The Unfinished Journey

...By the same token...

...His analysis of the divergent strands of the civil rights movement is powerful and comprehensive...

...Chafe's book is likely to become a standard work for the next few years—most of all, perhaps, because he has given blacks and women more pages than anyone else...

...Asked by a colleague why he bothers to write history, William Chafe answered, according to his preface, that "history offers a way of defining what mattered in the past, and understanding what has shaped the way we live today...

...That's it—seventeen words at the outset of a new chapter on the 1970s, beginning with the "positive legacy of the 1960s" for women and blacks, which later describes the televised final days of Saigon in two sentences...

...In fact, one might just as well argue that an aggressive foreign poUcy and belief in containment avoided an even more disastrous world war jmd fueled a booming economy for twenty years, thus making the quest for social justice possible in the first place...

...He accurately characterizes Kennedy's fabricated intellectual pose and relish for a style of great deeds, noting that his Inaugural "evoked a sense of moral alarm about a world that for eight years had largely been at peace...

...This may excite the undergraduates, but the mild irony, if it is that, puts no edges on his cuddly truism...

...Since the last few decades have witnessed the triumph of sociology among intellectuals, it is even appropriate that race and gender override foreign affairs and that "class" turns out to be an expression of capitalism's shortcomings...

...Carter, two decades later, appears naive, selfrighteous, and ineffectual, but he is also the victim of his times and of "misfortunes" such as the hostage crisis in Iran...

...Chafe nevertheless shows little interest in judging America's role in modern history or in speculating on the shape of the world that will come of our past...

...This eulogy to fallen magnificence could just as well describe Johnson's successor...

...This (1) misinterprets the Muslim contribution to black separatism both in its early days and in its contemporary eructation under Louis Farrakhan...

...At the same time, he can bypass difficult domestic questions...

...He tried "to transcend all human frailties and impose a solution from above that would bring the consensus he so desperately craved...

...I want [my staff] to kiss my ass in Macy's window at high noon...

...Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and Carter therefore escape the couch...

...Or Ford's pardon of Nixon a greater abuse of human rights than the creation of a million boat people...

...Yet his hagiographic depictions of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy as the slain saviors of a spUntered America lead him to overplay the drama: "The nation seemed to come apart as, one blow after another, it reeled from psychic and emotional wounds unprecedented in the modern era...

...Chafe does not pretend to find a lockstep progression from the Ttuman Doctrine to the riots at the Chicago Democratic convention twenty years later, but his overall picture is that of a march toward social justice and full equality betrayed by ruinous anti-Communism and foolish foreign escapades...

...Yet Chafe's view of Nixon's mendacity and questionable mental health is so intense that he loses perspective on the President's significant accomplishments at a turning point in modern world history...

...The rhetoric of victimization in Chafe's book is low-keyed, but it crops up, for instance, in his passive characterizations of women's entrapment in "the type of jobs set aside for female workers" and of escalating black impoverishment in the 1970s: "Black women also experifenced most severely the debilitating consequences of the new sexual mores...

...This unevenly distributed emphasis on presidential psychology, especially on instances of breakdown and deviance allied with a drive toward greatness, accords with a reading of recent American history that thrives on tragic drama...

...Even so, he has no thoughts on the Berlin Wall, the good life in Cuba, or the kaleidoscope of great leaps, experiments, and cultural revolutions that left miUions dead in Mao's China...

...However, if the main audience for Chafe's book is likely to be not specialists but students and lay readers, he runs the risk of writing an isolationist domestic history at a time such an approach makes increasingly Uttle sense...

...Chafe's discussion of the civil rights battles of the 1960s and the advent of "Black Power" relegates Malcolm X to a footnote...

...His isolationism takes several forms...

...The tragedy begins with Ihmian, whose misinterpretation of Yalta sought to deny the Soviets their rightful sphere of influence in Eastern Europe...

...In particular, the problems (and advances) of women and minorities are often allowed to stand forth provincially on his American stage, crowding out significant global acts of diplomacy and war from both ends of the political spectrum...

...Leave aside the farcical nature of the first claim and the willful lack of interest in the absurd task bequeathed Nixon in the case of the second...

...However, an emphasis on domestic problems related to race and gender need not exclude pertinent facts about the world, especially in an account that aims to be comprehensive and does, in fact, accomplish an immense work of synthesis...

...Chafe gives particular attention to presidential psychology and personality...

...Neither the misconception of a Soviet military threat to the United States nor the worst case for American capitalism's self-interested creation of new markets matters greatly in the face of such a brute fact...

...His strengths lie in the Eric J. Sundquist teaches American literature at the University of California, Berkeley...

...Chafe argues that Johnson's desire to match the deeds of his spiritual father, FDR, and to triumph over the Kennedy mystique led him to sacrifice the Great Society on the altar of Vietnam...

...Postwar America: 1945-1971 (1973...

...Yet Chafe assumes both that this was clear at the time and that no reasonable goal, save America's egotistic honor, was or ever had been in view...

...Narcissism, as the psychologists tell us, can lead to rage...

...The section on Reagan, journalistic in character, is too sketchy to judge, although Chafe accurately portrays the country's shift to the right...

...Chafe's analysis of the relationships among the civil rights, student, and women's movements, all three becoming infused with nihilistic elements of the counterculture as they drove toward the climactic year of 1968, is excellent and convincing...

...It may even guide our attitudes and behavior in the future...

...interweaving of domestic policy, economic development, demographic change, and cultural expressions of popular thought...

...There is no question that the snail-like progress of the Paris peace talks—which in the event turned out to be no progress at all—cost thousands of lives...

...His perspective is clear, he writes with dedication to democratic values, and his book covers more ground than other recent surveys...

...The lai;ge gains made by a black middle class are chalked up to a "strange filtering process," and outstanding achievements by blacks in the arts, in sports, and in the professions are neglected...

...Moreover, if Vietnam is the central event in postwar American history (as Chafe's chapters on LBJ and 1968 would imply), is it not worth mentioning why and how a staggering bloodbath ensued upon the Communist victories in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia...

...Isolationism is still in vogue...

...Few will disagree...

...That this is not necessarily a good reason to applaud a book or adopt it for college courses will be irrelevant...

...Chafe's analysis of the options available to the United States at the outset of the Cold War is careful and convincing—with one exception: he remarks, but apparently cannot take seriously, the Stalinist cataclysm (some 5(X),(XX) murdered in the postwar years alone...

...Interestingly, it is those Presidents with openly aggressive personalities— and foreign policies—that eUcit the most careful psychological treatment...

...But "by seeking to subjugate the world to his personal vision, he ended up destroying the one thing that he really cared about...

...The Negro Family, is not mentioned, perhaps because it soon became fashionable to see his observations on the disintegration of the black family as racist blunders (even though Moynihan himself took pains to say that poverty was responsible...

...Instead, consider Chafe's meditative analysis of post-1972 Indochina: "American troops withdrew from Vietnam, their departure followed quickly by the total collapse of the Thieu regime...

...Chafe's treatment of Vietnam offers a case in point...

...Inasmuch as Chafe is the author of several books on civil rights and the women's movement, this emphasis on social issues is no surprise...

...He explicitly admits that "race," as he uses it, will mean "black...

...For example, with the exception of a few casual remarks in connection with the Bay of Pigs, Vietnam, and Chile, Chafe has nothing to say about the creation and operations of the CIA, even though there is every reason to believe that it has had more bearing on recent American history than, say, the rise of feminism...

...Following the standard line of the rise and fall of what Godfrey Hodgson has called the "liberal consensus" (the struggle for social justice unfolding alongside hard, then soft, then evaporating anti-Conmiunism), Chafe's story is from many standpoints learned and intelligent...

...In another instance...

...But isolationist history can be its own house of mirrors...

...It is of course not reasonable to expect a historian to take note of every worldwide incident...

...What have turned out over the last decade to be the significant regions of world conflict—the Middle East, Africa, Latin America—are mentioned only by accident...

...Nor, for that matter, has he anything to say of a variety of Third World revolutions, coups, assassinations, and campaigns of terror, by both the left and the right, involving Americans or bearing directly on American history...

...I n tandem with his emphasis on social history...

...Awful as the assassinations of King and Kennedy were, this assessment of the period only makes sense if one has adopted a narcissistic view of the world and the "modern era...

...Chafe on the one hand tends to divorce the struggle for black civil rights from more wide-reaching issues of ethnicity, and on the other scants its less reassuring developments...

...2) obscures the ongoing quarrel among black Americans over the respective merits of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X; and (3) ignores a significant source of the now ineradicable alignment of the Third World with American minorities, a development central to the convergence of America's domestic and global history in the last two decades...

...Too often the "triple whammy of race, class, and gender oppression," as Chafe phrases it, floats forth to explain the collapse of the welfare vision...

...Here, as elsewhere, his avoidance of the global events that produced waves of new immigrants from Cuba, China, Southeast Asia, and Latin America blinds him to a problem more complex than the admittedly heroic struggle for black civil rights...

...But in highlighting the categories of race, class, and gender as a way to measure "the degree and kind of progress that has occurred in American society," he has taken a new departure among recent general histories of the postwar United States...

...Is that not as much a part of American history as Nixon's socalled genocide and the United States military's "crypto-racism" and war crimes...

...Moreover, when he calls World War II a turning point in American history (ushering in economic prosperity, political crisis, and the germs of social change) and 1968 the "pivotal dividing line of the postwar years" (separating chaos from a fresh conservatism...

...On the other hand, since Chafe has nothing to say about Hungary, China, or the Suez, and postpones any discussion of Korea and Vietnam until a chapter that follows that on Johnson's social programs, one might well believe that Kennedy manufactured alarm out of thin air...

...Like the illusions one beholds walking through a house of mirrors, America's best intentions became grotesque when imposed on a distant culture," Chafe remarks at the outset of his discussion of the war...

...Although it had an enormous impact, for example, Daniel Patrick Moynihan's controversial 1965 report...

...Agreeing with the standard diagnosis...

...Because the 1970s became a time for Americans to escape the trauma of Vietnam and all it represented, that ought not allow the historian to do the same...

...Contrary to all recent evidence of Eisenhower's hiddenhand brilUance, Chafe bluntly asserts that Ike failed to provide "constructive" moral and social leadership...

...Chafe does not sanctify Roosevelt in his deaUngs with Stalin...

...Despite his persuasive account of domestic upheaval and social epochs...

...Chafe's volume is by no means a rigid New Left interpretation of the postwar years Uke Lawrence Wittner's valuable Cold War America (1974) or Howard Zinn's flagellating incantation...

...yet he presents him in the mold of a Lincoln whose "mystical confidence" in his own ability to overcome the difficulties of his age would never face the final test...

...A few passing remarks on the bigotry faced by Jews and Chicanos constitute the only attention accorded a subject whose neglect is all the more unfortunate given the effort of Nathan Glazer and others to demonstrate the crucial relationships among many ethnic groups in public policy-making during the period Chafe writes about...

...In the case of Johnson, he renders a compelling picture of the President in torment over his own adequacy and the waste of Vietnam, punctuated by frequent examples of Texan extravagance ("I want loyalty...

...As the example of Malcolm X suggests...

...Is Robin Morgan's theory of the vaginal orgasm more important than Henry Kissinger's memoirs...

...Whereas Johnson is represented as a classical tragedian who acts out "the fragility of the Uberal consensus," Nixon is a maniac callously exploiting middle America's fury against the left...

...Chafe does not exactly break virgin ground...

...As Chafe points out, Korea "universalized the Cold War" for the United States, making the Far East and eventually the entire globe, mistakenly or not, theaters as important as Western Europe...

...Johnson, in short, had the correct social outlook...

...He is quick to proclaim that, upon Nbcon's ordered incursion by American troops in 1970, "Cambodia lost its neutrality," and that Nixon's touted plan for peace, culminating as Chafe sees it in the Christmas bombing of Hsmoi in 1972, represented at best "the acting out of a bully's fantasies" and at worst "a criminal abuse of human rights that in the eyes of some was the equivalent of genocide...