Elmer Davis and the Grim Facts
HOWE, QUINCY
WRITERS and WRITING Elmer Davis and the Grim Facts Two Minutes Till Midnight. By Elmer Davis. Bobbs-Merrill. 206 pp. $2.75. Reviewed by Quincy Howe American Broadcasting Company commentator;...
...author, "The World Between the Wars" Two assumptions inspire Elmer Davis's new book—the probability of nuclear war and the possibility of American defeat...
...But, most important of all, if war does come we must win it...
...He rejects F. S. C. Northrop's Meeting of East and West, citing Alexander the Great's unhappy experience with India?a nation which pays more attention to what happened to it years ago than to what might happen in the near future...
...But, in the setting in which he has placed them, they serve rather to remind his fellow-citizens of our priceless national heritage and of the dependence of that heritage on the world around us...
...Consciously or not, he is applying the "philosophy of the as if," originated by the German Hans Vaihinger, who argued that man, being unable ever to know the whole truth, has nevertheless survived and prospered by acting as if certain fictions were true...
...If we can't go on being Americans, we might as well not be at all...
...Torn from context, these words and others in Mr...
...And in his closing chapter he writes: "The United States would have been far more secure if nobody had invented or ever could invent a hydrogen bomb...
...in Two Minutes Till Midnight, he has written a high-minded case for hard-boiled realism...
...As in his previous book, he opens with a caustic commentary, entitled on this occasion "Year One, Thermonuclear Era...
...Davis wants no part of any unilateral or preventive war...
...Only the future can tell whether events will bear out the worst assumptions we can make...
...Most scare books on the H-bomb either call for a suicidal "go it alone" policy or set forth a Utopian plan for world brotherhood...
...Davis wrote a hard-boiled defense of high principles...
...I am only saying that we damn well better take care not to lose it...
...He defends Roosevelt's unconditional-surrender policy and criticizes Churchill's obsession with "the soft underbelly of the Axis...
...On the other hand, too many self-styled realists will not, as Mr...
...Whatever happens, we must not surrender...
...And, when it comes to allies, Chiang Kai-shek and Syngman Rhee are not enough...
...In his previous book, But We Were Born Free, Mr...
...Recognizing the horror of nuclear warfare and the ruthlessness of the Communist conspiracy, Mr...
...God will not save us...
...The fate of Carthage calls to mind what happened to a nation which "found it more pleasant to save its money than to save its liberty, and in the end lost both...
...While most of us, in high stations or low, go about our business as if the H-bomb were not the most important fact of life in 1955, Elmer Davis assumes the worst...
...That war, if it comes, will be for all we have and are...
...Davis dedicates his book "To the first victim of the hydrogen bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer...
...Now it may be a fiction that the United States stands at the brink of nuclear extinction, but in Elmer Davis's hands this becomes an illuminating and constructive fiction...
...If it were fought, I do not say that we would even probably lose it...
...Davis does, carry the worst possible assumptions of nuclear warfare to their logical conclusions...
...We might better have no world at all," he concludes, than live in the totalitarian, obscurantist One World that the Communists would create...
...That war may never be fought," he writes...
...and if they had it and we had not, our situation would be very far from happy...
...Davis insists that United States foreign policy must stand on a basis of principle that will command the widest possible support throughout the world...
...He therefore admires President Truman's response to the Korean crisis, when we stood on principle and did not stand alone...
...The sole, and sufficient, reason for our making it was the certainty that the Russians would make it anyway...
...Unfortunately, in the past couple of years the idea has grown among our present leaders that we can say anything we like, and if it seems likely to lead to trouble we can merely say we didn't mean it...
...if we value that, we can't give up, in any circumstances...
...Davis's new book could promote hysteria or trucu-lence...
...Then come half a dozen wide-ranging discussions of war, peace, history and God...
...But, if we would prevent these assumptions from coming true, we cannot face up to them too soon...
...He saves only those who save themselves...
Vol. 38 • March 1955 • No. 12
