Six Men, by Alistair Cooke

...Ignorant of history as king, Edward was similarly ignorant in exile...

...that, indeed, his marriage to Mrs...

...Six Men is distinctively the work of such a man...

...In aristocratic ages," he observed, the historian's attention "is con-stantly drawn to individuals...

...With a few moving exceptions, his protest is the same as that heard on college campuses in the late sixties...

...The implication is that Russell sought the lofty explanation when downright lust may have been—and probably was—all that was at work...

...This new Burke offers "nothing less than a pivotal insight into that great turning point in our history—the transformation from the aristocratic to the bourgeois world...

...but it is an accurate one...

...Simpson, and then moves on to comment on Edward's 35 years in exile...

...Marine Corps, works for the United States Industrial Council in Nashville, Tennessee...

...Mencken, Adlai Stevenson, Bertrand Russell, and Humphrey Bogart—were good friends of Cooke or subjects for a lot of his by-lines...

...Marines were fanning out across the rice paddies, some in extended skirmish lines, some in serried, staggered ranks, the mortar shells bursting among them...

...The dustjacket notes that in reading Six Men one will come upon a seventh—Cooke himself—and I would be remiss were I to let him go unattended...

...A veteran of countless firefights, he confesses that he, like many who shared his experience, is unable to detach himself from the compelling thrill of combat, with its mystic lure of danger...

...His objections to the Vietnam adventure are not particularly original: He wonders why we were there, what with the corrupt Saigon regime...

...Cooke might have written as Shana Alexander, whom he quotes, once did: " 'On this side of the water, the entireaffair can only make sense as romance...

...At the same time, the author is candid...

...Any writer should seek this effect, but especially a memoirist, since at his best he will enforce something like adagio speed on the reader, the better to allow him to take in the life being remembered...

...He personifies this transformation...

...Each of the six men—Charlie Chaplin, Edward VIII, H.L...

...And because it is, one happily lingers over phrases, sentences, and even whole paragraphs...

...We remember, too, that in 1965 there were few who thought twice about sending ground troops to Vietnam—to plod through glue-like mud in jungles, carrying mortars and 25-pound machine guns, chasing an enemy who lived there but did not mind dying if it helped kill or mutilate an American...

...But I should think that the more interesting glimpse of Cooke is suggested in the two sentences that close his prefatory "A Note on Fame and Friendship": "They [the six men] all seem to me to be deeply conservative men who, for various psychological reasons, yearned to be recognized rather as hellions or brave progressives...

...BOOK REVIEW A Rumor of War Philip Caputo / Holt, Rinehart, Winston / $10.00 Edward J. Walsh Of the American writers, it was probably Stephen Crane, in The Red Badge of Courage, who first described the sublime camaraderie of men in battle...

...that Stevenson could not commit what his political managers asked for—at least one grammatical error a day during a campaign swing through California...

...As history, it was outrageous, medieval in its cruelty...beyond all human comprehension.' " But no: Cooke likes Edward, all right, but cannot admire the self-pitying Edward in exile...

...Caputo survived almost a year in the hot wet jungle, watching his fellow Marines kill, and die...

...the book could have been a poignant work of art...

...A Rumor of War is his bittersweet memoir...

...It is in this that his importance and even his greatness consist...

...Well, there's no use trying to get inside Cooke's head to discover whether he yearns, or once yearned, to be the hellion or the progressive...

...punctuated often by cowardice and awful malice, but with acts of true nobility and manly tenderness as well...

...He does this not only in his ideas, but also in himself...

...Ten years after leaving the Corps, Caputo has finished his war story...

...Particularly does Cooke avoid this temptation in his treatments of Edward and Russell, possibly the best memoirs of the lot, and so worth noting...

...If so, it is more evidence that the New World likes what the Old periodically and graciously seems to deposit in its midst: a civilized and civilizing man...

...About them one learns a variety of things, ranging from the odd bit of fact to traits, habits, and dispositions...

...A century had passed since the end of that most tragic of American wars when Marine Second Lieutenant Philip Caputo led his rifle platoon at a jaunty double-time down the ramp of an Air Force transport onto the tarmac at Danang, Vietnam...

...It is this underlying polemical purpose which explains Professor Kramnick's attempt toclassify Nathan Glazer, Irving Kristol, Edward Banfield, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, James Q. Wilson,, Allan Bloom, Andrew Hacker, and the late Alexander Bickel with such Burkeans as Peter Stanlis, Russell Kirk, and Francis Canavan...

...He failed to understand that "in the British system the monarch is the vessel of the monarchy and that once the vessel is changed the old monarch has at best a dubious status...

...even fewer—probably no one —who would defend the way Caputo and his men were forced to fight...

...After his discharge, Caputo participated half-heartedly in the antiwar movement, mailed back his medals, etc., all of it tortuously replayed in A Rumor of War...

...Under fire, man's powers of life are heightened in proportion to the proximity of death, so that he [feels] an elation as extreme as his dread," he tells us...

...One learns about these men, moreover, with good humor and irony and without gush or whitewash...

...Cooke tells the story of Edward's abdication, brought about by his insistence on marrying an American divorcee, a Mrs...

...and the battle episodes: The last helicopters were taking off, climbing nose down, banking sharply as they climbed, with the dark-green mountains in the background...

...Edward failed in having both a sense of duty and a knowledge of history, and Russell lackedCooke's term—horse sense...

...In so doing, he panders to the worst prejudice of our time —that which suggests that because most men are captivated by the spirit of the age, all men must be...

...Simpson that raised the issue of whether there may not be some ways in which a king has independent political power...

...BOOK REVIEW Six Men Alistair Cooke / Alfred A. Knopf / $8.95 Terry Eastland A bout a third of the way through this splendid book, I had the feeling that somehow the television had come on and there was Alistair Cooke, speaking the very words that I was reading...

...In a democratic age, he will "attribute hardly any influence to the individual...

...Thus, what purports to be a book about Edmund Burke is in fact a work of psycho-social typology designed to account for that irrational and obsessive "rage" which Professor Kramnick believes to be "at the heart of conservatism" and to help us understand and appreciate "the eternal longing of the conservative for the elimination of rational thought from politics...

...he laments what the war did to the good, average, small-town boys in his platoon...

...He [Fleming] felt the subtle battle brotherhood more potent even than the cause for which they were fighting...

...It was a mysterious fraternity born of the smoke and danger of death...

...Crane wrote: "There was a consciousness always of the presence of his comrades about him...

...Had Edward known what happened in 1688, he would have also known that there were none...

...But on the other matter, the style and substance of Six Men leave no question: Cooke is conservative, in the spiritual and social sense of that word, and in that sense more "deeply conservative" than some members of the sextet he writes of...

...Simpson touched the public interest and so was subject to scrutiny by Parliament...

...As the Marines bore the brunt of the fighting for the first two years of the war, they took casualties: to booby traps and disease, to insects and misplaced friendlyfire, as much as to the Viet Cong...

...That is not a flattering notion about a man who hated hypocrisy and made much of the importance of honesty...

...that Russell figured Gladstone, not Lenin, was the most terrifying man he ever sat opposite...

...That is, in fact, precisely what distinguishes this book: It is written for the ear...

...For him, the war was neither evil nor virtuous, Edward J. Walsh, who served as a. First Lieutenant in the U.S...

...There was a time when psychohistory was regarded with disdain by members of the historical profession: That time has passed...

...We learn—or, for those who were Marines, are reminded—of the Marine Corps policy, cast in iron, of using black ink, never blue...

...It is the unending contradictions which mark Caputo's book most conspicuously...

...The book is a chronicle of modern war: shorn of glamor, but not heroism...

...In and of itself, Professor Kramnick's silly book is not worthy of notice—but the fact that it was written by a reputable scholar and published by a respected commercial press should arrest our attention...

...Crane may have been more 36 The American Spectator February 1978...

...I shouldn't have objected had this in fact happened, inasmuch as any one of the memoirs that make up Six Men could agreeably be read aloud, even over the air...

...and that Bogart, though afraid to say so, was at bottom an incurable puritan...

...Two-and-a-half years after America's humiliation in Indochina, there are few left who would defend our policy there...

...he despises, understandably, the body-count syndrome...

...Edward was no more than a washed-up king, and yet in his self-pity he wanted the perquisites of royalty...

...but, one suspects, a terrible adventure he undertook, seeking no more than adventure and material for a Hemingwayesque novel, living out his tough-Marine fantasies, but getting more than he bargained for...

...Of the Marines, traditionally the "first to fight," the 9th MEB was the first to dig foxholes in the muddy clay of 'Nam, the first to hear sniper fire about its ears, the first to shed the illusions wrought by John F. Kennedy's proud mythmaking...

...Here Cooke might have adopted that attitude towards Edward which the former monarch himself came to adopt, namely, that "he had been condemned to exile for nothing but his great love...

...But Cooke perceptively notes that the puritan in Russell and his "very conscious intellectual nature" forced him "to explain every sexual call of nature as a The American Spectator February 1978 35 fated invitation to a mystical union of souls, an incurable form of rationalization that got him into perpetual trouble...

...His unit, Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, of the 9th Marine Expeditionary Brigade, spearheaded the introduction of American ground troops, in the spring of 1965...

...Caputo, like many of our friends and neighbors, went along...

...of the archetypal gyrene platoon sergeant, who rules by intimidation—and well...

...Yes, there are spots throughout the book where Cooke necessarily pops up, as in the anecdotes in whichhe co-stars...

...Which is a shame...

...But for all the searing emotion of collecting the wounded, for all the gripping suspense of waiting in foxholes on endless pitch-black nights, it is the handwringing ambiguity of the author's loss of faith that finally dominates, and dilutes the genuine power of his book...

...This tendency has two roots—the fact that "general facts serve to explain more things in democratic than in aristocratic ages," and the fact that history which does justice to the few great individuals is offensive to democratic sensibilities...

...Perhaps that is their real link with this writer...

...In arguing that Burke's ideas "should be treated as products of historical and personal experience," Professor Kramnick is denying the possibility of reflective detachment and suggesting that Burke's thought obeys "some superior force" ruling over it...

...side but from no one did he get that necessary attribute of royalty, a sense of duty...

...It is all too true, told without melodrama, every fact in place...

...It was his insistence on marrying Mrs...

...of the heartrending eagerness of young men for war—the blood-swollen god, Crane called it...

...Kramnick finds his Burke "fascinating" because, by disposing of one psychosexual misfit, he believes that he can dispose of all of liberalism's contemporary critics...

...he was lucky enough to come back...

...But Caputo plays out his disillusionment with the war as if he had to sell it to the reader...

...Concerning Russell, the temptation is to say on the subject of the man's goatish ways that he was a great lover, and then to say no more...

...that Edward inherited from his grandfather a sensual, sybaritic Terry Eastland is an editorial writer for the San Diego Union...

...that Mencken was a compulsive hand washer and rarely wrote a piece without retreating to the washbasin five or six times...

...An enemy automatic rifle tack-tacked from a row of grassy mounds, west of the landing zone...

...Instead, he will "assign great causes to all petty incidents" and lead men to believe that the world's "movement is involuntary and that societies unconsciously obey some superior force ruling over them...

...Because qualities such as these often are missing in our public men, and in our journalists, I venture that their presence in Cooke accounts for a great deal of his popularity...

...Edward "had not been simply a lover defied but the mainspring of a constitutional crisis...

...It is the absence of these latter that credits Cooke as a memoirist, since the temptation of the genre is to indulge the person written about...

...The best passages are the descriptions of Marine Corps training which the author, for all his agony, thoroughly enjoys in the retelling, as do all Marines...

...The publication of this Marxist psychobiography of Burke illustrates an important and powerful trend—one best described more than a century ago by Tocqueville...

...he did not get them, and Cooke wisely does not indulge him now...

...One learns, for example, that Chaplin was as unaware of his rising fame early in his career as he was later on of the $900,000 that had piled up in a checking account...