Make-Believe Presidents: Illusions of Power from McKinley to Carter
Hoffman, Nicholas von
BOOK REVIEW Make-Believe Presidents: Illusions of Power from McKinley to Carter Nicholas von Hoffman / Pantheon / $8.95 Karl O'Lessker In an age when all too many journalists are both childish...
...What, after all, is the alternative, in a highly industrialized nation of 220 million, to a more or less free economy in a more or less representative political system...
...the odds are that a contrary so-and-so like von Hoffman will once in a while be irreproachably right about something...
...The problem with this book-shaped collection of essay-shaped ramblings is not that it isn't dazzling but that it's largely incoherent...
...He goes through life seeing naked emperors and being delighted far more than scandalized by them...
...Unadulterated Marxist bilge, right...
...But Nicholas von Hoffman has managed it, despite his Teutonic name, with eclat, panache, and a plenitude oijoie d' esprit...
...The reader must not expect to be quite as enchanted by von Hoffman's wit and inKarl O'Lessker is senior editor of The American Spectator...
...Then they'll see trouble...
...For instance, speaking of President Nixon's efforts to gain control of the bureaucracy, and of the anger and revulsion those efforts aroused, von Hoffman remarks: Centralization of the parts without unity of the whole has served industry groups, unions, and others with narrowly particular interests well...
...His secret, I think, is a simplicity and purity of spirit scarcely to be found in any journalist above the rank of reporter for a cub scout troop...
...But the rest of us may be forgiven for suspecting that the bureaucrats of the collectivist future will be not one iota more humane, enlightened, imaginative, or sweet-natured than those of today...
...Far worse than Churchill's pudding, it not only has no theme, it explicitly promises one but then makes almost no effort to deliver...
...That may or may not sound scarifying to von Hoffman, who perhaps envisions all those industrial and governmental bureaucracies staffed with jolly white-haired replicas of himself...
...atrocities in the Philippines, Big Business's efforts to stifle competition, repression of radicals after World Wars I and II, the domination of our politics by corporate interests-all this and more, but not another word about illusions of presidential power...
...Clear enough, right...
...A book about how presidents have much less real power than we usually think they have, right...
...feeling is...
...Sick, man...
...He is content to be outraged, but by no means outraged enough to drive himself to the hard work of thinking about alternatives...
...Von Hoffman would doubtless be offended to the core of his simple being to be called a Marxist, because whatever its manifold faults a Marxist state is nothing if not organized and on that score alone must be anathema to von Hoffman's anarcho-populist soul...
...Commissioner of Education, this meant that the president was changing his role to policy maker and manager from his traditional one of mediator and umpire...
...How else can one account, for instance, for the otherwise inexplicable assertion that "American higher education is run by businessmen and -women and/or people of inherited wealth," and for that reason colleges and universities have "never been incubators of dissent" ? It certainly is not that von Hoffman hasn't been on a campus in recent years...
...Like the dope-besotted student who tells you, "Just wanna tear the structure down, man...
...Sound familiar...
...Moreover, Marxism posits an alternative order of things, while our author, true to his countercultural Muse, refuses absolutely even to consider what an alternative order might look like...
...Von Hoffman should wait until he and his fellow anarcho-populists, aided by those a little better organized, a little more purposeful, have troubled this messy old system to its grave -got rid of all the bloated capitalists, the unrepresentative legislators, the lobbyists, the militarists, the bosses, the whole human paraphernalia of a mixed-up society...
...In fact, von Hoffman is exceptionally fair-minded about Nixon and even has generous things to say about Warren G. Harding, But it is hard to escape the impression that the author's kind words about these two most condemned presidents of the past hundred years flow more from contrariness than from any thoughtful evaluation of their successes and failures: Whatever everybody else is for, von Hoffman is against, and vice versa...
...The remaining 190 pages are about whatever von Hoffman happened to find titillating while he was assembling this "book...
...sight as the dust-jacket quotation of Studs Terkel suggests: "dazzling...
...Trouble...
...Wrong again...
...No wonder, for all his prematurely white hair, he reminds us so much of the flower children of the counterculture: Thinking isn't his bag...
...And it is precisely this sense of mingled discovery and delight that he manages to convey so winningly in his Washington Post column, To be sure, not all the emperors he sees really are naked nor, in the case of those who are, is it much of a discovery...
...BOOK REVIEW Make-Believe Presidents: Illusions of Power from McKinley to Carter Nicholas von Hoffman / Pantheon / $8.95 Karl O'Lessker In an age when all too many journalists are both childish and terrible, it is no easy matter to become a genuine enfant terrible...
...Color it gray...
...Sharpness of insight, elegance of style, abundance of wit are qualities that make reading pleasurable as well as instructive...
...On the evidence of this book and the many hundreds of his newspaper columns I've read, I should have to say that Nicholas von Hoffman has probably never thought about a subject for ten consecutive minutes...
...Wrong...
...And then consider the opening chapter: "The Captive Presidency...
...And oh what a joy it is for him to come upon such marvelously sinister institutions as the Bohemian Grove, where "the ruling classes...decide what that thinking should be...
...And every so often von Hoffman offers us something that looks suspiciously like an insight...
...And here at last is the point of the whole book-not, to be sure, an expose of * The Bohemian Grove and Other Retreats: A Study in Ruling-Class Cohesiveness (Harper & Row, 1974).the CFR, but rather a portrait of a nation comprised of a great mass of effectively disfranchised ordinary people dominated by a clique of superpowerful hierarchs operating behind the facade of representative institutions like parties and legislatures which in fact represent nothing but the interests of the ruling classes...
...From cattle grazers in happy symbiosis with the Bureau of Land Management to teachers' organizations resonating as one with the U.S...
...U.S...
...And if the Bohemian Grove is worth but a single paragraph, think how much more sinister, in our author's mind, must be the Council on Foreign Relations, to which he devotes nearly three full pages: For it is the CFR that brings together the Wall Street lawyers, the international bankers, the foundation heads, and the other power types to work in concert for the kind of foreign policy it advocates...
...So the consternation at what Nixon was trying extended to every organized group living in harmony with its own set of agencies and bureaucracies...
...to the contrary, he does very well on the academic lecture circuit...
...So if he is unaware of the heavy proportion of Maoists, Trotskyites, and other species of Marxists and nihilists in our humanities and social science faculties, it can only be because he has never bothered to talk, or at any rate listen, to people on the host campuses...
...Wanna tear it down," von Hoffman is content to be outraged by the depredations of the robber barons, by racism and inequality, by the aesthetic tawdriness of a capitalist system that really does respond to consumer demand, by imperialism, by nuclear war, by all things dark and ugly in American life...
...The answer is a bureaucratically directed economy in an authoritarian (which is to say bureaucratically directed) political system...
...Though he neglects to acknowledge the debt, I assume von Hoffman read G. William Domhoff s remarkably silly book* of a few years ago exposing the conspiratorial doings of "the ruling classes" and was predictably enthralled by it...
...And they will have a lot more power, and there won't be very much left in the way of mediating institutions to stand between them and us...
...But if only one didn't have to wade through so much sheer impulsive mind-lessness...
...It is easier by far to rant about "the kept professorate" and the "like-thinking graduates...
...Some among us can still cause trouble, so we can hope that some among us will...
...Still, given the appalling complexity of practically everything, it is useful to have that kind of perspective available...
...Consider the title: Make-Believe Presidents: Illusions of Power from McKinley to Carter...
...The theme of limited presidential power disappears on page 43, never to reappear again...
...Granted, lack of a consistent theme is annoying but not necessarily fatal in an object resembling a book...
...Who, for example, still supposes that Woodrow Wilson (or "Woody" as von Hoffman is pleased to call him) was a saintly defender of the rights of the poor and downtrodden...
...That is the final sentence of Make-Believe Presidents...
Vol. 12 • February 1979 • No. 2
