tactical nuclear weapons, engage in a nuclear test-ban treaty with the Soviet Union, and in general put atomic weaponry as far from us as possible.

Kissinger anatomizes the baleful effects of this reversal on the NATO countries. The Europeans, he notes, down deep still tend to believe their security lies not in their own efforts but in the nuclear arsenal of the United States. Alternatively, if their security is not dependent on that arsenal, they see no reason for con-

tinued deference to Washington as the senior and ruling partner in the Atlantic Alliance. And they are confused—as who is not?—by such things as the continued buildup of tactical nuclear weapons on the continent and the proposal to equip mixed-man forces with atomic hardware alongside insistent statements that nuclear weapons are verboten.

There is no one better than Kissinger in turning such issues this way and that to catch every stray wisp of meaning or to anticipate the remotest objections to his line of reasoning. Along the way towards demonstrating what he charitably calls the "ambiguity" of U.S. policy, and what might be more accurately described as no policy whatever, he strikes off instructive and frequently brilliant comments on such matters as Washington's obsessive fear of nuclear "proliferation," de Gaulle's concern to maintain freedom of action for France, the curious hodge-podge known as the Multi-Lateral Force, our government's habit of undercutting its allies, our strangely uneven treatment of Germany, etc. All of these criticisms, however, are sub-

ordinate to his central theme—that we have been prepared, and in large measure are still prepared, for one kind of strategy, and are now behaving as if that strategy were the last thing on earth we are prepared to act upon.

Seeking the deeper sources of this alteration and the European mood it has helped create, Kissinger fixes on the widespread belief (promoted by our own government) that substantial parity exists between the two major powers in their ability to produce and deliver nuclear weapons, creating a balance of terror in which both nations can destroy each other and the rest of the world; and the partly resultant, partly contradictory, belief that the United States and the Soviet Union are ready to call a halt to the Cold War, and have for all practical purposes entered a period of accommodation. These ideas, the central precepts of current American policy toward Moscow, are fatal to the Atlantic coalition.

FOR AN ALLIANCE to come into being and operate with reasonable effectiveness, two conditions must exist. There must be something to ally about—generally some common adversary; and there has to be something the alliance can do, some project which will yield benefits from concerted action. If present assumptions governing American policy are true, neither of these conditions is met. If the détente is real, there is no enemy, and therefore no reason to have an alliance. If the threat of nuclear holocaust makes war unthinkable, the Soviet Union, even if it is an enemy, cannot be effectively resisted. That, in essence, is the dilemma Kissinger describes.

If the premises are true, however, it is difficult to see why there is a dilemma. If war is unthinkable and Moscow is mellowing, why do we need

512 NATIONAL REVIEW
June 15, 1965

NATO, and what is it supposed to do? Why should we demand concerted action? On these terms, the dissolution of the Atlantic Alliance may be worrisome as a symptom of other difficulties, but it is not a problem in and of itself.

Kissinger suggests two rebuttals, one of which he partially disclaims, the other of which he advances as his own. The first is that we need the alliance to deal, not with the Soviet Union, but with the new villain, Red China. But if Red China with its concededly primitive economy and backward military establishment is the only real threat, then European nations may be forgiven for thinking their assistance is hardly needed by so immense a super-power as the United States. As for the much-discussed fear of "escalation," this makes sense only if the Soviet Union re-enters the picture, which means the assumptions about holocaust and détente re-enter with it and the discussion reverts to its original basis.

The other argument, which Kissinger himself professes, is that the alliance has other purposes to serve—purposes of the Atlantic Union, economic-and-political-development sort. He suggests this can be accomplished through a NATO Executive Committee, to which all members would surrender undefined portion of their sovereignty, which would iron out existing differences over military strategy which would—presumably its important function in view of supposed détente—prevent the end from "consuming its substance" so about the business of "forging sales from diversity." This rebuttal, however, seems as tenuous as the other.

W HATEVER THE prevalent attitudes of Europeans, it is certain this step toward supergovernment—for such it is, although Kissinger is vague about its non-military duties—would be a topic of hot controversy among Americans. If this sort of union is to be attempted, on however modest a scale it should not be brought in by the door of NATO. There is no reason for improvising even a simple form of it as a *fait accompli*, a body created for another purpose, and even less reason for trampling the improvisation an urgent

objective of American policy.

There is, in fact, only one good reason to be worried about the disintegration of NATO; namely, if there is an enemy, and if there is something NATO could and should be doing about it. "The troubled partnership" is a priority item only if the détente is not real, and if concerted action among the Atlantic nations can make us more secure against the hostile initiatives of the Soviets. It is our own network of assumptions about Communist mellowing, etc., which is destroying NATO. If the alliance is something we should be deeply concerned about, it can only be because

those assumptions are wrong—which of course they are.

Kissinger, so incisive on other points, is silent about this central and contaminating error. While he can give us a dozen reasons why the Multi-Lateral Force is absurd, he has nothing to say about the imbecile notion that history's champion aggressors have suddenly mended their ways and embarked on a quest for peace. Perhaps it is ungrateful to suggest that a book which contains so many good things should also contain something more. But this particular something more, alas, is the key to everything else.

## Technicolor and a Serbian Postcard

### GUY DAVENPORT

THE FATTEST of these novels is the worst; the thinnest, the best. Realism is a dead duck, and it is realism in its debased sense of verbal cinema that makes nine out of ten fat novels a boredom unto coma. There is always, of course, the novelist with lots to tell. Realism has come to mean Describe Everything, significant or not. You don't have to worry about the right detail if you chuck them all in. The novels at hand are all entertaining and readable; they are, however, by men at different stages toward mastery of their craft.

Omnes amorem vincunt. Nicholas Monsarrat, one of the glossiest romancers of the decade, writes in Technicolor. His characters, coming direct from Make-Up, speak pure Steve Canyon, sashay around in sets as posh as any Hollywood ever slicked up to frame a lacquered leading lady and her winsome cavalier servente, and act out their arch frivolities with a style that can only be called cool. But for all the taffy, jazz and chrome, the fare is still unabashed melodrama. Our heroine is a rich, beautiful South

The Pillow Fight, by Nicholas Monsarrat. Wm. Sloane Associates, $5.95

Garden on the Moon, by Pierre Boulle. Vanguard, $4.95

The Woman from Sarajevo, by Ivo Andric. Knopf, $5.95

African, sharp as a tack and cute as a bug's ear. She is also a career girl, all business and no fluff, until there comes along a boyish genius who has a social conscience and is writing a book about South Africa.

WELL NOW, we are supposed not to suspect that this self-satisfied filly who's due to inherit a gold mine and diamond farm could possibly fall in love with the unpressed smarty pants but, bless my soul, amor vincit omnia, and she does. Well, they fornicate all over the Rand (fornication being the glossy novelist's tip-off that sincerity has made the scene) and, once the unkempt but frightfully keen writer's book is published and a grand success (it is so wise and generous a book that even South African millionaires read it with admiration), they get married. Golly. Well, things take a turn here. The book falls into the hands of Broadway. Although it is a serious study of racial strife and injustice, dear old Broadway turns it into a musical, a zany laff fest, in fact. Miss Priss, of the Suidafrikaner Meisterrasse, has by this time found a social conscience and is appalled by the musical. But he (Good God!) has been corrupted by success and can be found in Florida, drink in one hand, floozie in the other, as grieved about South Africa as the Grand Dragon of Mississippi. The tables, you see, have turned. Well, it's not that awful in the end, for his wife leaves

JUNE 15, 1965 513

Book Reviews

Three Views of Europe

DECLINE AND RISE OF EUROPE, by John Lukacs, New York: Doubleday, 1965, 295 pp., $4.95.

ALTERNATIVE TO PARTITION,
by Zbigniew Brzezinski, New York:
McGraw-Hill, 1965, 208 pp., $5.95.

THE TROUBLED PARTNERSHIP,
by Henry A. Kissinger, New York:
McGraw-Hill, 1965, 266 pp., $5.95.

THE MEN OF MUNICH who thought they had worked out a settlement with Hitler 27 years ago did not know that what they had really done was to consign half of Europe to the domination of the Soviet Union. When the German armies withdrew in 1945 it was Stalin who inherited Hitler's suzerainty over the nations of eastern Europe, and ever since then the word "Europe" to most Western ears has tended to mean "our Europe"—the part of Europe on this side of the iron curtain. Now at last there are signs that the partition of the continent may turn out to be relatively brief, as history goes. People who live in Europe are coming increasingly to think of themselves as Europeans, and the air is full of projects (some of them pretty elaborate) for putting the continent together again.

The most radical proposals are those of France's President Charles de Gaulle, who thinks America should get out of Europe and leave the Europeans to organize themselves. He believes that the American

presence inhibits an over-all European settlement. His opponents reply that Europe cannot unite itself without the support of the United States and Britain as part of an Atlantic Community. France is not strong enough to lead a united Europe, the argument runs, and furthermore the Russians would drive too hard a bargain. The three books under review, by a Hungarian-American, a Polish-American and a German-American, argue respectively for the Gaullist viewpoint, for a more sophisticated American response, and for a reconsideration of the Atlantic Alliance in the light of the Gaullist critique.

An Historian's Approach

While most writers on European politics are concerned with pragmatic questions of power or with the solution of particular problems (e.g., what to do with NATO, or how to control nuclear weapons), Professor Lukacs is more interested in the growth of a European consciousness. The tendency of Germans and Frenchmen and Hungarians and Poles to think of themselves as part of a larger entity is a recent development in history, but he sees this as the key to the continent's future. "It is not the creation of European super-bureaucracies, not the existence of European economic organizations, but the existence of the European consciousness that may in the end bring about some kind of higher European unity."

Like de Gaulle, he is opposed to the

efforts of bureaucrats, economists and internationalists to prod Europe into federating around NATO or the Common Market. These are artificial constructs based on abstract ideas of the kind that "Atlantic intellectuals" are prone to. Europe must wait until it is ready, and must organize itself. It is not true, Lukacs says, that America and Europe are growing more alike; in some ways they are, but in other ways they are becoming more different and developing their own national characteristics. America has many preoccupations that Europe cannot share, such as its growing concern with Latin America and its heavy involvement in the Pacific. Europe's destiny lies in becoming a New Force between America and Russia.

Just how this is to be brought about, and who is to organize the new Europe and lead it, is a question that Prof. Lukacs leaves unanswered. For an historian this is perhaps just as well, but anyone who aligns himself with the President of France is not only writing history but helping to make it. He concedes that the problem of Europe contains within it the very difficult problem of Germany, and that the reunification of Germany wouldn't dominate Europe, a necessary step in the unification of Europe. This leads of course to the question whether a reunified Germany wouldn't dominate Europe, and whether most Europeans are ready to face such a prospect. At this point his argument seems to stop.

If the other nations of Europe, together or in confederation, feel that they are simply not strong enough to resist the domination of Germany; if they are not confident enough to attract and bind the Germans spiritually, and to balance German power politically and industrially, then all the talk about the revival of Europe, indeed, all talk of a united Europe, is empty and vain.

But an even more difficult question is that of Germany and Russia. He notes that Germany's role in eastern Europe is bound to increase as those countries are drawn toward a united Europe. This indeed is the fear of many east Europeans, particularly in Poland and Czechoslovakia, and the communist governments play upon it adroitly for their own purposes. One may doubt whether the Russians will ever accede to a significant expansion of German influence on their borders, particularly if it involves a lessening of their own. At any rate, the new Europe cannot very well be made until this problem is solved. Prof. Lukacs answers that one must not confuse states with nations. While relations on the state level between Russia and Germany are not very promising, he finds solace in the fact that culturally the Russians have borrowed much from the Germans; this leads him to hope that their relations in the future may be determined more by their common European consciousness than by the superficial hostilities of their governments.

Despite the difficulties raised by the German question, the Gaullist point of view is heartening to a lot of people who fear that Europe is being swallowed up by two competing empires. Such a confirmed Atlanticist as Walter Lippmann recently wrote that "there is no real conflict between Greater Europe as a community or concert of sovereign national states and the inevitable fact of history and geography that Europe and the Americas are tied together in their ultimate interests because they are connected by the Atlantic Ocean." He urged that the US "give up the idea of leading Europe" and, instead, "assist and encourage the movement toward that greater Europe which is actually under way."

## Peaceful Engagement

The growing interest in de Gaulle's "European Europe" has awakened a variety of counter-responses in America. Prof. Zbigniew Brzezinski argues that the United States must make a special effort to dispel the "growing European feeling that America is becoming irrelevant to the future of a divided, safe, but somehow frustrated Europe." His *Alternative to Partition* is an examination of what America might do to speed Europe's unification—all of Europe, not just that Western portion which is now in NATO or the Common Market or OECD.

By taking the initiative in developing policies designed to bring both Russia and East Europe into a closer relationship with the West, and thereby to end the European partition, America would be furthering its own basic interests. First of all, the very fact of such commitment would do much to revive America's waning relevance to Europe. Secondly, it would provide a framework for restoring the East European nations to independence without simultaneously creating new instabilities or stimulating narrow nationalisms. Finally, by laying the foundations for a broader East-West settlement, it would eliminate the persisting European fears of an American-Soviet power duopoly. All that would be consistent with domestic American values and the American quest for world order.

Prof. Brzezinski agrees with the Gaullists that the partition of Europe is a thing of the past, but maintains that Europe by itself is not powerful enough to achieve unity. A new Europe will require Soviet-American cooperation to bring it about and to stabilize it. He would replace the current concept of an Atlantic Community, extending from the Elbe to the Pacific, with the image of "a future cooperative community, involving eventually four major units, America and Russia as the peripheral participants, and West Europe and East Europe as the two halves of the inner core (in time perhaps becoming still more closely linked)."

This is a distant and uncertain prospect, but no more improbable as

a picture of the future than the Gaullist one. From the strategic standpoint his proposal has the advantage of preserving the balance of power between the US and the USSR in Europe. It avoids on the one hand the risks that would be entailed by an American military withdrawal from the continent; on the other, it avoids the threat to Soviet interests inherent in policies which seek to draw the east European countries away from Russia, and it does this by approaching them jointly with Russia. On the latter point Brzezinski emphasizes that instead of encouraging them to defect we ought to favor tendencies which "would begin with the internal liberalization of the East European societies and lead toward their gradual evolution into a Greater Europe jointly with the Soviet Union."

Brzezinski has much to say on the question of German reunification. Although his arguments would not win him many votes in this fall's elections in the Federal Republic, his basic viewpoint corresponds with the evident assumptions of current German, French and American policies. This is that reunification is still a long way off, and that it will come "only as a consequence of a gradual but qualitative change in the relationship between both Russia and East Europe and the West." In working toward this, the West should endeavor to isolate Ulbricht'ssatrapy by establishing closer ties with the other eastern states and reducing their interest in maintaining a divided Germany. The West should also assure them that a united Germany would not serve to advance NATO to the Oder River. Finally, East Germany's economic ties to the USSR would have to be maintained after reunification because of their importance to the Soviet economy.

On the much-discussed question of East-West trade, Brzezinski belongs to those who feel that the West should trade more with the East, but at the same time should use its economic influence—including long-term credits—for political ends. "In very broad terms, American economic assistance policy with respect to East Europe should be guided by

49

[L]

two basic criteria: whenever a country increases the scope of its external independence from Soviet control, it should be rewarded; whenever a country appreciably liberalizes its domestic system, it should be rewarded." The opposite would also apply.

Ties of all kinds—economic, social, cultural—should be built up between East and West on a multilateral basis. The eastern countries should be encouraged to establish links with international organizations such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, GATT, the Common Market and OECD. They should also link up with each other as much as possible.

He ends his suggestions for "peaceful engagement" by proposing a kind of Marshall Plan for European economic development, to be financed by the US and western Europe. Since it would have as its premise the eventual reunification of Germany, he recognizes that it might be rejected by Moscow much as the original Marshall Plan was. Even so, the United States could not but gain by taking this sort of initiative. At least we would be adopting an "honest and rational" policy on German reunification instead of giving it lip service and following policies that work against it.

## Strengthening the Alliance

Henry Kissinger, in *The Troubled Partnership*, takes a less optimistic view of European union. While he has much to say on the need to revise US policies toward Europe, his conclusion is that Americans should concentrate on improving the Atlantic Alliance. That indeed is the subject of his book. But he recognizes that one of the biggest long-run problems facing the Alliance is German reunification, and that a German policy depends in turn upon one's conception of East-West relations. Here there is need for a common Western viewpoint, and the lack of one has been a serious handicap of the West in its dealings with Moscow. There has been a running dis-

agreement between those who tend to "treat every Soviet peace offensive as the beginning of a new era of international cooperation," and those who see in Soviet peace offensives "merely a variation of tactics, not a major shift in objectives."

The current Soviet peace offensive, which began after the Cuban de-bacle in 1962, is only the latest of a number. Kissinger points out that each of them was brought on by "some internal or external strain on the Soviet system," and argues that the present détente may end as the others did—"when an opportunity for expanding communism [presents] itself." But even if the détente should continue for a long time it still would bring problems, for a period of relaxation tends to produce conflicts in the Western alliance between those who welcome a breathing space and those, particularly in West Germany, who fear that it will lead to an acceptance of the status quo in central Europe.

Very well then, why not put forward a policy that looks toward the eventual reunification of Germany, and do so now while there is some chance of a dialogue between East and West? In a period of relaxation it may be possible to show the eastern countries that they stand to gain nothing by their continued support of the Ulbricht regime. Kissinger briefly considers the proposals of those who want to isolate East Germany by improving relations with the other states of eastern Europe. He suggests that one possible solution would be for the West to accept the continued existence of a separate East Germany for, say, 15 years in exchange for a new government chosen by free elections. Such an East Germany should be independent, neutral and demilitarized.

"Nevertheless," he concludes, "it is improbable that any negotiating formula will advance German unity. Even the most reasonable program is likely to be rejected by the East." Thus German unity is only a long-run hope, and the real business before the West is to get on with repairing the strains in the Atlantic Alliance. "A united Western Eu-

rope," he argues, "... will be a powerful magnet for the countries of Eastern Europe."

Kissinger feels that de Gaulle has been misunderstood in the United States, and devotes a whole chapter to arguing that French and American views are not as different as is often supposed. When de Gaulle speaks of a Europe extending "from the Atlantic to the Urals," he does not mean anything very revolutionary by it. "The reorganization of Europe to which de Gaulle refers is to take place after communist ideology no longer dominates the Soviet Union, that is, when Russia is once more a national, and not an ideological, state pursuing a policy dictated by its national interests. This is the precise eventuality postulated by four American postwar administrations as the prerequisite of a final settlement."

He agrees with de Gaulle that the US has been too paternalistic, and that it is time for Europeans to work out their own problems. Rather than seeking to impose American ideas of federation upon Europe, the US should conduct itself so that its Allies will always consider the advantages of the Atlantic partnership to outweigh those of a narrower European solution.

On paper there seems to be no approach to Europe that will get a unanimous vote from the experts. As Prof. Lukacs would say, the present partition is an historical question and the workings of history transcend the purely mental and logical. Just as the division of Europe was not something thought out in advance, its unification—when and if it comes—will depend on the illogical and incalculable happenings that make up the behavior of nations. Changes in the Soviet Union, in the communist world and in western Europe, which cannot now be foreseen, will obviously determine the choices open to American policymakers in coming years. But it is time for Americans to consider the real meaning of their past and present policies in Europe and to realize that sooner or later new policies will have to be made.

F. P.

50

ership of flocks, herds, etc., that has prevailed in the Arab world from time immemorial. Royalist commandos mined the roads used by Egyptian armor, blew up tanks, motor convoys, staff cars, and artillery pieces with considerable regularity. Egyptian patrols were picked off and even in broad daylight no Egyptian dared to get very far away from his unit. It was only command of the air that allowed the occupation forces to keep the royalists bottled up in the northern and eastern mountains.

Nasser urged his old friend, John S. Badeau, the American Ambassador in Cairo, to persuade President Kennedy to accord diplomatic recognition to the new republic. He promised Badeau that as soon as Washington recognized the new regime the Egyptian army would leave Yemen. On December 19 the U.S. accorded the desired recognition to San'a in the belief that the royalists would be discouraged and quit fighting and that Nasser would keep his promise to withdraw his troops.

But the war continued. Fearing the extension of the struggle the State Department next negotiated a "phased disengagement" agreement. The Egyptians again declared readiness to get out of Yemen if the Saudi Arabians, who they said were supporting al-Badr, would do the same. The United Nations sent "observer teams" to Yemen to check on both parties. After a year of such supervision UN Secretary General U Thant acknowledged that the Saudi Arabians had kept their promises to let the Yemeni fight it out among themselves, but Nasser again had broken his word.

Today Cairo has 75,000 infantry and technical troops in Yemen plus artillery, air, and tank units. All that this Soviet-equipped and-trained establishment has been able to accomplish is to occupy the chief cities, the coastal areas, and the central plain. Offensives directed against the mountain strongholds of the royalists in the north and east cost Cairo 25,000 men killed, 10,000 seriously wounded, many prisoners, and the loss of huge quantities of weapons and munitions.

The failure of the latest thrust, designed to crush resistance in the Haradh and Razeh areas in northern Yemen, caused thousands of tribesmen to leave Egyptian-held territory and tender their submission to al-

Badr. Especially telling was the defection of the great Hashed Confederacy which holds the region between San'a and the chief city of the north, Sa'da.

On December 16, 1964, Sa'da fell into the hands of the royalists. This is the first city of any consequence that they have captured. Then on January 3 almost a thousand Egyptian and Yemeni republican troops,

trapped on the Jebel Razeh mountain, surrendered. Further disasters have followed. In the Arab sector the front has advanced to within eighteen miles of San'a itself. Bani al-Harith tribesmen have surrounded the Soviet-built ar-Rahba air base only ten miles from the capital. As an iron ring seems to be tightening about the capital from the north and east savage revolts are raging in Ibb province south of San'a. Here Bani Matar clansmen are threatening the road leading from San'a to Hodeida on the Red Sea. This is the Egyptian lifeline to the coast. Its loss would mean that the Egyptian forces based in San'a would have to be supplied by air.

## Nasser's Forces Diluted

The Egyptians were expected to launch an all out offensive this spring. But the royalists beat them to the punch by opening up new fronts in hitherto quiet sectors. Nasser's generals have had to disperse their forces to deal with this new situation and have been unable to build up at key points for a breakthrough. Forty different fighting fronts exist in Yemen today and enemies are rising up in the rear of the Egyptians whichever way they turn. On March 10, the royalists took Harib on the eastern front. This is the second major town that

they have captured. Although the Egyptians suffered only about 100 casualties here their defeat is symptomatic of a general deterioration of the military situation. More important, the Egyptians have been unable to retake Harib. At the moment their garrisons in eastern Yemen have to be supplied by air.

The most effective tactic employed to date by Nasser's people is the

deliberate and systematic destruction of crops, animals, and homes in areas contiguous to the royalist-held zones. So the State Department's decision to send food to the Mutawakelite Kingdom, the existence of which it hasn't recognized for more than two years, is opportune. Probably the moulders of American diplomatic destinies made this gesture to the royalists in the hope that it would moderate the opposition evinced by Congress to the continuation of food shipments to Egypt. Some congressmen couldn't follow the State Department argument that for "humanitarian reasons" the United States should feed Egyptians when the latter were doing their best to starve the Yemeni. Without the $50 million in U.S. aid Nasser is receiving, he might have had to pull his army of over 100,000 from the country.

Today the State Department finds that the government it recognized more than two years ago exists only on paper. And that the government it wrote off at the time is not only a going concern; it has taken the offensive. It is to be hoped that the Yemeni will remember only the food shipments that they may receive from America (if they ever get them) and will forget the diplomatic tragi-comedy that preceded them when peace returns to Yemen, if the time comes that it ever does.

JUNE 15, 1965 511

LJ

H. L. MENCKEN: The American Scene. A Reader. Selected and edited by Huntington Cairns. Knopf. 542 pp. $8.95.

Here is Mencken, pushed back on stage again in 1965. Of all his many gifts, his greatest was his unvarying lucidity, his definiteness, his concreteness, his hard-headedness—in a word, his air of possessing all the common sense, irreverence and sociability needed to make him the ideal companion, the most reliably interesting of friends. So the friends are always faithful to his memory—his publisher republishes him with love, his old editor on the Baltimore Sunpapers still audibly “chuckles” when he remembers Henry roaring forth on an assignment, his old proteges among tough young novelists of 40 years ago can not and never will forget that first acceptance from The American Mercury, old Baltimoreans cannot look at new Baltimore without weeping in copious mourning for the days when H. L. M. personified the most comfortable, the most Germanically self-satisfied, the most *gemutlich*, the most gastronomical, of all Eastern seaboard cities.

So Mencken is pushed on stage again, doing all his familiar stunts and reciting all his best pieces. And looking at him up there—as hard, charming, pointed in his effects as an old vaudevillian, one imagines for a moment that it is the 1890s again or the 1920s still (for Mencken all the same period): i.e., that it is still the age of Victorian hypocrisy and Comstockian prudery, of Woodrow Wilson's unctuousness, of Calvin Coolidge's thin-lipped craftiness, of Upton Sinclair's crusade against rotten meat, of The Society For The Suppression Of Vice, Elihu Root, red-light districts and Pilsner from Pilsen.

There is good cigar smoke floating under the chandeliers of our music hall, the waiters are all named Otto or Emil, and they cAVeSDoWt with rapture on James Gibbons Huneker: "Down went a *Seidel* of Pilsner—and out came the authentic last words of Whitman, gasped into poor Horace Traubel's solicitous ear, and too horrible, almost, to be remembered in a Christian land. Down went another—and out came a precise and meticulous description of Liszt's vast flo-tilla of warts and wens: the purple ones and the little ones. Down went a third—and the theme was the virtuous love affairs of Gounod, or Wagner's encounter with the lascivious Swedish baroness..."

It is 19th-century positiveness, which lasted until the depression, Hitler and the Bomb, that rises up before me again in all its innocent pretentiousness when I read Mencken again. For if Mencken was first of all a satirist of society at large and all its arid little corners, it was because his America was so pleased with itself; if he was the most deliberately *irreverent* of satirists, it was because the new plutocracy disguised the brutality of its wealth behind evangelical poses; if he was the most vehement and outraged of individualists, it was because nowhere was the power of “popular” opinion, of the respectable, timorous, mass opinion, so easy to enlist—and to make fun of. If he was the cockiest and most belligerent critic of our culture, it was because the culture was still in bondage to English names and English books, still colonial, and as moralistic as it was provincial.

Mencken began as a newspaperman in the 1890s—a time when it was natural, still, to believe that a lively

Deftly bagging
the rubes

By Alfred Kazin

and independent writer must start as a newspaperman. It was a time when important newspapers were owned by men as brazenly independent-minded as they were wealthy, when managing editors were often more genuinely heretical than many a sad soul in Greenwich Village. And perhaps most important in his development, Mencken learned his trade in an age of oratory, of pious buncombe, of late-Victorian rhetoric thick and bedazzling. It was this that helped to form Mencken's most personal and important gift—his inimitable *spoken* style, the style in which every detail is clear and hard, the style of a man talking right at you, aiming every shot straight at the audience, beating the audience down with the fury of his performance.

Before Mencken, our greatest oral performer in print was Mark Twain. And although Mark Twain had a genius for narrative and Mencken was more of a virtuoso at newspaper writing than anything else, it is a fact that Mencken's showy, self-conscious, hilariously self-justifying performances came out of the same tradition: the clever American newspaperman ready, at any hour of the day or night, on any subject from Ibsen to William Jennings Bryan, to "astonish" an audience that modestly thought itself in need of learning and exhortation on every subject under the sun. Mark Twain could get up on a table at three in the morning and whip to tears with sob stories about the war an audience of Civil War veterans already stupefied by a long night of speeches. When he wrote comic squibs for Nevada papers, when he attacked James Fenimore Cooper, when he complained to the gas company, when he fended off his wife, when he avoided reading Henry James, he had, always in the same manner, to "astonish." Everything he said, thought, believed, wanted to believe, loved, hated, had to come out witty and strong, emphatic and sharp. This became Mencken's great trick and forte; no wonder he adored Mark Twain. And if Mencken succeeded in "astonishing," as Huck Finn liked to say about certain performances he had seen up and down the river, it was because at the end of the Victorian era, in Mencken's America as in Shaw's England, the writer formed in this school of public performance could still get a hold on his audience—and his audience on him. Each knew just where and what the other was. There were no "ambiguities," no age of "anxiety," no unspeakable

Nazi horrors—only speakable faults, laughable politicians, pompous fools, innocent rubes.

Imagine a world in which the majority of Americans still believe that democracy is the normal aspiration of most other people, have never seen a play, think Theodore Dreiser's *The Genius* immoral, are afraid of Ibsen's *Ghosts*, and don't know the difference between Burgundy and Bordeaux, between Thomas Mann's first period and Thomas Mann's second period. Imagine a world of American hicks who still believe by the hundred million in the sanctity of marriage, that might makes right, that we went to war to save the world for democracy, that we took over Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines for the sake of little brown brother. Imagine a world in which a man who had three times been a candidate for the Presidency of the United States could actually deny in a Tennessee courtroom that man is a mammal. Imagine a world in which it still has to be proved, with examples, that the American language is as vital for literary purposes as the English —in which the fact that Walt Whitman was fired from a miserable clerkship in the Department of Interior because the Secretary of the Interior had discovered that this said Walt Whitman had published an immoral book called *Leaves Of Grass*, was, 40 years later, as important an instance of the general American stuffiness and mediocrity as the pompous funeral obsequies, in 1882, of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Imagine a world in which a newspaperman with a lot of learning could tell his readers that Sidney Lanier's book on English prosody was "the first [and last] intelligent work ever published upon the nature and structure of the sensuous content of English poetry"—who said in passing that poetry rested on self-delusion, on fact-denying, of "saying what isn't true"—who just had to tell his readers that Beethoven "was preeminently a modern man, with all trace of the barbarian vanished." Mencken always knew.

In that vanished world all the rubes were in one corner, with the Woodrow Wilsons, the Henry Van Dykes, the Henry Cabot Lodges—and Mencken and Nietzsche and James Gibbons Huneker were in the other. What a contrast between free spirits like the latter and William Jennings Bryan, that muttonhead, that imbecile, that religious fanatic, with "his huge catfish mouth set in a hard line, his great eyes glittering, his black hair clumped in sweaty locks over his epicycloid dome!"

Does all this sound as if Mencken were hopelessly old-fashioned? Not always in his content is he out-of-date, far from it; but what comes out of another time and belongs to it is his clanging positiveness, his assurance, his archaic personal conceit, his *air*. Take that masterpiece of rhetorical attack on the aridity of the South, "The Sahara of the Bozart." Much as the South has improved since the Twenties, it hasn't changed enough to make irrelevant Mencken's uproarious crescendo of complaints. But who today would want to write of the South that "down there a poet is now almost as rare as an oboe-player, a dry-point etcher or a metaphysician. It is, indeed, amazing to contemplate so vast a vacuity. One thinks of the interstellar spaces, of the colossal reaches of the now mythical ether. Nearly the whole of Europe could be lost in that stupendous region of worn-

(Continued on page 13)

BOOK WEEK June 13, 1965

Page 3

Too many cooks and not enough KPs

By Alastair Buchan

THE TROUBLED PARTNERSHIP: A Re-appraisal of the Atlantic Alliance. By Henry A. Kissinger. McGraw-Hill. 266 pp. $5.95.
NATO IN TRANSITION: The Future of the Atlantic Alliance. By Timothy W. Stanley. Praeger. 417 pp. $7.50.

In the past six months, the angry debates between Washington and Paris or between London, Bonn and Paris have been somewhat muted. But this is not because any of the central difficulties of the Atlantic relationship have been solved: it is simply the quiescence of exhaustion or a sign of a temporary preoccupation with other problems, notably Viet Nam. Whatever happens in the Far East, the question of the relationship of Germany, its status within the Western alliance and its relationship to its European partners must soon rise again to the top of the international agenda. And when that happens, probably after the German elections in the fall, the years which we have wasted, the failure to resolve the Franco-American argument over higher policy control, to ratify the MLF or to consider better alternatives for associating the non-nuclear powers with strategic planning, or to make our ideas about the defense of Europe correspond to the changing political relationship between the two halves of Europe, may rekindle the old NATO arguments in an even more embittered fashion.

This is one reason why Henry Kissinger's interesting and powerful book is so timely. It is the work of a craftsman in a rare but highly skilled trade, the making and repair of alliances between sovereign states. Kissinger is not a military theorist, like some of the men at RAND or elsewhere, and his one excursion into this field—an attempt to evolve a viable theory of limited nuclear war—was unfortunate. Rather, he is a diplomatic historian with a fine grasp of American military and European political realities. “The deepest problem before the Alliance,” he points out, “is that the pressures of the new technology run counter to traditional notions of political sovereignty.”

Since the advent of the Kennedy Administration brought so many members of the Harvard and M. I. T. faculty into government, Kissinger has been a somewhat lonely figure. He has opposed the attempt, so much associated with the New Frontier, to impose on Europe a largely American conception of what form European unity should take: he has pointed out that de Gaulle's arrogance obscures a service to France's restored morale and vitality which her allies must respect. And, with others, he has argued that the attempt to evade the awkward choice of relinquishing full American freedom of action in the interests of allied confidence by such devices as a mixed manned force must in the end be self-defeating. Now, however, there are probably more people in the major capitals of the alliance, including Washington, who agree with Kissinger who dispute him.

The starting point of his present survey is the curious paradox created by the strategic stalemate between the Soviet Union and the U. S. which has had the effect of increasing the political freedom of action of the smaller members of the alliance and creating a situation in which the U. S. has fewer sanctions to keep her allies in line. Yet military strategy must remain centralized if deterrence is to be maintained. Kissinger writes: “But, from a psychological point of view, unless centralization of strategy is coupled with

an effective sharing of political decisions—far beyond anything so far envisaged—the practical consequences could be a growing sense of irresponsibility among our allies.”

He then applies this point to a close analysis of the Franco-American relationship of recent years. “Washington insists on a structure which makes separate action physically impossible by assigning each partner a portion of the over-all task. Paris insists that a consensus is meaningful only if each partner has a real choice,” he says. “The irony of the Franco-American rivalry is that de Gaulle has conceptions greater than his strength, while the United States’s power has been greater than its conceptions.” Kissinger offers no apologia for the arrogance of the French president’s style nor for the short-sightedness of many of his actions, but rather displays an ability to understand the quite different French conception of the word “alliance” that is rare among Anglo-Saxons.

He passes from the Franco-American debate to an examination of the strange confusion of thought that has arisen about the defense of Europe, particularly as it concerns the American attempt to reconcile a desire for greater flexibility of response to various levels of Soviet attack with the disposition of an increasing number of nuclear weapons in Europe. Here, perhaps he is less fair to American official intentions—a little readier to take at their face value European confusions about what American policy really is—than the situation warrants.

But he has a superb chapter in which he dissects the curious history of the proposed multilateral force, a proposal which the Germans and other European non-nuclear powers were induced by the more ardent New Frontiersmen to believe was the one and only road both to European unity and a more successful strategic relationship with the U. S. In view of the consistent American anxiety to prevent proliferation—one national interest that it clearly holds in common with the Soviet Union—the MLF was and is a fraud upon the allies. “The MLF cannot at one and the same time satisfy demands for nuclear sharing and assuage concerns about nuclear proliferation.”

The essential failure of such mechanistic conceptions

as the MLF brings Kissinger back to his starting point: “Central command and control over all the nuclear weapons of the Alliance is incompatible with undiluted sovereignty. The United States cannot insist on integration of strategy while jealously guarding its complete freedom of political decision.” This leads him to re-formulate a position in which he has often been isolated in the American debate of recent years, but with which more and more people would agree today—namely, that there can only be a political solution to the problem of the NATO alliance, that there must be a deliberate attempt by the U. S. to create an entente out of its relationship with its principal European allies. This implies more than perfunctory consultation between countries pursuing independent and uncoordinated foreign policies in large formal bodies like the North Atlantic Council.

Kissinger proposes an Atlantic Executive Committee composed of the U. S., Britain, France, Germany, Italy and one other NATO member in rotation. This may be the right answer. But, as he points out, consultation between independent countries is often more effective in implementing a consensus than in achieving it, and what is required is a change of perspective as well as of machinery. Kissinger notes, “A decade and a half of hegemony have accustomed us to believing that our views represent the general consensus” and that Europe can only acquire the right of dissent by developing power equal to that of the U. S. itself. Such unified European power may be very long in developing, may never develop, may be unnecessary. But in the process of waiting for it to develop, for a genuine European-American partnership to come into existence, the Atlantic Alliance may decay when put to the test by such events as Viet Nam where European power is irrelevant but European support is essential. “What is needed,” Kissinger argues, “is that it is in the long term interest of the United States to share responsibilities even more than burdens.”

A new phase of European-American relations started when President Johnson came to office and decided to suspend many of the policies of his predecessors. These have not yet been replaced by new ones, and Henry Kissinger should provide a most important stimulus to the process of re-formulating new ones.

Timothy Stanley has written a very different book though one of equal utility to serious students of the NATO alliance. It is a detailed examination of the strategic and military problems of the alliance, together with a close professional analysis of the faults in its machinery. He attacks these problems from a radical standpoint—namely, that NATO is the nucleus of a more universal system of security. “The central thesis of this book is that the Atlantic alliance is in transition from a regional security mission to the task of providing leadership in building a viable world order,” Stanley writes.

He is prepared to argue, moreover, that the U. S. stands to gain more than lose by relinquishing some of its apparent freedom of action in relation to its NATO partners, and that endowing NATO with some supra-national characteristics ought seriously to be considered rather than indefinitely extending it as a mere national coalition.

This is one of the most competent books on the alliance that has been written.

Page 4

BOOK WEEK June 13, 1965

June 28, 1965

Miss Sonia Levinthal
McGraw-Hill Book Company
330 West 42nd Street
New York, New York 10036

Dear Miss Levinthal:

In Dr. Kissinger's absence, I am
writing to acknowledge your letter of
June 25th.

He is expected to return to the
office next week and I will bring your
letter to his attention at that time.

Henry V. Klaasinger
Secretary to Dr.
Joan Blanchard

Sincerely yours,

letter to his attention at that time.
office next week and I will bring your
He is expected to return to the
June 25th.

writing to acknowledge your letter of
In Dr. Klaasinger's absence, I am
June 25th.

Dear Miss Levinthal:

New York, New York 10036
330 West 42nd Street
McGraw-Hill Book Company
Miss Sonia Levinthal

June 28, 1962

Your opportunity to order advance copies of vital, timely books in your special field

The Atlantic Policy Studies
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329 West 41st Street
New York, New York 10036

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THE ATLANTIC POLICY STUDIES

The series of at least ten books comprising the Atlantic Policy Studies will analyze four major areas of Atlantic involvement: the Atlantic Community's external environment; Western military policy and organization; political relationships, in the Atlantic Community; and economic relationships, including trade arrangements, agricultural policy, financial systems, and economic relations with underdeveloped countries.

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THE ATLANTIC

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*The Peripatetic Reviewer* BY EDWARD WEEKS

EVER since 1963 the demonstrations in behalf of Negro rights have rocked the cities in the North — Rochester, New York, Detroit — spasmodically if not as violently as the smaller communities in the Deep South; and now for the first time, the entire nation has had to face the local difficulties of granting Negro Americans the full measure of citizenship. Though the struggle originally centered in education, it soon spread to voting, to travel and accommodations, to employment and housing, and to the churches. As television has shown, every demonstration has called out more sympathy among the twenty-year-olds than among those over fifty; the restraint of the Negroes despite the brutal handling in Alabama and Mississippi has been admirable, and if proof were needed, Selma has given it that neither the Negro nor the white demonstrators have a monopoly on courage. We are all in this, for even the diehards admit that change is coming, and the scope of what needs to be done is so big as to be staggering. Our hope is that the young are committed to the doing and that as the Negro secures the vote, he will demand and respect the opportunity for development so long denied.

Truth has no color line: it is just as imperative to listen to the evidence and explanation of Ralph McGill as it is to that of James Baldwin — a fact which the South recognizes, as witness the extraordinary sale of McGill's book *The South and the Southerner* from Atlanta to New Orleans. There will be many seeking to testify in this crucial year, and the first, in whom I have a special interest, JOHN A. WILLIAMS, is the author of *THIS IS MY COUNTRY TOO* (New American Library, $4.50).

A Negro novelist and poet, Mr. Williams was born in Jackson, Mississippi, forty years ago. His parents soon moved to Syracuse, New York, and there during the Depression he grew up. The dream of America had begun to taste sour in his mouth before he matriculated at Syracuse University,

and his biggest battles during the war were not against the Japanese, but against the segregation in the U.S. Navy, which cost him three hitches in the brig. *This Is My Country Too* grew out of an assignment from *Holiday*: the editor wanted Mr. Williams' impressions of America, and both knew that the most disagreeable part of the exposure would be in the South.

At Detroit he picked up a new white beach wagon, loaded aboard his bags, typewriter, sleeping bag, road maps, and a *Travelguide* listing places in America where a Negro can stay without insult, and for safety's sake he drove under California license plates. Old friends he had alerted along the way, and for each stop he had a list of newspapermen, Negro leaders, undergraduates, or the braver citizens who would give him the word.

He travels fast and writes breezily, is thin-skinned in his emotional reactions and very concise in his findings. In Detroit his old boyhood friend John Clair tells him, "The Negroes feel that their bloc of votes put Mayor Cavanagh in office. . . . White people move to the suburbs to get away from us, but leave the voting power in our hands." He learns about Louisville from an attractive schoolteacher who says that the responsible newspapers have been pressing for integration for twenty-five years, and that the town has been "blessed with good mayors." And she adds in a burst of confidence after dinner, "You know what all this has brought on? Colored men and white women. Oh, they've always been ducking and slipping around, but now they've brought it into the open." At the Meharry Medical College in Nashville, he gets a flick of anti-Semitism, Negro medical students worrying about "the Jewish doctors" they would have to compete against.

The further south he drives, the more he dreads the roads by night. In Jackson, his birthplace, he

136

THE ATLANTIC BOOKSHELF

asks an old friend who had been born in the North
how he could bear to live and teach in Mississippi,
and the answer comes back, "We have this house,
I have my doctorate. I make good money. . . .
I've got security, Johnny." This is confirmed by
another friend at Alabama State College who tells
him that where there is resistance to integration
on the part of Negroes, it is often for reasons of
self-preservation. A professor of sociology whom
he does not name says curtly, "Governor Wallace
pays my salary; I have nothing to say to you.
Excuse me, I have a class to get to."

Mr. Williams gets his best material from Negro
sources. In his interchange with white liberal
newspapermen who have been taking the punish-
ment in the South, men like Seigenthaler of the
Nashville Tennesseean and McGill of the Atlanta
Constitution, Williams was too much on the defen-
sive, failed to ask the right questions, and his
findings are negligible. I also had the feeling that
he was overplaying his dread of Southern violence,
but after all, he was reporting his reaction, not
mine. Not all the book is concerned with the
struggle. His picture of Vermont is dreamy; his
relief on reaching Chicago, infectious; his reunion
with his mother and brother, Joe, in California,
touching.

CASING THE REBELS

As one of the leaders of the Fugitives, ROBERT PENN WARREN was concerned about segregation as far back as the early thirties. He too is Southern-born, having grown up in Kentucky and Tennessee, and when he set forth on his big inquiry, WHO SPEAKS FOR THE NEGRO? (Random House, $5.95), he cast a wider net than Johnny Williams; he listened with sympathetic patience to what people had to say, frequently taking down their testimony with a tape recorder. Thus he has had a meeting of minds with the men and women in the many movements and in the dangerous communities, and with the skill of a novelist he has pointed up what they stand for and how they have borne the battle. His interviews in some of the Louisiana parishes and in Mississippi placed him in jeopardy, but he writes without repugnance, and his book is a comprehensive case study, vivid, searching, and compassionate.

Here is the Reverend Joe Carter's narrative of
how at the age of fifty-five he tried to register; of
how he was falsely arrested, stripped of his clothes,
forced into a uniform, and eventually released
— without the registration blank; of how he organized a school to study voters' rights; and of how
the next fall he led twenty-three Negroes down to
the courthouse and this time he was registered.
We hear from Lolis Elie, a practicing Negro

lawyer in New Orleans, who got his degree with
G.I. money after Korea and who believes that the
desegregation of the armed forces is "one of the
most significant things that has happened in this
country." Elie admits that the Southern judges
are prejudiced against a Negro lawyer and that this
drives away his clients, but he finds hope in the
fact that there are today twenty-five Negro lawyers
in New Orleans when a decade ago there were
two. Mr. Warren has a fascinating session with
Clarice Harvey of Jackson, the manager of a
successful business combine and the founder of
Woman Power Unlimited, in the course of which
she remarks that Martin Luther King's non-
violence "is really an aggressive force which
speaks to the conscience of the wrong doer." Or
he seeks out Dr. Aaron Henry of Clarksdale,
Mississippi, whose house has been bombed and
shot into and whose store windows have been
repeatedly knocked out; whose daughter Rebecca
has grown so used to the abusive phone calls that
when the anonymous voice says, "I just shot your
daddy," she replies, "Aw, fellow, are you kid-
ding?" Dr. Henry lives with an armed guard, but
what arms his spirit is knowing "that the United
States sanctions what we are doing."

This is at times a shocking book and, thanks
to Mr. Warren's probing, an edifying one. His
long talk with Ralph Ellison, the Negro novel-
ist, is the most profound of any in the book.
Ellison's words are charged with affirmation:
"Another factor is that Negroes, despite what
some of our spokesmen say, do not dislike being
Negro — no matter how inconvenient it frequently
is. I like being a Negro. . . . I have no desire
to escape the struggle, because I'm just too inter-
ested in how it's going to work out, and I want
to impose my will upon the outcome to the extent
that I can." In their talk Ellison insists, over
and over again, on the Negro's will, even under
slavery, to develop discipline and achieve indi-
viduality. His prophecy of what the South will
be is eminently sane, and when he says that "Ne-
groes are forcing the confrontation between the
nation's conduct and its ideal, and they are most
American in that they are doing so," one is
prompted to reply Amen! An interchange such
as this is tonic for any reader and blessedly free
from sociological molasses.

WINSTON'S SUNRISE

LADY VIOLET BONHAM CARTER is uniquely
qualified to tell us of the formative and stormy
years of Winston Churchill, and my, how well
she has done it! She was nineteen and he was
thirty-two when they first met at a dinner party
in the summer of 1906, and she was fascinated by

137

The Atlantic Monthly

the " torrent of magnificent language" in which
he railed against the brief mortality of man, end-
ing with the words, "We are all worms. But I do
believe that I am a glowworm." She listened to
him spellbound, as she was to do many times
thereafter. She sparked his interest in poetry and
introduced him to Keats's odes, which he promptly
learned by heart. His world, she writes, was built
and fashioned on heroic lines, and throughout their
friendship she was an intuitive and bracing force in
his development.

As the daughter and confidante of Herbert
Asquith, the Prime Minister who first brought
Churchill into the Cabinet, she knew better than
any other woman how Winston was being judged
by his seniors, where he excelled and where he
was vulnerable.

In her devoted and discerning book, WINSTON
CHURCHILL: AN INTIMATE PORTRAIT (Harcourt,
Brace & World, $8.50), she illuminates many as-
pects of his character: his immense power of con-
centration, the careful memorization of what he
was to say in the House of Commons, his passion to
vindicate his father, who had been dismissed as
Chancellor of the Exchequer, and his spurring
belief that he would die young and must accom-
plish his life's work by forty. She tells us of his
brave, rambunctious career as a war correspon-
dent, and of how after the Boer War he earned
$50,000 in five months of writing and lecturing,
money which was to finance his early career in
Parliament.

From her seat in the spectators' gallery, Lady
Violet watched Winston's sunrise: she thrilled at
the brilliance of his debating, was amazed that
in eight weeks he could absorb the knowledge of
economics which he had to have in his passionate
support of free trade, and her spirit soared when
Winston broke with the Conservatives and crossed
the floor to serve with the Liberals under her
father. She saw how Winston was played upon
and mesmerized by Lloyd George, and she did not
like it and told him so. She catches the tension
of the crisis over Agadir, when her father and the
Cabinet stood up against the German threat, and
she shows how this led to Winston's appointment
as First Lord of the Admiralty, an office he held
for four of the happiest years of his life. She
describes the extraordinary foresight with which
he prepared the Fleet for the eventual showdown,
the courage with which he committed the Dread-
noughts to the 15-inch gun, and in vivid detail
she writes of his plans for the Dardanelles expedi-
tion, "perhaps the most imaginative strategic con-
cept" of the First World War, which were frus-
trated by a "monolithic soldier," Lord Kitchener,
and a "megalomaniac sailor," Lord Fisher.

Her words throughout are fresh and beautifully

selected; not the smallest detail escapes her, as,
for instance, his love for butterflies and the idea
of devoting part of his Eightieth Birthday Fund to
the "creation of butterflies." And in her sum-
ming up I prize this sentence: "He makes his own
climate and lives in it and those who love him
share it." An endearing book, worthy of its subject.

ALLEN OF ALLEN'S ALLEY

From the Calvin Coolidge Administration until
his death in an airplane crash in 1935, Will Rogers
was our national humorist. In that shrewd, drawl-
ing way of his, he cut through bluff and hypocrisy,
and we accepted his criticism, however stringent,
whether of the President or of our national fail-
ings, because of the affection we felt for him.

On Will's death, Fred Allen moved into the top
billing. He was beyond question the funniest
man in radio and at times the most caustic. But
because of the limitation of the industry, Fred was
not given anything like the liberty which the
*Times* gave Rogers.

Fred Allen had always wanted to write, but in
the heyday of Allen's Alley he was so absorbed in
his show, so busy with his staff writers (Herman
Wouk was one of them), so embroiled with Jack
Benny or the professor in the box, or with carica-
turing the little people — for example, that awful
family of father, mother, and destructive Junior
on their first visit to the World's Fair in Flushing
Meadows — that he had small time for FDR
and the foibles of the New Deal. In the midst of
all this, his letters became a kind of literary
consolation, and at last, thanks to his friend Joe
McCarthy, they have been collected in an engag-
ing volume, FRED ALLEN'S LETTERS (Doubleday,
$4.95).

Fred never used capitals; he preferred to write
in a lower case patois reminiscent of Don Marquis.
Like all American humorists, he is at his best when
exaggerating and complaining. Fred never in all
his life found a resort which he and Portland
could enjoy. His one visit to Bermuda, where the
water felt like warm sarsaparilla, ended in three
days, and the nearest thing he could come to a
holiday was at Old Orchard Beach, where he
tramped around the golf course cadding for his
friends. His best letters are naturally to those in
show business, to Groucho Marx, Mark Leddy,
and Jack Donahue, a great comedian-dancer
whom he adored and for whom he had writ-
ten comedy skits. This book should be read in
snatches, with the eye skipping over personal para-
graphs in quest of the satire and fantasy. It is
spoken prose, and in listening to it one hears
again that dry, rasping voice which was beloved in
so many American households.

138

BOOKSHELF

THE ATLANTIC

Reader's Choice

BY WILLIAM BARRETT

The death of FLANNERY O'CONNOR at the age of thirty-eight was a serious loss to American letters. Though she had been ailing for the last thirteen years — crippled by the dread disease of lupus — she managed to carry on her life cheerfully, and to the extent that illness permitted, continue the loved and laborious task of her writing. A posthumous collection of stories, EVERYTHING THAT RISES MUST CONVERGE (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $4.95), shows that her unusual talents escaped even the ravages of disease.

Her qualities are unique and quite inimitable. She was a Catholic and a Southerner, and though both of these traditions are alive in her fiction, they scarcely define its individuality. Deeply religious, she is never sentimentally pious. Her Catholicism — as that of François Mauriac, a writer whom she much admired — emerges in an extraordinary vision of the evil and perversity at work in the heart of fallen mankind. But she is more human than Mauriac, and her vision of evil is complemented by an impish and delightfully absurd humor. Though she is a thoroughly regional writer and all her characters belong to the South, they are nearly always paradigms of mankind at large contending with the ultimate perplexities of life.

The title story deals with a bus ride into town by a young man and his mother, in the course of which they run into the race question. The mother represents the old South and cannot change her patronizing, if kindly, attitude toward the Negro; the son, educated and liberal, wants to acknowledge the Negro's equality and is very much embarrassed by his mother's conduct. The two generations cannot communicate. But

**"Professor Randall"**
has crowned his 40-odd years of teaching and research with a work staggering in its depth of erudition and remarkable in its readability," said Library Journal, reviewing THE CAREER OF PHILOSOPHY, I. We now proudly publish

John Herman Randall, Jr.
THE CAREER OF PHILOSOPHY, II

From the German Enlightenment to the Age of Darwin

By the 18th century the European heritage derived from the ancient world had split into three distinct intellectual traditions, the German, the French, and the English. Prof. Randall shows how each tradition developed and how each responded to the important social events of the mid-19th century. John Barkham said of Volume I, "This book demonstrates...that an abstruse subject such as philosophy can be made appealing to the general reader when presented by a skillful writer." 704 pages, $12.95

*The Career of Philosophy, I: From the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment.* 933 pages, $16.95

TRUTH AND ART

By Albert Hofstadter. Displaying an originality rare in American thought about the nature and significance of art, Professor Hofstadter uses the theories of Croce, Cassirer, Langer and Mariain as stepping stones to a new and comprehensive theory of truth by which science, morals, and art can be seen in a single context. $6.00

ARISTOTLE'S VISION OF NATURE

By Frederick J. E. Woodbridge, edited by John Herman Randall, Jr., with the assistance of Charles H. Khan and Harold A. Larrabee

"The most important writing on Aristotle's thought since the revolutionary study of Werner Jaeger in 1923."

—John Herman Randall, Jr. $4.50

THE MORAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY
OF DAVID HUME

By John B. Stewart. "This excellent book fills a long-felt need."
—*American Political Science Review*. "Commendably thorough and measured."
—*Times Literary Supplement*. $7.50

At your bookstore

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

2960 Broadway, New York, N. Y. 10027

139

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Editor-at-Large

I am not, I must confess, particularly fond of animals. Aside from a painted turtle once sent me as a souvenir from Florida, I have never had a pet. Circuses, apart from cotton candy, have always bored me. And I haven't been to a zoo since I gave up smoking and re-developed my sense of smell.

Therefore, you can understand my surprise when I recently glanced at Hermann Dembeck's *Animals and Men* and found myself completely captivated by it.

As the subtitle says, this book is an "informal history of the animal as prey, as servant and as companion," and it is loaded with interesting facts and amusing stories about animals of all sorts.

For example, there's a bit about a Roman emperor who kept two tame bears in his bedroom, and another about how peasants killed wolves in feudal days; a chapter on falconry, and an explanation of why some people won't eat pigs; and an account of how Jefferson Davis introduced camels into the United States Army. There are also hundreds of pictures, including one of a pet stork on a dining room table and another of Los Angeles during the ice age.

In addition to all this fascinating lore, there is also some practical information on how to keep pets humanely, which covers everything from goldfish and birds to cats and dogs. Reading the book has made me feel quite a bit differently about animals, even though I'm not yet ready for bears in my bedroom.

L.L. Day

EDITOR-AT-LARGE

*Animals and Men*, by Hermann Dembeck ($7.50) is a publication of the Natural History Press, which is the Publisher for The American Museum of Natural History, and a Division of Doubleday & Company, Inc., 277 Park Avenue, New York 10017. Copies may be obtained at any Doubleday Book Shop, one of which is located at 17116 Kerecheval Avenue, Grosse Pointe, Michigan.

what emerges even more strongly from the whole episode is the son's feeling that his very intelligence and education have doomed him to a feckless existence in the South.

The single moral, indeed, that runs through these stories seems to be that the liberal mind, convinced of its own rationality and self-righteousness, cannot possibly understand the perverse depths of the human personality. In "The Lame Shall Enter First," Sheppard, a social worker, tries to befriend a young delinquent, Rufus, by bringing him to live in his own home. A widower, Sheppard is also charged with taking care of a ten-year-old of his own, Norton, whom he nevertheless manages to neglect. Rufus is lame and has had a horrible childhood, having suffered all the deprivations that arouse compassion in any right-thinking social worker. But kindliness and good intentions work no miracle with the boy, and Sheppard desperately begins to suspect that he is confronted with some appalling incarnation of human evil. By the time, however, that he has got rid of Rufus, he has contrived, through his high-minded stupidity, to bring about the death of his own son.

The details are woven together perhaps a little too neatly in order to establish the moral parable. But the power of imagination and the vivid simplicity of language are what make the story live as art, and in the end, what succeed in really getting across its frightening message.

## THE HYPERTHYROID JOURNALIST

With everybody twitching to the rhythms of the frug and the jerk it is to be expected that language itself will have to be jumping, too. English prose has somehow survived the convulsions and writhings of various journalistic innovators in this century, so we may take heart that it will also outlast the newest hypermanic jitters of TOM WOLFE. THE KANDYKOLORED TANGERINE-FLAKE STREAMLINE BABY (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $5.50) is a collection of his reportorial pieces, and its title gives a pretty fair idea of the tone of the whole book, in which every day has to be parade day with tons of confetti and strings of firecrackers.

Yet he is a remarkable reporter too, who, by his talents and even more by his failings, manages to hold a slightly warped but fascinating

mirror up to the contemporary American scene. The very vulgarity of his urge to be sophisticated, to be "in," is itself a revelation of what now preoccupies a whole generation of Americans. Las Vegas, custom cars, decal eyes, beehive hair, stretch pants — oh, yes, Mr. Wolfe has quite an eye for stretch pants, and he probably mentions them more than any other single item in the American culture. At the same time, he must be able to drop a reference to the sociologist Max Weber just to show that his generation is knowledgeable and read the highbrow quarterlies back there in college a decade ago.

He is at his best when he writes about what really interests him, such as the stock-car races in the South, and he diligently probes into the human beings behind the spectacle. These races are more dangerous and demand more raw courage from the driver than any other automobile competition in the world. Most of the drivers, it seems, got their training on the dirt back roads of the South, carrying bootleg whiskey while eluding the federal revenue agents. It's good to know that the tax on liquor has produced some tangible benefit.

## HAUNTED LADIES

In a previous novel, *The Light in the Piazza*, ELIZABETH SPENCER related the experience of an American girl in Italy with a grace and insight that could only be compared with that of the early Italian novels of E. M. Forster. KNIGHTS & DRAGONS (McGraw-Hill, $3.95) returns to the same Italian theme, but not nearly so successfully. Despite many touches of a very fine and unusual talent, the story as a whole is too fragile and haunted and lacks the solidity of the author's previous fiction.

Martha Ingram works in the cultural office of the American government in Rome. She is young, beautiful, poised, brilliant at her job, and so would seem to have everything to live for. But inwardly she is in distress, haunted by the specter of her husband, from whom she has just been divorced. But here, precisely, the reader's trouble arises. Gordon Ingram, the ex-husband, and her marriage to him are never quite real enough to make one understand why they still hold such a powerful grip over Martha's mind. A live

140

A remarkable close-up of
the tribal life of the Dodoth
of Northern Uganda, with
intimate profiles, and
descriptions of secret
rites and sacrifices
witnessed by
Mrs. Thomas

WARRIOR
HERDSMEN

By ELIZABETH MARSHALL THOMAS

author of *The Harmless People*

32 photos by Timothy Asch

Map and diagrams by Guy Fleming

$5.95 • now at better bookstores

ALFRED • A • KNOPF

A vivid political portrait of

a man
and of
an age

First
Printing
$6.50

Fleet Publishing Corp.
230 Park Ave., N.Y., 10017

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person can turn into a ghost to haunt one, but a character who was never more than a ghost ought not to have enough substance to linger on.

Martha meets Jim Wilbourne, an economist who has arrived to work for the American embassy. She sees Jim clearly enough — he is pushy, opportunistic, mendacious, and a bit crude — but she allows herself to have an affair with him. In her spiritless mood she can drift into almost anything, and even her own self-degradation does not seem to bother her. Not only does Jim have a wife, but also Martha knows that in time he will return to America while she will stay on in Rome.

When Jim does go home, Martha seems to have found her real freedom at last. But this ending is thoroughly ambiguous; she has escaped the specter of her ex-husband, and she has survived Jim's departure, but she seems to have lost all sense of herself also. Has she in fact found freedom, or has she become inhumanly detached?

This portrait of a lady passing through a phase in which nothing seems quite real to her is done with much subtlety and delicacy; but the very unreal detachment of Martha's mind is what makes her story just a little too distracted and wispy.

A lady in even more desperate straits is the heroine of EDNA O'BRIEN'S AUGUST IS A WICKED MONTH (Simon and Schuster, $3.95). It is hard to say whether this is an entirely successful novel, since the characters are at times so detached from feelings that they seem scarcely human, yet the whole is written with such a deadpan flatness of tone that it becomes an entirely convincing account of one month of nihilism in the life of a young Englishwoman.

Ellen is estranged from her husband, and they agree to separate on their vacations. He will take their young son with him on a summer trip to Wales, while she proposes to have her fling of freedom on the Riviera.

Miss O'Brien's theme is sex, but she does not hoke it up. Ellen is not a crashing success as a seductress, and when she does find sex, it is as insipid as champagne without fizz. In the midst of her sordid adventures a long-distance call from her husband tells her that their son has been killed in an accident. In the enormity of her affliction Ellen can

A Drama
With a
Cast of
Three Thousand

was enacted in the United States from 1945-47. The three thousand were the relatively few scientific and technical workers who formed the Federation of American Scientists. The drama they took part in was the battle for civilian control of atomic energy.

In a PERIL AND A HOPE
Alice Kimball Smith records the two years after World War II when scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project strove to convince the American public and government of the peril they themselves had ushered in.

THE CONCERN of scientists with public policy no longer needs apology but it is largely because of the efforts of these two hectic years when the scientist first became lobbyist and publicist that this is the case.

ALTHOUGH THERE IS NOTHING of the "I was there" approach in Mrs. Smith's book, she was there. She lived in Los Alamos and later worked on *The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists*. She has written "as nearly as possible an unvarnished tale... in the currently unfashionable belief that recreating the past is a respectable and fascinating end in itself." The tale may be unvarnished but it is not unadorned with grace and style and it is, indeed, fascinating.

From *First Impression*, a sampler of our books with comment on the vagaries of publishing. May we put you on our mailing list?

A Peril and a Hope $10.00

UNIVERSITY
OF CHICAGO
PRESS

Chicago and London

141

Never
heard of
Cockerell?

THEN meet that great eccentric, great Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, and great collector of rare manuscripts and 19th-century luminaries—the man, who said to his biographer, “Don’t try to make me out a great man. I wasn’t.” Maybe not. But the story of his life makes wonderful reading.

COCKERELL

The Life of Sir Sydney
Carlyle Cockerell (1867-1962)

By WILFRID BLUNT

$7.50 • now at
better bookstores
ALFRED·A·KNOPE

The first major
study of the
American high
school today—

as an influence,
as an experience,
and as a way of life

COMING OF
AGE IN
AMERICA

Growth and Acquiescence

By EDGAR Z. FRIEDENBERG

author of The Vanishing Adolescent
$5.95, now at your bookstore

RANDOM HOUSE
457 Madison Ave., N.Y 10022

experience grief only as a paralysis of all feeling. Her story ends in the same flat monotone that has carried it throughout: back in England, Ellen looks at the falling leaves and hopes for a cooler and less harassing autumn.

Miss O'Brien has a genuine gift for fiction and a scrupulous honesty. The material she writes about — the blank desperation of the young woman whose marriage has failed — is real enough in modern life too; but somewhere in this desert of modernity there must be less dehumanized pockets from which her talent could dig a richer ore.

WAR AND THE INTELLECTUAL

The literary history of the nineteen twenties has been pretty well researched, but about the earlier decade of the teens, which in many ways set the stage for America's coming of age intellectually and culturally, much less is generally known. The outbreak of the First World War, which caused utter dissension among the writers, has obscured other developments in the period, particularly those on the literary home front. The period has not attracted attention partly because it did not have the sensational figures and masterpieces of the twenties. The decade of the teens was a time of spadework and preparation in American history rather than of glamour.

One of the more brilliant figures of the time was Randolph Bourne, and the selection of his essays and letters in *THE WORLD OF RANDOLPH BOURNE* (Dutton, $5.75), edited by Lillian Schlissel, is valuable not only as historical documentation but as very interesting reading in its own right. Bourne was a free-lance critic who ranged widely over the subjects of books, politics, society, and travel. One is tempted to speculate that had he not died prematurely at the age of thirty-two, he might have been an earlier Edmund Wilson. But bad luck seemed to dog his footsteps, and his really productive period was brief, from 1911 to 1918, when he fell victim to the nationwide influenza epidemic. Yet, numbered as his days were, he did leave a decisive mark upon his time.

Bourne was a liberal and a socialist, though not a Marxist. The American intelligentsia was to feel the impact of Marxism some years

later. His socialism was of a progressive and gradual kind, and for a general philosophy he looked toward the pragmatism of John Dewey, who was then the great intellectual bulwark of progressivism. Bourne later broke with Dewey when the latter approved our entry into the First World War. As a pacifist, Bourne had denounced the war from the start and continued to do so after we were in it. He was thus abandoned to a most unpleasant and alienated position, and his bitterness comes out in a treatise on the state, which he was working on during the last years of his life. His thesis, simply put, is that "war is the health of the state" — the means by which those in power can unify the herd under them in some kind of blind crusade. Otherwise, the masses would simply fall apart into their own passive and diverse interests. In order to survive, the state must seek the perpetuation of war, which is done even in periods of nominal peace by the maintenance of armaments. If there are no hot wars, there at least have to be cold wars.

One positive result of our own long siege of the cold war is that it has compelled more people to become attentive to public affairs and international policy, and there has consequently grown up a whole new generation of Clausewitzes pondering the strategy of the bomb. One of the best in this field is DR. HENRY A. KISSINGER of Harvard University, and his new volume, *THE TROUBLED PARTNERSHIP* (McGraw-Hill, $5.95), is a highly topical and illuminating reappraisal of the Atlantic alliance.

So far as the public is aware of strains within the Atlantic alliance, it tends to think that these have all been caused by one man, De Gaulle. Nothing is more dangerous, Dr. Kissinger holds, than to persist in this simpleminded line of thought. The fact is that the world has changed very much since 1949, when NATO was set up. Our allies have become much stronger and are ready to challenge our decisions on a good many matters, as full-fledged partners should. Russia does not loom as so immediate a threat to Western Europe as it did fifteen years ago, and the Western nations, therefore, do not feel they have to cling so desperately to our apron strings. We, on the other hand, in-

142

Delightful, authentic
Irish folktales

Selected and translated by

CILEEN
O'FAOLAIN

A. beautiful book, richly illustrated by Trina Schart Hyman, of permanent value to adults and children alike. Mostly from peasant story-tellers, the translations keep the lilt and the earthy poetry of the original Gaelic. The finest collection extant in English. $6.75 at all bookstores

CHILDREN
OF THE
SALMON

AND OTHER
IRISH
FOLKTALES

ATLANTIC-LITTLE, BROWN

WYZANSKI

on judgment, ethics and the law

One of the most eloquent spokesmen for the high traditions of American law is Judge Charles E. Wyzanski, Jr. of the United States District Court for Massachusetts. His best pronouncements of the last 25 years, written and oral, have been gathered in one volume along with his first-hand portraits of great judges — Brandeis, Holmes, A. N. Hand, Learned Hand — and essays on social and individual morality. $6.95 at all bookstores

WHEREAS
A Judge's Premises

ATLANTIC-LITTLE, BROWN

stead of welcoming such changes as a remarkable triumph of our original policy (which was designed, after all, to make Europe strong), have remained stubbornly entrenched in our older attitudes and administrative machinery.

If the Atlantic alliance is to be revitalized, we are called upon for more flexible thinking, and Dr. Kissinger proceeds to examine the concrete alternatives by which improvement may come.

SEARCH FOR THE SELF

A new translation of a classic is always an occasion for comment, especially when the author is not as well known as he should be. DEMIAN by HERMANN HESSE (Harper & Row, $3.95) is the first of a series in which the publisher intends to introduce the bulk of this remarkable author's writing to the American public. Though Hesse won the Nobel Prize in 1946, he never gained many readers here, except perhaps for his novel *Steppenwolf*, and then mainly among college students. Yet he looms now, three years after his death in 1962, as one of the deeper writers of the whole century.

Demian is the story of the boy Arthur Sinclair and his growth into young manhood. At school, Arthur is terrified by a bully until a new boy, Max Demian, who has some unusual and hidden power, appears. Demian turns off the bully, and he and Arthur become friends. Demian has some special secret, some hidden grace, and fascinates but mystifies Arthur. They are separated when Arthur goes off to boarding school, but years later come together as young men, and Demian introduces his friend to a strange world of mysticism, magic, and theosophy. In any other writer's hands this business would ring false, but Hesse's passionate irony makes it convincing. Demian's secret, which marks him off from the run of mankind, is simply that he is one of those rare ones who have found themselves.

This novel, which first appeared in 1919, created a sensation among readers who had known the destruction of the First World War and the confused aftermath. As is the case throughout most of his writings, Hesse's characters are searching for an identity within a disintegrated world, a theme that is as timely (or timeless) for us as for his generation.

Edith Wharton
& Henry James

The Story of
Their Friendship

by Millicent Bell

"Millicent Bell has exhaustively explored and fascinatingly re-created, with rich fresh source material, the bright observing world of Henry James and Edith Wharton, dedicated, in books and talk and motor trips, to a relentless quest of the beautiful. Her study of the relationship between the two novelists, both personal and literary, seems likely to be the definitive one."

—Louis Auchincloss

George Braziller

Publisher • New York

"May well be the most controversial book of the year"

THE
FALLACY
OF
FREUD
AND
PSYCHOANALYSIS

by Edward R. Pinckney, M.D.

"It says things that very much need to be said, and it says them extremely well."

—FRED MOSS, M.D.

"This book should awaken the public—and the medical profession."

—COLEMAN HARRIS, M.D.,

American Medical Association
Archives of Internal Medicine

$3.95 at all bookstores or
Dept. 303

PRENTICE-HALL, INC.

Englewood Cliffs, N. J.

143

Little, Brown
and
Atlantic Monthly Press
salute
SAMUEL ELIOT MORISON

On the occasion of the publication of his monumental *Oxford History of the American People*, Atlantic-Little, Brown pays tribute to our foremost historian. We are proud to have published the following books by Samuel Eliot Morison.

**THE TWO-OCEAN WAR:** A Short History of the U. S. Navy in the Second World War. $15.00

**HISTORY OF UNITED STATES NAVAL OPERATIONS IN WORLD WAR II.** Volume Three was awarded the Bancroft Prize in 1948. 15 volumes; each $7.50

**ADMIRAL OF THE OCEAN SEA.** A biography of Columbus. Pulitzer Prize, 1943. $12.50

**CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS, MARINER.** A rewritten version of the biography. $3.75

**JOHN PAUL JONES:** A Sailor's Biography. Pulitzer Prize, 1960. $6.50 ($2.45 paper)

**THE STORY OF MT. DESERT ISLAND, MAINE.** $3.50

**FREEDOM IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIETY.** A discussion. $3.50

**STRATEGY AND COMPROMISE.** An examination of the strategic decisions of World War II. $3.00

**THE CARIBBEAN AS COLUMBUS SAW IT.** With Mauricio Obregón. Nearly 300 photographs, $8.95

**THE PARKMAN READER (Editor).** Selections from the works of Francis Parkman. $6.50

at your bookstore

ATLANTIC-LITTLE, BROWN

34 Beacon Street, Boston

POTPOURRI

BY PHOEBE ADAMS

The author's foreword perfectly explains the existence of *THE WASHING OF THE SPEARS* (Simon and Schuster, $12.00). "I first came across the tale of Rorke's Drift," *DONALD MORRIS* begins, "in a long-forgotten collection of stirring deeds written for children. . . . I certainly did not know who the Zulus were, nor even where Natal was. It stuck with me as the story of a fight, however, and it always seemed to me a more satisfactory battle than such better-known events as the Alamo or the Little Big Horn . . . and by 1955 I was planning a magazine article on" Rorke's Drift and Isandhlwana. Then "Ernest Hemingway pointed out to me that there had never been a readable account of the Zulu War of 1879, nor, indeed, any account published in the United States, and that it would be a pity to throw the two battles away on a magazine. He was, of course, right, and the present volume is the result." Six hundred and fourteen pages, all highly readable and well worth the trouble Mr. Morris has obviously expended on them. He not only describes Rorke's Drift; he explains how it came about, and therefore begins with South Africa before the arrival of the Dutch in the seventeenth century. The subsequent encroachments and collisions of Dutch, English, and Zulus (who were no more native to the territory than the Europeans) are expounded with clarity, liveliness, and sporadic explosions of a mordant humor, which, if brutal, is nevertheless just what the subject deserves. I was bewitched by the book, but before recommending it promiscuously, I should perhaps confess to a pro-Zulu bias acquired through early reading of Rider Haggard.

In defense of Ian Fleming, *KINGSLLEY AMIS* has written *THE JAMES BOND DOSSIER* (New American Library, $3.95), a careful but not entirely serious study of his late friend's popular, much abused creation. The book is stuffed with shrewd insights and amusing footnotes and explains, among other things, why, although Bond is a derivation of the Byronic hero, his following remains predomi-

nately masculine. "We don't want to have Bond to dinner or go golfing with Bond or talk to Bond. We want to be Bond." This relieves me of any further responsibility toward Bond, and I am grateful to Mr. Amis. Also much entertained.

It always seems faintly boorish to complain of a work undertaken by a competent author with the intention of aiding the cause of literature, but *DAVID WRIGHT'S* translation into modern prose of Chaucer's *THE CANTERBURY TALES* (Random House, $7.50) is really too much for good manners to bear. In the first place, Chaucer himself is not all that difficult to read. In the second place, Chaucer was a master-hand at getting comic or satiric or emotional effects by the juxtaposition of sounds and by subtle shifts in the timing of his lines. All this automatically disappears in a prose version. Frantic efforts by the prose paraphraser (translation is the wrong word for the business) may preserve part of it, but there is no indication that Mr. Wright has made any effort at all or has even noticed that the baby has gone out with the bath water.

**HELEN BEVINGTON'S CHARLEY SMITH'S GIRL** (Simon and Schuster, $4.95) is a memoir of the author's youth, and it differs from the general run of female memoirs in being neither spiteful nor sentimental. Mrs. Bevington was unlucky in her parents. Her mother was a woman of some talent and decided virtue, but coldly inept in dealing with people. Her father, Charley, was that ludicrous figure of folklore, a Methodist minister with an incorrigible itch for girl chasing. This dryly convincing book seems to be a belated attempt to do the pair justice — not because they were much better or worse than their young daughter thought, but because, on reflection, Mrs. Bevington has realized that they did as well as they knew how.

**THE BETTER HALF** (Harper & Row, $6.95) by *ANDREW SINCLAIR* is a solid study of the changing habits and position of American women during the nineteenth century. It inevitably becomes a history of the suffrage campaign. Mr. Sinclair offers no spectacular theories or unexpected discoveries. He does, however, bring together in an orderly pattern information that is normally left scattered about in several different fields.

144

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Our lesson for today is paint.

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THE TROUBLED PARTNERSHIP: A Re-appraisal of the 1/30/65 Western Alliance. By Henry A. Kissinger McGraw

Hill $5.95 266 pages

Dr. Kissinger's book is a brilliant analysis of the complex and critical problems disturbing the Atlantic partnership.
These are problems that must cause serious concern to all who regard the Alliance as an essential bastion of peace and freedom in Europe. There can be no doubt that the Alliance has become in the words of the author's title, the troubled partnership.
The fact is that very fundamental differences of opinion have developed on the whole future of the Alliance.

The Atlantic Alliance is perhaps the most powerful collective defence association ever known in peace-time. It grew out of and expanded the concept of a defence alliance, within the framework of the United Nations Charter, which the late Ernest Bevin, the then British Foreign Secretary, put forward in 1948, when he proposed a formula for Western Union embracing not only collective defence, but also technical, cultural and social cooperation.

The Communist coup in Czechoslovakia and the Berlin Blockade, Page. 3. as Dr. Kissinger points out, caused a turning point in Western policy, and it served to produce the decisive participation of the United States in what emerged as NATO in 1949. Thus

(the United States)