A New Isolation: Threat or Promise

...According to Halberstam, whose instinct is to personalize history, the tragic flaw in these men was their personal hubris, their corresponding ignorance of the world, and their unthinking allegiance to the empty notions and slogans of the Cold War...

...But while Hoover, Thomas, and Taft believed that the United States owed the world nothing except a good example...

...This is not to say that Halberstam is a liar or a fraud- clearly he is neither...

...Much the same can be said of the blacks, the helping professions (and increasingly all professions), the various mass media (especially the movies), and so on...

...it is also, and more importantly, the fact that, contrary to the pattern of the last decade, it is Halberstam's polemic rather than insiders' sentimental memoir which has risen almost to the top of the best-seller lists, and the Times' expose rather than "Years of Lightning" which has attracted the breathless attention of the news magazines...

...In Halberstam it is sketched laboriously and yet crudely, while in Fairlie it emerges more elegantly and in greater detail and coherence, but in both cases the underlying message is plain: the mess in which the United States found itself in the second half of the 1960s - especially the mess in Indochina, but also the shambles into which our domestic affairs had degenerated - was the direct and ineluctable consequence of the flawed and corrupting political styles of John F. Kennedy and the men whom he appointed to high office and whom Lyndon Johnson later inherited...

...Indeed, in some areas - one thinks particularly of the Democratic party and Women's Liberation - the ideas of the 1960s have actually gained ground and power in recent years...

...The second crucial fact which should caution us against prematurely pronouncing the sixties dead is the presence, power, and apparently undiminished potentiality of one of the few people - perhaps even the only person, and in any event the only known person - capable of re-mobilizing the now-disorganized forces of the sixties...

...In November, network TV showed "Years of Lightning, Days of Drums," a cinematic potboiler in the same general adulatory vein as the films of the Nixons shown at the GOP Convention in Miami last year...

...But my reaction to his work is rather like his and Fairlie's reaction to the Kennedy Administration...

...campus disruption and violence reached a peak in 1970 and disappeared immediately from public awareness and almost as quickly from the academy itself...

...the New Politics, so expansive in 1968, would appear to have been discredited by the debacle of 1972...

...the right wing was graced by Herbert Hoover, Harry Elmer Barnes, and Senator Robert A. Taft...

...And step by step more force and coercion must be applied until all liberty - economic, personal, and political - is lost...

...The first is that, despite the great differences between the authors' political positions and between their talents as political journalists, the themes of the two books are startlingly similar, indeed almost identical...

...James Grant The Alternative February 1973 WEAVER (continued from page 4) gan in 1964 ended in 1968 and have not recurred...

...for him as for the Kennedy men, style and personality is all there is in politics, institutions and "objective conditions" don't exist...

...the drug revolution, the sexual revolution, radical chic, the mini-skirt, Black Panthers - all have faded from our consciousness...

...Fairlie, an Englishman, was not personally involved in or altered by the Kennedy-Johnson years...

...The "new isolationism" proposed by Robert W, Tucker of Johns Hopkins University bears a plausible, but by no means perfect, resemblance to its III-fated predecessor of less than forty years ago...

...Eleanor Roosevelt once said of John Kennedy that she wished he would show a little less profile and a little more courage...

...what is more, they were arrogant and contemptuous toward those who suggested their data might be inadequate or their conclusions open to doubt...

...if there has been a retreat from the habits of activism, there has been no retreat from the ends in behalf of which students and faculty once practiced activism...

...Tucker argues for American participation in peaceful international projects and economic aid to the Third World...

...One of these is the publication by Random House of David Hal-berstam's The Best and the Brightest ($10.00), a lengthy and rather supercilious polemic against the men, style, and policies of the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations...

...What they wanted, simply and to a man, was that the United States forswear entry into a second world war...

...the intense waves of public concern over civil rights, the poor, the war, ecology, and other such matters seem to have receded, and nothing has yet taken their place...

...There is nothing new in the gist of Tucker's analysis...

...What is interesting in all this is not just the appearance of an anti-Kennedy literature...

...Later, many looked with undisguised glee on the possibility of a final military showdown between Stalin and Hitler...

...Feelgood" who, it turns out, was often in the company of President Kennedy, who routinely injected his patients with large doses of amphetamine ("speed") in order to produce a sensation of altertness, vigor, and generalized well-being, and who is known to have treated JFK on a few occasions (though with what medication, if any, has not been established...

...They were men of immense energy and ambition who were bent not merely on maintaining and improving the nation, but on mobilizing its powers and the sentiments of its people in behalf of strenuous new objectives...

...one does not trust it to be honest, to be reliable, to have been guided at all times by the aims that are appropriate to the activity he is engaged in, to maintain a clear distinction in his own mind between the world of affairs on the one hand, and the world of wishes, dreams, and illusions on the other...

...First, there is the fact that while all the movements, personalities, ideas, and moods that characterized the sixties have undoubtedly lost their cutting edge and elan, they still retain their troops, or anyway their constituencies...

...And if the Cold War rekindles, could the United States assume a position of leadership after having forsworn any future international involvement...

...Books can sometimes educate or crystallize opinion...

...Fairlie is something like a model political journalist: he is calm and deliberate, quick to understand, scrupulous about facts and about the limitations of his evidence, attentive to institutions and doctrines as well as to personalities, aware of the nonjournalistic literature on politics yet unwilling to pose as an academic "expert" or to pretend that his knowledge is more comprehensive than it can legitimately claim to be, and concerned above all not so much to move his readers to action as to inform them and to move them to thought...

...All united as one under the gaudily ecumenical banner of isolationism...

...We will probably never know what would happen if Tucker's book became foreign policy, and given the brashness of his proposals, Tucker himself may be as relieved on that score as the rest of us...

...They argued for the soundness - moral and strategic - ot going it alone internationally and in the powerlessness of the United States to effect lasting changes in the world...

...Central to both old and new schools is the conviction that if necessary, the United States could get along with very little foreign trade...

...Isolationists believed in the impregnability of the Western Hemisphere (if Hitler couldn't cross the English Channel, they asked, how could he land an army in New Jersey...

...The third event was the New York Times' recent expose of a widely-known New York City "Dr...

...The academy, for instance, exhibits more or less the same distribution of opinions today as in 1968...

...Concerning the Halberstam and Fairlie books, there are two observations to be made...

...I refer of course to Senator Kennedy, and more importantly to the peculiar public appeal with which he is invested as the heir to his two martyred brothers and their legends - the myths of Camelot, of the Unfinished Presidency and the Unachieved Presidency, of the politics of style, of charisma, of transcendence, of glory...

...They had an overweening sense of their own capacities to shape and control events in the manner of their liking, or in conformity to their particular, expediential requirements, and they placed great stock in the methods of rational analysis and the techniques of social science...

...And yet, until quite recently, the opposite view has seemed to me at least as plausible, for two major reasons...

...and perhaps most importantly, for him the evident object of writing is to tell a "good story," i.e., one that will mobilize people in behalf of his position and against opposing positions, that will help him and his friends and harm his enemies...

...What could be more unassailable than the prop: osition that the sixties are definitively over...

...These facts suggest the emergence of a new phase of our national appraisal and image of the Kennedys, a phase in which the old myths not only lose their luster but are challenged by a set of counter-myths, and so inevitably a period in which the Kennedy legend becomes less and less of a national obsession...

...The other observation I would offer is that these two books form an unwitting case study in the effects of the 1960s and of the Kennedy political ethos upon American public discourse...

...The United States should not merely withdraw from Indochina and dicker with the Russians for mutual reductions of strength in Europe - it should disown the entire postwar alliance structure, pack up its foreign bases, maintain a respectable nuclear deterrent, and say to hell with everything else...

...His ideas are the stuff that every student of foreign relations has toyed with, Mitty-like, at one time or another...

...Indeed, the personalities and movements which gave the decade its special character have themselves begun to confess defeat and failure, have become disorganized and demoralized, have, as it were, lost their voices...

...Both Tucker and his forbears argued that isolation as a policy is best understood metaphorically...

...neither school pressed for a literal quitting of the world...

...This possibility now seems much smaller than it did a few months ago as a result of three recent events in publishing and journalism...

...And in December there appeared yet another memoir of JFK by still more of his aides/confidants/hagiographers under the embarrassingly inept (and, let it be noted in its defense, deliberately ironic) title of Johnny We Hardly Knew Ye - a statement which Halberstam, Fairlie, and the more suspicious readers of the Times' story would wholeheartedly agree with, albeit in a spirit more of asperity than of sentimentality...

...Those on the Left believed that American involvement would only usher in military dictatorship at home: fascism through the back door...

...they were in fact the heart of the decade, its prototype and inspiration - and the perpetuation of the Kennedy legend by the mass media, by our politicians, and by the longings and memories of us all has kept alive, even under Nixon, the active possibility of a rebirth of the sixties under the aegis of a second President Kennedy...

...It is important to be clear on this: the person, method, spirit, and legend of John Kennedy were not merely a part of the sixties...

...Unless you are quite certain that, deep down, we all share her preference, don't be too sure that the Kennedy mystique is in fact dead, and don't be too surprised if, in 1980, when you look back, you decide that the seventies weren't so very different from the sixties after all.rent from the sixties after all...

...Herbert Hoover told the Council on Foreign Relations in 1938, "...democracies are first infected by the plausible motives of 'cure the business slump' through so-called economic planning...

...In the end, however, the fate of the Kennedy legend and of the spirit of the 1960s rests less with these books than it does with the impact of the Times' expose's innuendo, and less with all of these than it does with us...

...And Tucker, like the old isolationists, eschews moral crusading as the basis of foreign policy...

...Add to all this the fact that the past four years of the Nixon Administration, the prospect of four more, and the extraordinary size of Nixon's recent margin of victory...

...exclusively for foreign consumption and was not shown here until Congress voted to lift the restriction...

...exposes can create doubts or stimulate revulsion...

...A quotation by Senator Fulbright to the effect that a forward foreign policy is incompatible with domestic liberty seems to have satisfied Tucker in this regard...

...We can forgive Taft, Hoover, and Barnes an early misreading of the international situation because of their insight into what war might do to swell the already overblown state...

...None of these unlikely partners in peace believed that the United States should become literally isolated from the rest of the world, although most argued that such an alternative was at least strategically and economically feasible...

...But both view the Kennedy Administration as dangerous in principle and as destructive in fact, and both sound again and again- Fairlie by making frequent references to Caesar and to the Byzantine Empire, Halberstam by emphasizing over and over the personal defects of these menthe theme that the Kennedy legend is not merely exaggerated, but at bottom a total fraud and a source of authentic and continuing danger for the nation as a whole...

...Fascism and communism were as different, Nock observed, as competing brands of toothpaste...

...the spirit of crisis and confrontation, both foreign and domestic, that pervaded the decade has largely passed from the scene...

...according to Halberstam, the truth is that they were neither the best (who were really the Stevensonian liberals) nor the brightest, and the nation soon lived to pay the consequences...

...Isolationists of the late 1930s, wary of assigning moral superiority to any belligerent after the excesses of World War I propagandists, refused to acknowledge the causus belli of right and wrong...

...Tucker has called for a quitting of America's twenty-five-year vigil...

...What is finally missing from Tucker's "new isolationism" is the abiding mistrust of the state - a mistrust that provided the theoretical cornerstone for the old isolationism...

...The second is the appearance of The Kennedy Promise: The Politics of Expectation (Doubleday, $7.95) by Henry Fair lie, the British journalist, who has written a fascinating, even-handed, but quite devastating analysis of the entire political ethos and method of the Kennedys...

...he assumes a pose of omniscience, reporting as fact things he cannot possibly know to be fact and revealing not the slightest doubt about his evidence or his subject matter, not even the merest uncertainty about the character of the men or the exact identity and sequence of the events he describes at such tedious lengths...

...Every step in this direction requires another...

...Halberstam, by contrast, though he writes a good enough story, reveals a series of journalistic vices which almost precisely parallel the vices he identifies in the Kennedy men: he is arrogant toward his subject matter, tending to argue against those with whose judgments he disagrees simply by belittling them and by making them seem contemptible...

...To be sure, these are not the only recent developments in the Kennedy sector of our media industry...

...Conservatives argued that participation in a war would bring on the final triumph of "liberal" collectivism...

...what sets it apart from other anti-interventionist and "realist" arguments is its severity...

...Halberstam, of course, was one of the journalists who were most intensely and frequently in the thick of events, influencing them and being influenced by them in turn...

...If this is indeed what is happening - and only future events will confirm or disconfirm it - then I believe that we can say that the sixties are finally coming definitively and, for the time being, irretrievably to an end...

...it had been produced just after the assassination by the U.S.I.A...

...Book Review A New Isolation: Threat or Promise by Robert W. Tucker Universe Books, $6.00 A stranger political coalition may never be assembled than that ragtag band of pacifists, socialists, fellow-travelers, and conservatives that opposed American military intervention abroad in the late 1930s...

...His view of the Cold War - that it is over - may be premature, and his analysis certainly slights the role an activist American foreign policy has already played in relieving East-West tension...

...He has advocated what is probably an unwise course, but worse, he has not even done so for the right reasons...

...But events in the pubic discourse are no more than signs of future possibilities, and whether these come to pass depends, in the last analysis, upon us...

...But brashness is not wisdom, and there is much in Tucker's thesis that does not ring true...

...On the Left were such grand old campaigners as Charles Beard and Norman Thomas...

...According to Fairlie, the flaw was not merely in the character of these men but also, and more importantly, in the political method which they used to win the 1960 election and to conduct the affairs of state- a method involving the use of crises as occasions for the mobilization of national sentiment in behalf of transcendent goals as a means of ennobling and empowering themselves...