Editorial
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
Editorial/R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. The Harold Robbins Award • • Theodore H. White has devoted the past fifteen years to developing a new kind of book, a book alluring to the aural tastes of that...
...Just who dominated whom at those meetings between Huston and the panjandrums of the intelligence community is subject to Holmesian speculation, but it is clear by now that Huston, White's "menace to the republic," did not...
...In fact, viewed with respect to historical accuracy, Breach of Faith can be read as a sustained insult to the Organization of American Historians...
...At another point he speaks of America's ethnic diversity in such exaggerated terms as to leave the impression that the United States is at one with the Austro-Hungarian Empire...
...Thanks to White's amazing gusto for the art of the Methodist ranter, he has succeeded in his quest...
...My suspicion is that a White book on American political thought would be even more half-baked than his present work...
...It is a chapter of exceeding beauty, though its perceptions are variously incomprehensible, ignorant, and only intelligent when plagiarized from writers like Josiah Lee Auspitz and Paul Weaver...
...According to figures made public by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on September 25, the Federal Bureau of Investigation committed at least 238 surreptitious entries from 1942 to 1968...
...According to the author: (1) "What he [RMN] did not understand was the past—or the reasons why Americans so long ago had originally put so much potential power in the office he held...
...White will receive the entire paperback library of the works of Harold Robbins (used...
...Close its cover and it still chatters away...
...It croons...
...White's literary breakthrough they can write about a book that will not shut up...
...The Nixon disaster has ushered in the new 94th Congress—overwhelmingly Democratic, refreshingly vigorous, more determined than any Congress since 1866 to curb Presidential authority...
...Here is how it all began...
...And for any intelligent reader here is where it all should end...
...Bury it beneath pillows and it will not relent...
...It covers the period during which Richard Nixon played cat and mouse with reality: the reality that for some 42 years Presidential conduct both visible and arcane has often been unconstitutional, the reality that a President cannot hoodwink a Democratic Congress for long unless he is a Democrat, the reality that bureaucracy has become an informal fourth branch of government possessing veto power over the legislative and executive branches, the reality that about half the nation's press corps is neurotic, and, finally, the reality that Mr...
...At one point he erases from the record practically every Presidential Administration since the late Mr...
...Conduct Unbecoming: Veddy British, veddy stiff, veddy bloody dull: Ind-jah late in the last century, and an "incident" in the regiment precipitates a kangaroo court trial of the accused and rather diffident officer...
...Ah, yes, what a magnificent Congress, and what a magnificent book...
...niscent of Genesis...
...3) "...the presidency the supreme office, would make noble any man who held its responsibility...
...He has written a book whose gasconade and bombast could waken the dead...
...We see RMN struggling up from the log cabin, passing through the searing experience of California politics, treading water as Vice President behind one of the greatest dog paddlers in American Presidential history, and finally the most searing experience of all: a Presidential campaign against John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and the Democratic voters of several populous cemeteries...
...For once in this age of ripoffs of the old horror flicks, a winner...
...It provides us with all sorts of luscious information about RMN, his associates, his adversaries, and his country, everything except that one transcendent fact that everyone must know to understand RMN, to wit: he had a biological aversion to principle...
...Le Chat: Jean Gabin and Simone Signoret make as much as possible of Georges Simenon's depressing tale of the married couple communicating by note, she having killed his cat, he having decided to punish her thereafter with eternal silence...
...Under your reading light it lurches violently, and when you open it you are practically flattened as it roars its first orotund sermon and shrieks its first condemnation...
...That he also claims that the Huston Plan represented: (1) an ominous turning-point in the Nixon Administration, (2) a direct route to Watergate, and (3) a "Heresy, or truly dangerous thought," is sheer fustian...
...It is a glory: "Middle America had been without a great leader for generations, and in Richard Nixon it had elevated a man of talent and ability, a President so powerful as to change the world, so powerful that Richard Nixon alone had been able to destroy Richard Nixon...
...Radio and television have dealt crippling blasts to the publishing industry, but White has with his quadrennial tomes been striving to overcome these electronic monsters...
...Something about fixing boxing matches...
...Bravo...
...The Congress has astounded and delighted all observers by its first efforts to make the Congress responsible to the changing needs of a new generation of Americans...
...In White's hands this political biography takes on the proportions of an American saga...
...Here is where White's book blows up as a work of history or of journalism, and where it becomes devastatingly obvious that White in his windiness is either unable or uninterested in chronicling events accurately...
...That White never mentions this in all his verbosity about RMN is suggestive...
...It is (continued on page 36) 4 The Alternative: An American Spectator January 1976 EDITORIAL (continued from page 4) manifest that he does not do it for the sake of historical accuracy...
...It's spooky as all get out...
...The plan went into effect on July 23, 1970 and was withdrawn on July 28, 1970...
...Up until now reviewers could write of a book that they could not put down or a book that they would never forget or a book that changed their lives, but now with Mr...
...Because White's blowzy analysis of Huston and his plan is pivotal to White's analysis of Watergate and the coverup, it is the most crucial of his misstatements—it is not his last...
...Lots of chills, eerie performances by Keir Dullea as an easily rattled pianist, Olivia Hussey as his girl friend, and enough terror to make Hitchcock's Psycho seem like Bambi...
...Breach of Faith is historical revisionism at its most preposterous...
...Bill Cosby and Sidney Poitier once again in dutch with the hoods...
...Unfortunately, White never describes the conditions attendant with Watergate and Nixon's resignation quite so sparingly...
...Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you the 1975 winner of the Harold Robbins Award, Theodore H. White...
...It is the noisiest book ever printed...
...White is one of the most garrulous writers ever uncorked on these shores...
...Nothing much matters, but the spirit's willing and the flesh is understandably weak for this sort of spoof...
...Next to him Hubert Humphrey could be a model librarian...
...What White calls the Huston Plan was a plan calling for the restructuring of the American intelligence community and recommending various activities such as surreptitious entry, mail covers and interceptions, the penetration of reputed subversive groups, and the monitoring of international cable traffic...
...Breach of Faith is White's bombastic rendering of Richard Nixon's latest crisis, the Watergate pickle...
...For him history is soap opera, and one is remiss in narrating it unless he spruces it up with abundant quantities of hellfire...
...When you purchase it you purchase something more than a bestseller, you purchase a mother-in-law...
...It is the worst book of the year —a masterpiece of the disc jockey's art...
...As White sees them, James Madison and his associates were indistinguishable from an assemblage of Rexford G. l ugwells...
...What matters is sheer noisiness, noisiness to lure from their tvs and radios those wretches who need stupendous jolts of excitement to make life worth living...
...Tom Charles Huston, a staff assistant to the President, "because he was a favorite of Bob Haldeman, because his ideas had reached the President, he could sit with the masters of American intelligence, commanding millions of dollars and thousands of agents, and dominate all but one of them, J. Edgar Hoover...
...Drop it in the bath and it hisses, it gurgles, it drones on, invincible and unabashed...
...Diamonds: Shelley Winters has all the best lines, playing an American Jewish widow tromping around Israel, but she is wholly incidental to the story, which has to do with a Britisher (Robert Shaw), his Negro accomplice (Richard Roundtree), and the Diamond Exchange in Tel Aviv...
...The recommendations had been made to the President through his young White House aide, Huston...
...If Breach of Faith continues to be the gorgeous success that it presently is, history will remember White as the man who revolutionized book publishing, degrading old Gutenberg's art to a level about which Marshall McLuhan could only fantasize...
...The penetration of groups adjudged subversive is old hat...
...His knowledge of the Founding Fathers is memorable...
...Let's Do It Again: The inevitable sequel to last year's Uptown Saturday Night, which, like the original, is light and frothy, jivey good time, fluffy but sprightly...
...That White can seriously suggest that a 29-year-old White House transient "dominated" the chiefs of the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the National Security Agency would strain the faith of a Boy Scout...
...It is written for people who do not like to read...
...On September 24 former CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton testified that his agency had illegally intercepted all mail to and from the Soviet Union from 1952 until 1973...
...Possibly White puffs out such stuff to keep his audience awake or away from the tv...
...according to disclosures by the Senate Committee on November 5, international cable traffic was monitored by the National Security Agency from 1947 to May of 1975 without the knowledge of any President since Harry Truman...
...The performances, although splendid, cannot rescue the "plot," such as it is, from unremitting boredom...
...It shouts at you...
...Then we get another of those sweeping biographical sketches for which White is so justifiably famous...
...Can you guess that the gentlemen have grand theft on their minds, that Shelley waddles in and out at soft moments, and that you've seen the robbery before, in Topkapi and about nine other flicks...
...By chapter five White has roared and sobbed portentously about the numinous qualities of the Presidency and the enormities about to be perpetrated by RMN...
...Enough stiff upper lips to revive the Empire, but also enough bargain-basement Freud to bring back mother love...
...It bellows...
...Lies My Father Told Me: Cross Duddy Kravitz with Fiddler's Tevye, situate the story in Canada, find yourself the cutest little Jewish kid on the block, give him a wise but cratiky grandpa, a weepy momma, a bumpkin papa, a neighborhood whore with heart of unkosher sandwich spread, a gossipy yenta, the village (continued on page 39) 36 The Alternative: An American Spectator January 1976...
...but his votes on foreign affairs always, under Truman, were enlightened and supportive...
...This is a book for the modern aural audience...
...As you carry it home it begins to stir beneath your arm...
...It is the worst book of the year...
...McKinley's by declaring, "Richard Nixon and his men were, for the first time in American politics since 1860, carrying on an ideological war...
...none was more hopeful than the crowning myth of the presidency—that the people, in their shared wisdom, would be able to choose the best man to lead them...
...These are exciting times in which to live...
...he had broken with the faith that had glued Americans to each other in the beginning to make a republic...
...It vaticinates...
...Subsequent to the publication of Breach of Faith various government investigations have revealed not only that the intelligence chiefs have been free of the duress of Huston but that they have been tolerably free of the influence of several Presidents...
...Yet whereas some revisionists twist the record because of their ideology or because their wives laugh at them for lingering at the bottom of the academic ladder, White revises the record because to him the record does not matter...
...Nixon, despite White's earlier encomiums, is an untutorable second-rater withdelusions of grandeur—a Jay Gatsby remodeled...
...2) "Of all the political myths out of which the republic was born...
...Next to RMN Stalin was a philosophe...
...Alexander Haig is pleading with him to rise to the occasion and retire, and Peter Rodino is weeping in the Capitol while Gerald Ford furiously burns his entire wardrobe of double-knit suits...
...It is just as clear that the Huston Plan is no more a causal antecedent to Watergate and the plumbers than Breach of Faith is a causal prelude to the Presidential candidacy of Linda Lovelace...
...Scarlett—and no Butterfly McQueen for miles...
...Michael York carries on nobly as the defending attorney, James Faulkner has very dreamy eyes as the accused, and Susannah York flashes her teeth quite a bit as the aggrieved Mrs...
...More suggestive still is the following: "His votes on domestic affairs were conservative...
...His story begins with RMN hunkering under his desk, hoping that the American people are unable to comprehend plain English when they hear it on tape...
...Such balderdash is characteristic...
...The Harold Robbins Award • • Theodore H. White has devoted the past fifteen years to developing a new kind of book, a book alluring to the aural tastes of that vast throng of Americans whose ebullient spirits would wither into mere smudges were it not for the constant companionship of hundreds of millions of radios providing soundtracks for their lives and of millions more tvs illuminating their stupefied faces wherever they pause to roost...
...David Brudnoy Brudnoy's Film Index • • ^ Black Christmas: Retitled from Silent Night, Evil Night, under which name it bombed, this gripping chiller plays with a brutal fellow going 'round killing young ladies and their sorority house mother...
...Now White has us gathered up around him in a fever to find out how it all began...
...Next, White discusses recent changes in American life, slipping into a tone astonishingly remiTHE WORST BOOK OF THE YEAR Breach of Faith: The Fall ofRthhard Nixon • by Theodore H. White Atheneum $10.95 HONORABLE MENTION Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape by Susan Lee Brownmiller Simon & Schuster $10.95 The Fight by Norman Mailer Little, Brown $7.95 *For his achievement, Mr...
...Soon it is gushing forth with its message...
Vol. 9 • January 1976 • No. 4
