An Assassin's Diary

...It may seem a trifle wild, but this reviewer wouiu like to put forward the theory that Harding Lemay does not exist...

...rather that, under that fanciful signature, Arthur Bremer himself wrote the introduction to this volume in his most subtle effort to exonerate himself while passing off the blame for his crime on American society as a whole and Richard Nixon, ex officio...

...He ran the 18 The Alternative December 1973...

...With renewed enthusiasm, he stalks Wallace across Michigan and Maryland...

...While the need for attention grew ever more urgent, every effort toward it was foiled...

...Thus, much was neglected...

...I can see it in McGovern...

...He writes economically and unemotionally as he trails Nixon in New York, Ottawa, and Washington...

...And who decides who is a failure...

...During his period of office the terrible economic problems which beset the country today first gained a tight grip on the nation's throat...

...Macmillan was a man of yesterday and the day after tomorrow...

...Since it was Macmillan he rang with this rather angry view, there can be little doubt about who his sponsor was: but Macmillan has nothing to say...

...He made a herculean effort to shake off Britain's past: when Hugh Gaitskell, leader of the pretty nouveau arriviste Labour Party attacked the decision to enter Europe as a betrayal of a thousand years of history, Macmillan replied, "For them a thousand years of history--for us, the future," a remark that was astonishing from the leader of the history-drenched Tory Party...

...As a young man, he had already postulated that despotism forces man to live in a political ~animal kingdom...

...Though a competent domestic Prime Minister, he was no more than that...

...The pulverization of the mass of the population has not yet reached its saturation point either in the USSR or in Communist China...

...and there is evidence to suggest that when he discovered how much opposition his candidacy would meet, he felt betrayed...

...as his memory gathers dust in the Maryland State Penitentiary, Bremer is chalking up royalties on this copyrighted work...

...Bremer was rejected by a sixteen-year-old girl after a date late in 1971...

...The implications of these ideas are frighteningly meaningful...

...stuff, this collective breast-beating...

...but if the reader will pardon another lapse of professional modesty, I would submit that, if "Lemay's" introduction had been entered as evidence in the Maryland trial, Bremer would be resting comfortably today in a psychiatric ward, non compos mentis...

...In personal style, in temperament, in feeling, he was the last British leader (except Home--but he led only briefly) who was bred and formed in the great days of Britain...

...He exerted himself, by the grandiosity of his style, to conceal that fact from his fellow-countrymen, partly in order to assuage their hurt, partly in order to lead them deviously into a new future, that of the EEC, in which enterprise, though he failed, his lieutenant and ultimate successor Edward Heath has at least temporarily succeeded...

...Lacking an elementary knowledge of the lurepen Marxism that Mao had '~creatively developed," they are in all likelihood genuinely unaware that the military-industrial establishment of the Chinese (and Russian) Communists, which excludes any popular control of military and industrial power as we know it, is far less tolerant of socia] and intellectual freedoms than was customary under Oriental despotism...

...it is merely hidden from the society that betrayed him by cheapening the values we all live by and robbing him of meaning beyond what we can glean from these pathetic scribblings about his hopes, his fears, and his need for future renown, aspects of the human being we all share with him as we share the shame that produced him...

...Macleod and Powell refused their services, and many like-minded Tories their allegiance, because they believed that Macmillan had maneuvered the Home succession, which was thought to be the culminating move in a deep plot of his, running for many years, to deny the succession to R.A...

...His diary of the six weeks before his attempt to kill Governor George Wallace is a picaresque rendering of the Great American Flop...

...To the founders of the Chinese Communist Party, Mao included, the Marxist-Leninist concept of Asiatic society and Lenin's concept of the possibility of an Asiatic restoration had no reality, since, having been vulgar Marxists when they organized their party, they easily accepted the lumpen Marxist interpretation of "Asia" that had been ambivalently initiated by Lenin and ruthlessly consolidated by Stalin...

...But he knew those days were past...

...For example, readers in Britain avidly awaited two volumes in particular of the series--the one dealing with the Suez operation, and the present one, because it might be expected to give Macmillan's version of the strange sequence of events which led to the emergence of the Earl of Home as Prime Minister of Britain in 1963 (he was not elected, but chosen by the Establishment after a still uncertain amount of consultation with the Party's members of parliament), when illness forced Macmillan himself to lay down his burden...

...Butler, his deputy Prime Minister, and guru of the young Tories of the postwar generation...

...J.P...

...Mao did not betray the principles of socialism, to which he adhered officially, for the simple reason that for him these principles never had any meaning...

...He swaggers into a Forty-Second Street massage parlor,, laying down a $30 tip, but in his anxiety he walks out after a few minutes...

...The Macmillan memoirs have almost nothing of revelation, or indiscretion, nor even very much of special pleading about them...

...But there can be no doubt that the Chinese Communists, who at a very early stage of their revolutionary history, instituted atomizing controls in the territories they were occupying, were able, after their seizure of power, to initiate a policy of pulverization, not when they began their collectivization of agriculture in 1954, but as soon as they began their "land reform" in 1946...

...Mao, who had more to destroy agronomically, found it easier to assert total power in the villages in which the Communists had monopolized political and military organization twenty years before they occupied the whole of the Chinese mainland...

...These conditions require a variety of micro- and macro-analytical studies that are as realistic as the macro-historical concepts underlying them...

...Bremer was promptly clapped in jail for his near-deadly attack on Governor Wallace, but not before the bloodhounds from Harper's caught a whiff of his heady account of sensational crime (many a stomach churns at the recollection of the Harper's cover feature a couple years back, "Manson Wins--A Fantasy...

...he drives for hours in prey of Nixon, only to discover that the President has followed another route...

...Two ministers--the late Iain Macleod and Enoch Powell--refused to serve Home...

...In addition, like Macmillan, de Gaulle was a brilliant tactician of today: either man was more than capable of outmaneuvering, in the quotidian intrigues of politics, almost any rival or combination of rivals...

...Heavy...

...Acknowledging the grave contradictions in Lenin which many critics have ignored, we find tragedy in the career of a Lenin, whose Aesopian warnings against the neo-"Asiatic" trends in Soviet society reveal a pained awareness of having betrayed the principles of his socialist creed...

...His own place in history Macmillan sought to define by large brushstrokes: he wanted nothing less than to alter radically the history of his country, and even change its nature...

...And in this respect he based himself primarily on Marx, whose ideas, orthodox and classical, he knew extremely well...

...and whose government came to its end in the aftermath of sordid scandal and the breakdown of his own health...

...Marx deplored the fragmentation of the toiling population of Asiatic society, a fragmentation that left only the dispersed villages, the rural "atoms," intact...

...and he left the leadership of the Party the following year...

...his clearest expression of a motive is a desire to gain attention by publishing his diary...

...The Chinese Communists also proceeded with their Asiatic restoration against a much less clear radical intellectual opposition than had the Bolsheviks, and they did not suffer internal doctrinal qualms of the kind that plagued Lenin...

...Marx was motivated by a strong urge for truth which, together with his urge for power, dictated his behavior...

...A penny for your thoughts, Arthur...

...A final irony is that the greatest success in Bremer's life has been the publication of this chronicle of failure...

...Need I banter with the reader's intelligence any longer...

...And being suspicious of all "ideologies" their knowledge of Marx, the social scientist, and of his socio-historical thought is equally irrelevant, the evoking of Marxist slogans notwithstanding...

...But there is no similar tragedy in a Mao's career, because there is no similar awareness...

...he accidentally fires his pistol in a motel room...

...Macmillan denies that he intrigued for Home and argues--in my view with a great deal of justification--that the fourteenth Earl was the favored choice of a great majority of the parliamentary party: certainly, Home would have been, after his triumph at the party conference of October 1963, the choice of the party in the country, whose darling he still is...

...His last entry, recorded two days before the Wallace shooting, declares quizzically, "My cry upon firing will be, 'A penny for your thoughts.' " Mr...

...Their knowledge of nonMarxist theories of history and society is close to nil...

...At times Bremer's frustrated adventures take on the air of sentimental slapstick: he leaves his weapons on an airliner, only to have them returned by a conscientious hostess...

...Harper's Magazine Press published it...

...It goes without saying that if "Lemay's" assertion of President Nixon's complicity in the Wallace shooting were aired in open court, even America's conscience, Senator Weicker, would guffaw...

...In all likelihood they are genuinely unaware that, under the Chinese (and the Russian) system of total managerial power, man's social and human alienation--which according to Marx decreased qualitatively under the advancing Csocial") capitalism of his last years--is reaching a peak under the "communist" system of totalitarian power...

...he lost, though only narrowly, by Harold Macmillan Macmillan s Harper & Row will publish in January the general election of 1964...

...Lemay" pontificates: "So perhaps Bremer is, as he feared, 'just another god Damn failure.' If anyone can be a failure at twenty-two...

...As a retrogressive social revolution that moves toward the total alienation of man, the Chinese Communist revolution is catching up with, and indeed surpassing, the retrogressive social revolution that is occurring in the Soviet Union and in other parts of the "socialist" Communist world...

...Now, although he always relished that capacity of his--few politicians have enjoyed the game more than did Macmillan: he practically invented his Edwardian personality as a move in that game--Macmillan also looked to the distant future...

...Arthur Bremer is a thoroughbred failure...

...Snatched by a fit of mock-remorse, Bremer observes: "The whole country's going liberal...

...Applying Marx's classical view of Asiatic despotism to Russia, the core area of his revolutionary activity, and being as macro-analytically oriented as he was, Lenin quite understandably recognized the relevance of the concept of an Asiatic restoration to what he was doing in Russia...

...Bremer rented a limousine resembling Nixon's and took a room at the Waldorf-Astoria...

...And he has sixty-two more years in which to collect his prison memoirs...

...What has been gleaned from the records and recollections of his acquaintances is a picture of remarkable loneliness: the only friend of Bremer's that neighbors could recall was Thomas Neuman, who shot and killed himself on May 22, 1971, while playing Russian roulette...

...Still, the exasperated assassin writes, "no one looked at me...

...Thus, for the historian of detail, there is very little in these memoirs...

...a man who first tried to get Britain into the EEC...

...However, partly since they are in large part made up of a contemporary diary, they are extremely valuable for what they tell us about Harold Macmillan, the magician of modern British politics, a man who, when he came to the leadership after the Suez debacle, restored his party almost by sleight of hand, and led it to an election triumph in 1959...

...by Arthur H. Bremer introduction by Harding Lemay Harper's Magazine Press $6.50 Bremer's published entries are the travel notes of a man bent on killing President Nixon...

...Bremer has no particular cause to espouse...

...A colleague has told me that Macmillan considers the chronicle of his life, which closes with this volume, to be aimed, not at those reading it now, not even at the students of a next generation--but further on, perhaps fifty or a hundred or more years ahead...

...for his ingenuity at concealing a gun from customs agents, he loses it in the body of his '67 Rambler...

...Despairing of the plot to kill the PresThe Alternative December 1973 17 ident, Bremer looks to a new target...

...Among the latter, the concept of an Asiatic restoration is decisive, not because Lenin stressed it, but because it compels us, in the light of the macro-analytical (classical) view of history and society, to determine, first of all, what kind of societal change was involved in the Communist revolution in Russia...

...Stalin accomplished their pulverization through his collectivization of the rural economy...

...At a showing of A Clockwork Orange, he is taken by a fantasy of killing George Wallace...

...But recognition of these circumstances is not particularly helpful for evaluating Communist China's internal conditions...

...who presided over the final liquidation of the British Empire...

...Lenin was a brilliant macro-strategist, but he paid little attention to the ideas of social science except those that were pertinent to his practical aims...

...The first 148 pages of this unemployed busboy's journal, which he boasted would be read ~as closely as the Dead Sea Scrolls," are buried somewhere in Milwaukee...

...The Chinese Communists proceeded with their variant of an Asiatic restoration--without having to face a peasantry of the Russian type, which, having been sympathetic to a socialist peasant party, the Socialist Revolutionary Party, wanted a land reform that was very different from the one Lenin had been advocating since 1905 and particularly since April 1917...

...And it is a chronicle...

...Today's New Left extremists, who call for the creation of a more just and free society and who in their campaigns invoke Mao Tse-tung, are, of course, even more ignorant than he...

...You know, my biggest failure may well be when I kill Wallace...

...Marx found that the atomization in Asiatic society left man no choice but to vegetate...

...Duggan Andrd Malraux once said of General de Gaulle that he was "the man of the day before yesterday and the man of the day after tomorrow," meaning by this that the General drew his inspiration from a past often remote and cast his vision forward to a future equally distant...

...During the recent days of unprecedented bombings in Southeast Asia, I find it hard to believe anyone's life can match the failure of Richard Nixon's . . . . [Bremer's] life is not over, as he hoped it would be...

...But he did not consider its significance for China, to which for obvious reasons it applies at least as well...

...I thought I was coming as a healer," he said...

...But nowhere is there any account of how Alec Home came to be a candidate for the leadership: he did not put himself forward--he was quite unambitious...

...The Chinese Communists set up a system of total power in a world that, prior to 1911, had had no possibility of transforming their single-centered Asiatic society into a multi-centered non-Asiatic society and that, from 1912 to the thirties, advanced but slowly along this road...

...Recognition of these circumstances is essential for an understanding of PekingMoscow relations yesterday and today-and in a future in which there will be no Mao to hamper Peking's reassociation with Moscow, a policy that seems to have not ~a few supporters even now...