American Document/Life After Liberalism: The New Republic at 80
Kramer, Hilton
The New Republic at 80 Life After Liberalism by Hilton Kramer R eading the New Republic these days, I often think of the late Lionel Trilling. It was Trilling's fondest wish to remain, in...
...A New Republic Book/Basic Books, 518 pages, $28...
...The most unsatisfactory aspect of Kramer's analysis," he wrote, "is his failure to face up to the contradiction between the marriage of modernism and capitalism, on the one hand, and the history of their relations, on the other...
...It was my view that the historical relation which obtained between the avant-garde, on the one hand, and its bourgeois antagonists, on the other, had been unduly simplified by radicals and reactionaries alike...
...I responded in a heartbeat: "Dr...
...Two months' supply gives you a 10% discount, and total cost of $58.85 - less than a dollar a day...
...Pronouncing the Bush administration "degenerate," a word seldom employed in liberal political discourse, the editors dismissed "the question of character"—"Webelieve it tells in Clinton's favor," they wrote—and cited the Democratic candidate's "Arkansas record" as a sign of the wonderful things he could be expected to accomplish in the fields of education and health...
...Indeed, to incur the wrath of the Stalinists was in those days, for a liberal of Trilling's persuasion, a badge of honor...
...Only in a capital as intellectually provincial as Washington could a president like John Kennedy earn a reputation as a supporter of the arts simply by inviting Andre Malraux and Igor Stravinsky to dinner...
...They were an instrument of terror, and they served their purpose with all the cold-blooded efficiency that Stalin meant for them to have...
...If so, please clip this out and give it to a friend who may want to join my SLENDER REVOLUTION...
...The sheer idiocy of the entire document is still astounding to contemplate, yet this was the kind of thinking that held the liberal left in thrall during one of the periods of the New Republic's greatest influence.where Cowley is concerned...
...When Michael Straight moved the New Republic to Washington, in the aftermath of the Wallace debacle, the nation's capital was still a cultural backwater, and in many respects it has remained one...
...Republic that a cogent criticism of culture and arts cannot claim...
...These relations have not been harmonious...
...Edmund Wilson's tenure as literary editor was closely tethered to New York literary life in the twenties and its involvement in European modernism—a tradition that was continued by Malcolm Cowley until the effort foundered on the shoals of Stalinist orthodoxy...
...She never actually explains that Straight was inducted into the Blunt-Burgess spy ring and for a time reported regularly to his Soviet "control...
...I went on my formula and lost 18 pounds in a month...
...Instead she treats us to a report dispatched to the New Republic for the issue of February 14, 1933, by H.V...
...Wickenden has included just enough in this Reader to give newcomers to the subject a glimpse of what the New Republic's liberal fellow-traveling line entailed in the heyday of Stalin's influence on American intellectual life...
...About 5 months ago, I started something which, in my opinion will revolutionize the approach toward weight loss in Western civilization...
...That killed some people...
...Or is it that, from the perspective of Washington, even the most mistaken political analysis inevitably commands an interest for the editors of the New 2 It isn't even true, by the way, as the dust jacket claims, that this Reader is "the first major anthology of essays" drawn from The New Republic...
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...This is the salvo that Wieseltier fired against the New Criterion upon the publication of its first issue in September 1982...
...Bliven was worried, you see, that, as he wrote to Comrade Stalin with a heavy heart, "the series of trials of traitors, spies and saboteurs has had a bad effect on world public opinion...
...To this first accusation Wieseltier added another that was equally false...
...As a result, criticism of the arts has for some years now been relegated to a marginal status in the magazine...
...Sidney Blumenthal did a stint at the Washington Post, to be sure, but he soon hurried back to the more salubrious purlieu of the New Republic, where he waited for something better to show up...
...Whatever the result of the March fifth election, it will not give Adolf Hitler the opportunity to establish his long heralded Drittes Reich...
...Simon & Schuster, 1964...
...Not the whole way, to be sure, but a large part of the distance to be traversed, given the appalling political history of the New Republic since the Thirties...
...About the present literary editor of the New Republic, however, I cannot speak in an entirely disinterested spirit...
...Wickenden makes a brief and not altogether intelligible reference to Wilson's letter to Cowley in her introduction to the Reader, but never mentions Farrell's attack, which ought to have been taken account of...
...So it was born...
...In that essay I was attempting to restate the theory of the modernist avant-garde, which I had first put forward in my book The Age of the Avant-Garde in 1973, and amplify it in the light of the so-called "postmodern" assault that had been mounted against modernism in the interim...
...Literature still fares better than most other fields in the New Republic, but that may be owing to the fact that the work of so many of the writers who are nowadays highly regarded is itself an expression of social policy, if not indeed of social pathology...
...The principal exception to this rule has been the magazine's abiding attention to the movies—that sacred staple of yuppie culture, which years ago supplanted literature as the lead item in the• magazine's back-of-the-book and, more often than not, has virtually nothing to do with serious artistic interests...
...Even a writer as deeply immersed in political affairs as Walter Lippmann, another founder of the magazine, was capable in the early days of producing first-rate literary commentary, as he did in essays on Sinclair Lewis and H.L...
...In the afterlife of liberalism at the New Republic, the magazine's so-called turn to the right always comes to a halt at the voting booth, at which point the critical faculty is furloughed to make way for the same old political sentimentalities...
...But that was before he fell victim to "the Trilling dilemma" as a member of the New Republic's highly conflicted editorial board...
...Trilling died without responding to the charge, and the debate over the exact nature of his conservative liberalism—or, if you like, his liberal conservatism—has continued to haunt his posthumous reputation...
...In any comprehensive historical account of the New Republic, the implications of its move from New York to Washington in 1950 would have been closely scrutinized...
...What are you calling it...
...Wickenden...
...This is partly true, but it is by no means the whole story?specially The American Spectator December 1994 69 periods was one of the magazine's chief glories, is given little more than token acknowledgment in this new Reader.2 From reading this New Republic Reader, you could have no idea that the magazine employed two of the finest theater critics writing in this century—first Stark Young and then Eric Bentley—or that in Otis Ferguson it could boast of one of our best movie critics or that there had ever been a time when writers as distinguished as Leone Adams, Conrad Aiken, Van Wyck Brooks, Kenneth Burke, Horace Gregory, Paul Rosenfeld, and Delmore Schwartz were regular contributors to its literary and arts pages...
...303, Winter Park, FL 32789 1-800-FAT-IS-OFF (1-800-328-4763) The American Spectator December 1994 67 der to black nihilism in Eldridge Cleaver's Soul on Ice in the 1960s, the old New Republic had a pretty dismal record when it came to resisting or even comprehending the nature of the left-liberal fashions of its time...
...He then added a further suggestion: that Stalin withdraw, as he wrote, "from the public life of your country for a stipulated length of time, perhaps a year or eighteen months," to prove to the world that he was not, after all, like the other dictators on the world scene...
...In Bliven's mental universe, it was unimaginable to be opposed to Communism, for such opposition would have constituted a violation of the liberal compact...
...As the infamous Moscow Trials were completing their course and the Great Terror continued to sweep millions of lives in its path, this abject liberal acolyte of the Soviet experiment made an open appeal to Stalin to, as we would say today, improve his image...
...Yet this attempt to bring the principles of "variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty" to bear on the study of modernism was firmly rejected by Wieseltier, who, donning the dunce'scap of the classroom radical for the purpose of slaying a suspected neoconservative dragon, insisted that "Modernism was a cultural insurrection," pure and simple...
...For one of the longest essays that Ms...
...culture and politics as essentially conservative in spirit...
...He had, of course, sharply criticized the liberalism of his own generation—the liberalism that in the 1930s and 1940s had proved to be so easily captive to Stalinist influence...
...I asked Joe if he would put my formula into capsules to be taken 3 times a day, 1 hour before meals, and label the bottles of 90 capsules for me...
...Then, in an attempt to soften so bold a suggestion, Bliven added: "It may be unjust of the Americans, for example, to suspect that torture is used in these cases...
...What was interesting about this charge, false as it was, were the unacknowledged restrictions that Wieseltier clearly wished to impose on what was now permissible to question in the name of "variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty...
...Those who served in the underground Soviet apparatus knew otherwise, of course, but that was one of the reasons they were obliged to remain underground?rom which position they were able to manipulate fellow-traveling fools like Bruce Bliven with the skill of expert puppeteers, no matter how contradictory or embarrassing the twists and turns of the Moscow party line might be...
...N otwithstanding these egregious confusions, however, Ms...
...Three months' supply is the best deal...
...Under three of its most notoriously compromised editors?ruce Bliven, Michael Straight, and Henry A. Wallace?he magazine remained, with only occasional exceptions, a complaisant supporter of Soviet foreign policy during the worst years of Stalin's murderous reign...
...The New Republic deserved a better book than Ms...
...The fact is, Cowley consistently used the literary pages of the New Republic to advance the reputations of writers favored by the Stalinist left and discredit writers who opposed it...
...The New York Review of Books, now the New Republic's only real competition for the loyalty of campus liberals, was already oversupplied with anti-conservative savants, and in any case preferred writers with more glittering intellectual credentials...
...In the realm of literature and the arts, however, Ms...
...I picked up the phone and called Joe Oneal, a friend of mine who heads up Progressive Laboratories, Inc., a nutritional manufacturer/distributor near Dallas...
...This, Ithink, has something to do with the magazine's entrenched Washington orientation, which predisposes it to favor a philistine perspective, and a lot to do with its failed liberalism, which values the arts only when they can be seen to be an appendage to social policy...
...When it came time for Kinsley to decamp, he at last found his true vocation, bringing his Ivy League brand of liberal facetiousness to the world of the television talk show, where it is accepted practice for glib phrases to serve as a substitute for thought...
...His models in this endeavor were Arnold and Mill—especially the Mill who had written about the conservative Coleridge and the radical Bentham with such undeceived intelligence...
...1994 Hilton Kramer...
...It gets better, for Bliven's second point, or plea, was to suggest "that in the future you shall not merely present to the world testimony which many people in all countries find incredible, without some attempt to make its credibility apparent...
...What liberal acolytes of Stalinism like Bliven could not bring themselves to comprehend was that the trials were never meant to be convincing?ot about the defendants' guilt, anyway...
...Others tried it with similar results...
...But the fact that the editors have settled for such an intellectually inept account of the magazine's own history is no doubt a reflection of the troubled and conflicted choices that continue to beset the New Republic itself...
...This was something that the editor of the great liberal journal simply could not fathom?nd neither, apparently, could the magazine's loyal liberal readers...
...For over 20 years, I have specialized in nutritional medicine...
...Rare contributions like T.S...
...Kinsley himself generally assumed the lighter ittititi will11110.1 66 The American Spectator December 1994 burden of amusing the magazine's yuppie liberal constituency...
...Wickenden's patchwork anthology to mark its eightieth anniversary—the kind of book that at least made an attempt to define the magazine's mission in the aftermath of liberalism's failures now that those failures are once again so vividly on display in our political and cultural affairs...
...It was like subsisting on nothing but milkshakes laced with vitamins...
...Until Tina Brown made it safe?nd far more lucrative, too?o practice radical-chic journalism without risk or restraint, the opportunities were limited for the left-liberal mandarins at the New Republic...
...In fact, no more than the rest of the liberal media did the New Republic bother to scrutinize Clinton's Arkansas record before the election...
...In the vain hope of warding off such charges, the magazine conducts a sort of intermittent border warfare against some of the neoconservatives who are its natural allies—often, in fact, its only allies—against the radical left...
...Even if these upscale liberals had really wanted to break with the New Republic over its much-discussed turn to the right, where could they have gone...
...As Ms...
...The reason I think of Trilling while reading the New Republic is that this celebrated journal of liberal opinion nowadays offers us almost weekly bulletins on what might be called the Trilling dilemma: how to function as a critic of liberalism without being stigmatized as a conservative...
...I myself needed to lose some weight, at that time...
...If anything, of course, that first issue of the New Criterion may have been 70 The American Spectator December 1994 somewhat overloaded with expressions of doubt about a whole range of current cultural orthodoxies...
...and The Faces of Five Decades: Selections from Fifty Years of The New Republic, 1914-1964, edited by Robert Luce, with commentary by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr...
...It had to be non-toxic, non-addictive and not harmful in any way...
...Kaltenborn, who offered the magazine's readers the following assessment of Adolf Hitler: "He is sworn to obey the Constitution and is likely to do so...
...Wickenden isn't very clear about the war itself...
...And it's been downhill since then, for such invitations nowadays go to the likes of Oprah Winfrey and Maya Angelou...
...When the charge was made—and not by any Stalinist hack but by Joseph Frank, a critic of impeccable liberal credentials—Trilling was stunned...
...And so Bliven persevered, blind as a bat to the moral implications of the policies he espoused, advising Comrade Stalin in the fourth of his recommendations that he "offer an amnesty to all opponents who have not yet been guilty of any crime under the normal civil code, on a pledge on their part of future good behavior...
...There are occasional articles of considerable interest, but little or nothing in the way of sustained attention...
...0 The American Spectator December 1994 71...
...While Hertzberg's liberalism wore a frown of scornful disapproval, Kinsley's displayed the self-satisfied smile of the perennial undergraduate scoring points against his elders...
...It seems not to have occurred to him, however, that he might be put down as a conservative by non-Stalinist liberals because of the very nature of his attack on liberalism...
...This categorical refusal to entertain the "possibility" of "variousness" or "complexity" in the discussion of modernism made Wieseltier a pretty lame advocate of the principle of "difficulty" he wished to claim in Trilling's name, but it was a perfect example of what I have called "the Trilling dilemma": the affliction suffered by disabused liberals out of a fear of being stigmatized as conservatives...
...Mencken...
...That his own criticism of liberalism was likely to meet with resistance and opprobrium from the radical left was a risk that Trilling was willing to take...
...Wickenden has proudly reprinted in The New Republic Reader...
...Both give better accounts of the periods they cover than the new Reader...
...If you order by charge card via the 800-number, your order ships in 3 business days...
...This essay is reprinted with permission from the New Criterion's September 1994 issue...
...North Korea...
...At the same time, however, the magazine publishes certain neoconservative writers—usually in its book-review pages—on subjects that are safely distant from party politics...
...Apparently she is still unaware of what happened to Poland in September 1939...
...It was Trilling's fondest wish to remain, in everything he thought and wrote, a paragon of enlightened liberalism...
...What does it cost...
...Yet Straight, who had once served as one of FDR's speechwriters, did not disclose this betrayal to American authorities until long after the event, and then only because disclosure was a condition of securing a job he wanted with the Kennedy administration...
...Eliot's review of Julian Benda's The Treason of the Intellectuals, in 1928, and Scott Fitzgerald's obituary memoir of Ring Lardner, 1933, have likewise been dropped down the memory hole, as have George Santayana's essays from the earliest years of the magazine's existence...
...But these were not the kind of doubts that Wieseltier's liberal pieties could easily countenance, for they put into question the received opinions then dominating—and, for that matter, still dominating—the academic left...
...One of my secretaries who had never been able to lose weight because of headaches lost 13 pounds in a month, without one headache...
...The magazine had been established in New York by a circle of intellectuals that had a serious interest in the arts...
...Only now—in the issue of August 22/29—does the magazine speak of "the general foreign policy vacuum at*the center of the Clinton administration," for example, and this is but one of the many other issues—the health-care proposal, the Whitewater affair, the Paula Jones lawsuit, sundry conflict-of-interest cases, etc.—on which the magazine's fantasy candidate has proved to be an immense political embarrassment...
...The New Republic, which this year observes its eightieth anniversary, still presents itself to its readers as a bastion of liberal thought...
...He set out to reform it, to make it more responsive to the complexities of experience and less doctrinaire in its formulas of salvation...
...Which was why, in 1940, James T. Farrell published an article in the American Mercury attacking Cowley for turning the New Republic into what he characterized as a literary mouthpiece for the Communist Party, and why Edmund Wilson, in a private letter written around the same time, criticized Cowley's Stalinism along the same lines...
...You get a 20% discount and 3 months' supply delivered to your front door for $76.80...
...The time for a Fascist coup d'etat is past...
...From Malcolm Cowley's praise of the enlightened "jurisprudence" governing the Moscow Trials in the 1930s to Richard Gilman's pusillanimous surrenpaid advertisement paid advertisement Dr...
...But since Hendrik Hertzberg, who alternated for a time with the peripatetic Michael Kinsley in the editor's chair, could always be counted on to supply the requisite take-no-prisoners assault on Reagan himself, the protests of the loyal opposition at the magazine never amounted to much...
...Joe asked...
...Take, for example, the November 9, 1992, editorial endorsing "Clinton for President," which Ms...
...Then, getting really desperate, Bliven added: "If these proceedings are not convincing, there is no point in holding them"?n observation that tacitly acknowledged that the Moscow "treason" trials weren't judicial proceedings at all but political show trials which were proving to be embarrassing to the faithful...
...There is a sense in which it can truly be said that he never recovered from the demoralization he suffered as a result of this attempt to characterize his whole approach to Hilton Kramer is editor of the New Criterion...
...That's 85?a day...
...You can order by mail with check or M.O., but that can take up to two months for order fulfillment...
...Actually, I can't make any claims at all, because the Food & Drug Administration has strict guidelines against that...
...If the bourgeois ethos may be said to have both a 'progressive' and a 'reactionary' side, the avant-garde is similarly divided...
...To remedy the situation, Bliven made four proposals...
...This was the charge that we had somehow set out to undermine Lionel Trilling's call for "variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty" in critical debate...
...Wieseltier took fierce exception to the essay called "Postmodern: Art and Culture in the 1980s," which I contributed to that first issue of the New Criterion...
...Two Chinese herbs called atractylodes and citrus aurantil, plus hydroxycitrate, chromium picolinate and chromium arginate...
...S till, it must be said that, whatever the magazine's flaws, failures, and contradictions have been during the last twenty years of publication, Marty Peretz has succeeded in breaking the mold of the traditional liberal weekly by the changes he brought to the New Republic...
...Maybe you have no personal need or wish to lose weight...
...Parsons' SLENDER REVOLUTION...
...In 1982, the New Criterion and its editor clearly looked like easy targets for a writer eager to renew his liberal credentials in the face of charges by the left of a turn to the right at The New Republic, and it hardly seemed to matter that the claim to uphold "variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty" in critical debate got rather mangled in the process...
...In the "Postmodern" essay of 1982, I restated the point this way: "The modern movement was always, perhaps, a more complex and pluralistic phenomenon than its more doctrinaire champions—and, for that matter, its more doctrinaire enemies—could ever bring themselves to recognize...
...I was able to get a 24-hour toll-free number: 1-800-FAT-IS-OFF, to handle all orders in the USA and Canada...
...At least two earlier collections have been published—The New Republic Anthology, 1915-1935, edited by Groff Conklin, with an introduction by Bruce Bliven (Dodge, 1936...
...role that was finally reduced to macabre political comedy when, in 1946, the year in which Churchill issued his warning about the "Iron Curtain" that Stalin was then imposing on Eastern Europe, the magazine's proprietor, Michael Straight, appointed as editor the most eminent fellow-traveler in the country, Henry A. Wallace, who had been Vice President during FDR's third term...
...Wickenden does not seem to have either a keen interest or a firm grasp...
...Straight was not lacking in Stalinist credentials of his own...
...She seems to be under the impression that in September 1939 "the war began with Germany's invasion of Czechoslovakia...
...Two of Cowley's successors in the literary editorship—Robert Richman (no relation, incidentally, to the New Criterion's poetry editor) and Robert Evett—did a creditable job of keeping up a high standard in the magazine's coverage of literature and the arts in the fifties and early sixties, but in the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination and the eruption of the counterculture and the codification of the "new sensibility" in the period of the Vietnam War, the magazine's cultural pages suffered a descent into radical chic almost as devastating to sound judgment and high standards as the Stalinism of the thirties...
...Of course it is immensely flattering to find that the debut of our journal exactly a dozen years ago is deemed to be the only cultural event of the last eighty years important enough to merit a nine-page essay in this New Republic Reader...
...In this department, the Reader' s prize exhibit is undoubtedly Bruce Bliven's"Letter to Stalin," from the issue of March 30, 1938...
...A s to what those liberal loyalties now consist of, it is sometimes difficult to say, especially since the departure of Hendrik Hertzberg and Sidney Blumenthal for Tina Brown's leftwing political salon at the New Yorker...
...One day I thought: with over 20 years experience in nutritional medicine, I ought to be able to put together a formula that would curb appetite, shed excess fat, and conserve lean muscle mass, with no rebound weight gain...
...But then, Ms...
...While allowing his left-flank editors and contributors plenty of space in which to vent their dissent from the magazine's new course and vilify those outside the magazine who uphold views that in some cases are virtually identical with those that had now become central to the New Republic itself, Peretz went a long way toward disembarrassing the magazine of its disreputable political past...
...A t the New Republic, the troubled afterlife of liberalism has often proved to entail more in the way of contradiction and denial than of anything resembling real complexity...
...Its founding editor, Herbert Croly, was a writer on architecture...
...Malcolm] Cowley's and [Edmund] Wilson's myopia about Soviet communism did not extend to the arts," she writes, "where they exuberantly explored modernism and its relation to the cultural legacy of the West...
...Yet the pleasure which this remarkable judgment affords us is somewhat allayed by the misrepresentations and unconscionable bad faith exhibited in the essay itself...
...Yet its expression of that thought, which on many issues is now all but indistinguishable from certain aspects of neoconservative thought, is frequently marked by an obvious dread of being seen—especially by liberals further to the left than the New Republic—to be deviating from the permissible limits of liberal orthodoxy...
...group more interested in style than substance?ith his flippant patter on domestic political affairs...
...Wickenden's view that one of the New Republic's "saving graces" in the thirties was its "cultural criticism...
...Hitler himself had definitely lost prestige and power before he won the chancellorship...
...t is one of the merits of The New Republic Reader, which Dorothy Wickenden has edited to mark the magazine's eightieth anniversary, that it acknowledges the reality of this shameful political past both in the introduction and in the selection of texts.1 It doesn't, to be sure, attempt to give us a comprehensive account of this history or dwell on the role played by the New Republic's pro-Soviet line in the political life of the thirties and forties...
...I suggest, first," he wrote, "that in future treason trials, a procedure should be followed more compatible with that of countries under the Anglo-Saxon or the Roman law tradition...
...Here's how all that was changed...
...He has weaned the magazine away from its infantile leftism, closed the door on any doubts as to what the Cold War was really all about, cast a critical eye on the new politics of racial quotas and preferments and the judicial arguments supporting them, kept a prudent distance from the excesses of feminist radicalism, and in general purged the pages of the New Republic of its abject obeisance to the political and cultural legacy of the sixties...
...Can I guarantee your results...
...The Nation, which had long been the New Republic's principal rival among left-liberal weeklies, had further degenerated into a sectarian organ reminiscent of the bad old days when radicals still worshipped at the altar of revolution...
...As one turns the pages of this Reader, there are times when one almost suspects Ms...
...I will send full instructions, research data, etc., with each order shipped...
...By March 1938, Stalin had already caused the deaths of millions of innocent people, and in the years that were left to him he would cause the death of millions more...
...The editors do not mind borrowing a little intellectual authority from the neoconservative camp so long as it is not seen to compromise the magazine's liberal loyalties...
...Before now, medical weight loss involved a starvation diet, and often the patient was given stimulants such as dexedrine, an addicting drug...
...Yet it was never his intention to repudiate liberalism itself...
...As a result, that whole side of the New Republic's history, which in certain 1 t is Ms...
...Like a lot of other wounded liberals at the time, the editors of the New Republic turned Bill Clinton into a fantasy candidate, praising his "integrity," his "moral intuition," his grasp of "the cultural reality of today's America," his "internationalism" and "deep understanding" of foreign affairs, even his "marriage," as if on every one of these questions there were not already grave doubts to be entertained...
...For the better part of twenty years—since Martin Peretz acquired ownership of the New Republic in 1974—the magazine has seemed deliberately to organize its staff and its contributors into opposing liberal factions, some more liberal, some more conservative, some merely more facetious, than others...
...As I wrote in the introduction to The Age of the Avant-Garde: "The history of the avant-garde actually harbors a complex agenda of internal conflict and debate, not only about aesthetic matters but about the social values that govern them...
...Wickenden has thought it appropriate to reprint in her survey of the New Republic's first eighty years—and the only one that makes even a feeble attempt to comprehend the arts in the age of modernism—is Leon Wieseltier's "Matthew Arnold and the Cold War...
...Then, of course, the party line changed, and so did the New Republic's...
...In a parenthetical aside, she acknowledges that while Straight claimed to have become an ex-Communist by the forties, his "own loyalties, however, remained a little murky...
...Parsons' SLENDER REVOLUTIONTM The Story Thus Far I am James M. Parsons, M.D...
...It is inevitable that this country should look with suspicion upon confessions obtained in secret hearings, however plausible these confessions may be on their face...
...And in Wieseltier's case, moreover, it represented an unacknowledged intellectual reversal on his part, for when he reviewed The Age of the Avant-Garde in the pages of Commentary in June 1974 he had nothing but praise for what he described as "not only a thoughtful and provocative statement of a revisionist view of avant-garde art, but . . . a comprehensive theory of modern culture as well...
...but in the United States there is a nationwide and long continued tradition of police brutality, of extorting confessions by torture in every sort of case from petty larceny to murder...
...Wickenden delicately points out, Straight "fell in with the Soviet agents Anthony Blunt and Guy Burgess" during his student days at Cambridge University in the thirties...
...Bliven's utter incapacity to understand the world he was writing about was made fairly explicit when, in his third recommendation to Comrade Stalin, he 68 The American Spectator December 1994 urged him to "abolish the death sentence for these and all other crimes...
...As if anything I have ever written had claimed that they were...
...In this essay Wieseltier had some disparaging things to say about several of the writers who contributed to the first issue of the New Criterion, and falsely accused us of attempting to foster what he described as "the political delegitimation of doubt...
...This carefully modulated deviation from liberal orthodoxy, which is mainly but not exclusively confined to the realm of foreign policy, inevitably brought cries of protest from the magazine's left-liberal constituency when it resulted in outright support for some Reagan administration initiative—as it did, for example, in the case of the Nicaraguan contras...
...Clearly, contributions of this sort are of no interest to Ms...
...Which is why, since the election, as more and more has come to be known about the president's political and personal past and his conduct of the presidency itself, the New Republic has been obliged, like the rest of the press that favored Clinton, to explore all of the questions that were studiously avoided during the 1992 campaign...
...Let me illustrate...
...Wickenden, who was formerly the New Republic's executive editor and is now the national affairs editor of Newsweek, is sometimes a little murky herself in explaining, or failing to explain, how the magazine's liberalism adjusted to the shocks of the Hitler-Stalin pact and the outbreak of the Second World War...
...And do you remember the craze called the modified protein sparing fast...
...By and large, when the folks on Marty Peretz's left flank departed the magazine, it was more a matter of opportunity than of political principle...
...SLENDER, INC., 2699 Lee Road, Suite No...
...Wickenden of harboring a wicked sense of humor...
...By such people, Communism was still looked upon as a somewhat more militant variety of the liberal vocation, which itself was believed to have an exclusive patent on political virtue...
...G iven this history, it has been disappointing, to say the least, that the New Republic under Marty Peretz has never seen fit to appoint a literary editor whose primary intellectual interest is literature and the arts...
...What's in it...
...Until now, weight loss was a minefield of snack-attacks, headaches, arcane cravings and yo-yoing of body weight until at last the miserable candidate gave up to achieve rest from a vicious, ineffective ordeal...
...In March 1951 [while the Korean War was still raging], Burgess ran into Straight in Washington, D.C., and admitted that he had passed along to Moscow the U.S...
...She professes astonishment that the New Republic "counseled fatalism and restraint"?n other words, non-intervention?in the face of Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco" at the onset of the war, as if this had not been the Communist Party line as a result of the Hitler-Stalin pact right up to the day in 1941 when Hitler's armies invaded Russia...
...plans to advance into I The New Republic Reader: Eighty Years of Opinion and Debate, edited by Dorothy Wickenden...
Vol. 27 • December 1994 • No. 12
