Reinhold Niebuhr: A Biography / The Essential Reinhold Niebuhr
Fox, Richard Wightman & Brown, Robert McAfee
REINHOLD NIEBUHR: A BIOGRAPHY Richard Wightman Fox/Pantheon/$19.95 THE ESSENTIAL REINHOLD NIEBUHR: SELECTED ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES Edited by Robert McAfee Brown/Yale University...
...In 1928 Niebuhr recalled that when the First World War started, "I was a young man trying to be an optimist without falling into sentimentality...
...Other major works of this period were Moral Man and Immoral Society, the two-volume Nature and Destiny of Man, Faith and History, and The Irony of American History...
...His appearance is especially eloquent: A decade ago he was resplendent in afro and dashiki, chained and bemedaled, loud and insistent...
...His theological education—the foundation of the "Rev...
...He directed his anger against the evils of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, and against the idealists, utopians, and rationalists who could not comprehend tragedy and evil in the world, and the cynics who didn't care about the fate of freedom...
...This central theme became stronger as the brutalities of Hitler's and Stalin's secular utopias impinged upon him...
...Lingering socialist postulates clouded Niebuhr's view of the "Soviet Union through the 1930s...
...In these vintage decades he developed this century's most compel-ling critique of "rational idealists," "liberals," "utopians," and "sentimentalists," as he variously labeled his adversaries...
...Niebuhr castigated Marxist arrogance, Soviet brutality, and the "timid spirits" who will not acknowledge "this universal evil of Communism...
...Of course, the delegates listened, and some even wept, but they are THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1986 37...
...Niebuhr, he notes, deplored "the Vietnam tragedy" as "an example of American imperialism" (Brown's words...
...In 1943 he said that any viable postwar settlement would require the continuing commitment of U.S...
...Nowadays he has traded the garment of the agitator for the wardrobe of a pimp...
...He embodied Churchill's provocative assertion that "facts are better than dreams...
...superiority in nuclear arms was the "chief deterrent of a Russian venture to conquer Europe...
...This remarkably consistent affirmation of political realism and responsibility persisted until the mid-1960s, marred only slightly by the not fully examined assumptions of his Marxist past...
...Though he spoke out on many issues, Niebuhr was preoccupied with international politics and U.S...
...A war against Russia, he said, was possible...
...Harvey Cox, there is the tendency to downplay Niebuhr's fundamental and enduring contribution to Western moral and political thought...
...Though he had been critical of certain Soviet practices since the early 1920s, as late as 1936 in Radical Religion he called the Soviet Union "the most thrilling social venture in modern history...
...They are most welcome...
...Robert McAfee Brown's The Essential Reinhold Niebuhr: Selected Essays and Addresses is a fine collection of largely theological essays...
...On several occasions, he said that it took Hitler and Stalin to force him to accept the logic of his earlier premises...
...To avoid the pitfall of using Niebuhr selectively, one must distinguish the essential Niebuhr from the socialist-pacifist Niebuhr of the 1920s and also from the failing and confused Niebuhr of the mid- and late-1960s—the last five years of his life...
...Just last February he surfaced in South Carolina eulogizing Ronald McNair, the black astronaut who died in the shuttle explosion, and conferred upon the poor deceased a signal compliment: a connection with himself...
...He speaks in measured tones, occasionally raising his voice for emphasis or biblical citation...
...In July 1941, he called for the 36 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1986 JESSE JACKSON AND THE POLITICS OF RACE Thomas Landess and Richard Quinn/Jameson Books/$17.95 Philip Terzian "immediate use of the American navy and air force...
...That is easy, but to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way—that is not easy...
...In 1945 he said that if the divisions between the Soviet Union and the Western allies continued to widen, the United Nations might become "irrelevant...
...Niebuhr drew his wisdom from the Judeo-Christian moral tradition—from the Hebrew prophets, Saint Paul, Saint Augustine, and Mar-tin Luther—and, less consciously, from American statesmen like James Madison and Abraham Lincoln...
...He did not join the disarmament movement and defended the right of states to use violence in the interests of justice...
...responsibility for confronting the new barbarians...
...Jackson is ten years older than McNair, and they probably never met...
...And selective interpreters, whether of the extreme left or right, trivialize Niebuhr's biblically rooted insight into the tragic yet hopeful nature of man and history, and his commitment to human dignity, justice, freedom, and the survival of the West...
...When it ended . . . I became a realist trying to save myself from cynicism...
...This record adds up to a profile of a thoughtful neoconservative, a liberal mugged by reality...
...In short, as Thomas Landess and Richard Quinn make painfully clear, Jesse Jackson is a liar and a fraud, even a usurper, a demagogue minus a message, a hypnotic performer whose spell is lifted without the snap of a finger...
...Even in his early pacifist-socialist years, Niebuhr railed against both secular and religious utopians who thought they could build the kingdom of God on earth...
...This shrewd analysis did not immediately prompt him to support U.S...
...Jesse Jackson, who takes himself nearly as seriously as the authors of this otherwise admirable book, likes to believe he is the inheritor of the mantle of Martin Luther King: America's preeminent, perhaps America's only, black leader, whatever that may mean—a moral authority in the gown of a visionary reformer...
...but on the central issue of freedom vs...
...He did occasionally vacillate on the specific means for championing justice and freedom...
...the Western allies should be prepared for it...
...At the same time, Brown accuses unnamed "con-temporary right wing anticommunists" of overlooking the blemishes in American political and economic life...
...policies for defeating Hitler and containing the Soviet Union...
...He rightly reflects Niebuhr's views that all political communities are under God's judgment and that the United States is not perfect, but wrongly asserts that the "patent evils of Stalin-ism" are "latently (and sometimes not so latently) present" in America...
...like most confidence men, it is his victims who measure his progress...
...tyranny Niebuhr was never ambiguous...
...As early as 1932 the essential thrust of Niebuhr's thought could be properly called neoconservative, if one earns that designation by throwing off pacifist, socialist, and other illusions in the face of harsh realities and more modest approaches to grappling with injustice and tyranny...
...In Children of Light and Children of Darkness, he said: "Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible...
...Before Pearl Harbor, Niebuhr was a member of both Norman Thomas's Socialist party and William Allen White's Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies...
...For that matter, McNair's academic credentials were genuine, whereas Jackson's are problematic at best...
...There was a time when civic banquets and organizational get-togethers were in-complete without his bogus uniform, sonorous voice, and familiar one-liners...
...His celebrated contradictions have led sympathetic observers to contrast him with the systematic and more disciplined H. Richard Niebuhr—the brother who "thought before he wrote...
...The essential Niebuhr emerged and flowered in a highly productive period of thirty-five years, roughly from 1930 to 1965...
...Niebuhr agreed: "So is a clash between myself and a gangster...
...Communist dogmatism creates an ideological inflexibility" that reinforces "the monolithic political structure" of the Soviet Union, he said...
...This confusion prompted Professor Paul Ramsey of Princeton, perhaps the most authentic incarnation of the essential Niebuhr, to say in sorrow: "Reinhold Niebuhr signs petitions and editorials as if Reinhold Niebuhr never existed...
...He was not a precisely calibrated man but a dynamic and turbulent bundle of ambiguity...
...Vintage Niebuhr, then, is indeed a man for all seasons...
...The United Nations, like the failed League before it, was at best a frail reed and at worst an illusion...
...He condemned the churches for giving ad-vice that, if followed, would ensure "an easy Nazi victory" and for escaping the war issue by spinning "utopian plans" for the postwar world...
...embargo against Japan...
...He acknowledged this flaw in a 1952 essay, "The Tiriumph of Experience Over Dogma," in which he said that he clung to shreds of Marxist dogma long after he supposed himself free of such illusions...
...In 1937 he condemned Japanese aggression against China and shortly there-after urged a U.S...
...He promptly quit the Socialist party...
...REINHOLD NIEBUHR: A BIOGRAPHY Richard Wightman Fox/Pantheon/$19.95 THE ESSENTIAL REINHOLD NIEBUHR: SELECTED ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES Edited by Robert McAfee Brown/Yale University Press/$19.95 Ernest W. Lefever 1-'yone can become angry," wrote Aristotle...
...He is at his best when least eligible, most brazen: Mikhail Gorbachev nodded gravely at the plight of Soviet hymies...
...He condemned the naive confidence in the Kellogg-Briand Treaty "outlawing war," and criticized idealists for glorifying the League of Nations...
...Tyranny," Neibuhr wrote, "is worse than war" because it is "a `cold war' which destroys life, liberty and culture" and "must inevitably lead to war...
...On the contrary...
...but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary...
...He was especially critical of the "subservience" of Communist parties to "Russian diplomacy, in all its tortuous turnings," adding that the "trouble with all the comrades and semi-comrades" was that they had "made Communism their Christ and Russia the Kingdom of God...
...But no one bothers to read the label...
...His success tells us more about ourselves than about his guile, which is self-evident, even flagrant...
...At the same time, Niebuhr maintained a running criticism of the mainline Protestant churches for their perfectionism and neutralism: "If modern churches were to symbolize their real faith they would take the crucifix from their altars and substitute the three little monkeys who counsel men to `speak no evil, hear no evil, and see no evil.' " Anticipating the current debate over moral symmetry, Niebuhr charged the Christian perfectionists with blurring the moral distinction between tyranny and democracy, and with espousing "perfection without pity, goodness without discrimination and responsibility, and loveless love...
...His ordination was honorary...
...Many of Niebuhr's statements during his last five years were profoundly at variance with his repeated insistence that America must use military means to stop the expansion of messianic Marxism, whether Soviet or Chinese...
...By focusing on his many angry outbursts against contemporary actors in the unfolding political drama, they often overlook his fundamental anger against Nazi and Soviet totalitarian regimes...
...He was in South Carolina for the same reason George Jessel used to show up at the Friar's Club: No one knew quite why or how, but he had to be there, and it was too much trouble to keep him away...
...In the introduction Brown says, "we must be careful not to assume that a particular analysis, eminently valid for the time" is "necessarily valid for another time," though as he properly notes, "the amount of Niebuhr's thought that transfers from one age to the next is impressive...
...He and McNair, he said (and so Time and the New York Times reported), had been classmates at North Carolina A & T University, when in fact they had been nothing of the sort...
...Reinhold's inconsistency and ambiguity enable an ideologically mixed bag of persons—from Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Robert McAfee Brown, and Harvey Cox to Michael Novak, Richard John Neuhaus, and the late Will Herbergto claim that they are true Niebuhrians...
...Philip Terzian, a TAS contributor since 1975, is writing a book on the American Century...
...Among some of his followers, notably Ernest W Lefever, president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C, is editor of The World Crisis and American Responsibility, a collection of nine essays by Reinhold Niebuhr...
...Richard Fox's Reinhold Niebuhr: A Biography provides a thorough portrait of the man and his thought, but its thoroughness is also its flaw: Fox tends to obscure the essential Niebuhr under an avalanche of intriguing detail, concluding that Niebuhr "was not a man for all seasons," and that it "is futile to wonder what he would have said today about Central American revolutions, about `free enterprise,' and about the women's movement...
...In fact, I am inclined to think that if he has picked up any fallen standard it is George Jessel's, the late toastmaster general of the United States, and a ubiquitous presence if not a moral authority...
...Early on he warned against the menace of Hitler...
...Jesse Jackson is his modern equivalent: He seems to be everywhere, but especially on television, reciting his motivational doggerel, rhyming "hope" with "dope," turning up in such unlikely places as Damascus or Geneva or Havana, where he cannot always tell the good guys from the bad, lending his celebrity presence where it may or may not be welcome...
...that punctiliously precedes his name—was fitful, incomplete, and unrewarded by any sort of diploma...
...Will Herberg, a former leading intellectual in the American Communist party who was converted by Niebuhr into a Judeo-Christian realist, asserted that one could establish a kinship between Niebuhr's conservatism and that of Edmund Burke...
...He called for a "historical realism" that recognized both "man's limitations and possibilities...
...His larger consistency, rooted in his belief in "original sin" and "original righteousness," was elaborated in his most important work, The Nature and Destiny of Man...
...In a 1953 essay often overlooked by liberal revisionists, "Why Is Communism So Evil...
...Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971)—preacher, theologian, teacher, prophet, pamphleteer, activist, political philosopher, and self-styled biblical realist—was quick to anger and did not always direct his anger at the right per-son or in the right way...
...He says one thing, means another, and both are untrue...
...One must allow for foibles, contradictions, and ambiguities in any seminal thinker, especially one as turbulent and torn as this preacher turned political philosopher in the crucible of a world menaced by the totalitarians...
...When Mussolini invaded Ethiopia, Niebuhr urged the revision of U.S...
...By 1938, however, he was comparing Stalin's "dictatorship" to Hitler's, and in 1940 he predicted the possibility of postwar Russian expansion into Europe...
...When Jackson spoke to the Democratic National Convention in 1984, he came as a forgiving conqueror, having lost every contest he entered, and by some distance...
...Convinced that Soviet expansionist policies were the major threat to freedom and world peace, he became an unabashed Cold Warrior, agreeing with Churchill that U.S...
...Two new books attempt to revive interest in Niebuhr to a generation that has not known him...
...Niebuhr was impatient with the idealistic planners of the postwar world...
...neutrality laws so we could invoke sanctions against Italy...
...But he fails to mention Niebuhr's undiminished confidence in American democracy and his consistent support for a strong military to undergird our Free World responsibilities...
...He repeatedly attacked "the illusion of world government" and in 1949 wrote an article by that name in Foreign Affairs which remains a testament to his profound understanding of world politics...
...This is not to say that Jackson is insignificant, or that time and energy are wasted on figuring what he is about...
...From the early 1930s until the mid-1960s, he supported the fundamental direction of U.S...
...A few months later he admitted he had been wrong in his earlier criticism of President Roosevelt's "preparedness program," noting that FDR had "anticipated this peril . . . more clearly than anyone else...
...In 1928, he declared himself a "realist" and disavowed his former utopian confidence in man, automatic progress, and social engineering...
...Niebuhr anticipated Brown's attitude: in 1963 he said America's remarkable sense of "global responsibility . . . must excite the imagination of both friend and foe...
...power and that an Anglo-American alliance "must be the cornerstone of any durable world order...
...A decade later he declared that Soviet Communism was far more dangerous than any authoritarian regime—it was "a pretentious scheme of world salvation, a secularized religious apocalypse...
...A Socialist ideologue informed Niebuhr of his inconsistency and said that "this war is a clash of rival imperialisms...
...In these books, and in Christianity and Crisis and other journals, Niebuhr developed the basic tenets and sinews of contemporary neoconservatism, especially in foreign policy...
...military intervention in World War II, but by early 1940 he said that America needed a "navy big enough to defeat all the fascist powers...
...Other students of Niebuhr, myself included, remain perplexed by his comments on the Vietnam war...
...Yet he goes on to violate his warning by invoking Niebuhr in support of his own liberal view that tends to equate the brutality of the Soviet regime with the imperfections of American society...
Vol. 19 • April 1986 • No. 4
