Dialogue of a Schizophrenic
Fulbright, J. William
"Dialogue of a Schizophrenic" policy in Germany, which he felt was leading to mass starvation, was based on the Nazi doctrine of collective guilt, and was diametrically opposed to...
...Gair, however, made a great contribution to the firm - - he put me in touch with Russell Kirk...
...We did a few books of outstanding quality, but didn't have sufficient capital to put it over...
...It was our first real success...
...Miss Utley was the first established author to appear on our list, and a following book of hers, The China Story, which we published in 1952, was our first book to make the best-seller lists...
...The war, Which represented the triumph of good over evil, had been won...
...To understand what has happened since, one should have some understanding of the general atmosphere of the immediate post-war period...
...an entire issue of the alumnae magazine was devoted to it...
...Then we decided to try to build up a college test book list, and brought in a retired text book traveller, Sidney Gair, to put together a list...
...Fulhri~t, Yale University, 3 April 1971...
...His book on this subject, Our Threatened Values, was declined by his former New York publisher, who, by the way, had published the Morgenthaubook, and somehow he came to me...
...Its impact was immediate, and beyond all expectations...
...This seemed highly promising for a time, but the publication of God and Man at Yale put a stop to that...
...Sen...
...It is probably difficult even for those who experienced it to believe that it could have happened...
...Jr., and it gave enormous pleasure and satisfaction to its publisher...
...I read it during my vacation, and what an inspiring experience that was...
...the PeaceI~ving Nations, joined together in San Francisco in a perpetual bond, would preserve peace, protect the weak, and guarantee the rule of democracy - - the future seemed assured...
...Our first step in this direction was an arrangement with the Great Books Foundation to publish paperback editions of the books required in their program, paperbook editions of the classics being not then available...
...J. William Fulbright "The source of an effective foreign policy under our system is Presidedtial power...With their excessivelyparochio al orientation, Congressmen are acutely sensitive to the influence of private pressure and to the excesses and in, adequacies of public opinion that is all too often i~morant of the needs, the dangers, and the opportunities in our foreign relations...legislators display a distressing tendency to adhere to the dictates of public opinion, or at least to its vocal and organized segments...
...I published it, along with another book by Gollancz which consisted of his account, with photographs, of several visits to Germany during that first terrible winter following the war...
...The liberal press, which meant nearly the entire press, still fighting fo~" its illusions, ignored it, but such an influential publication as the Christian Century gave it a long and serious review, and it doubtless had some influence on American policy...
...The following year we had another - - William F. Buckley's God and Man at Yale Frank Hanighen, who had published a piece on Yale by Buckley in Human Events, told me that Bill, who had just graduated, was writing a book along the same general lines...
...Then Time magazine--as a result, I ieat,~d later, oi a s u ~ k , n of Whittaker Dialogue of a Schizophrenic The Rt...
...The A l t e r n a t i v e October, 1971 15 policy in Germany, which he felt was leading to mass starvation, was based on the Nazi doctrine of collective guilt, and was diametrically opposed to every principle the West stood for...
...But to get back to book publishing...
...He replied at once, and a few months later God and Man at Yale gave Yale and the entire liberal establishment a shock from which it has never recovered...
...We published it the following spring, and after much deliberation called it The Conservative M/rid...
...Her strong sense of justice and her scorn of hypocrisy were outraged by what she saw, and the resulting book, The High Cost of Vengeance, appeared on our list in 1949...
...for those too young to remember, it must seem entirely incredible...
...the Liberal could believe, in fact, that no other position was conceivable...
...it is to the credit of the New York Times that it reviewed the book favorably and at length, although Miss Utley blamed the Times for helping to create the illusions concerning the Chinese Communists which had disastrously influenced American policy...
...This, I think, is the explanation of the violent, irrational hatred by the Liberals of McCarthy - - he has become for them the symbol of the influence that brought their illusions down to earth...
...Fascism, militarism and colonialism had been banished from the earth...
...Whether the book had any positive influence on Yale is doubtful, Yale's selfesteem at that time being pretty solidly entrenched, but it helped to launch the career of William F. Buckley...
...Miss Utley was an authority not only on Communism, Communists and Fellow Travellers, but on Asia as well, and made it her business to put things down as she understood and saw them...
...a commission was appointed to report to the Trustees on its allegations...
...We needed a "back list," some books which would be steady, reliable sellers - - a cook book, for instance, or text books...
...For nearly a week after the book appeared on prominent member of the faculty after another in the most ponderous, professorial manner, inveighed against "the book" as it soon came to be called in the Yale News...
...It was carefully denied...
...And Madly Teadh by Mortimer Smith which received much attention and was widely read, William Henry Chamberlin's America's Second Crusade, The German Opposition to Hitler by the distinguished historian, then at the University of Chicago, Hans Rothfels, several important books in philosophy, including James Collins' The Existentialists, which is still in print, to mention only a few...
...It received leading reviews in the Times, HeraldTribune, New Yorker, Saturday Review, etc...
...Only if one subscribes to the cult of the 'strong' Presidency which mesmerized American political science in the fifties and early sixties can one look with complacency on the growth of Presidential dictatorship in foreign affalrs...a good Executive is not one who strengthens his own office by exerdsing his powers to the legal utmost and beyond, but one who, by respecting the limits of his own authority, contributes to the vitality of the constitutional system as a whole...
...The daughter of one of the early Fabians, she became a Communist in the early twenties, while a student at th~ London Scool of Economics, but some six years in Soviet Russia as the wife of a Russian made her about as antiCommunist as one can be...
...There were reviews everywhere, columns, letters to the editor, interviews with the author, all any publisher could ask for...
...Another early author of ours was Freda Utley...
...Liberalism reigned supreme and without question...
...of course, that the commssion had anything to do with "the book," which made it all the more apparent that "the book" was its sole reason for existence, and, as was to be expected, Yale completely exonerated in its report...
...Sen...
...There were, of course, other books - - a witty little book on vrogressive education...
...In 1948 she went to Germany as a correspondent...
...If Bill had been a nobody or the book without basis it could have been ignored, but that wasn't the case--he had been Chairman of the Yale News a member of the debating team, an outstanding student, and, for a time, one of the president's prize exhibits at alumnae gatherings, and worst of all, his book was effectively written and based on fact...
...We were having some impact, it seemed, and some of our books had done well, but it wasn't enough to put the operation on a sound financial basis...
...Returning from one of his searches for desirable textbook projects, Sidney told me that a young instructor in English at Michigan State had completed a manuscript he thought I should look at...
...It was a beautiful picture and questions about its conformity to the facts of life were not welcome...
...This came out just at the time MacArthur was dismissed from his command and when, as a conqueror, the whole subject of Asia, and particularly the loss of China to Communism, was at the center of discussion...
...The other book on that list, Max Picard's Hitler in Ourselves, was a study of Hitlerism, not as an exclusively German phenomenon, but as an expression of the sickness of the West, which had taken a particularly virulent form in Germany...
...Her account of the loss of China couldn't be ignored...
...He doesn't say much," Sidney said, "is about as communicative, in fact, as a turtle (how Russell has changed), but he ires a formidable intelligence, and when he gets behind a typewriter, the results are most impressive...
...I wrote to him immediately to ask if we might see the manuscript...
...I wrote for the manuscript which, as it happened, had just been rejected by Knopf, and a few days later the very neatly typed manuscript of The Conservative Rout, as it was then called, arrived in the mail...
...What Albert J. Nock said of World War I, that it was a "Liberal's war and a Liberal's peace," was even more true of World War II, at least insofar as this country is concerned...
...Fulbri~ht, Cornell Law Quarterly, Fall, 1961...
Vol. 5 • October 1971 • No. 1
