The Nation's Pulse

...They move as the stream moves, to fall as the leaves fall...

...Yes...

...Suddenly the Supreme Court has reversed itself...

...The misconception which should be straightened out, then, is the idea that.the so-called Huston Plan was a Watergate blueprint...

...systematic derangement of the senses--suggest a midwesterner's rowdy imitation of long-ago Chelsea decadence...

...Poor old Sam, for years he has defended the rights of individuals before the law, but inject a little moral zeal into him and before long he is afflicting his fellow citizens with the same kind of abuse that he once chastized Senator McCarthy for practicing...

...It must have been at a meeting of our local chapter of Common Cause where I first heard my high-minded colleague, Tyrrell, asseverate his famous maxim that "for American politicians moral zeal seems to have the properties of a hallucinatory drug or of Unitarianism, for whenever one is bitten by the stuff he generally becomes obsessively idiotic...

...The methods of intelligence gathering included monitoring the mail of selected targets, surreptitious entry to procure vitally needed foreign cryptographic material, wiretapping, and so on--all perfectly standard if in some cases infrequently used modes of intelligence gathering...

...Clor sharply criticizes the Justices for their failure to confront the case for regulation of obscenity--a case, he says, which is '~nowhere examined and nowhere refuted" by the Court...

...He is distressed by recurrent difficulties in the Court's thinking as well as by the increasingly permissive cast of its findings during that period...

...Among large sectors of the population arose an antinomian mood of resistance to all tradition and all authority...

...If, as everyone would admit, adults can be affected by good literature, why not by evil literature...

...Madison and Jefferson were wary of censorship, Clor notes, "but they did not deny that a power to restrain some forms of expression must reside somewhere in government...

...Nor does it seem to matter to Senator Ervin that his career has benefited from the testimony of an admitted perjuror whose transgressions against civil liberties are a matter of historical record...

...Because the White House and Huston refused to do nothing, beth have come under fire from the Monday-morning quarterbacks of the Ervin Committee...

...Although the memorandum suggested no intrusion into domestic politics or Watergate-type activities, and even though Huston had left the White House in the spring of 1971, a full year before the Wateergate break-in, Ervin and his colleagues apparently decided that the fact that Huston had once worked for the White House was pr/ma fac/e evidence of his complicity in some comprehensive plot to turn America into Chile...

...Of what else should anyone die, in such a book...

...The surprising reason for this quality of theirs is that they were all, by election as well as by birth, men of the nineties, the true successors (transatlantic branch) of Walter Pater's di~iples, of Dowson and Symons, Wilde and Lionel Johnson, the men of W.B...

...In conclusion he says: '~Political violence at the end of the d e c a d e . . . may not have brought about a revolution--but it was the closest thing to it that an ongoing society could imagine...

...The fact that Huston's memo originated not with Huston but with the various intelligence agencies has yet to be mentioned...

...If the decisions of the Warren Court are murky and inadequate, where can we turn for guidance...

...As a matter of fact, one of liberals' allegations against Edgar Hoover had long been that the FBI was involved in wasteful duplication of functions...

...A Second Flowering, he suggests at the end, to match the first flowering, in New England eighty years before...

...Now, unexpectedly, the pendulum is swinging back...

...Despite the fact that Huston was dealing with subversion, not party politics, despite the fact that Huston was not even distantly associated with Watergate, but was merely a twenty-nine-year-old liaison man with intelligence agencies who was attempting to do what liberals had been asking for years, Sam Ervin in all his back-country, Consider The Alternative The Alternative February 1974 19 Bible-quoting wisdom has marred Huston's record for life...

...And yet, in an era of rampant ideological warfare, two of the rarer political virtues are apt to be prudence and humility...

...Having Joyce, Pound, and Eliot for mentors and the war for a public crucible serves to disgxtise this inheritance without reducing its latent power...

...Ervin and his committee have repeatedly dragged the "Huston RelSort" through the committee's proceedings without ever giving Huston an opportunity to respond...

...Supported by increasingly permissive Supreme Court rulings, the advocates of unfettered selfexpression and the "new morality" appeared triumphant...

...At the time I first heard it I was struck by the collossal idealism of the remark, and now after months of witnessing the Senate's foremost civil libertarian in action I am convinced of our gentle editor's timeless wisdom...

...The so-clalled Huston Plan recommended that the government establish a coordinated intelligence community to intensify coverage of individuals and groups which posed a major threat to internal security...

...Edmund Burke Writing home from the trenches of France in World War I, an unknown American soldier advised his son, '~When a man begins to be certain, he begins to be a fool...

...In the recent hearings, Senator Ervin, long a proud spokesman for civil liberties and due process, has personally dragged through the dirt the names of many innocent men without even allowing them the opportunity to defend those actions which he in his zeal has condemned...

...It may be the prodigy of the age, but I seriously doubt that it has done much to clarify the issues at stake in the Watergate spectacle...

...we simply do not know what they thought or intended about obscenity...

...Clor next proceeds to explode a number of misconceptions about the Founding Fathers' views on free speech...

...Compare the merely very skillful Wolfe chapter, where we always sense that the colorful anecdotage is coming at secondhand...

...On the contrary it was a proposal written in an extraordinary period of our history and intended to prevent violence and domestic strife...

...But if they can engender enough fear, they can generate an atmosphere that will bring out of the woodwork every repressive demagogue in the country...

...Or perhaps endure...

...Huston observed the growth of the violent radicalism long before Kirkpatrick Sale wrote his book, but his plan to counter the violence was not a t all the scheming of a wild-eyed reactionary...

...Clor is particularly skeptical of some libertarian arguments, such as the "tenuous and disputed theory" that obscenity operates as a "safety valve...

...President Nixon had been alarmed by this unprecedented violence and asked J. Edgar Hoover, Richard Helms, Admiral Noel Gyler, and General Richard Bennett to prepare a report on national security and 18 The Alternative February 1974 to submit options for future policy...

...Who is your father?'") Malcolm Cowley too is bent on recovering moments...

...Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within...

...Kristol in turn has been strongly influenced by the Straussian political scientist Walter Berns, whose own important essay on the subject appeared in the Public Interest in 1971...

...According to other sources, during that same period radical violence managed to close some 500 colleges and universities...

...He cites Leonard I~vy's contention that the very men who adopted the supposedly "absolute" First Amendment actually left in place federal prosecutions for seditious libel...

...Hart Crane's visible career--dixmkenness, bisexuality, suicide---and also his poetic procedure---magpie connoisseurship of exotic words...

...What I do with my life is my own affair--not yours, and certainly not the government's...

...Then he shouted to Monte, 'My father is a millionaire...

...Lionel Johnson would have nnder,~tood...

...But 20 The Alternative February 1974...

...Massive infusions of obscenity into society might well help to "desensitize" citizens and to subvert the "convictions" and feelings that support "moral standards...

...Faulkner's first writings were hand-medown ~nineties" poems, cummings and Dos Passes belonged to a Harvard group that called itself the Aesthetes and, Cowley tells us, tried %0 create in Cambridge, Massachusetts, an after-image of Oxford in the 1890s...

...The book's longest views m'e taken at the beginning, in the chapters on Fitzgerald and Hemingway, where we learn on firsthand authority how it was in Pro'is, how the war ~_~eemed to Young Americans, how the peace seemed, what the act of writing seemed to imply...

...Later the very army disintegrates, Frederic Henry is a different man forever, and Catherine Barkley dies of multiple hemorrhages...

...rather, it has dragged his name into the Watergate mess as if he is indistinguishable from the average John Dean...

...Unless this stuff was stopped, the country was going to fall into the wrong hands...

...In addition the late 1960s witnessed the formation and growth of militant black and Chicano movements...

...The question he raises in putting these chapters together with others less distinguished though necessary to his pattern is the question of the meaning of the pattern: what exactly that generation of his signifled...

...He points out that Madison and Jefferson, the most libertarian of the Founders, regarded the First Amendment as a restriction on Congress only...

...His whole Crane chapter, an evocation sustained for twenty-five pages, calls up a temps perdu suffused with affection...

...In 1969 the armed forces recorded a 25 percent increase in the desertion rate over the previous year...

...Not only were the recommendations legal, but they had been widely practiced by the previous four presidents and their attorneys general...

...Their passions forge their fetters...

...Such a period was the late 1960s in America...

...It is or...

...On the contrary, if a real threat to the nation's security did exist in 1970, either from the violent Left or in the form of repressive reaction, someone had to offer a course of action...

...In short, no one has decisively proven that "salacious literature" directly affects overt conduct...

...In this area we must interpret the Constitution for ourselves...

...Among intellectuals, Irving Kristol, a ~eader of the "neo-conservatives," has written a memorable article, "Pornography, Obscenity, and the Case for Censorship," b y Harry 12...

...This point, said Justice Burger recently, is "categorically settled...

...Above all, the revived intellectual rationale for limited censorship has been articulated most thoroughly by a scholar named Harry Clor in a book already recognized as a classic in the field...

...Minnesota and Michigan fueled the gem-like flames that crafted those books...

...The leaves, his narrator recalls, "fell early that year," and the soldiers marched by leaving "the road bare and white except for the leaves...

...Yeats ~ ~Tragic Generation...

...And it was a plan to streamline the American intelligence organization--something that had been advocated by thoughtful liberals for years...

...First, he analyzes the argument of Justices Black and Douglas that the Constitution absolutely prohibits censorship...

...What seems to be taking place in Ervin's committee--at least with regard to Huston --is a remergence of lynch law, but I guess that was to be expected from a politico bitten by moral zeal...

...With it appeared an uncompromising ideology of "do-your-own-thing," of pure and total laissez-faire as the sole principle of political (or antipolitical) phileslesophy...

...Because Huston's plan advocated the legal use of surreptitious entry and wiretapping to counter threats posed by violent domestic and subversive foreign groups, and then, two years later paid employees of CREEP used the same tactics for clearly illegal partisan political reasons, the implication has been made through a fantastic leap in logic that Huston was in some way responsible for the Watergate break-in...

...During the 1969-70 school year alone, the U.S...

...An intellectual counterrevolution has begun...

...it certainly did not prevent the states from limiting "licentious speech...

...dained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free...

...The remainder of his book may best be described as a long and formidable demolition of one objection after another to the moderate but necessary restraints on expression which Clor advocates...

...To refer to it as the Huston Plan is imprecise, misleading, and unfair to Huston...

...When barricades are raised and symptoms of decadence multiply, the appeal of all-purpose political panaceas often becomes irresistible...

...The committee has given no indication that it will ever give Huston his day in court...

...Clor University of Chicago $9.50 also in paperback $2.50 in the New York Times Magazine...

...It is up to judges to decide whether a "slight restraint" upon speech really constitutes an "abridgement" of the overall "freedom of speech...

...Tie smashed Montgomery Schuyler's collection of records and tried to throw the phonograph out of a second-story window...

...Published in 1969 and more recently in paperback, Obscenity and Public Morality is an indispensable book for all who seek to establish a free yet civilized society...

...Clor argues forthrightly that '~the widespread circulation of obscenity, particularly when legally protected, can so affect the moral atmosphere of the average man that virtuous dispositions are inhibited and vicious ones encouraged...

...Judges," he warns, "cannot reasonably assume, without argument, that obscenity is harmless to individuals and to society just because it is indulged in voluntarily and in private...

...Yet even if Clor estabhshes that obscenity control is arguably constitutional, he still must answer the objection that obscenity is not a political problem at all, that it has no harmful effects on other people or the community...

...Clor further demonstrates that the Founders were primarily concerned with political and religious speech...

...Only a few years ago the trend seemed inexorable...

...W. Aid.ridge, discussing Cowley's book in ti~e November 1973 Commentary, pronounces that the Cowley writers ~had one ~biding interest, themselves when young," and that along with their creations they ,-~ti]l project "the clarity of outline, the individualiW, and the eternal openness which, as a rule, only young people of college age seem to possess...

...the more there must be without...

...The resulting memo that fell into Senator Ervin's hands was not a plan authored by Husten...

...Cowley's generation were the first-rank minor talents...

...That needn't be claimed...

...As a result, Huston fell victim to the Senate Watergate Committee's nationally-televised ax, and his reputation has been eternally stained...

...Kirkpatrick Sale, in his recent book SDS (Random House, $15.00) documents much of the violent activity of the growing radical movement...

...in Miller v. California (1973) Chief Justice Burger and the majority have rejected the notion that "anything goes" and instead sanctioned the suppression of some forms of obscenity...

...It was Huston's duty to summarize the report and to grade the suggested options...

...To the strictures of moralists and traditional conservatives, the retort was blunt: "Mind your own business...

...The Constitution, as interpreted by the courts, allowed these sorts of activities until a Supreme Court decision of June 19, 1972, two years after Huston wrote his memorandum...

...Clor begins with an analysis of Supreme Court decisions from the Roth case (1957) to Ginzburg (1966...

...Maria...

...Yes...

...In the first place the so-called Huston Plan was not a Watergate blueprint...

...According to a New York Times interview with Huston on May 24, 1973, "a handful of people can't frontally overthrow the government...

...It is more than enough for the honor of twentieth-century America that two Americans helped shape the great age in which Mr...

...What can be claimed for them is that they availed themselves of a certain transatlantic detachment to transcend the premises of decadence as much as they did: that they made a substantial native literature out of wrecking their lives, in several instances, as thoroughly as many English lives had been wrecked in the decade of their birth, on principle but to no avail whatsoever...

...Through it time pours, an tmstanchable wound, and what memory and prose have fixed, as the nine~ies prescribed, is the brief being of what never again will be...

...Over 2000 political demonstrations occurred in the nation's high schools...

...When Cowley is reliving his book is alive...

...Huston would have ended all this...

...A second charge leveled against Husten's memo, to which Huston was not allowed a reply, is that the memo advocated policies that were illegal, unprecedented, and totally out of line, not only with previous Executive actions, but also with regard to the proper balance between presidential and congressional control over the various agencies of government...

...In 1970 Huston, who was then the President's liaison man with American intelligence agencies, received the order to submit a proposal for keeping the Executive well-informed on the radical I~ft, which then seemed to be threatening the very workings of the government and had stopped the day-to-day operation of hundreds of colleges and universities...

...As long as what we did was r as long as it was done voluntaVAy and privately, as long as it supposedly did not interfere with others, who could object...

...The meaning of the First Amendment, he argues, is neither ~elf-evident nor self-defining...

...The Supreme Court has consistently held for a generation that "obscene matter" is not protected by the First Amendment...

...This is a grave misrepresentation, and despite the Ervin Committee's reluctance to do so, some things need to be set straight...

...it had nothing to do with party politics...

...Obviously the average man can be moved by what he roads, and that includes obscenity...

...So it was in an attempt to spare the country from the threat of a violent clash between the New Left radicals and reactionary demagogues that Huston carried out White House directions and compiled his memorandum...

...Protest demonstrations involved over 60 percent of the nation's college students, or over 4,350,000 people in over 9000 protests...

...Hemingway, though he could reduce a magic moment to "Maria...

...After a meticulous scrutiny of the current data, Clor concludes that the evidence is mixed...

...The specific targets of this network included not the Democratic National Committee or any of the numerous Democratic presidential candidates, but violence-prone and student-related groups...

...To be sure, the First Amendment states that Congress shall make "no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech...

...Finally, it's not Husten's fault that Congress eschewed its responsibility to control the CIA...

...Nowhere, perhaps, was the new ideology more successful than in the field of obscenity and pernography...

...A memorable example of Ervin's dishonorable behavior is the case of Tom Charles Huston, a young White House functionary who in 1970 put together a memorandum on a plan of government surveillance of foreign and domestic groups then threatening the country's security...

...Far from those battlefields and those times, we may grant that the soldier overstated his point...

...Here Clor seems to be on solid ground...

...What is far more important, I believe that it has advanced still further the capability of government to intimidate, harass, and slander free and innocent men, the Bill of Rights notwithstanding...

...Not, Clor insists, to the principles of inflexible, unmodified libertarianism...

...Both sides can cite experts and studies to support some of their contentions, while on many points reliable evidence is not available...

...As the social fabric unraveled, such conservative ideals as moral consensus, individual self-control, and duty to others were frequently stigmatized as repressive, even totalitarian...

...To that end, they ritually "discussed the music of Pater, the rhythms of Aubrey Beardsley, and, growing louder, the voluptuousness of the Roman Church and the essential sanctity of prostitutes...

...In fact the proposals made by Huston-including those concerning wiretapping and surreptitious entry to procure needed documents--were legal in 1970 when they were made...

...He lacked the style for it...

...He criticizes libertarians for their superficial exploration of possible "long-range effects of obscenity upon mind and character...

...His Senate investigation may have accomplished many great and noble things...

...And Congress, in keeping with its recent practice of failing to act and at the same time bemoaning the fact that the Executive has become too powerful, did nothing...

...Treasury Department estimates that as many as 2800 politically-inspired bombings of buildings occurred, resulting in millions of dollars of property damage and several deaths...

...It must be remembered that the violent Left in 1970 was growing in prominence, numbers, and degree of violence at an alarming rate...

...Yet, Clor replies, the Constitution does not specify precisely what an "abridgement" may be or what the Founders actually considered to be ~'the freedom of speech...

...Still, some judgments are possible...

...And for all the uncertainty of the specialists, surely everyone would agree that children can be influenced substantially by what they read and hear...

...There is no English Gatsby, no English In Our Time...

...Maria," could elsewhere be as eloquent as Walter Pater about what vanishes forever, telling us on the opening page of A Farewell to Arms how the water moved past the pebbles and the troops past the house, "and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees...

...And if children, why not also adults...

...To these charges, one can only point out that they are based not on fact, but have gained credence simply because they have been made with no chance for reply...