The Real War

...We .are looking for a person with a good sense of humor and a desire to learn the business end of publishing...

...And he b i t t e r l y states that "too many of those who profess to be the guardians of our ideals have instead become the architects of our retreat" without allowing for unintended irony...

...He is no less insightful when he turns his atbe in America's, Israel's, and Egypt's interests to resolve the whole business forthwith...

...Those he missed he managed to affect significantly--in 1964 by campaigning generously for Goldwater and in 1976 by travelling conspicuously to China, at the expense of the campaign of his pardoner, Gerald Ford...

...The second is that we might be defeated without war...

...But in the twentieth century, of course, it did...

...wff/ M" puhk~r/.,eff lhz-r month ,lay Cranc-Ru.~.vak...

...The thesis of Counting by Race is "that the Bakke case was supremely a conflict between two ideas of equality," which Eastland and Bennett call the ideas of "moral equality" and "numerical equality...

...We should remember that this is a man who landed himself on the national ticket in five of the past seven presidential elections...

...Adopting a pro-freedom foreign policy, it should THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR .JULY 1980 31 be pointed out, need not lead to a human rights campaign like Carter's...

...in the main the Africans themselves are responsible for t h e i r own economic woes and political tyrannies...

...Jimmy Carter after his conversion on the road to Kabul...

...That campaign, too, has lost sight of freedom: Authoritarian countries like South Korea have been criticized more often and more vigorously than t o t a l i t a r i a n countries like North Korea...

...Even Secretory of Defense 1 larold Brown admitted that, with real 5 percent increases, it would take the United States more than 40 years to equal the rate of Soviet defense spending...

...Accordingly, his language fluctuates between the incantatory and the analytical...

...But such a strategy may be more sound in theory than in practice...

...I n The Real War, Nixon himself speaks in moral terms, but in a diff e r e n t way...

...Understandably, he much p r e f e r s the Chinese, whose extreme cultural snobbery determined that they "had n e i t h e r the need nor i n t e r e s t in foreign conq u e s t s , " in c o n t r a s t with the Russians, "whose whole history has been one of r e l e n t l e s s outward expansion...

...They praise Lincoln and the firstJ ustice Harlan for deepening the Declaration's principle of moral equality, and describe (rather Whiggishly) the final " v i c t o r y of moral equality" in Brown and the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which reflected " t h e ultimate conversion of the people of the United States to the idea that color is irrelevant in the consideration of a man's worth...

...The 5 percent increase originally proposed bv the Carter administ,ation-and exen that figure has been cut back I(> 3 percent and then manipulated--he dismisses as "totally inadequate to meet the threat...

...It merely need be a "beacon on the summit of the mountain, to which all the inhabitants of the earth may turn their eyes for genial and saving light...

...But the "key to winning World War III," in which we are presently engaged (the second reality), lies, according to Nixon, in a new global strategy that woukt shift the world's "geopolitical momentum" in "our favor," and he uses such terms as "pincer movements," "fronts," and "flanking movements" to describe it...

...foreign policy" with "an avoidance of fatal miscalculations" (d&ente) makes good sense in the nuclear age...

...We know freedom, liberty, hope, self-indulgence," he says at one point, " t h e y know tyranny, butchery, starvation, war, and annihilation...

...Nixon's " t i l t " toward authoritarian Pakistan and away from basically democratic I n d i a in 1971, as well as his overtures toward China, make less sense when judged against the touchstone of freedom...

...He then demands that the United States fully p l a y " the game of power diplomacy" which requires " a t times matching duplicity with duplicity and even brutality with brutality...

...But in reality relatively few African "strings" are pulled directly by Moscow...

...To his credit, Mr...

...In the section of his book entitled "The Big Enchilada"--surprisingly not about John Mitchell at all but career opportunity CIRCULATION MANAGER The American Spectator has a challenging career position open for an intelligent, well-rounded person to work on the business end of magazine publishing...

...The heart of their case is that although "defenders of admissions by race insist that their motives are benign, and indeed they are," admissions by race is an impediment to the realization of true equality, that is, moral equality...

...The first of these is that if war were to come, we might lose...

...at SRI lnlcvnational, wrile.r /)('ql&,vl/.]: fi)r The American Specta~w...

...The Constitutional Convention was marked by long and heatcd dehates between Alexander Hami/ton, who wished to holster Americ a s world mission with national power, and Charles Pinckney, who wished to fulfill that mission solely by example, lohnQuincvAdamswas laf('r to soutld a similar theme: in the world at large, he said...

...It has threatened, blustered, connived, conspired, stole, tortured, spied, blackmailed, murdered --all as a matter of deliberate national policy...

...Moreover, to temper "the resistance of Soviet expansion" (containment) as "the sine qua non of U.S...

...And he is righT, of course...

...COUNTING BY RACE: EQUALITY FROM THE FOUNDING FATHERS TO BAKKE AND WEBER Terry Eastland and William J. Bennett Basic Books / $10.95 FAIR GAME ? INEQUALITY AND AFFIRMATIVE ACTION John C. Livingston/W.H...

...THE REAL WAR Richard Nixon / Warner Books / $12.50 Kenneth L. Adelman States need do nothing...

...The essence of that strategy would be melding d&ente with containment, and t h e r e is a good deal to recommend this...

...Whether "Soviet leaders, in effect, had publicly accepted" the end of power politics, making the " o l d patterns" of power politics anachron i s t i c - a s Nixon slated in the early 1970s--became the fundamental question of American foreign policy...

...Moscow has trained and subsidized guerrillas, disrupted elections, shot down unarmed planes, sponsored coups, shot refugees, imprisoned dissidents...

...The tension between "idealists" and "realists" is not new: h even predates the founding of our government...

...Nevertheless, for a long time it was not really clear whether "our" system and " t h e i r " system d i f f e r e d in important ways: In 1978 Cyrus Vance said that Carter and Brezhnev held "similar dreams and aspirations" for the world...

...If, for better or fi)r worse, our system of government is unable to maneuver in a manner that scrves both containment and (t~~ente, I h e n N i x o n ' s t h e o r i z i n g b e - comes mor...

...Correcting it requires that our strategy become, in the simplest terms, a bit less antiSoviet and a bit more pro-freedom...

...His inclination is to assume lhat...

...Eastland and Bennett's treatment of the policy of numerical equality demonstrates the merit of their entire approach, as they .draw on their own historical account, as well as on the work of other writers (like Thomas Sowell), to make their case...

...a reviewer of Allan Sindler's book on Bakke wondered a year ago in this journal...

...A thin reed indeed on which to rest the West's survival...

...Nixon clearly believes "power politics" to be very much alive, particularly in the Kremlin...

...And he says that, whatever he once believed, it has always been so, given the nature of our adversaries' ideology and the character of those directed by it...

...Richard Nixon, amending slightly in The Real War what he had said at th~ UN in 1970 and in his State of the World Message in 1972...

...A( least one other part of Nixon's global strategy deserves critical atwntion...

...Those who believe Nixon to have a split personality will find traces of it here...

...The Real War should help him to win this, his final battle...

...He writes Congress to convey how "the Soviet leaders, in effect, had publicly accepted [that] offer of the new road in Soviet-American relations...

...In so regarding, he places himself somewhere between those, like Geotge Ball, who deem resolving the Palestinian issue key to stability throughout the area and those, like Eugene Rostow, who consider it peripheral if not irrelevant to regional tranquility...

...Box 1969 Bloomington, Indiana 47402 about Saudi Arabia--Nixon calls the "Palestinian i s s u e . . , a rallying cry for radical f o r c e s " which can be "constantly exploited by the Soviet Union and its designs...

...This approach reminded me of the late Herbert Storing's essay on Booker T. 32 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1980...

...He is no less insightful when he turns his attention elsewhere...

...demands, in P r e s i d e n t J o h n s o n ' s words in 1965, "equality as a fact and as a result...

...As he points out, if Carter's system and Brezhnev's system are not "poles of good and evil in human affairs," then moral concepts become meaningless...

...And more g e n e r a l l y , one has merely to look at Khomeini's Iran, Doe's Liberia, or Pol Pot's Cambodia to know that not all forms of barbarism and political mayhem derive from Moscow...

...Whether the "beacon" inspired others or not, the United States did not project i t s e l f into the worlds of the e i g h t e e n t h and n i n e t e e n t h centuries--for various reasons...

...The position involves managing the circulation and some business matters for The Spectator...

...The two books under review here, Terry Eastland and William J . Bennett's Counting by Race and John C. Livingston's Fair Game?, confirm these points, and allow for some elaboration upon them...

...Their focus on the importance of black self-respect, on the effects of policies on character, rather than on deriving policies from the latest theoretical understanding of the demands of abstract justice, is notable...

...Whatever the color of the local p u p p c t , " he writes when discussing the Soviets in Africa, "the strings are pulled in Moscow--and t h e r e are no black faces in the Politburo...

...And if this is characteristic, then Soviet restraint can only follow from containment pure and simple, in the style of the {ate forties and fifties, that is, without having to be wrapped in the cloak of ddtente...

...For instance, although j u s t i f i a b l e in anti-Soviet terms, Mr...

...The political side of Nixon comes through in the book as well, not so much in the book's content as in its timing, which has a certain quadrennial momentousness about it...

...His conclusion was: not much about the case itself, but one could learn from Sindler that "all the elaborate arguments for racial p r e f e r e n c e imply a decisive break with traditional notions of equal opportunity," that "the public consensus on civil rights has already disintegrated," and that these two facts are probably related...

...Nixon seems to know that history is r e p l e t e with instances of barbaric forces of evil overrunning the civilized forces of good...

...But he probably overemphasizes China's importance when he states that whether Peking reverts to a " d o c t r i n a i r e communist economic model" or continues with modernization "might eventually determine whether the West surv i v e s . " This would mean that our very survival depends upon the internal course of a totalitarian regime which, during its three brief decades of existence, has enjoyed the internal chaos of the Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom campaign of the late 1950s, the Great Leap Forward of the early 1960s, the Cultural Revolution of the mid to late 1960s, and the Gang of Four exorcism of the mid 1970s...

...As Nixon himself is 30 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR .JULY 1980 fond of saying: We must stand up to the Russians if we wish to sit down with them...

...Their acceptance was "confirmed in various private exchanges" and proven by "concrete progress . . . on a wide range of issues...

...Aa'~:/man, Senior Polilical .S'ck,nlLr...

...trade, friendship, and com...

...In the first half of their book, they intelligently and gracefully trace the fate of the idea of moral equality from the Declaration of Independence through Lincoln to the present, focusing on the battles over whether and how the Negro should be included within the bounds of that moral equality which requires that we render to a man "his due, as a man...

...Later he is dashed when he finds that it isn't so...

...To be perfectly ~hi1, however, so has the nation strayed throughout its history...

...But at the time, the charqcteristic sound was less of cannons blasting than of champagne glasses clinking...

...Nixon assumes a "substantial part of the responsibility" for the "excessive euphoria" of d&ente, during which the recognition of power politics was scrupulously put aside ("it was an election y e a r...

...because the Soviet Union poses t h e , g r ( ' a l e s t t h r e a t to American sc('uritv and because the contest between lhc Soviet and American x~ax's of life bears directly on the futures of many peoples, the Soviets at(" m a i l e t l v e r i l ? g (.~v(:tlts where they really are not...

...Now, in 1980, he's back at it, campaigning hard to become a former President of the United States...

...In p a r t s , Nixon rehashes "the failures of America's leadership c l a s s , " of which he is surely an eminent member...

...But no sooner did moral equality triumph than it began to be replaced by the new and quite different concept of numerical equality, which William Kristo/ is asristant professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania...

...the United K'ennclh I...

...And with the looming presence of the Soviet Union having been e s t a b l i s h e d politically at the end of World War II, the question of America's world mission took on almost cosmic proportions...

...Against the first of these realities Nixon urges that we r e d r e s s the present military imbalance, specifically by leaving the "SALT process" behind, by reestablishing the strategic nuclear balance, by reintroducing the draft (this doesn't prevent him from calling its elimination in 1973 "one of the major achievements of mv administration"), and, most important, by increasing defense spending by $30 billion each year for the next five vears--.a real increase in the defense bud.g.et of 20 percent...

...After describing the rise of this second idea of equality, and after presenting the case against it, Eastland and Bennett conclude by discussing the Bakke and Weber cases in the context of both ideas of equality, particularly as they seem to make manifest the victory of the second over the first...

...Send your resum6 or write for an application: Personnel Department The American Spectator P.O...

...academic than prescriptive...

...In particular, numerical equality requires that blacks, to say nothing of other groups, be represented in various categories of society roughly in proportion to their percentage in the general population, and it endorses "counting by race" as a means to this end...

...In a milder form, this would justify linkage, wherein Soviet deportment in one a r e n a would be brought to bear on another, rewarding good behavior with economic;cultural, and political exchanges and punishing bad deeds with the denial of such exchanges...

...Perhaps so...

...American officials forget that, however faint, the glimmer of freedom in authoritarian countries seems like a s u n b u r s t when compared with the darkness of the totalitarian night...

...For instance, there is the practical question of whether the rewards of d&ente are sufficiently important to the Soviets to a l t e r t h e i r fundamental world designs, that is, to compel them to resist expansion and become a status quo power...

...Until recently, Jimmy Carter chose to answer the question in moral terms divorced from the reality of power, asserting that because of our economic aid...

...Eastland and Bennett are friendly toward remedial programs for the economically or culturally deprived, but they stress the injustice o f " treating people as categories;' and the harm of patronizing to blacks as a group...

...mitment to human righis "in the long run our system will prevail...

...D e s p i t e all the wisdom of The Real War, it nevertheless remains true that Nixon the man is far more fascinating than anything he says or does...

...His having mined Haiphong Harbor on the eve of his 1972 .Moscow summit is a good example of what he means by this...

...The two often overlap, of course, but not always...

...Those believing Nixon to be selfdestructive will also find evidence here: The book, so obviously written by an intellectual, denigrates intellectuals...

...As Profe.ssor Hugh Seaton-Watson, a specialist on the Soviet bloc, has remarked: "Man is a far more advanced species than the crocodile, but all the same he woukt be i-ll-advised to rely on this while swimming in the Ganges...

...Nonetheless, at times his memory is selective: "During all my presidency, we were engaged in a 'war' with the Soviet IJnion...

...Communist leaders," he says, "act by instinct, just as the maneating tiger or the piranha does...

...lli.v /)Mt h(2('.,~., African Realities...

...Admissions by race is above all else damaging to black s e l f - r e s p e c t : it institutionalizes low expectations for minority applicants, dampens motivation, and encourages blacks to believe they cannot make it, or, if they can, " i t is only through the charity or the payoffs [they] can extort from the white man...

...This is a critical flaw...

...The problem, as Nixon sees it, is that "in the 1980s, America for the first time in modern history will confront two cold realities...

...D e s p i t e all this, Nixon is full of insight when talking about the Soviet Union and its designs...

...This is an excellent opportunity for growth and advancement in an interesting work environment...

...Although a foreign policy opposing the Soviet Union undoubtedly advances freedom, it should first and foremost champion freedom rather than anti-Sovietism...

...Under normal circumstances, nothing in this book would lead a r e a d e r to probe its a u t h o r ' s c h a r a c t e r , but every r e a d e r of The Real War is bound to carry into his reading experience strongly held notions about Nixon himself...

...Despite strong presidential d e t e r m i n a t i o n to the contrary, we failed to furnish the " c a r r o t " of economic benefits to Mos.cow in 1974 and the " s t i c k " of military aid to Angolans fighting against Sovietbacked fi)rces in 1975...

...The book is itself split between sections of cheering the United States back to greatness and sections of strategic analysis painting the gloomiest of geopolitical pictures...

...Evidently, the host of treaties signed in 1972 and 1973 on space and strategic arms and medicine and codes of behavior and ballets and so forth did not mean enough to the Kremlin to restrain its behavior...

...A related question arises about whether the American government, under any leadership, can manage such a two-fisted approach to foreign policy...

...B O O K R E V I E W S The President addresses the United Nations General Assembly eager to usher in a new era: "We must transcend the old pattern of power politics in which nations sought to exploit every volatile situation for their own advantage or to squeeze the maximum advantage for themselves out of every negotiation...

...Freeman & Co./$12.95 William Kristol 1 I s there anything left to say about the Bakke case...