The way we are (sigh)

...Reading Hackworth you know what that passion is like...

...But for the most part, you can dip into America Observed on almost any page and find yourself both enlightened on a familiar point of history and awed by the author's inexhaustible felicity of phrase...

...Trust meant you'd risk your life for your buddies, because you knew they would do the same for you, and they'd never leave you dead or dying on any hill, for any reason...

...He brilliantly dissects the mystery of Barry Goldwater, whose honesty he admired and whose charisma somehow was never transmuted into national popularity...

...But though his hands were bloodied and his heart uncir-cumcised, he lived by his own fierce moral code, and About Face is as good an antidote to the revisionist apologies for America's "noble" involvement in Vietnam as you are likely to get...

...The frontier is still open," Fallows insists...

...Salvation lies in being able to pick up and start over again...

...A year later he lied about his age and joined the army...

...IH.95,245 pp...

...Reading Cooke on Thurgood Marshall's appearance before the Supreme Court in 1953 to argue the unconstitutionality of school segegration has an obvious poignancy...

...But Hackworth, who won a battlefield commission in Korea at the age of twenty, also is reputed to be the model for Marlon Brando's megalomaniacal Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now...

...More important, he was taught the fundamentals of "soldiering" by the quick-fisted NCOs he believes to be the heart and soul of the army...

...About Face is a fascinating story told at preposterous length and in a regimented style...

...He believes people can succeed...

...For example, both urge a return to the draft as the most democratic solution to the question of service and a necessary check on the military and the politicians who would use it...

...PAUL BAUMANN is a staff writer and movie critic for The Day in New London, Connecticut...

...Like Fallows, Alistair Cooke is infatuated with America and its ongoing sense of pos-sibilities...

...Our talent for disorder goes hand in hand with the "creative destruction" capitalism spawns...

...His deft sketches of various politicians, including Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, Joe McCarthy, and a 1960 version of Richard Nixon, are marked by a keen sense of detachment and perhaps an even deeper skepticism about whatever the conventional political wisdom might be...

...His reasonableness, lucid prose, and moral commitment are reminiscent of George Orwell or Robert Coles...

...Fallows thinks deferments should be eliminated as well...

...Masters and Johnson's lab-cloaked prurience arouses Cooke's wit and scorn...

...Let's look forward to the condensed About Face, for this is a story that needs editing as much as it needs hearing...

...In a forced march of more than 800 pages, he takes us from the relative chivalry of the Allied victory in Europe to the dark treacheries of the Mekong Delta...

...Hackworth tenders no apologies for his ostensible sins as a trained killer...

...Hackworth excoriates the army for a misplaced emphasis on academic ability, for its impractical "wonder gear," its bureaucratic values and oversupervised command "Permission to write a poem, sir...

...Institutions, like the church or unions, may handicap people by teaching them to "know their place...

...Away from public affairs, he is by turns whimsical and withering...

...Little more than a decade later, Cooke is in Atlanta to describe the Rev...

...Even traitor...

...The Miss America pageant receives a long ironic look...

...The frontier metaphor is emboldening, but rugged individualism and unbridled entrepreneurship were only one part, and usually a small part, of how the West was actually won...

...For one thing, Fallows's waist is not as wide as Hackworth's forearms...

...If the Japanese have a talent for order and group devotion, Americans have an equally characteristic gift for disorder and individualism...

...Its economy of means is not the least of its merits...

...He's right...

...Such is the traditional devotion of soldiers, and like all sacrifice, it has a quality of undeniable beauty...

...But without a sense of place how are we to determine our obligation to others...

...Ten thousand military acronyms and the nicknames of a thousand buddies detain us further...

...As a professional "warrior," Hackworth is something of a cross between Vince Lombardi and Steve McQueen...

...Oh, there were other words for the notorious "Hack...

...Words like success and health are used somewhat promiscuously in More Like Us...

...American society is healthier and more successful when our culture suppresses the instinct to set ourselves apart from one another...

...A soldier's soldier, a stud, an animal, are the words Hackworth and his fellow adepts used to describe each other...

...For another, Fallows earned some of his first stripes as a journalist for some brave articles about the class aspects of the Vietnam War, a war in which he and his fellow Harvard classmates dodged the draft by feigning anorexia, suicide, and other moral sensitivities while the less politically enlightened marched off to serve alongside Hackworth...

...Fallows is at his most seditious and compelling attacking the once unassailable assumptions of the meritocracy...

...Our naive willingness to "overestimate (the) chances for success" is as valuable a resource for Americans as oil is to the Saudi Arabians...

...Still, he doesn't offer much to help mediate capitalism's destructive side...

...One consequence was that in Vietnam friendly fire was responsible for as much as 20 percent of American casualties...

...His paean to the decency of middle-class ambitions takes little note of the fear of failure haunting those peaceful streets and well-tended lawns...

...Of what real consequence is any "radius of trust" when the most American response to failure is to hightail it for the territory...

...Fallows is well aware of these contradictions...

...Such a system permits most people to succeed and to feel they have a stake in the larger community...

...His raw nerve and composure in the face of death would have been signified by a halo in a less fastidious age...

...He accepts America's historically low "threshold of culture" as the price of broad opportunity, and accedes to "the fundamental culture of American success...

...Risk management, in the form of the U.S...

...An orphan cared for fitfully by his grandparents, he fled reform school to join the Merchant Marine at fourteen in 1945...

...But mobility and a plucky indifference to tradition are not always blessings...

...Her sense of duty, he writes, "planed away the emotional fat on a feckless, generous man...

...Warring, brawling, and whoring make up a good deal of Colonel David H. Hackworth's vainglorious odyssey in About Face...

...When Hackworth writes of risking death or of the masculine cult of warriors, it comes, paradoxically enough, straight from the heart...

...Without much complaint, he endorses the idea that individuals should change the idea of self to fit the market...

...Cooke's tribute to Eleanor Roosevelt is a model of graciousness and domestic insight...

...Martin Luther King, Jr.'s funeral...

...With a characteristic disdain for crossfire, he appeared on ABC's "Issues and Answers" in 1971 and spoke bluntly about the army's tactical failures, the fraud of "Vietnamization," and the senseless sacrifices of the war...

...General Creighton Abrams, who commanded American forces in Vietnam, called him the best battalion commander he had ever seen...

...Fallows can wax almost lyrical on the intoxications of mobility...

...Admitting to having gone "partway around the bend" in his final command, he concluded more than four years of duty in Vietnam outraged over the conduct of the war and in almost outright rebellion against his superiors...

...Such flexibility, although disruptive, will enlarge what Fallows calls "the radius of trust...

...Nurses, for example, should be encouraged to assume more of the tasks assigned to doctors...

...He sings hosan-nas to the virtue of people "not knowing their place...

...Unfortunately, Hackworth chronicles his life with a supply sergeant's obsessive attention to detail...

...America Observed, in which Cooke, among other things, rhapsodizes about Ava Gardner, pities Mike Wallace, and lionizes the Chicago Tribune, is drawn mostly from his work as American correspondent for the Manchester Guardian from 1942 to 1972...

...There are a few dead spots...

...structure...

...Such testing consigns too many people, usually poor and working-class people, to the dunce's corner...

...Initiated into the infantry by World War II combat veterans, Hackworth got his first taste of guerrilla warfare sparring with Tito's Yugoslavia partisans in Italy in the late 1940s...

...It's one of his hard sayings...

...It's a life lived with an enviable intensity, and a certain savage dignity...

...Like Mick Jagger on stage or Michael Jordan on a court, Hackworth had the instincts of a prodigy on the battlefield...

...More Like Us, James Fallows, Htmghttm Mifllin...

...Fallows's broader indictment of American society reminds us that complex institutions like the army are reflections of the nation they serve...

...Warrior Hackworth preaches the fundamentals: The tougher the peacetime training, the fewer the wartime casualties...

...You believe him...

...That peculiar American faith in possibilities is threatened, however, by the dominance of an "aristocracy of intellectual merit...

...These portraits are remarkable at putting public figures in new moral or aesthetic contexts...

...Hackworth was always a volatile property...

...Marilyn Monroe was a "charming and shrewd, and pathetic woman of tragic integrity...

...He even comes to the defense of Southern California, where he grew up amid the crass but redemptive striving of those who take America's promise of a "second chance" to heart...

...For those who only know Cooke as the graven eminence who presides over "Masterpiece Theatre" on PBS, his writing will come as a delicious revelation...

...It was a stunning plea from a man who loved the army more than anything else in the world, as his former wife and his children surely will attest...

...Fallows recognizes that a desire to limit the economic and social risks inherent in American life is the source of the popularity of medicine and law as careers...

...America Observed, with its reporter's disciplined objectivity, presents a series of vivid snapshots of many of the pivotal events and issues of our time...

...More Like Us uses the economic and cultural prowess of Japan to help illuminate the singular character and virtues of America...

...and produced a great president...

...Churches, "superstitious" religions, unions, and other curbs on the accommodating self only impede that necessary metamorphosis...

...If we truly are interested in equal opportunity, we must start testing for specific, not general, skills...

...more important, he believes it is essential they do...

...Still, Fallows and Hackworth, who share a deep skepticism about experts and privilege, end up in similar ideological foxholes...

...You trust his sense of fair play...

...Cavalry, is an old American tradition as well...

...While the frontier remains open, too often our schools, professions, institutions of popular culture, and much of the marketplace are not as freedom-loving as they should be...

...Such pregnant historical allusion is as easily within Cooke's grasp as the brandy snifter on the table beside him on the "Masterpiece Theatre" set...

...He [Goldwater] thinks of Jefferson, and his audience looks on Caesar...

...Army, Retired) and Julie Sherman, Simon & Schuster, $24.95...

...His annotations to political conventions "a chess tournament disguised as a circus" are as thick and pungent as the cigar smoke clouding the assembly halls...

...At one time or another, Hackworth bent every rule, broke every commandment, countenanced every evil from the killing of prisoners to the whole-scale "liberation" of government property...

...In America Observed he brings his singular voice ingratiating, erudite, empa-thetic, but reserved to bear on four decades (from the 1940s to the 1980s) of tumultuous change...

...Hackworth lays the army's failure in Vietnam on the desks of those organizational wizards who substituted management for leadership, schooling for battlefield experience, and pettifogging for "NCO justice...

...If the result is prosaic, so be it...

...Somewhere Chesterton says there must be something good about war or so many good men would not have loved being soldiers...

...Clearly, he thinks there are greater dangers...

...the best protection is to enter the fray...

...Left free to reinvent themselves and recreate their circumstances, Americans will prosper...

...He has an encyclopedic knowledge of American history and politics, and colors in the background of his topical assignments with a sure hand...

...As a soldier, Hackworth was a man of almost freakish courage he was the most highly decorated officer in the United States Army when he retired amid scandal in 1971...

...But whatever the reader's moral scruples about this soldier's appetite for violence, the voice in About Face, has real authority...

...Fallows thinks Americans are more likely to get hurt by shying away from the body contact involved in our competitive system...

...Hackworth and James Fallows, the author of More Like Us: Making America Great Again, would seem to be the most unlikely of comrades-in-arms...

...Trust' was a magic word," he writes...

...Fallows risks this to champion our political "fictions" about equality and the democratic bonds opportunity creates...

...In the "new look" army of the 1950s and 1960s, real soldiers were pushed aside by over-educated careerists, officers Hackworth dimisses as "ticket-punchers...

...Aboni Face: The Odyssey of an American Warrior, Colonel David H. Hackworth (U.S...

...In the realm of more peripheral phenomena, Cooke chatters on brightly about the evolution of Neiman Marcus, that quintessentially Texan institution of higher consumption...

...Cooke is, I think, scrupulously fair, and at times this impartiality comes across as a kind of indifference...

...Like Tom Wolfe, Fallows is invigorated, not offended, by the vibrant vulgarity of middle-class aspirations...

...He looked like Merlin posing as Whistler's Mother," Cooke writes with amused admiration of Frank Lloyd Wright...

...Once before, the ninth of April was a memorial day throughout the South," Cooke wrote with his typical eye for historical detail...

...And let's not forget Joan of Arc...

...On everything from the barbarisms of the "permissive society" to the manifold ironies of American history, Cooke who became a United States citizen in 1941 is a loving but firm interlocutor...

...His 1956 report from Montgomery, Alabama, on an obscure local minister who was leading his black followers in a bus boycott, has the interest of a historical artifact, if for no other reason than its curiously ambivalent tone...

...Few reporters have ever been so unfailingly eloquent while meeting a daily deadline...

...Our cantankerous hero loved everything about the army, right down to the parades, the shiny boots and polished brass, and he wants to account for every order, every exercise, and practically every bender...

...In Japan, Fallows writes, intelligence is like health: Most people are thought to have enough...

...There doesn't appear to be much dispute on this point...

...Wide open spaces are also disorienting...

...One hundred and three years ago today Robert E. Lee tendered his sword to General Grant...

...Japan's notorious examination system is understood as a measure of effort and determination, not absolute capacity...

...Fallows, the author of National Defense, has been the Atlantic's Asian correspondent for several years...

...Here we can learn something from the Japanese...

...Before signing on at the Atlantic, he crusaded at the Washington Monthly...

...The conceits of formal schooling, aptitude testing, preprofessional channeling, and creden-tialism are deftly exposed...

...When something more elemental and bolder was demanded on the battlefield, it was in short supply...

...575 pp...

...Mimicking the Japanese devotion to obedience and industry is not a realistic alternative for Americans, he writes...

...There is no significant correlation between intelligence as measured by IQ and success in most jobs...

...Cooke, like his fellow citizens Fallows and Hackworth, has an inspiring allegiance to the American enterprise...

...Similarly, a deemphasis on formal schooling will establish a "tighter connection between effort and reward," allowing people to enter the contest at various points...

...But it serves him well over the long course...