Letter from a Whig
Slemp, C. Bascom
readers aged six to eight or eight to ten in the New York Times Book Review are written. I was ten when I read all the 286 pages of The Errand Boy, and from there could go on to Hemingway,...
...said: "I believe that we, as representatives of the people, should know the truth about the people who are doing the lobbying...
...The issue, indeed, is not the rightness or wrongness of the war in Vietnam...
...from Trinity College and his LL.D...
...But Wills never delivered a message to anybody that bode anyone good, only the dry seeds of dead fruit garnered from a twisted tree in a lifeless desert...
...In a surgical operation complete in a footnote, Oakeshott isolated the element in Marxian literature which may have--shall we say enticed?--Bevan into her--admittedly not unqualified--conclusion that Marx was no speculative Rationalist: "By casting his technique in the form of a view of the course of events (past, present, and future), and not of 'human nature,' Marx thought he had escaped from Rationalism...
...Garry Wills m a y have discovered the title for his book on first looking into Bertrand H. Bronson's Johnson Agon/stes, published in 1946...
...Wills wanted him to be toppled before Watergate was translated from the Bible (Nehemiah: 12, 37) to Washington, D.C...
...In this case, we have been subjected to the oratory of a woman who is, according to her own statements, a believer in communism and an unregenerate partisan of the North Vietnamese Communist cause...
...he can never get a square meal of experience...
...Even here our author is not being authentic...
...l)whether the House of Representatives should: "allow supporters of communism the use of facilities of the U.S...
...The widow's name was Ethel Field...
...But, ! do question--and I condemn--the use of taxpayers' facilities to provide her a public platform to proclaim those views...
...C.P...
...The older empiricists were all the way empirical, taking note of the primordial datum that the moderns affect to ignore--that men differ from stones and statistics in that they think, feel, and believe...
...Now, in the environs of the Post (any Post, Washingtonor New York) he has become a well-paid "earner," which not only makes him feel cheated, but a cheat...
...Expressing concern that some Americans might not be aware of Fonda-Hayden's sympathies, Congressman Roger Zion (R.Ind...
...But contrary to the District committee's policy, the Fonda-Hayden seminars were not open to the public, and a number of congressional aides (including myself)were even refused admittance...
...A sweetened boy's breath...
...We understand you and we have a common enemy, U.S...
...offered the following opinion: '~Fhe good people that I represent were appalled by the spectacle of Jane Fonda and her group of antiAmerican radicals using a committee room of the Congress to conduct a seminar against American imperialism...
...There is a right way and a wrong way to do anything...
...Duberstein, incidentally, for those who aren't up on the Washington scene, was listed by Cosmopolitan magazine as one of Washington's most eligible bachelors and Duberstein has seen fit to list this "recognition" in the Congressional Staff Directory...
...As a result of the Fonda-Hayden activiThe Alternative June-September 1974 21 ties, a small group of incensed congressmen went to the floor of Congress to hold a "Special Order" and voice their disapproval over the "misuse" of congressional office space, and to discuss the policy procedures involved in allowing members access to committee rooms for private use...
...I have had the honor of visiting your country...
...In particular, it is an affront to the men and women in uniform in Southeast Asia...
...There was a century between Burke and Marx, but the pretechnical world of learning was one, just as the universal church was still at least pan-(Western) European, its language received as a matter of course by secular scholarship...
...Marx only as far as acknowledging that men by nature are not %ribeless, lawless, hearthless," much less atoms awash in nihilistic vacuum...
...Bevan makes all these points with clarity in behalf of her protagonists in her chapter '~Philosophical Foundations" and elsewhere...
...No one makes it on his own _9 . . [this is] a cruel hoax...
...Do you think there would not have been an uproar raised in the national press and over the TV networks that would not have even subsided today...
...The answer is no...
...I think it was an indiscretion that the use of a committee meeting room was chosen by Jane Fonda and those who support her causes...
...chairman of the Americans for Democratic.Action, recently sent out a fund-raising letter 22 The Alternative June-September 1974 given the use of the same space...
...On the other hand most representatives feel that they could return to their districts before the election and portray a willingness to vote for impeachment if the evidence so indicates...
...As do, of course, in fact, the behavioralists themselves: so that their valuefree findings are apt to be free only of the values of their adversaries and chock full of their own...
...There is also a strong sentiment in Congress that it would be politically wiser not to make an impeachment vote a campaign issue...
...Such use of any of the facilities of the Nation's Capitol is an affront to all Americans and an insult to the hallowed and historic halls of the Capitol of the United States...
...Stephen Daedalus (in U/ysses) observes with compassion one such boy in his classroom: "A bag of figrolls lay snugly in Armstrong's satchel...
...A Dellums' aide, Mike Duberstein, made it quite clear to us that congressional aides could attend the meetings upon invitation only--and we were not about to be extended an invitation...
...Shuster made the following remarks: "There have been those today who tried to cloud the i s s u e . . . I would like to emphasize what the issue is not...
...Ives The Alternative June-September 1974 23...
...It will be noted that young Bianchi was not at all "sycophantic," anymore than was Phil, the pretotypal "errand bey" in Horatio/tiger's story...
...Not even Burke could have put it better...
...After all, Phil Brent, the sublime "errand boy," is all the things that Wills finds hateful in Richard Nixon...
...Bevan has intimations from time to time of the empiric logic that gnaws at her thematic Marx as empiricist...
...That is a right guaranteed under our Constitution and our Bill of Rights to every American, irrespective of persuasion...
...Beth are, rather, Empiricists, Realists in the popular usage, though not quite Pragmatists in the cramped and vulgar meaning nowadays given that term in trendy political discourse...
...Let us count the ways in which the lady advances her theme...
...Crazy Jane's Salvation Show A READING FROM the spicy pages of the Congressional Record...
...to those who were held prisoners by the Communists, and to those who are missing in action in Vietnam...
...Under House rules, however, any congressman can request space in a committee hearing room...
...Aristotle, a f a r all, was the author as well of the Ethics, just as laissezfaire Adam Smith wrote not just The Wealth of Nations, but (as Burke remembered), also The Theory of Moral Sentiments...
...So Burke warned against the revolution that returned France to an authority tighter than the Old Regime, after an erosion of consensus persisting to this day, and not only in France...
...Self-made men are not bold, spontaneous, free...
...The "evil" words finally extruding from his phlegm-encrusted throat, Wills explodes: ~Only the most resolutely self-deceived 'earner' can make the boast ~I never get something for nothing.' And only by a cultivated solipsism canparts of the middle class keep saying 'Wemade it on our own, why can't they...
...But to date, no action has been taken in that direction...
...is awarded for almost everything, Karl Marx was certified as a Doctor literally of Philosophy in the rigorous University of Jena...
...Concurring with that opinion were, in fact, a number of Vietnam POWs who were visiting Capitol Hill on the day the "Special Order" was being held...
...none has created so vast an intellectual proletariat, with nothing but its technique to l o s e . . . " Nor is that all...
...As a matter of fact, she called the POWs liars when they returned home with tales of the horrible deprivation they had suffered...
...And what Bevan fails to prove is that Marx, despite some renunciatory gestures, ever did shake wholly loose from speculative Rationalism---a claim, indeed, from which she herself begins to recede in the later pages of the book...
...That is the message of Alger, although he never delivered messages...
...Equally critical was Alabama congressman, Bill Dickinson, who pointed to the "hypocrisy" and the "double standards of the left-wing media": "Who of our so-called opinion molders have you heard raise their voices in opposition to such action and even raise an eyebrow...
...And from these dry bones he...
...What do you think the reaction of those same great 'civil libertarians' would have been if the same space had been loaned to .the Ku Klux Klan, for instance...
...I say the answer to this question is no...
...The concern, then, of the members of Congress who spoke out against Jane Fonda was (as expressed by John Rousselot [R.-Calif...
...He was kind and decent and he trusted his own trust---and it was that which finally brought him reward...
...On Impeachment In their recent newsletter Evans and Novak reported that the House of Representatives appears ready to vote for impeachment by July, in which case it is quite possible that Mr...
...Representative Donald Fraser (D.-Minn...
...Marx, abstracted into the dialectic from t h e reality of Bonapartism, put his shoulder to the revolutionary wheel which started at Kaiser and Czar and turned in friction and fury full circle to Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler...
...That is why he could endorse Phil Berrigan's cruel condemnation of our tortured returning POWs as %vat criminals...
...Drastic punishment," asked Florida Republican, Skip Bafalis...
...Be it remembered that Aristotle himself was troubled by the ethereal quality of Plato's remarks on revolution...
...Sources t have spoken with, however, do not believe a vote on impeachment would come until after the November elections...
...And Aquinas had seen to it that Aristotle of the Peripatetics (the Walkie-Talkie School...
...Considering the press coverage received by Fonda-Hayden, and the lack of coverage given to those members who criticized the seminars, it is probably worthwhile highlighting some of the comments offered by the membership critical of the FondaHayden seminars...
...Why should he...
...He had come to do small chores for her, to tend to her when she was too ill to go out...
...I was ten when I read all the 286 pages of The Errand Boy, and from there could go on to Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner...
...And they also hoped to set in motion new procedures which would prevent the recurrence of a similar incident...
...Crumbs adhered to the tissues of his lips...
...he hates him because he sees him with the bloodshot eyes of the elitist fanatic who feels chronically deceived and denied...
...Privately, however, most of the members questioned Dellums' judgement for his participation in and support for the seminars...
...Not even Aristotle...
...This ADA attitude plus the partisan political nature of the House Judiciary impeachment inquiry has served to bring disenchanted Republicans back into the fold...
...he had also said that the citizen of any European state was at home in any other, and so that the old Christian dom, though broken now into warring states and quarreling schisms, was still a cultural principality, sounding of the past out of which it had come...
...In the Republic," Aristotle says, "Socrates treats of revolutions, but not well . . . He only says that the cause is that nothing is abiding, but all things change in a certain cycle...
...Did he who made Jane Fonda make thee...
...Nixon could be standing trial in the Senate when The Alternative resumes publication in September...
...I strongly condemn the crimes that the United States government representing the American people is committing in V i e t n a m . . . '~Ve . . . support the Vietnamese people's struggle...
...Wise in such matters, Representative Dellums, therefore, then requested that the chairman of the District of Columbia Committee, Charles Diggs (D.-Mich...
...The issue today is not whether there are political prisoners in South Vietnam, and if so, whether this is right or wrong...
...Well, we still haven't heard the real horror...
...Ora pro nob/s...
...Bevan gives highly important testimony in distinguishing this Aristotelian empiricism from the ~valuefree" brand of the contemporary '~behavioralists...
...Volution is from volvere, to roll...
...Arriving amidst the fanfare trumpeted by the Washington news media and cast in the rolo of a romantic folk hero and people's lobbyist, this past week actress Jane Fonda and her accomplice (husband Tom Hayden) arrived in town.~aanks to the generosity of an accommedating faction of the membership of the House, Miss Fonda and company have taken up residence in a Judiciary subcommittee room, courtesy of the United States taxpayers, where congressional staff personnel will allegedly be educated in the facts of life . . ."---thus spoke Congressman Robert Price about the arrival of Crazy Jane's Salvation Show, an amusing occurrence save for the fact that American taxpayers picked up the tab...
...Hayden were not able to conduct t h e i r lobbying activities in a House Judiciary subcommittee room...
...was part of the sound...
...But all that she actually proves is that though her principals have indeed gone to school at the Lyceum, they agree on only one point--doubtless the most important--of The Philosopher's teaching: that anarchy is impossible since man is a social, hence, a political animal, not just _9 hypothesis but by direct observation of his behavior in half or more of the jurisdictions of Greek antiquity--Sicyon, Chalscis, Syracuse, Carthage, Lacedaemon, ~ontini, Sicily, Gela, Rhegium, to name those cited on a single page of the Politics...
...The issue . . . is should an American who gave aid and comfort to an enemy against American POWs in time of war have the use of the taxpayers' facilities in our Nation's Capitol to continue her near treasonous treacheries...
...Quaint as it seems in times when the Ph.D...
...The seminars held under the sponsorship of Congressman Dellurns were, according to Representative Price, entitled "American Imperialism," and they focused on the _9 so-called atrocities and crimes against humanity which ai'e being committed by the "Thieu clique," and which are being supported by the United States government...
...Wills loves Jane and Tom (Hayden) and the Berrigans and the Black Panthers, and all the things the hated 'hniddle classes" fear, because he is a fat boy with sugar-coated lips, out of the same class which, while it could provide him with a classical education, did not provide him with the talents to make it either as scholar or classicist...
...It is freedom of speech we are told...
...Most committee chairmen will usually approve~such requests, with the expectation that the member requesting the room will exercise proper judgement in deciding for whom to request space, and how the space will be used...
...imperialism . . . "The United States society is not an answer to those who seek happiness" From a speech at Michigan State University, the following Fonda quote was also cited: "I would think that if you understood what communism was, you would hope, you would pray on your knees that we would someday become Communist...
...The signs of Marx's deviation from Aristotle begin to show in Bevan's chapter on "Social Application," mount in '~l~ne Politics of Reality," and climax in Chapter Five, '~ne Politics of Change...
...Nixon Agon/stes...
...who had requested the use of the room on behalf of California Congressman Ren Dellums, the Fonda-Hayden sponsor--withdrew his request after he found out what the room was to be used for...
...The statements Miss Fonda and others issued so willingly to condemn our involvement in Southeast Asia were the tools the Communists used to pry so-called confessions from the POWs...
...preaches a message of contempt for his own shortcomings...
...Congressman Bob Sikes (D.-Fla...
...Language, Burke had said, was the cement of society...
...but since he had taken the precaution, of first turning the course of events into a doctrine, the escape was an illusion...
...to comfort her, and to take her %ips...
...No, unless it is the willof this House that such facilities be made a v a i l a b l e . . , there is not one shred of evidence, there is not one scintilla of evidence that such is the will of this House . . . [and] hell shall freeze over before it will be the will of this congressman...
...What would the reaction have been if, say, the Palestinian Liberation Front were vania Republican E.G...
...On that I have no question...
...Not really," continued the congressman...
...And because of Fonda's antiwar activities, during the Vietnam War, former POW Colonel Day, charged that Fonda's "treasonous actions strengthened us [the POWs], while the morale of the North Vietnamese was in turn lifted because they thought overwhelming American opposition to the war at home was about to bring down the government and end American involvement...
...honoris causa after the usual interval of four decades...
...They go on to study the classics whence they emerge stuffed with nonsense like the palindromic Revilo Oliver, or they come out--Garry Wills...
...And when the lies spread by Miss Fonda wouldn't break their spirit, they turned to torture...
...With a flair for history and eloquence Representative Jack Kemp (R.-N.Y...
...James Thompson went even further: '~She and others like her were traitors and I see no reason why they shouldn't be hung for it...
...It was there that her anti-American carnival was held...
...The following news item tells us something Wills never understood about America and something he doesn't understand to this day: ~Pips amounting to more than $50,000, including a fortune in old silver, were disclosed yesterday to have been the reward of a supermarket delivery bey who befriended an elderly widow who l i v e d alone on Manhattan's East Side" (New York Tim~s, December 11, 1973...
...The boy from Whittier, California (not even from the East Coast...
...Evolution is ex-volution, revolution re-volution...
...offered the following remarks: "I do not question Jane Fonda's right to proclaim her views...
...It was not a literature for fat boys...
...Is it indeed...
...Marx and Burke DR...
...The point is that Garry Wills despises Nixon for his virtues, not for his frailties...
...The generation of rationalist politics is by political inexperience out of political opportunity," says Michael Oakeshott, a modern Aristotelian, writing in the metaphor of the horse fancy, of which his knowledge is by no means abstract...
...The intensity of my feelings is, however, mitigated by one sure fact: America and its institutions will long survive Jane Fonda and her causes...
...BEVAN PROPOSES in this thoroughly researched and earnestly argued study that Burke and Marx are intellectual brothers not far under the skin--that both are Aristotelians, hence anti-Rationalists, counterIdealists',h-Raalists in the technical senses of the last two categories...
...Like Midas, the Rationalist is always in the unfortunate position of not being able to touch anything, without transforming it into an abstraction...
...Here one may ask: Who and what made Garry Wills...
...Thus men were admonished on the whole to prefer growth to cataclysm, evolution to revolution, the middle of the path to the edge of the cliff...
...The boy's ~Ame is John Bianchi...
...Some of the tortures these men were made to suffer are so grim that even now, after a year of freedom, they cannot bring themselves to speak of them...
...Would it be freedom of speech then...
...provide space for the Fonda-Hayden activities in the D.C...
...The membership was careful not to criticize Representative Dellums personally for his role in the Fonda-Hayden seminars during the "Special Order...
...All the agon is here, in this exquisite little study of Samuel Johnson, but not the nastiness that attracted the editors of the New York Post to serialize Wills' opus...
...Through the "Special Order" the participating members attempted to show their disapproval over Fonda's use of congressional committee rooms...
...he doesn't understand that Homer was blind so he could refrain from gazing upon the follies of men, especially those who put spite above sympathy, and envy above competence...
...without so much as an inkling of what is contained in Aristotle (or in Bart/ett's, Garry's most frequently thumbed volume), pushed his way up the ladder of success to reach the summit from which vantage Wills would topple him...
...He curled them between his" palms at whiles and swallowed them softly...
...Burke, she recalls, had his M.A...
...Yet the distinction is elementary etymology, and surely etymological precision is urgent in the discussion, risky at best, which determines the state and fate of nations...
...Now Miss Fonda denies that American POWs were ever tortured...
...But as suggested, she shows Burke to have embraced historical empiricism entire...
...Putting the Fonda-Hayden Capitol Hill lobbying activities in perspective, Pennsylsaying that sentiment for impeachment was waning and that additional funds were necessary to rejuvenate the impeachment drive...
...There is simply no compassion in the man...
...but it is the theme rather than the intimations which prevails in a nonetheless scholarly and instructive work...
...And for that he will forgive no one, least of all himself--or Horatio Alger, Jr...
...and that the origin of the change consists in those numbers 'of which 4 and 3, married with 5, furnish two h a r m o n i e s ' . . . . " Now that is really speculative rationalism...
...Ours was a lean literature made for boys who knew the joys of catching a ball on the fly or playing stickball on the streets...
...The almost evenly divided public sentiment on impeachment concerns any congressman because of the uncertainty of response an opinion on impeachment would elicit from the electorate...
...They are cramped, full of pretense, diminished-Richard Nixon...
...all such he left to his ~delivery boys...
...committee meeting room...
...Lt...
...But such "sweet" boys do not join the renghand-tumble games of their schoolmotes, nor wore they taken in to our two-for-anickel movies...
...exis out, away from...
...Here is the essence of Alger...
...and indeed the issue is not that of free speech in America, because I believe most of us, or all of us, defend Miss Fonda's right to dissent here in America...
...It is in the same tone that we read this denunciation of Alger in Nixon Agoniste~ ~The evil of Horatio Algerwas not that he made an apprentice hustle sycophantically in the wake of the millionaire, but that he distilled the poison that (only a touch of it) turns the s a i n t l y . . . into the sanctimonious, e.g., Richard Nixon...
...Representative John Conyers (D.-Mich...
...To offer support for Zion's charge a number of congressmen quoted various Fonda remarks, including the following from a Hanoi radio broadcast: "I am Jane Fonda speaking to you in Hanoi...
...The result in political science, forming Burke and Marx alike, says Bevan, was an Aristotelian theorem of factual observation, straitly limited to people as they were and are, and then a generalization of such behavioral patterns as could be demonstrafed to survive variation in time, place, A Revisionist View by Ruth A. Bevan Open Court $7.95 and nurture in the promotion of community...
...Congress as a forum for the dissemination of their propaganda...
...Actually Miss Fonda and Mr...
...Wills, of whom it could have been predicted that he would find it easy to slide .down the ecclesiastical greasepole from Cardinal Newman to the Berrigan Brothers, does not like Horatio Alger...
...There is, indeed, at times an almost blurring of the two terms evolution and revolution...
...re is back, hack to a former state or position---a mere return to the starting place, but worn, eroded by the friction of the turn-around--at best a squeaky wheel, at worst an ominously broken one...
...Moreover, "nothing in this field can compare with the work of Marx and E n g e l s . . . They are the authors of the most stupendous of our political rationalisms--as well they might be, for it was composed for the instruction of a less politically educated class than any other that has ever come to have the illusion of exercising political power . . . No other technique has so imposed itself upon the world as if it were concrete knowledge...
Vol. 7 • June 1974 • No. 9
