The Portable Conservative Reader

...The American failure at Pearl Harbor was a failure at many levels...

...He makes g r e a t play of the views of military and naval men bitter about the humiliation of their services at Pearl Harbor, and the maltreatment of the two hapless commanders, Admiral Husband E. Kimmel (Commander in Chief, U.S...

...Agricultural land use must be viewed in a wider context than agricul...

...Any nation that can take pleasure in such trashy displays as "The Dukes of Hazzard" and "The Phil Donahue Show" probably contains enough lunkheads to relish yet more Watergate drivel, and certainly my brethren in the media will look forward to this sort of insane pageantry...

...Recently a middle-aged father pubiished a book about his sordid adventures in massage parlors, wife-swapping communes and the "worlds of easy sex and prostitution...

...The "noise" phenomenon (the difficulty of selecting out important from trivial messages) we have seen in connection with Pearl Harbor...

...Others are in retirement, and some prosper on the campus lecture circuit...

...His intimate knowledge of the treacheries of the human heart would make him an excellent inquisitor...

...Actually the pack that lit out after the American President was not animated by moralism at all...

...etc.-are blissfully absent...

...Philip Raup, of the Univermty of Minnesota, sees the issue not as one "Readers might be i n t e r e s t e d in a l e t t e r from American Farmland T r u s t to Robert ) . K e l l y , who had i n q u i r e d a b o u t t h e claims made by the T r u s t in a direct mail package...

...Admiral Nagumo refused to launch a second attack to destroy American oil tank farms and repair facilities...

...The American Magic describes these achievements and their consequences in some detail...

...Certainly they fared no worse than their congressional opponents...

...Lewis, in a passage headed "The Poison of Subjectivism," considers the importance of a belief in the existence of truth to the survival of a free society...

...But once Washington politicos jumped onto the issue with both feet, the scale of these activities increased dramatically...

...Kelly for b r i n g i n g this to my a t t e n t i o n . Rather than refute the logic of Profes,,t>r Simon that you brought to our attention, I would encourage you to consider carefully the findings of the National Agricultural Land,-, Study that will be presented to President Cartel shortly after January 1, 1981 My reasoning on this is quite simple...

...Taking one thing with another I doubt the Watergate rascals fared worse than any other cross section of American politicians...

...since then he has become the Conservative Mind...

...The reports cast doubt on the scarcity of farmland, but that didn't find its way into the Final Report, which was 180 degrees away from the research input in many c a s e s . " Brewer seems to have just about disavowed the NALS findings: "Efforts to determine the 'nature, rate, extent and causes of reduction in the land base' led NALS into a morass of inconsistent and conflicting numbers that left issues possibly more confused than previously...

...flat cerebrum of the Neanderthal: It is a literary mind vivified by the moral imagination, not mystical but reverent...

...It wanted Nixon's hide...

...According to Time, several of them have become gentlemen of letters...

...We see this unreadiness even at the lowest level...

...K i r k ' s introduction to the Reader is reasonably objective...

...At these points courage, ability, and teamwork alone could bring victory...

...We are not timid when we ~onfront the liberal cultural cant...

...Among these were the development of torpedoes that could be dropped by plane into shallow water, and practice in refueling on heavy seas...

...The awnings were on the antiaircraft guns, ammunition box locks had to be hacked off, crews (with the exception of one ship, the Indianapolis) stood to half-strength peacetime watches...

...Other problems included the "perishability" of information--decrypted messages which could not be taken advantage of--and the problem of discovering the intentions of an enemy maintaining radio silence (e.g., the task force on its approach to Pearl Harbor) or using fake radio nets to deceive or mislead...

...He has conT. John Jamieson is a Richard Weaver Fellow at Northwestern University...

...Even the cynical Europeans believe this myth, and they snicker at us for it...

...Up to each of those dates, neither country had faced the stern necessities of war: like all armed services in peacetime, theirs had not yet got into gear...

...Thirty'years ago Russell Kirk wrote The Conservative Mind...

...The American bureaucracy and its members were, as Ronald Lewin wisely points out in The American Magic, unready for warDecember 7, 1941 was for the Americans the equivalent of September 3, 1939 for the British...

...Insofar as liberalism seeks to enslave us to the tyranny of material wants and class envy, it is the liberal who is the New Neanderthal...

...As other studies (including Roberta Wohlstetter's brilliant Pearl Harbor: Warning anal Decision, which Toland never discusses) have argued at length, the pieces of evidence pointing to Pearl Harbor were buried in a mass of contradictory or seemingly more important signals...

...Moreover, the politicization will continue so long as government remains a lush source of influence and boodle...

...In a chapter from Democracy and Leadership, Irving Babbitt muses on the legacy of Burke and is shown doing what he does best, tracing ideas back to their sources: Rousseau for the revolutionary ideology of modern sentimental humanitarians, Bacon for the modern worship of science and cult of material progress...

...It is a book which, unlike Prange's, concentrates its attention exclusively on the investigations that followed Pearl Harbor...

...The Critical Difference In Chronicles o/Culture, we feel there is a need for a counterpoise to those who judge cultural offerings without giving any thought to the impact of messages which are liberated from all codes of moral and intellectual responsibility...

...And from the London Times, " . . . it is a relief to receive an American publication which puts forward another view . . . . [Chronicles] displays a pleasantly open and ironic position . . . . Who, among the liberal monopoly of power in this sphere, will reply to Tyrmand...

...Brezhnev, etc...

...Its preeminent myth is that Watergate was the consequence of the high moralism animating American political life...

...As common sense and P r a n g e ' s book show, Toland's explanation is nonsense...

...SIMON (continued from page 20) t e n a n c e o f amenity v a l u e s . T h i s r e a s o n is likely to be p a r t i c u l a r l y compelling if the objective is to s h a p e n a t i o n a l policies for a g r i c u l t u r a l land p r e s e r v a t i o n . T h r e a t s to o u r ability to f e e d o u r s e l v e s and meet our f e l t o b l i g a t i o n s to a hungry world a r e more l i k e l y to m o b i l i z e a p o l i t i c a l r e - sponse to p r e s s u r e a g r i c u l t u r a l land t h a n t h r e a t s to t h e p l e a s u r e s o f a Sunday a f t e r n o o n drive t h r o u g h the c o u n t r y s i d e . The concern for farmland preservation is not a new phenomenon...

...The Watergate spectacle weakened the American presidency...

...At Midway, the turning point in the Pacific war, the American fleet was smaller, its airplanes fewer in number and mechanically inferior to those of the enemy...

...Paul Elmer More's essay "Property and Law" stands as a challenge to the sentimental humanitarians with its italicized declaration that "the rights of property are more important than t]se right to life...

...Information on internal criticism of NALS comes from Michael Brewer, head of the r e s e a r c h staff, and is corroborated by another member of that staff...

...In the final days of the Carter Administration there arose an organization called the American Farmland Trust, which began to solicit funds to preserve farmland, but without saying how the money would be used...

...In ours, he torments everybody...

...Superior signal intelligence gave Admirals Nimitz and Spruance their chance, but bravery and skill alone gave them victory...

...We firmly believe that culture, books, movies, behavioral trendstheir meaning and success-deeply affect man's preferences and, consequently, his sense of moral and social order...

...Under the heading "Misapprehensions of Conservatism," he derrron~rates his thorough experience with the generic errors, confusions, and misunderstandings of liberal intellectuals and with the popular sophistries through which the masses are deluded, by demagogues and by themselves...

...Have they moved on to high positions in government or at one of the giant corporations...

...Its verdicts have not been kind...

...As Prange puts it, "Far more quickly and thoroughly than the Americans could have done themselves, the Japanese had kicked the U.S...

...Were they out to deny the solon Holtzman usufruct of her office space...

...Federalist Fisher Ames decries the threat of democracy to the new constitution, and dryly observes, "While the passions of the multitude can be conciliated to confer power and to overcome all impediments to its action, our rulers have a plain and easy task to perform...

...Pacific Fleet) and Lieutenant General Walter C. Short (Commanding General, Hawaiian department...

...l" Clifton B. Luttrell of the St...

...o o + , , ~ ~ 1 7 6 1 7 6 1 7 6 1 7 6 o ~ 1 7 6 1 7 6 1 7 6 1 7 6 1 7 6 ~ 1 7 6 1 7 6 ~176 o ~ EDITORIAL (continued from page 6) more curious about the present condition of those six drunks from the War for 1508 Flatbush Avenue...

...To be sure, "Magic" helped American commanders know when they could safely bypass enemy fortresses such as Rabaul (a stratagem which, according to Lewin, MacArthur initially opposed...

...Virtually all of Toland's evidence is familiar, culled from selective bits of documents...

...Success, however, was not...

...Rather than a tedious series of tracts in the social sciences, Kirk presents a parade of genuinely literary works: rousing orations, letters, marginalia, poetry, a chapter from Henry Adams's novel Democracy and from Gissing's The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft...

...tinued to define and redefine conservatism because conservatives must understand who they are and what they stand for if they are to repel the organized assaults of liberalism and l e f t i s t ideology...

...For all that, two points should be made here...

...Furthermore, even if the alleged problem did exist, there is no evidence that it could be solved more effici<'ntly by social planning than by market participants...

...These analysts have access to the best and latest data on the topic, and have been charged with painting the most realistic picture possible of present farmland conditions for the president...

...Those who might have doubted Kirk's authority in the Mind may see the actual primary sources in the Reader...

...According to the s t a f f member, "The politicos didn't give a damn what the data said...

...Eighteen vessels had either been sunk or badly damaged, and over two hundred airplanes had been hurt or destroyed...

...Appointed to head up NALS was Robert Gray, former aide to Congressman J ames J effords of Vermont, who had once sponsored an unsuccessful farmland preservation bill...

...Prange describes in detail the Japanese commanders' intelligent and persevering efforts to train t h e i r men and ready their equipment for this audacious operation...

...After 1979 I could no longer keep count of the carnage but came to the conclusion that Richard Nixon's powers were far more diabolical than his opponents had imagined...

...Chronicles reports on the reporters, and reviews the reviewers...

...20006 tA more complete statement of Clawson's point of view: "'Preservation of prime agricultural land is important, but so is the preservation of land prime for other uses...

...On the other hand, the work of NALS represents the collective analysis of some of the most knowledgeable people in th~s country on the issue of agricultural land use...

...The psychological blow to American pride hurt more badly than the physical ruin inflicted by Japanese airmen...

...at worst it becomes mob rule and imperils the preservation of a culture...

...L e s t the r e a d e r think my views unusual or out of the mainstream, I wish to conclude by citing some of the nation's leading agricultural economists...

...Tom Wolfe said about our work, "It has been a pleasure to watch Leopold Tyrmand and the Chronicles of Culture confront-a la Orwell-the smelly little orthodoxies of our time...

...Small wonder that since then Americans, from congressmen to editorial writers, have sought for explanations, refusing to ascribe catastrophe to bad luck, poor judgment, and sheer incompetence...

...American politics...

...73 THE PORTABLE CONSERVATIVE READER Edited by Russell Kirk / Viking Press / $16.95 Penguin Books / $6.95 paperback T. JohnJ amieson r r n the face of questioning classes, every unthinking Conservative endangers what he d e f e n d s - - h e is a vexation to the Liberal, and a misfortune to his c o u n t r y . " Thus wrote Walter Bagehot in an essay which appears in The Portable Conservative Reader...

...John Toland, a popular historian, repeats this accusation in Infamy...

...The critics were grateful to Gay Talese...

...By late 1979 nearly fifty of them had been indicted, convicted, or forced to lie low...

...Second--and more i m p o r t a n t - - "Magic," like "Ultra," could help commanders and fighting men, but could not make their task an easy one...

...The fact of the matter is this: The United States in 1941, like Israel in 1973, was surprised because no one would credit its opponent with extraordinary audacity and competence...

...The Paris agreement was undone, and the Soviets could spring to life in Angola, Ethiopia, South Yemen, Afghanistan, and Poland...

...Marion Clawson of Resources for the Future says straight out: "We're not very worried around here about the loss of prime farmland...

...While it substantiates Kirk's vision of conservatism the Reader will, of course, produce infi~rmed conservatives...

...Many of those who broke with the informal morality of American politics, pretending it never existed, were sufficiently cynical to rank with any European...

...Nor were the eight smitten battleships lost for good: Before war's end five were salvaged, repaired, and returned to war...

...T h i s guided tour of the conservative heritage (which is very much like a guided tour of Kirk's warehouselibrary at Mecosta) begins with fifty choice pages of Burke, to lay the foundations of an understanding of "reflective" conservatism as a critical response to the systematic uprooting of the basis of civilization by ideology, and to show that the conservative accepts change as a condition of life but demands discrimination...

...Had he d6ne so, most American admirals agreed, the remnants of the fleet would have had to flee to the West Coast...

...In seven hundred pages there are 57 selections, from 44 authors, each selection presenting a unique 38 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1982 perception of the conservative soul as that soul reveres tradition, respects custom, distrusts systematic doctrine, and despises demagogy...

...Such foul behavior is characteristic of highly politicized times, and the times have been highly politicized for most of the past four decades...

...After the resignation of Richard Nixon I used to keep meticulous records of the destinies of his opponents...

...A letter of Tocqueville deplores the emergence of the cant of social justice and the perversion of Christian charity as a spiritual exercise into a social obligation enjoined by demagogues...

...Thus the Reader acknowledges the roots of the American "intellectual" conservative...

...Doubtless manyknew what we all know now, namely: that dirty tricks, abuse of power, exploiting indelicate political intr and cover-ups have in varying d e g r e e s been f e a t u r e s of American political life going back to the time of FDR at least...

...J u l i a n Simon r e p r e s e n t s the thinking of htmself only--we do not know his personal objectives for furthering his positions...

...Sadly, what passes for "cultural criticism" in Time, Esquire, Chicago Tribune, Ladies Home Journal, et al., amounts to an elitist, moral shoddiness...

...Write to: National Agricultural Lands Study Room 5020 New Executive Office Building Washington, D.C...

...In 1979, the C a r t e r Administration established the National Agricultural Lands Study, a joint effort of the Council on Environmental Quality and the Department of Agriculture, with the p a r t i c i p a t i o n of a flock of other government agencies, including eight Departments, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Water Resource Council...

...Agricultural research in particular must be fostered and protected...

...Newsweek said that *Talese's research has an awesome solidity about it...

...The state of literary criticism today strongly confirms Laurence Steme's warning:, the cant of criticism is the most tormenting...

...Are they still in their cups...

...Lewin also floods his reader with details which unfortunately will make sense only to those familiar with the course of the war and American military and naval organization...

...Arguably the morality was practiced more broadly than during earlier administrations, though the more I learn about the Johnson Administration 1 begin to doubt even this...

...The conservative force which Burke called the "spirit of religion" recurs as a theme, and C.S...

...university faculties abound with such weird appointments...

...Do last month's journalistic orgies mean that we are now going to commemorate the anniversaries of every dramatic moment in the 26-month Watergate Spectacular...

...Review the historical record: His enemies have come to tragic ends far more often than his friends whose trips to the hoosegow are so celebrated...

...NALS proceeded to publicize the three-million-acre figure, as well.as many o t h e r dubious c l a i m s - - e v e n though members of NALS's own research staff made it very clear to Gray that t h e i r studies did not substantiate such claims...

...Indeed, in 1941 the Japanese themselves knew that they were pushing their capacities to the limits...

...There exist only so many vulgar In earlier epochs, a critic tormented only the writers...

...Like most books advancing conspiracy t h e o r i e s , it will enjoy unmerited attention and respect...

...The Japanese were stopped by these factors, not simply by the superior weaponry of a larger industrial power...

...And the Chicago Tribune - a newspaper respectable primarily in its own eyes-turned its enthusiasm into promotion by running excerpts of Thy Neighbor's Wife for Chicagoland families to read...

...In surprising numbers they met with unenviable ends...

...The National Review remarked that we, "Go for the jugular...

...But sooner or later the war came down-as it had to--to slugging matches like Guadalcanal, Midway, and Okinawa...

...he is, however, too charitable a man to perform this function, except in two or three recalcitrant cases where the parties e i t h e r ought to know b e t t e r or are wilfully perverse...

...tural alone Prime land is important, but so are all the other inputs in the agricultural production equation...

...It costs them nothing but hypocrisy...

...Two are involved in Christian endeavor...

...The American Farmland Trust does not want you, or anyone else, to simply take our word that the loss of American farmland is a real and growing t h r e a t to our national well-being...

...As Lewin points out, "Magic" (the name for our decryptions of the Japanese ciphers) helped enormously throughout the war, particularly in the Solomons, our submarine campaigns, the epic aerial assassination of J a p a n ' s best sailor, Admiral Yamamoto, and above all at the battle of Midway, but it was not a military panacea...

...for property is the basis of civilization, and there can be no security for life without the security of property...

...The attack, however, had killed 2,500 men and wounded over a thousand others...

...The intellectual capital of conservatism, as revealed in these pregnant and quotable passages, is awesome, both rhetorically and philosophically...

...Who commemorates these anniversaries...

...In the Pacific, as in Europe, the Allies faced a cunning, resourceful, and determined foe, who had to be outfought...

...I am g r a t e f u l to Mr...

...The notion that a vast conspiracy (including among its members such paragons of integrity as George C. Marshall) could have been maintained over the years defies a reader's intelligence...

...In conclusion, Kirk speaks personally of shoring fragments against one's ruins, buying early editions of the classics in Scotland as cheap as waste-paper that a scholar during the Renaissance would have given his hide for...

...It was Watergate that allowed them to raise themselves to their bogus eminence as democracy's priesthood...

...A depressingly common version of events is that Roosevelt and his top advisers knew about the attack but withheld information about it in order to get America wholeheartedly into the war...

...First, signal intelligence was of more value to the United States in the Pacific war than human intelligence, a fact which shou4d sober some of the critics of America's current intelligence establishment...

...The Watergate shenanigans were part of the informal morality of...

...On November 27 a war warning had gone out to Hawaii, but, as always, it would take the b i t t e r t a s t e of real war before men would p r e p a r e thoroughly to wage it...

...John Adams ridicules the notion of equality for being irrelevant to political reality and the facts of human nature...

...The Critical Response In every issue, we challenge the dominant cultural establishment on what it preaches about culture, politics and social matters...

...To make things worse, the modern media have transformed the critic into a midwife of mass consciousness...

...His book will repay a reading, however, for it is the product of a sober and experienced student of military history...

...Malcolm Muggeridge is heard on "The Great Liberal Death Wish...

...Furthermore, Lewin observes that "Magic" had nothing to say about some crucial questions of military intelligence, such as the strength and dispositions of the defenders of the Pacific atolls...

...Years ago, various individuals and organizations began to campaign for zoning changes and other farmland preservation laws...

...As we all know, the surprise was complete...

...Louis Federal Reserve Bank finds "there is no evidence that the quantity of cropland is shrinking or that shortages of food are imminent...

...Kimmel and Short were indeed training their men for war (the Navy to fight its way across the Pacific, the Army to repel an amphibious assault on Oahu), but somehow the grim urgency of wartime necessity had not made itself felt, and the possibility of a carrier assault was not taken seriously...

...Please listen to and study the words of national experts...

...As Kirk's anthology attests, conservatives deny that democracy has any metaphysical imperative: For them, at best, a system of elected representatives may be expedient toward the end of governing by consensus...

...Vogue was proud of " . . . Gay's triumph over the puritanical strictures of Ocean City, strictures that so inhibited him that he didn't even masturbate until his second year in college...

...Curious liberals will find, in perusing the Reader, that the Conservative Mind is not the...

...Regardless of what we wish to know or ignore, we live with cultural events and their consequences - a s interpreted by the modern critic...

...Yet Watergate as celebrated today is a mere folk tale...

...Thus, America's e x t r a o r d i n a r y cryptographic breakthroughs could not rescue America from its opening humiliation...

...After the defeat of the Carter Administration, the names of Robert Gray and Carter Secretary of the Interior Cecil Andrus appeared as prominent functionaries of American Farmland Trust...

...If you care about la difference, send for your subscription today...

...Navy upstairs into a swift, modern force with the carrier at its heart...

...The American Navy's precious three aircraft carriers Saratoga, Lexington, and Yorktown were at sea and hence escaped attack: These ships would be vital to America's counterattacks in 1942...

...My guess is that a lot of my fellow Americans would find news of these nocturnal patriots equally as engrossing as the p r e s e n t condition of the Watergate rascals...

...Irving Kristol declares that "the enemy of liberal capitalism today is not so much socialism as nihilism...

...General Short failed to prepare the embryonic radar screen and alert system...

...The Japanese had caught Pearl Harbor completely unawares...

...doubtless tenured positions would await him: head of Watergate Studies at Berkeley, Annenberg Fellow in Telecommunications...

...Those of us who have watched the parade of chiselers move from government into the calaboose in a steady and tawdry parade since Watergate are not convinced...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1982 39 e r r o r s , and over the years Kirk has confronted each one and all its variations many times...

...Some simply wobbled off and died...

...40 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1982...

...The more government agencies that back a project, the more confidence the electorate is supposed to have in the project...

...Lewin, an extremely able British military historian, has done for the Pacific war what he did for the European war in his excellent Ultra Goes to War...

...One is obviously non compos mentis--what a hot commodity he might be on the campus circuit...

...To cross him was to put o n e s e l f under the power of some supernatural hangman...

...But it is said that many salutary reforms came with Watergate...

...Some of us know that the major theme of Henry K i s s i n g e r ' s recent memoir is sound...

...Admiral Kimmel failed to send out patrol planes along the northern approaches to the island (the most likely and, indeed, the ac.tual route the enemy would take...

...Malcolm Muggeridge observed t h a t " . . , in Chronicles of Culture the Consensus assumptions-that the New York Times is a great newspaper, that the South Africans are uniquely the villains of our time, that President Reagan is an idiot, that all good men and true build their hopes on disarmament talks with Mr...