A Life in the 20th Century

...Had European statesmen beyond Germany enforced treaties, Hitler never would have gotten past his attempt to militarize the Rhineland...

...t is this last which forms an impor tant- indeed crucial-part of the narrative...

...Those Americans who in the 1990's allowed the rule of law to be selectively abandoned and intellectual standards to be ignored might find the stories Burleigh and Kershaw have chronicled instructive...

...Throngs of Germans adored the hysterical spellbinder, as his most recent and authoritative biographer, Ian Kershaw, demonstrates in the final volume of his 66 February 2001 The American Spectator To this day the myth endures that Hitler was a genius...

...Alas, too often it races on, and soon its proprietor is advancing some momentous proposition injurious to the public...

...By the way, the FÜhrer had named his headquarters the "Wolfs Lair...

...It is then that the brain needs a rest...

...Wallace was also the author of this memorable phrase: "If we define an American fascist as one who in the case of conflict puts money and power ahead of human beings, then there are undoubtedly several million fascists in the United States...

...But for all their pseudo-mysticism, fundamentally the Nazis were a type known to all history: predators, killers...

...On the other were the friends of the Soviet Union Theodore H. White, The American Spectator February 2001 65 Predatory Man Max Lerner, Lillian Hellman, Paul Robe-son, Leonard Bernstein, et al...

...Of Hitler he says, "He combined being the worst sort of reductionist scientific bore, forever citing cats and rats, with being a saloon-bar conspiracy theorist, forever banging on about the Jews...

...Schlesinger is not merely an academic, but that rarest of things in our midst- an intellectual of the European type...

...His penchant for such names can be construed differently...

...From what I can only conclude is Kershaw's false sense of the historian's etiquette, Kershaw never declares what a lout Hitler really was...

...Although in his public role Schlesinger has not been a particular favorite of mine, nor, I trust, of most readers of this magazine, I am forced to confess that I found his autobiography absorbing and at times even charming...

...It leaves the lessons of the 1930's to the imagination...

...Doubtless to a worrier such as Churchill such names suggested the fantasies of a predator...

...He might have added that though Wallace has been dead now for many years - and though he subsequently repudiated his pro-Soviet views - revisionists are still trying to rehabilitate him as a selfless martyr to our own alleged Cold War bellicosity (see, for example, John Morton Blum's The Price of Vision...

...One fears its tone and direction will be quite different...

...He agreed and got worse...

...One of the most amusing anecdotes in the book describes a meeting at the New Republic in New York between Schlesinger and Wallace which resembles nothing so much as a leftist version of the Mad Hatter's tea party...

...As he writes, "premature anti-Communists in the 'forties received as much censure from the left as premature anti-fascists in the 'thirties received from the right...

...With noble exceptions, the failure was that of an entire European generation...

...righteous in its moral fervor...

...But he had promised the mob a resurrection, and, writes Kershaw, "mounting economic problems fed into the military and strategic pressures for expansion...

...The drama is something for democrats to ponder...

...Then came the destruction of his own people, as he sat in demented solitude at the Wolf's Lair, mucking up the military's retreats and planning with his intellectual soul mate Albert Speer the architectural future of Europe -the FÜhrer from Charlie Chaplain on has been seen as an absurdity, and his intellectual and artistic pretensions are essential ingredients in the joke...

...Contrast that with the exaggerated postures of alienation struck by most American academics nowadays...

...Thankfully Professor Burleigh has no such scruples...

...or earlier propositions advanced by Woodrow Wilson or by Marx (Karl, not Groucho...

...Their hero was former Vice President Henry Wallace, who, first as editor of the New Republic, then as presidential candidate of the Progressive Party in 1948, argued that anti-Stalinism "was per se warmongering...

...P erhaps the English academics now blaming Churchill for failing to negotiate with this lunatic find it easier to blame one heroic figure than to accept that many of the most distinguished Europeans of the 1930's were responsible for Europe's ruin...

...He is the best known public intellectual in the United States, and arguably the most vigorous...

...I suspect at times he must wonder too...

...When his plumbing ached and his bodily stench became unbearable he resorted to potions that were probably poisonous...

...As standards of democratic restraint eroded, the cranks emerged from the shadows...

...He also poohpoohs the New Left versions-which, alas, are now largely regnant- of the decision to drop the atom bomb on Japan, the origins of the Cold War, the guilt of Alger Hiss...

...is editor-in-chief of The American Spectator...

...Ahead lay the first volumes of his monumental Age of Roosevelt...

...It was during this period that he produced his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Age of]ackson...

...Certain English academics such as John Charmley, a historian at the University of East Anglia, argue that Churchill could have avoided World War II in the spring of 1940 and the consequent dissolution of the British Empire had he then offered to negotiate with the FÜhrer...

...He named R. EMMETT TYRRELL, JR...

...He calls Hitler's henchman, Heinrich Himmler, "a moralizing little creep...

...After graduation he did a year at Peterhouse College, Oxford, returning to teach at his alma mater where he produced an important biography of Orestes Branson...

...The cantankerous academics now faulting Churchill for the destruction Hitler left behind are as frivolous as the 1930's Europeans who assumed that they could "deal with" the disgusting little boor from the Austrian down-and-out...

...and not a moralist...

...He is flatly anti-multicultur-alist, and rejects the currently fashionable attempts to prettify the his-tor)'of the American Commu- nist Party...

...That such nonsense has endured into our own time can also be blamed on a generation of politicians who would not govern competently or enforce the law...

...To those academics sharing Prof...

...The issue divided the old New Deal constituency...

...This, the first volume of his autobiography, tells the story of his life from his birth in 1917 to 1950, when he published his most important political treatise, The Vital Center...

...While the twentieth century's other ideological visionaries celebrated "the dictatorship of the proletariat" and other pretty thoughts, Hitler and the jack-booted boys celebrated the predatory life, referred to generally as war...

...After the war he spent a season in Washington as a writer for Fortune magazine before returning to teach at Harvard...

...This is an error...

...To be sure, ahead lay further divisions within the American intellectual community, with the anti-Communist faction splitting once again over the Vietnam war and detente...

...He also helped to found Americans for Democratic Action and the Congress for Cultural Freedom, and played a vital role in the political and ideological struggles that attended the early days of the Cold War...

...He considers much of what now passes for modern social history as excessively "aggressive in its 'from the bottom up' ideology...pretentious in its vocabulary...

...Charmley's sanguinity, they demonstrate yet again the Ftihrer's fondness for animals...

...On one side was Pres ident Truman and his secretary of state Dean Acheson, backed by Eleanor Roosevelt, Schlesinger, Hubert Humphrey, and anti-Com munist leaders of the labor movement like Walter Reuther...

...The American Spectator ? February 2001 67...

...Teacher, historian, and publicist, he is also high priest of the Democratic Party's far-flung constituency among intellectuals or would-be intellectuals...

...Cranks such as Hitler live in the shadows of every democracy, far in the shadows, but they are there...

...The narrative also underscores the degree to which America has changed dur-ing the author's lifetime...

...There was a time- yes, there really was - when professors and their wives gathered to dine in black tie and long dresses in college towns in the Midwest...

...Could that be the "innocence" referred to in the subtitle...

...As the Nazis' chief theoretician and poet, Hitler composed dithyrambs to "the sword...

...It is, admittedly, very long - at times excessively prolix even for someone of my own particular interests...

...But Schlesinger has done much, known many fascinating people, and witnessed much history, often close up...

...Joycelyn Elders, the Clinton Administration's militant condomist (an advocate of godless condomism...

...Stalin probably killed more innocent people than Hitler did," he writes, "but the defenders of Stalin, unlike the defenders of Hitler, were somehow deemed within the circle of civilized people...

...Far more interesting is the texture...

...A s with the human heart, the human brain never rests, which is not always a good thing...

...As they bungled and Hitler climbed the next rung on his ladder to ruin, they came to the view the tattered corporal was a genius...

...It leaves Hitler appearing as the bad fruit of democracy in an off year...

...Yet to this day the myth endures that Hitler was a genius, politically and militarily...

...Few e\ r learned from their failures...

...True, in their emotionalism, Nazi racial and scientific theories took on the appearance of a pseudo-religion, as Michael Burleigh points out in his masterful The Third Reich: A New History...

...The Third Reich: A New History Michael Burleigh Hill and Wang 1938 pages / $40 Hitler 1936-1945: Nemesis Ian Kershaw W. W. Norton /I040 pages / $35 REVIEWED BY R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...

...Had the generation governing Germany enforced German law, Hitler would have remained a ranter in some dismal beer Stube and died quietly and painfully...

...Which is to say, a homme a lettres unafraid of power or proximity to it...

...Many of what are called "intellectual debates" exist merely because some third-rate thinker's brain would not shut down when sleep beckoned or cannabis agitated or an alien idea excited vast cogitations...

...First came Germany's nearby democracies...

...Recall, if you will, the momentous propositions advanced by Dr...

...Schlesinger gives us a foretaste of things to come in a painful discussion of his relations with the late Sidney Hook, whom he describes as "a highly intelligent man who permitted anticom-munism to consume his life to the point that his obsession, like Aaron's rod, swallowed up nearly everything else...

...Even worse creeps are in the shadows...

...Some encouraged it...

...requires no introduction...

...He did not eat meat and contemplated taking strong measures against meat-eaters once the war was over...

...Or when liberals were sufficiently confident in their own values to be unintimidated by political or cultural radicalism...

...Son of a well-known historian, Schlesinger spent his childhood and adolescence in academic communities, eventually matriculating at Harvard whence his father was called in the late 1920's...

...At issue was the proper response to the threat of Stalinist Russia, poised to extend its influ ence over an impoverished and demoralized Western Europe...

...Houghton Mifflin /557pages / $28.95 REVIEWED BY Mark Falcoff A rthur Schlesinger, Jr...

...So much for the story in outline...

...From Kershaw we see that Hitler was a diplomatic bungler and a military fool, but Burleigh within one exuberant outburst exposes the essence of Hitler's political genius...

...Moreover, he is clearly a product of the pre-PC period of American university life, and unapolo-getically so...

...A well-rested brain might have saved us from the controversies that these goof-ball academics stirred up, as well as from the current controversy over Winston Churchill's rude treatment of Adolf Hitler...

...That book, and Schlesinger's review of it, belongs to the Reagan era- which is to say, the period covered by the next volume...

...II found him physically unfit for military service, so he went into the Office of War Information, then the OSS, first in Washington, then in London...

...another the "Eagle's Nest...

...He was a sucker for medical and dietary quackery...

...Or when the most emblematic figures of the Democratic Party were Adlai Stevenson, James Forrestal, Thomas Finletter, or Averell Harriman, instead of Alan Dershowitz, David Geffen, Al Shap ton, or Hillary Rodham Clinton...

...Whatever one may think of his subsequent political choices, Schlesinger cannot be praised enough for the courageous stand he took at this time...

...During the early days of the Cold War, there was a cultural conflict of major pro portions in this country which spilled over into electoral poli tics...

...His reluctance has something to do with his sense that he is a scholar "I m only a good dane...

...As time passed, and if he was not killed off by his doctors or by his vegetarian chef, his chaotic administration of the country and its doomed economy would have brought German collapse...

...Sweeping off the Asiatic steppes in the fifth century, the Hun hordes answered to the same predatory impulse and doubtless would have heralded their campaigns with rhetorical masterpieces the equal of Hitler's at Nuremberg if they could write or stand still long enough...

...The lassitude, demagogy, and lawlessness of the Clinton-Gore years have opened the door to such cranks as Jesse Jackson...

...In Kershaw's first volume (Hitler 1889-1936: Hubris) the biographer shows how the dictator's rise came about through flukes, his opponents' ineptitude, their indolence, stupidity, and the fatuous conviction that they had Hitler on a string...

...World War MARK FALCOFF'S new book, The Cuban Revolution and the United States: A History in Documents, will he published in the spring...

...Indeed, reading these and similar passages I could not help wondering if a younger version of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., fresh from Harvard, could find a place today on any history faculty in the United States, major or minor...

...two-volume biography, Hitler 1936-1945: Nemesis...

...Churchill's latest critics have a knack for overlooking what was unique to Hitler and his Nazi party...

...And, as no one needs reminding, he is also court historian of the line of Kennedy pretenders...

...Or perhaps I am merely reassured by meeting the Schlesinger of pre-Kennedy days...

...German politicians allowed unreason, mysticism, resentment, and bigotry to flourish...

...No European diplomat would have persuaded Hitler to subside, and by the time Hitler had acquired the chancellery and the Wehrmacht, Churchill was left no alternative but force of arms...

...Accordingly, Churchill blew it again a couple of years later when the FÜhrer, then licking his wounds at headquarters, might have welcomed a hand extended in friendship...

...In a famous review of Hook's autobiography Out of Step, Schlesinger had made the famous remark that "there were more things in heaven and earth than were dreamt of in the anti-Communist philosophy...

...Next, Russia when the Fiihrer could no longer suppress his apprehensions about "Jewish Bolshevism...