Intellectual Event

...Reviewed by ROBERT LEKACHMAN Since otherwise selection is impossible, anniversary collections of magazine articles inevitably represent a point of view...

...Another is the conclusion that even if the Communist issue had to be fought out among the intellectuals, the details of these venomous old battles are neither very interesting nor very edifying...

...The seven sections into which the volume is divided are affirmations of these two criteria for selecting articles...

...Like almost every issue of Commentary, this volume is surrounded by the aura of controversy, of intellectual argument waged with sharp tools...

...He's divorced, smokes Camels, has a crew cut, and sleeps in an orange plaid sarong...

...The next section, "East and West," derives almost entirely from the Podhoretz era...

...He visits opium den-brothels and gets himself in dirty pictures, is trailed by a bizarre Eurasian in sun glasses, gets shot at by the Vietcong and abducted by evil men in lurid pop-art masks, and does some spare-time spying for the CIA...

...He drinks giant-sized Martinis, consumes frequent bottles of champagne (Dom Pérignon and occasionally Krug extra brut), and has a favorite kind of brandy whose manufacture is erotically described...

...These recollections of the controversial past suggest just how easy it would have been to organize this collection around the political theme of Communism, anti-Communism, civil liberties, McCarthyism, anti-McCarthyism, and antianti-McCarthyism...

...He must isolate themes and narrow the range of his choices...

...Elliot E. Cohen, the guiding spirit of the magazine, focused his attention above all upon the central issue as it seemed to him of Communism and the intellectuals...

...Here the trouble is a version of embarrassment of riches...

...Someone like myself who began to read Commentary regularly at the start of the 1950s, frequently got the impression that the only subject which really aroused the magazine's editors was the mischief that the Communists were up to at home and abroad...

...A third observation is the encouraging thought that none too soon a new, post-Marxist generation has appeared, blessed with other interests than radical polemics and endowed with other definitions of the politics of the 1960s...

...Inevitably, therefore, Commentary's was a dissenting liberal voice on the vexed issue of the Fifth Amendment...

...In the end, he narrowly escapes...

...The numerous articles deriving from his own regime demonstrate just how successful Commentary has been in identifying new controversies and identifying some new contributors...

...These names, it is fair to say, are a list of the best serious journalists of our day...

...The framework of discussion in the HookHughes-Morgenthau-Snow symposium on "Western Values and Total War," Oscar Gass' "China and the United States," and George Lichtheim's "Reflection on Trotsky" progress far beyond the sterilities of simple pro- and anti-Communism...

...At $12.50 The Commentary Reader is a bargain, for it is the price of an intellectual event...

...a movement guided by conspiracy and aiming at totalitarianism...

...In the case of Commentary concentration on the pre-Podhoretz years would certainly have evoked at least one such theme...

...Thought in Crisis,' the fifth division, is a miscellany of Henry Aiken comment on the flight from ideology, David Bazelon speculations on the state of the economy, and Clement Greenberg strictures on the condition of American culture...

...Indeed, it passes possibility that a single mortal man can really scan-I do not say read-a half century of old magazines...

...This emphasis upon the "Communist conspiracy" was echoed in Sidney Hook's "Does the Smith Act Threaten our Liberties...

...Not a one of these essays dates...

...The first, "The Holocaust and After," bearing dates from 194662 contains some almost unbearably powerful evocations of the agony of the six million...

...Hard upon Trilling's essay followed Irving Kristol's "Civil Liberties1952-A Study in Confusion.' The essay's subtitle, "Do We Defend Our Rights by Protecting Communists...

...A terrifying quantity of material is published in two decades even by a monthly like Commentary or in one decade by the Anglo-American Encounter...

...Higher in quality than the Encounter collection, solider and less dated than either the New Republic or the New Statesman anthologies...

...Writing" is graced by Dwight McDonald's classic put-down, "By Cozzens Possessed" and Edmund Wilson's fine appreciation of Paul Rosenfeld...

...It includes articles by Midge Decter on "The Legacy of Henrietta Szold," R. H. S. Crossman on "Gentile Zionism and the Balfour Declaration," and Isaac Bashevis Singer on "Yentl the Yeshiva Boy...

...His selections from the Commentary of the '40s and the '50s are a demonstration that there always was a good deal more to the magazine than a crusade against political evil...

...Section four, "Groups,' features the editor's own inflammatory essay "My Negro Problem-and Ours," and Bayard Rustin's recipe for the next stage of the civil rights revolution, "From Protest to Politics...

...One can start by discarding an almost useless guide to the specialized mode of anthologizing, the bland recommendation that the anthologist simply select the best things that his magazine has printed...

...Unavoidably the anthologist must seek excellence by category...

...A final section, "The American Predicament,' contains first-class pieces by James Baldwin, Daniel Bell, Edgar Friedenberg, Paul Goodman, Leslie Fiedler, and Robert Warshow...

...Lionel Trilling"s graceful tribute to "George Orwell and the Politics of Truth" contained many insights into the Orwellian universe, but the Orwell trait which won Trilling's special praise was his "disillusionment about Communism...

...A truly distinguished periodical (and in the last 20 years what magazine has been more distinguished than Commentary...

...advocated "complete responsiveness" and adjured the former Communist to "think twice before reserving to himself the decision as to whether his former comrades are presently dangerous to American society...

...One is the tired character of the old arguments...

...What principles have animated Norman Podhoretz, since 1960 editor of Commentary, in the making of the series of choices which comprise this sumptuous reader...

...Hook advanced many criticisms of the Smith Act, he nevertheless opposed its repeal on the ground that "such repeal would give new life to an illusion whose widespread and pernicious character was partly responsible for the original enactment of the Act: namely, that the Communist party is a political party like any other on the American scene and therefore entitled to the same rights and privileges as all other American political parties...

...A Kind of Allegory A KIND OF TREASON By Robert S. Elegant Holt, Rinehart and Winston 284 pp...

...Reviewed by ANNE HENEHAN Executive Secretary, American Friends of Vietnam Gerry Mallory, the journalisthero of Robert S. Elegant's novel, is a sort of existential, middle-aged James Bond whose personality and exploits seem ready-made for the movies...

...implied a negative answer which was duly forthcoming in a text which castigated such civil libertarians as Alan Barth, Henry Steele Commager, William O. Douglas, and Zechariah Chafee for their "Refusal to see Communism for what it is...

...Clearly Norman Podhoretz is of this generation...

...The third section, "The Light of History," is the most specifically Jewish of the seven...

...To take a not unusual example, the March 1952 issue contained four articles in a row keyed to the magic words Communists, Communism, and Soviet Russia...

...3.95...

...Although most civil libertarians argued that silence was frequently the honorable response to the incessant demands by Senator McCarthy and his imitators that repentant radicals "name names," Alan Westin, in the fourth of these articles, "Do Silent Witnesses Defend Civil Liberties...

...contains issue by issue, year by year, a high percentage of excellent exposition, novel notion, and sophisticated analysis...

...Their samples add up to the best collection from a periodical of recent times...

...It says something about the intransigent anti-Communism of the Commentary line during the 1950s that although Dr...

...When the assortment is derived from a half century of a weekly like the New Republic or the New Statesman the amount of prose to be discarded is stupendous...

...But the major echoes of this era, Leslie Fiedler's "Hiss, Chambers, and the Age of Innocence," and Robert Warshow's poignant "The 'Idealism' of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg," suggest several points...