Then and Now
Clifford, Nicholas R.
ONE REPORTER'S NARRATIVE THEN AND NOW How the World Has Changed Since WWII Tad Szuic William Morrow and Co., Inc., $22.95,515 pp. Nicholas R. Clifford f, as Gibbon and Voltaire both remarked,...
...the enormity of the Holocaust, for instance, transcends any simple formula like "anti-Semitism," or "social Darwinism," though it draws on both, and Stalinism and Maoism represent more than simply a Marxist approach to social engineering...
...But because it lacks this organization, Szulc's book has no particular thesis, and becomes too much simply a recitation of events put together in no particular order...
...and decolonization, and the rise of the third world with its state of permanent crisis...
...There is a tendency to treat the non-Western world only when it impinges on the West (decolonization, the Korean and Vietnam wars, the dangers for the West that lurk in the sands of the Middle East, and so forth...
...It is, rather, "a reporter's narrative" of the events through which he has lived (many of which he has himself witnessed), since the end of the Second World War...
...Szulc points to the rise and fall of Marxism-Leninism, and his descriptions of the Soviet Union's assumption of control over Eastern Europe in the late 1940s and its loss of control in 1989 are among the strongest points of the book...
...But though he reverts to these phenomena from time to time, none of them really forms a theme to the book, a thesis which can be used to explain, or begin to explain, the changes that the world has undergone...
...This despite the promises of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century positivists that the outdated dogmas of religion would cease to plague us and the promise of Marx that nationalism, with its attendant dangers, would soon vanish...
...today no one would defend the biological theories that gave us Auschwitz and Dachau, and few are still willing to defend the social science that gave us Stalin's planned Ukrainian famine of the 1930s and Mao's unplanned Chinese famine (probably the greatest in world history) of 19591961...
...Such an approach would give the book the organizing principle that this one lacks, and would make a fascinating work...
...As one of the most respected journalists of his day, he not only lived through, but covered many of the events of which he writes and has met the men and women who formed them...
...it is also an attempt to understand why human beings behave as they do, and it is also an attempt to broaden one's understanding of the human condition by transcending the parochial concerns of one's own society, one's own culture, and one's own times...
...Nicholas R. Clifford f, as Gibbon and Voltaire both remarked, history is no more than a record of the crimes and follies of mankind, it is nothing to be proud of that the greatest crimes and the most disastrous follies have taken place in the twentieth century...
...Admittedly, it has been bad science that has been responsible...
...But there are troubles with this approach...
...But history is more than mere record...
...He also mentions the development of technology that grew out of the war, and its impact on daily life...
...Surely the two professions have much in common...
...And though Japan is clearly a major player by the book's end, almost nothing is said of that country's extraordinary rise to power, nor of the role that America, through the occupation reforms, played in that rise...
...Szulc instead to give us a reporter's memoirs...
...Granted, some phenomena simply will fit no pattern...
...Szulc, who has been a distinguished reporter for the New York Times, and who has written widely about contemporary / affairs, begins his book with the statement that"joumalism is the first draft of history," and warns that although his work is cast in a historical framework, it is not to be read as a scholarly work of history...
...Moreover, Szulc's world is very much a Western world, in which Europe and America are the primary actors...
...Such crimes and follies have helped to shape the world in which we live, and anyone reading the litany of abuses against human rights, of the tortures, murders, wars, famines, that comes near the end of Tad Szulc's book may be excused for thinking that they continue to shape it...
...if the journalist must often hurry to meet a deadline and cannot enjoy the luxury of the historian's reflection and access to sources, he nonetheless shares a desire to make sense of the world, of human behavior...
...What are the most significant ways in which the world has changed since 1945...
...22 February 1991:141...
...we already have many histories of them...
...and that they have taken place not in the name of politics or religion but in the name of science...
...Nixon's visit to Beijing, for example, gets four pages, while Mao's shattering cultural revolution is dismissed in two brief paragraphs...
...In the first place, many of the events described-- the onset of the cold war, the Marshall Plan, and so forth--are well beyond the point of needing a first draft...
...That demands a kind of organization which seems curiously lacking in this book...
...If this is to be read simply as a reporter's narrative, then let us go all the way and ask Mr...
...Organization does not mean forcing facts into categories invented by the writer, or into an ideology to which the writer may be attracted, but rather, on the basis of one's own experience, one's own knowledge of the world, allowing them to form their own patterns and then trying to understand those patterns...
...Second, good journalism, like good history, is more than simply a record of events, whether they be crimes and follies, or works of virtue and enlightenment...
Vol. 118 • February 1991 • No. 4
