Grassroots: The Autobiography of George McGovern and Promises to Keep, by Robert Shogan
Nuechterlein, James A.
BOOKS IN REVIEW - "Grassroots: The Autobiography of George McGovern and Promises to Keep, by Robert Shogan" teaching were not living up to some ideal of Socratic self-evaluation, but down to the lowest common denominator of that era's politics. Under cover of free scrutiny, they helped pave the way to a...
...Eban, were governed by "interests" and not by "sentiments...
...He can be counted on for automatic support of any revolution that happens to be going, provided only • that it is properly situated on the left...
...Avoid McGovernism" is a wise slogan, but it doesn't by itself take us very far...
...never saw even an elementary trace of painting or sculpture....They secrete less by the kidneys, and more by the glands of the skin, which gives them a very strong and disagreeable odor...
...He understands that this is a middle-class society and he formulates policy accordingly...
...All this, of course, carries no guarantee of easy political resolutions for Carter, as his decline in the popularity charts shows...
...indeed, they have little theological content at all...
...classic populist challenge—"all right we are two nations"—remains an evocative literary image but a totally misleading picture of American politics...
...The American people are all over the map ideologically but they are firmly united in their love for their country and themselves...
...A Triple First is so rare that Mr...
...It was a Sisyphean undertaking punctuated by short-lived triumphs to be inevitably followed by new pressures...
...Abba Eban, Israel's scholarly diplomat, had learned this early in his career, and it stood him in good stead during the long years he served as Israel's Ambassador to the United Nations and to Washington, and as Israel's foreign minister...
...McGovern fully shares populism's credulous assumption that the natural state of human affairs is one of egalitarian abundance and cooperative brotherhood and that only the machinations of special interests and conspirators make things otherwise...
...These people imagined themselves as Middle America's political, cultural, and moral betters...
...Carter is our first post-liberal liberal, and his fundamental problem involves nothing less than the construction of a coherent and substantive post-liberal order of things...
...His obsession with Vietnam found expression in ever more hysterical attacks on government policy: "This Chamber reeks of blood," he told his fellow senators in 1970...
...After withdrawing from Garrett Theological Seminary, McGovern enrolled in the graduate program in American history at Northwestern University...
...The reason is simple: Populism's vision of a nation polarized between the poor but virtuous many and the powerful and selfish few can make little sense of an America dominated by a middle-class majority which is at least as concerned about disorder below as about oppression above...
...Rusher...
...Americans are impatient with words and uncertain about deeds, but settling for ambiguity is a state of blessedness few democracies achieve...
...Hardcover $7.95...
...Eban achieved the F.S...
...There is a certain vestigial civility in Wills' attitude—don't kick a man when he's dead...
...BOOK REVIEW Abba Eban: An Autobiography Random House / $15.00 F.S...
...234) to suggest clearly, without explicitly saying so, that Nixon was involved in the assassination attempt on George Wallace...
...but no, it claimed to be exposing him to the withering confutations of the Right....Somehow, that offer did not quite grab the Yalies where they live...
...Shockley...
...We may not be willing to settle for ambiguity, but for the foreseeable future we have no choice but to live with it...
...Under cover of free scrutiny, they helped pave the way to a slaughter of Jews by the millions...
...Whatever be their degree of talent," Jefferson wrote Bishop Henri Gregoire in 1809, "it is no measure of their rights...
...Which brings to mind Lord Vansittart, the prewar head of the British Foreign Office, who used to say that there are not two sides to as many questions as we think, and that there is a catch in impartiality: "Having refused to distinguish between Right and Wrong, you will next be careful not to offend Wrong...
...This volume in his honor includes a bibliography of his published works and essays by Hugh Kenner, Russell Kirk, Peter J. Stanlis, Stephen J. Tonsor and others...
...They are also more likely to think and act decently when they are encouraged to think well of themselves thanwhen they are urged to ritual self-flagellation...
...Carter has perfected the uses of issueless populism...
...Eban's dry wit, and is enhanced by revealing sketches of the principal statesmen who, over the past two generations, bestrode the world scene...
...IViva Vivas...
...At the moment the nation appears pluralistic to the point of incoherence...
...Because Sir Isaac Newton was superior to others in understanding, he was not therefore lord of the person or property of others...
...George McGovern and Jimmy Carter both think of themselves as populists and both trace their fundamental political beliefs to the Christian faith...
...but] what if Shockley proposes a system of bonuses and voluntary incentives?...No big government at all...
...and that in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous...
...So it is that McGovern's loathing (his word) for Richard Nixon is so uncontrolled that he on more than one occasion in 1972 compared the policies of the Nixon administration with those of Nazi Germany and that he here accuses Nixon of racism and even manages at one point (p...
...it was rather that segment of the upper middle class that considered itself, with becoming modesty, a constituency of conscience...
...The narrative begins with charming vignettes of life in prewar London and Cambridge, where Mr...
...LibertyPress LibertyClasstcs We pay postage on prepaid orders...
...As a campaigner, his traditionalist affirmations and' secure sense of self made his appeals to trust and decency effective, but as President he has to govern, which means making choices, and that in turn means making enemies, particularly at a time when Americans don't generally know what they want but are intensely urgent and vocal about their discontents...
...This is a down-the-line smear, the kind of thing angry writers reserve for monsters, and sober writers reserve for their wastebaskets...
...Such a] neat package of prejudice and free enterprise might constitute an offer much of the Right-wing constituency could not refuse...
...The dynamic force behind McGovern was not America's plain folk, however defined...
...Andrei Vyshinsky at least was honest about it: International policies, he explained to Mr...
...McGovern wanted not so much to rule the country as to save its soul...
...To order these books, or for a copy of our catalog, write: LibertyPress/LibertyCkssics 7440 North Shadeland, Dept...
...Unfortunately, he appears to be only half right...
...The American people have thoroughly rejected McGovern's New Politicsand are seriously disenchanted with the shopworn liberalism of the New Deal, but for all their mutterings about a government too big and too inept and too intrusive they do not not seem prepared to forego the support and security provided by the welfare state...
...It could be worse—Hillaire Belloc spent an entire career kicking 16th-century Protestants...
...Since YAF is a Right-wing organization, you might think it was sponsoring Shockley's views...
...But if Wills gets so hopped up over YAF (which, after all, wanted Shockley beaten), what will he have left someone who writes things like this?— Comparing [blacks] by their faculties of memory, reason and imagination, it appears to me that in memory they are equal to whites...
...Nonetheless, the different meanings they extract from common categories can be instructive, not as exercises in definition, but as indicators of the tortuous paths of liberalism in recent years...
...One expects a rather more skeptical view of human nature from a Southern Baptist deeply versed in Reinhold Niebuhr's neo-orthodoxy, but the psychological understanding behind such rhetoric is as shrewd as its specific content is dubious...
...He displayed in 1972 an almost perfect misunderstanding of the American people in whose name he presumed to speak...
...Carter is as much a victim of the nation's inconsistencies as of his own...
...Hardcover $9.00, Softcover $3.00...
...The Social Gospel cannot be satisfied with any set of social arrangements short of the New Jerusalem, the beloved community...
...he tries hard, but what he himself terms his "Jewish-Unitarian-agnostic" perspective renders him incapable of understanding the evangelical Christian mind...
...And so on...
...No government action follows from them and none is meant to: They are intended solely to maintain Carter's identification with the American people in their generality rather than in their various group attachments...
...For Carter, religion is not simply a handy club with which to goad the nation Now Available: The Servile State By Hilaire Belloc A perceptive warning, first published in 1913, of the consequences of statism and the effect of socialist doctrine on capitalist society...
...By 1939, when Chamberlain issued his White Paper forbidding further Jewish immigration into what was then British Palestine—and this 34 The American Spectator August/ September 1978...
...For whatever reasons, McGovern's opinions on international affairs are characterized by a persistent animus against the policies of his own nation...
...His guideposts are few and they are almost entirely negative...
...His academic career was interrupted by the war, at the outset of which a desperate sergeant-major was trying to make some 50 Cambridge scholars, young Eban included, march in step—a futile endeavor...
...Although he will occasionally indulge in attacks on behalf of the People against some special Interest or another (the politics of resentment always pays off in America), those attacks are wholly rhetorical and emotional...
...He denounces American support for right-wing dictatorships but feels that reconciliation with Vietnam and Cuba would indicate a new American capacity "to mature internationally...
...A landmark of political thought in this century"—Walter Lippmann...
...Not so Jimmy Carter...
...Shogan has great difficulty making sense of Carter's faith...
...YAF indeed contended that Shockley, as a social engineer, was most accurately described as a liberal.] If you liked semi-fascism, you'll love the real thing...
...Yet they have, as politicians, very little in common...
...Ignore for the moment (it is not difficult) the argument...
...Carter's difficulties are in fact immense: His contradictory internal impulses between liberalism and conservatism mirror well America's general ideological confusions, but those contradictions and confusions do not make for a serene and contented political order...
...Things are made more difficult by the continuing decay of the two-party system and by a Congress that, in its post-Watergate wisdom, seems persuaded that cooperation of any kind with the White House constitutes a violation of the separation of powers...
...Still, things could be worse: If under Carter the engine of state seems to be running around in circles, under McGovern it would have plunged straight off a cliff...
...Carter's patriotism is positive, unselfconscious, and uncomplicated...
...From these roots stem populism's characteristically overheated denunciations of the villainous Interests and its perpetual weakness for conspiracy theories...
...McGovern quotes Walter Rauschenbusch with enthusiastic approval: " 'The church must ...condemn the world and seek to change it....If a man is satisfied with things as they are, he belongs to the other side.' " There is no reform or series of reforms that will render the American reality acceptable to McGovern...
...Eban's achievement gave rise to letters to the Times...
...A racism of the private sector...
...A worthy tribute to a worthy man"— The Christian Century...
...Here is the key to McGovern's thought: the Social Gospel...
...Robert Shogan's competent, if bland and unoriginal, book helps us to understand the McGovern-Carter differences and what they indicate of the state of contemporary liberalism...
...Regardless of the particular issue under discussion, McGovern consistently constructs the worst case for the intentions and actions of the American government and the best case for the policies of its enemies...
...With both his principles and ideas set in concrete, McGovern is incapable of learning from experience, even so catastrophic a one as the 1972 presidential election...
...Carter's 1976 presidential campaign drew heavily on populism and religion but in ways entirely different—and vastly more successful than McGovern's...
...near-impossible: a Triple First...
...It is the custom of great powers to exhibit impatience when faced with irritating problems caused by small nations (the irritation in this case being compounded by the deep-seated, universal dislike of Jews only fleetingly overcome by remorse at Hitler's holocaust...
...When the debate was announced, people dissolved into laughter at the billing of racist Shockley as the liberal, to be debated by the conservative Rusher...
...Demagoguery issues naturally from populism's simplistic world view...
...The author, of course, is Thomas Jefferson (Notes on the State of Virginia, Query XIV...
...Nonetheless, Mr...
...He almost became a Methodist minister and did spend one summer as a student pastor...
...His religious views, as outlined in Grassroots, have no transcendent element...
...A10 Indianapolis, Indiana 46250 The American Spectator August/ September 1978 33 into the higher rectitude...
...The McGovernites had little use for labor (the feeling was reciprocated) and nothing but contempt for the political and cultural values of the American majority...
...Those who marvel at the obstinacy of Premier Begin, and puzzle at Israeli reluctance to accept President Sadat's sudden professions of friendship or President Carter's vague talk of guarantees, should study Mr...
...Shogan suggests that perhaps "we are fed up with eloquence and are prepared to settle for ambiguity...
...semi-fascism...
...For all its traditional characteristics, the McGovern campaign's populism was of anesoteric variety...
...Maybe he should take some stylistic lessons from Jefferson.] Rusher assures us he would have argued that the government has no right to interfere with people's breeding habits...
...Hardcover $8.00, Softcover $2.00...
...Again, the roots go deep in his personal experience...
...Eban's account of the broken promises that litter Israel's brief history...
...Though Wills' journalism is as shoddy as Belloc's, we can be all the more thankful for history as marvelous and exciting as Inventing America...
...But Rusher was not born in 1743, so Wills' patience and empathy do not extend to him...
...and since blacks (and Indians) possessed the moral sense to the same degree as whites, they were equally entitled to freedom...
...With an introduction by Robert Nisbet...
...Double first-class honors, or a Double First as it is known, is generally considered the acme of British academic distinction, a dignity that pursues the holder all his life—something on par with a Victoria Cross...
...His autobiography spans much of contemporary history and, of course, the entire history of the state of Israel...
...This edition includes sixty-four essays, practical and political, on farming and the social order of an agricultural republic...
...Eban reached the rank of major, but as soon as the war was over he abandoned both his military and scholarly pursuits to devote himself fully to the nascent state of Israel...
...Wills' prose gets a little woozy here—who is he calling semi-fascist...
...Then came the Yale contretemps...
...John Dos Passos' James A. Nuechterlein is associate professor of history at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario...
...Never yet could I find that a black had uttered a thought above the level of plain narration...
...The liberals...
...He loves America, even in its unredeemed state...
...Consider only the epithets, rattling like cans tied to a stray dog's tail: "prejudice...
...the best defense of human dignity (for any race—Shockley has also frowned on the genes of white Appalachians) is not scientific, but moral—precisely what Rusher would have said, if Wills' kids had let him...
...BOOK REVIEW Grassroots: The Autobiography of George McGovern Random House / $12.50 Promises to Keep: Carter's First Hundred Days Robert Shogan / Thomas Y. Crowell / $8.95 James A. Nuechterlein The poverty of political labels becomes clear as one reflects on the subjects of these two books...
...The Social Gospel, like populism, sees the world in simple dualistic terms and is most comfortable in its self-imposed "prophetic" task of condemnation...
...When utopia is all that can satisfy, moral earnestness submerges moral seriousness, noble words are the only noble things, and moral indignation becomes the prevailing mode of political discourse...
...Carter is a moralist, and his moralism is Christian in nature, but it relates fundamentally to personal behavior rather than public ideology...
...As Wills shows, he held with the Scots that intellectual and physical qualities were secondary to the "moral sense...
...The first friends of the Israelis were the British who, in 1917, issued the Balfour Declaration and thus set the foundations for the state of Israel...
...Henry Regnery, Editor Eliseo Vivas has attained eminence and respect as a philosopher, teacher and author...
...Edited and with an introduction by M. E. Bradford...
...Arator By John Taylor The most popular and influential work by John Taylor of Caroline, foremost philosopher of the conservative Jeffersonians...
...Jefferson's "understanding" has since been discarded (as will Shockley's...
...Manor Throughout Israel's 30 years of existence, and indeed during much of the half century of the Zionist movement that preceded it, Jewish politicians have had to follow Burke's dictum that most political decisions are a choice "between the disagreeable and the intolerable...
...Given his non-theological Christianity, it is not surprising that McGovern eventually gave up the church's pulpit for a larger, less encumbered one in politics...
...He tells us that as a pastor he liked preaching but felt "ill at ease" with his priestly and sacramental tasks...
...It is written in the elegant style one expects from this polished diplomat, a style informed with Mr...
...Others have clothed their hostile policies in the lofty expressions of a quest for peace, justice, impartiality...
...McGovern began and ended his campaign by beckoning a deluded and erring nation to a "higher standard...
...The history department at Northwestern has a lot to answer for: McGovern appears to have picked up there, along with his Ph.D., a simplistic version of Whig-Progressive history in general (he thought of naming this book Hurrying History) and a crudely revisionist picture of the origins of the Cold War in particular (his account of postwar international developments manages to avoid any mention of Joseph Stalin and blandly refers to Soviet aggression in Eastern Europe as an understandable reaction, "however regrettable," to two world wars, which is rather like ascribing Hitler's tyranny, "however regrettable," to the Versailles Treaty and the problems of the Weimar Republic...
...racism...
...George McGovern, as with all genuine populists, isn't very good at reality...
...Manor is senior editorial writer for the Winnipeg Free Press...
...He constantly invokes America's revolutionary origins in support of his views, showing not the slightest awareness that revolutions might differ from each other in purpose and meaning...
...Believing all this, Jefferson could still write that "all men are created equal...
...in reason much inferior...
...In practice, the indignation tends to the tendentiously selective, as becomes particularly evident in McGovern's views on foreign policy...
...Since creation of that community belongs to the realm of utopian fantasy rather than political possibility, McGovern must remain forever estranged from his own society...
...As for its citizenry, he never ceases telling us how good, kind, and decent we all are and how our greatest current need is to have a government reflective of our high civic virtue...
...Those who truly loved America, the candidate suggested, were those who would totally transform her...
...it is an essentially private matter relating to the mysteries of existence and to man's relationship to God...
...They consist simply of an earnest moralism, a ceaseless ethical quest that ignores indi32 The American Spectator August/September 1978 vidual salvation and focuses exclusively on building the Kingdom of God on earth...
Vol. 11 • August 1978 • No. 9
