Ghosts on the Roof

...Somehow, one suspects, it was not just his politics which prevented the new Time-stylists from consulting Whittaker Chambers before they undertook to anoint their "Man of the Decade...

...Then Strobe Talbott maunders on for 6,000 words under the impression that economic weakness and military strength are incompatible and therefore that the Soviet Union never did pose any threat to the West...

...E ach of these men has an Idea...

...he shoots...

...This was written at the time of the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956, when Khrushchev denounced Stalin...

...But ought we delicately to suggest that the "hallucinatory quality" of this curious electron basketball (he powders...

...This is journalism with guts...

...Gorbachev is an "international celebrity and impresario of calculated disorder" who "calls what he is doing—and permitting—a revolution...

...Compare that with the opening of Time's "Man of the Decade" feature, written by Mr...

...A bit later on in the magazine, Michael Kramer devotes some 1,700 words to the ineffably silly proposition that Gorbachev is saving Communism just as Roosevelt saved capitalism...

...In fact, the reader's sense is overwhelmingly of three epochs: the Communist era of the early thirties, here represented by forty-four pages and really not very interesting...

...What we take away from Chambers, however, isa wealth of information of the classic journalistic kind...

...That somber little jeu d'esprit, now reprinted in this collection of his journalism, was written for Time magazine by Whittaker Chambers at the time of the conference itself—when it was not occurring to many observers in the James Bowman is American correspondent of the Spectator of London...

...We are invited to take an interest not in the events in Eastern Europe but in the exotic vision of Mr...

...Here he does not doubt Khrushchev's sincerity, but he does point out that the end remains the same even though the means has changed...

...We learn not only about Karl Marx's habits of mind but also about his habits of diet and recreation...

...Chambers's trick here is a deft handling of rhetorical parallelism and a habit, even when he is writing about the most abstract and philosophical of issues, of anchoring his material at every possible point in the firm earth of the specific and the factual...

...What we take away from reading them is, nothing that we didn't know before—except the Idea, for whatever it may be worth...

...is hopelessly scrambled and completely distracting...

...Marx, who guided the Chinese boy's hand, was also last week the most important man in the world's two great centers of power . . . The only surprise here is that he doesn't tell us the girl's name (even if he had to make one up) and what it means in Chinese...

...The middle period, however, is filled with such delights as his "History of Western Culture" series, which makes a fascinating counterpoint to his thoughts on contemporary history, his reviews of the films The Grapes of Wrath and Ninotchka, his thoughts on Kafka, Rebecca West, Toynbee, Spengler, and Santayana, his appreciation of Marian Anderson and the Negro Spiritual, and his dialogue with the Devil...

...Anyone who thinks that ought to abandon political analysis and take up autograph collecting...

...In the midst of the national agonizing which accompanied the launch of the first Russian Sputnik, his was the voice that could be heard to say: "The problem does not turn wholly on the academic processing of what we loosely call `brains.' It would seem to turn, at least as critically, on the much more difficult problem of what we call loosely 'mind.' " This he defines as including "reflective and creative imagination" but for a more practical demonstration of what he means, read this book...

...Very well, let us explain what we mean by a quick run-through of the earth's major rivers: In the lands drained by the Sava, the Bug, the Moskva, the Dnieper, the Don, the Volga, the Yensei and the Amur, a man who wished to express approval—of a painting, a factory production record or a military operation—is likely to call it "Marxist...

...albino pigeon...

...The literacy, imagination, and drama of Chambers's account are all the more striking for being unselfconscious...

...The shell of an old world cracked, its black iron fragments dropping away, and something new, alive, exploded into the air in a flurry of white wings...

...A crowd of half a million Czechoslovaks in Wenceslas Square would powder into electrons, stream into space at the speed of light, bounce off a satellite and shoot down to recombine in millions of television images around the planet...

...To me the second is much the best reading...

...Trapdoors flew open, and whole regimes vanished...

...the Time era, from 1939 to 1948, when he had to make his living by journalism and therefore was led into writing about subjects that he might not have chosen for himself...

...he streams...

...This is the chief point and thrust of the tactics set forth at the 20th Congress...

...My own guess is that he would agree with Paul Nitze in pointing to the usefulness of Leninism, independently of most of the Marxist ideology of "Communism," as a tool of conflict management...

...In effect, says Chambers, Khrushchev was reforging the popular front of the 1930s, which Stalin had destroyed at the time of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact in 1939...

...The lugubriousness and world-weariness of the last phase, though it is illuminated by frequent flashes of wisdom, is hard to take after a while...

...Possibly we were not attending to the same corner of the field as Mr...

...Because its prescience reminds us that if there were anyone from among the legion of the dead whom we should wish to call back for a chat about the unraveling of the fabric knitted at Yalta, it would be the author of Witness, the man who did so much to enable Americans of the mid-century to understand what Communism was about...

...And the conceit is a happy one...

...Or not, as the case may be...

...Instead of an affectionate personal statement, he wrote: "What is the reason for the existence of people who reap wealth without laboring...

...The answer was to refine the cruder forms of Communist aggression, which had produced the favorable power balance, into subtler forms of aggression which the power balance both required and made possible...

...Stalinism had been a tactic for another era, and one which had been superseded even before Stalin's death...

...Lawrence, the Mississippi, the Orinoco, the Amazon, the Tagus, the Thames and the Clyde, a man who wishes to express disapproval—of a painting, a production record or a military operation—is likely to call it "Marxist...

...In every way—quality of writing, intelligence, insight, historical consciousness, seriousness of mind, even factual accuracy—the Time of forty years ago, as represented here by Chambers, was infinitely superior to the Time of today...

...One of the last subjects to which Chambers turned his attention in the relatively tranquil later years was that of education...

...T erry Teachout has organized this 1 book into five sections, which are intended roughly to correspond to phases of Chambers's career...

...What more natural than that they should also show their appreciation for the marvelous revolutionary creed, a creed that makes Machiavelli look like a Mormon, which has made it possible...

...Moreover, the political judgments are even more giddy...

...He gives a geographical location and political compass bearings before he attempts the extremely difficult task of explaining how it is that some long-dead egghead is the reason why people in the remotest corners of the earth are shooting each other...

...Let these two quibbles cancel each other out -and let us just compare the two treatments of a similar idea...

...West to see its outcome in this way...

...he bounces...

...As the editor points out, one of the most striking things about Chambers's contributions to Time is how much better the magazine used to be than it is now...

...In the same way, he goes on to make his subject immediately topical "Marxism last week made men fight in the ragged mountains of Greece"—and to give it a human interest: A Shanghai girl student asked a boy to write in her autograph book...

...Now, the Stalinist reliance on brute force was to give way to political finesse: For Communism the problem was how to convert the amorphous sentiments called "internationalism" or "neutralism" from negative to positive forces, from forces merely dividing the West's will to resist Communism into its marching allies...

...The ghosts are those of Nicholas and Alexandra, last Tsar and Tsarina of Russia, who have become Stalin's warmest admirers...

...Lance Morrow: The 1990s came to an end in what seemed like a magic act, performed on a world-historical stage...

...and the 1950s, after the Hiss case had brought him to national attention, 36 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1990 when his freedom to write of what he chose had both good and ill effects...

...If, as Chambers says, victory in the ideological struggle will go to the player "who succeeds in overleaping or bypassing the weapons stalemate, and swinging to his side decisive population masses and their economies now beyond his control" and if, further, Eastern Europe and its Stalinist mechanisms of control had become an embarrassment and an encumbrance to the Soviet side, then it makes sense to see the slimmed down and revamped "Communism" that Gorbachev still vehemently professes as designed to carry on, especially in the Third World, the global struggle whose nature Chambers did so much to make clear to us...

...Chambers begins his piece with a geography lesson...

...Morrow...

...Just as Chambers saw the essential continuity between Stalin and Khrushchev, in spite of their tactical differences, so it seems probable that today he would see a similar continuity between Brezhnev and Gorbachev...

...swan...

...we are told not only what his friends, critics, and followers thought of him but also something of why they thought it...

...has more to do with the self-indulgent peculiarity of the observer than with the events which he is ostensibly helping us to observe...

...Lance Morrow: Revolution took on a sort of electronic lightness of being...

...The transformation had a giddy, hallucinatory quality, its surprises tumbling out night after night...

...What he would tell us may be suggested by another in this collection, a brilliant piece he wrote for Life magazine called "The End of a Dark Age Ushers in New Dangers...

...If their choice is marred by the fact that Gorby didn't come onto the world scene until halfway through the decade, Chambers's is too, by virtue of the fact that Karl Marx didn't live in this century...

...The fact that it is a Wrong Idea scarcely matters next to the fact of their own fascination with it...

...Marxism" is what divides the earth...

...Only the fine writing is ludicrously bad...

...24.95 James Bowman T he roof of the title piece is that of 1 the Livadia Palace in Yalta where, in 1945, the conference which determined the postwar boundaries of Europe was taking place...

...Again, not many people were saying that in 1956, but the subsequent history of the "non-aligned" movement in the Third World and the evolution of the foreign policy of the Social Democratic left in the West show that he was exactly right—about the effect if not the intention of post-Stalinist and pre-Gorbachevian Communism...

...In fact, it might -be instructive to look in more detail at one point of comparison which calls immediate attention to itself...

...This past December, his successors in the 'senior editorial offices did something similar: they nominated Mikhail Gorbachev as "Man of the Decade...

...The metaphor of a stage transforming itself into an egg—an egg, it would appear, which is made of iron—that contains a mysteriously full-grown bird (dove...

...In conversation with Clio, muse of history, they pay elaborate tribute to the man who, at the scene of triumph over Roosevelt and Churchill, has realized old Russia's most improbable imperial ambitions...

...he "is playing Prospero in a realm ruled by Caliban for the past 72 years...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1990 37...

...Talk about your bouncing Czechs...

...In the lands drained by the St...

...What emerges is both a tremendously sympathetic portrait of Marx the man and a dispassionate and deadly accurate account of the poisonous ideology he gave birth to—and its influence on the century...

...My, what a lively crowd...

...This is exactly the opposite approach to Chambers's: instead of making the mysterious clear by bringing it down to earth, Morrow makes the clear mysterious by mooning off into a mist of fine writing...

...In 1948, the 100th anniversary of The Communist Manifesto, Chambers nominated Karl Marx as "Man of the Century"—deliberately playing off the Time tradition of nominating every December a "Man of the Year...