Myself When Young

...He respects the Scotty Restons and the Turner Catledges who grew up under his tutelage in the Washington Bureau for their reportorical capacities, but obviously thinks they never quite understood the genius of the traditional American republic, which once took it as Growing Up in the 1890s by Arthur Krock Little, Brown $6.95 gospel that the people should support the government, not vice versa...

...The hope of the present generation rests on strategic principles and diplomatic styles other than those of the Dulles years, which i s n o t necessarily an indictment of Dulles...

...My wife had just checked into the hotel and was up in her room unpacking...

...Every reader needs to have Dulles' era placed in a larger context, not just as to consequence or subsequence, but as to antecedents...

...For a fuller view of its gorgeous past read Margaret Case Harriman's Vicious Circle, a history of the Round Table group...

...His ancestry, mostly German-Jewish coming from Prussia, Silesia, and Alsace-Lorraine, trusted to family solidarity for social security...

...When it came to a big reshuffle in the Depression decade, however, the Times high command for his ability to live in Washington (work- made Charles Merz, Krock's colleague on ing for the Haldeman papers of Louisville, Kentucky, from 1910 to 1915 and for the New York Times from 1932 to 1966) without ever showing a single symptom of Potomac fever...

...Dulles thought it an error to believe that the foreign policy of any state was "due to the personal views and idiosyncracies of some . . . politician who may have temporarily secured an ascendance over his fellows...

...Arthur Krock had to work for what he got, He was bred to self,sufficiency in a world that was still half-frontier and halfimmigrant will-to-scrabble...

...It was a workaday world, and Arthur remembers stuffing geese with corn to fatten them for Christmas...

...But it was not arrogance or bluster or brash brinkmanship that contributed this character to Dulles' diplomacy...

...Arthur, always a combination of indulgent affection and acidulous objectivity, e ~ t s very little of politicians, which is a sensible American attitude...

...There's something in my room...

...Though not formally at war, the United States had been sustaining huge losses, and the prevention of further erosions of American security required Americans to be vigilant, energetic in endeavor, unified in spirit...

...And in Years with Ross James Thurber recollects his association with Harold Ross, founder and editor of the New Yorker...

...Her father, Frank Case, has a full account of the Algonquin in Tales of a Wayward Inn...

...Yes, the house cat, for your . . ." The bellhop finished the sentence with a wave of his hand, glancing uneasily from my wife to the second guest...

...Dulles' personality did affect American policy in the Eisenhower years, but not so fundamentally...

...Dulles, like other Americans, per- several years it would take the United haps more than many other Americans, Stages to close that first "missile gap...

...The bellhop smiled with relief...

...But the land helped too...

...Thus it was not moralism but appreciation for the psychic element of struggle that brought Dulles to employ a rhetoric of confrontation...

...Returning to her room an hour later, my wife stealthily unlocked the door...

...On two separate occasions Franklin D. Roosevelt, who hated Arthur's '~hooks and barbs," tried to get him fired...

...And Arthur Krock, with his inside track to such knowledgeable friends as old Joe Kennedy, began getting 20 The Alternative May 1974 his mysterious beats that made him as feared as he was respected...

...It would be an indictment of us if we had not progressed beyond the plans and understandings of the previous generation, for Dulles anticipated a different future than we do, just as he lived through a different past and confronted a different present...

...While confessing ignorance of the facts, I am willing to bet that the following has occurred: A hotel supply company that markets a remote-control, electromagnetic mousetrap--perhaps called the Gb-80 DeMouse-- sent a salesman to the Algonquin, but the hotel informed the man that "The The Alternative May 1 9 7 4 2 1...

...The nineties, in some literature, was the decade of Coxey's Army and the Depression of 1893...

...But it is difficult to argue that any or all of these elements of American policy and style were attributable to John Foster Dulles...

...He doesn't raise the issue directly in the gentle pages of Myself When Young...

...I have long marvelled at Arthur Krock Tunney--was much to be preferred to his former career of hobnobbing over bourbon with politicians...

...We had a working decentralization then...

...True, Dulles and Eisenhower left precedents and problems to their successors...

...I first knew him in New York City at the end of the twenties when he jumped from a doomed New York World to write editorials for the T/rues...

...Arthur himself was saved from backsliding by virtue of his roots in an America that younger fry could know only to be hearsay...

...Perhaps that is why Alternative types like Banfield, Campaign, Grant, Kristol, and Tyrrell never come to New York without putting in an appearance at the Blue Bar or in the lobby's elegant lounge...

...To be sure, the United States in Dulles' time was striving to be a great power rather than a great society...

...It was important that Dulles identified defense and security problems as paramount...

...The Washington news was soon flowing in such volume that the Times, in spite of itself, took on all the trappings of a national newspaper...

...Nor has the world gone to hell because of American policies in the Cold War...

...the con game in the New Deal period was still the con game, even when practiced by supposedly selfless creatures who talked about a passion for anonymity...

...The Do-Gooders of the thirties, who destroyed the old rural South by an agricultural policy that speeded the substitution of machinery for field hands on a smaller permitted acreage, set in motion an internal migration that, by the time of the nineteen sixties, had really created some slums (Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn, New York, for example) that are frightful beyond belief...

...The good reporters (Catledge, Reston) who had worked for Krock in New and Fair Deal times became the bad theoreticians of a later era (how do you beat the Zeitgeist...

...The critical insecurity of the mid-fifties was too frustrating to tolerate, but it was for a time beyond his power to alter in conclusive strategic terms...

...Arthur Krock despised Washington at the time, and it was no secret that he would have preferred to remain in the home office of his newspaper for the rest of his working life...

...Krock made Steve Early, the President's press secretary, miserable on more than one occasion, but Arthur Sulzberger, with a grit that was unexpected in a son-in-law successor to the job of publisher, stood by his Washington man even though the editorial page stance in New York and Krock's '2n the Nation" columns from the capital often diverged at ninety degree angles...

...The nice thing about Arthur Krock is that he can't hate his old friends even when they are backsliders from a most obvious common sense...

...She slammed the door and rushed to a bellhop, who was showing another new arrival to his room...

...The cat, meanwhile, had done its duty...

...From the corner of her eye, she saw a dark animal streak out of the closet and across the room...

...It was evidence of Dulles' intellectual habit of simplifying problems, of penetrating to the heart of issues and defining alternatives clearly even at the risk of fully accepted as policy even in mid-1974, oversimplification...

...Schooling was hit or miss, but there were good books around, and Arthur knew more about London (from Thackeray and Dickens) than anyone would get from the "social studies" favored today: Depression kept him from completing his courses at Princeton, but newspaper work in Louisville did for him what newspaper work in Baltimore did for H.L...

...The clerk promised immediate action...

...It was no easy task to bring the American people to such unity of conviction and purpose or even to convince them of urgency and perhaps of a need for sacrifice and dedication in the national interest...

...Frost, Frederick Remington, and Charles Dana Gibson...

...Tyrrell (Nzw Yom0--The hotel's worthy past notwithstanding, my favorite Algonquin story has nothing to do with Robert Benchley or Harold Ross...

...she exclaimed...

...Whatever it may have been, the Kingdom was not Glasgow's slum...

...was surely influenced by the development of massive insecurity and the conviction that things were getting worse...

...We may freely grant that Southern treatment of Negroes, even in border state Kentucky, was not precisely in accord with the world of the Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment...

...Likewise significant, Dulles preferred action over inaction, and there is no doubt that he moved at times without sufficient reflection, plantion of his conviction that the American diplomatic situation could hardly be worse, except perhaps in a time of general war...

...A cat...

...His mother, blind for six years after his birth, had to pass him over to grandparents and uncles for rearing, but it was still "family...

...He never forgot the lesson...

...Thomas H. Etzold B ok R iew Myself When Young ARTHUR KROCK, AN older American for freedom, retired some years ago at the age of seventy-eight as the Washington "In the Nation" columnist of the New York Times, but, bidding his sometimes faltering heart to take it easy, he still goes downtown to his old office for part of each day...

...In this edition of the Great American Saloon Series we see the Algonquin as it is today--as it has endured...

...and they were destined to get a hurts-memore-than-ithurts-you spanking in Arthur's memoiristic writing...

...It was by no means a matter of being kicked upstairs...

...Only a slightly distended belly suggested the gore of the battle...

...Arthur Krock, in his old age, has become that decentralization's laureate...

...She peeked inside to confront a pair of glowing eyes perched atop the television set...

...His business: writing nostalgically of a time in the United States that knew not the philosophy of those who succeeded him in the Times Washington Bureau...

...The bellhop regarded her calmly...

...He used to drop in at the small offices of the Times Sunday Book Review to tell of the delights of working in Manhattan, where mingling with prize fighters--Harry Greb, Gene the old World~ chief of the editorial page, and sent Arthur off to Washington to head a bureau which, with the sudden ladling out of all that New Deal alphabet soup, had taken a light-year leap in importance...

...Arthur remembers the graciousness of a tree-filled lawn in semirural Kentucky, but away from the lawn, in utilitarian array, stood the pump, the lye hopper, the springhouse, the icehouse, the smokehouse, the melon patch, and the privy...

...Someone once said of Dulles that he was a bull who carried his own china shop around with him...

...John Chamberlain The Great American Saloon Series by James Grant Hotel Algonquin and the Blue Bar In the twenties the Hotel Algonquin became a sort of haven for the famed Round Table, a group that included Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker, Robert E. S h e ~ , Alexander Woolcott, George S. Kaufman, and some of the staff from the New Yorker magazine...

...P.D...

...Now shrouded in an illustrious literary heritage, the Algonquin has never been more popular or profitable...

...But in those days the country could still save the city if only by providing a self-sufficient refuge...

...The absence of such a context leaves the authors unable to explain important aspects of Dulles' motivaning, or coordination...

...To complain because the previous generation did not resolve the problems we must face in our time is, after all, only to testify to the passing of one generation and the immaturity of another...

...Mortified, she rushed to the lobby and informed the clerk that she had seen a mouse...

...But anyone who knows a hawk from a handsaw can read between Arthur Krock's pleasantly brooding lines...

...Skeptical of government intervention, Arthur Krock is in a position to say "I told you so" to his journalistic successors...

...Oh, for m y . . . problem," my wife suggested, returning the gesture...

...Indeed, in the strategic terms of the middle fifties, the United States was attempting to maintain its position as the greatest power, for only in that position did the prospect of tolerable relative security lie...

...But the realist in Arthur Krock insists on pointing out to the likes of Tom Wicker that the quarter in Glasgow, Kentucky, known as the Kingdom, where the blacks lived, was better kept than the nearby poor white purlieus...

...The strategy of deterrence via equivalent power was at least two decades in the future, and has not been Dulles was realist enough or, one might insist, cynic enough to place more confidence in the exercise of power and the use of threats than in the arts of persuasion...

...If Dulles could help it, there would be no American confused or in doubt as to who were enemies of the United States, as to what tho~ enemies intended, and as to the serious threat such enemies posed in an era of dramatized insecurity...

...Arthur Krock grew up away from the big cities, where the Depression was really felt...

...It's a cat," he said...

...Mencken in the same period...

...It was also a manifestaBy its postwar experience, the United States had become inclined to denigrate international organization and to favor self-reliance, a proposition that certainly led to behavior and style that have mistakenly been described as the "arrogance of power...

...His unpretentious memoir of his Kentucky boyhood and newspaper novitiate, Myself When Young, deftly exposes roots that still keep the sap rising in octogenarian arteries...

...And perhaps postwar losses of security had introduced a modest paranoia into American approaches to foreign relations...

...There is much wisdom in one of Dulles' own observations on diplomacy...

...The murrain of the New Age has yet to infest the place, and the lilt of the more graceful era still lingers...

...As a "back-up" political reporter on the Louisville Herald, which strove to keep up with the be~er-heeled Times and Courier-Journal, Arthur discovered at a quite impressionable age that politics was "art, profession and con game" in subtly varying proportions...

...They were also the Gay Nineties, when "gay" had a more wholesome connotation than is currently attached to the word...

...But to blame Dulles for the fundamental principles, policies, and problems of the Cold War since 1952 perilously approaches promulgati0n of a "devil theory" as foolish and simplistic as that ascribed to Dulles in his combat with world communism...

...My wife vows eternal gratitude to the animal from refraining from outward displays of surfeit...

...As Hoopes emphasizes and Guhin acknowledges, Dulles was ready to exaggerate and stereotype the enemy--to distill complex cross currents of conflicting national interests and ideologies into clear-cut challenges and choices--if such tactics would awaken Americans to the risks and duties of American foreign relations in the mid-fifties...

...It was better to build fallout shelters and promote civil defense, even in the knowledge that such measures could hardly avail most of the nation's population, far better than to sit in frustrated paralysis for the tions...

...They were the time of the front porch, the genial local-color artist, the pleasant magazine draftsmanship of A.B...

...It concerns, rather, a mouse and a cat, and dignity, which is the moral of the tale...

...Tom Wicker had better meditate on the career of his predecessor...

...Dulles was not the devil, and the United States has not gone to hell because of what Dulles did or failed to do...