A Liberal Victim
BERNSTEIN, DAVID
A Liberal Victim Promises to Keep: My Years in Public Life, 1941-1969 By Chester Bowles Harper & Row. 657 pp. $12.95. Reviewed by David Bernstein Editor, Binghamton "Sun-Bulletin' EVERYTHING...
...Bowles was forced out as Under Secretary of State, ironically, because he had been attacking the very habits of mind within the State Department that President Kennedy himself detested and distrusted...
...But Bowles was so identifiable, vulnerable and predictable that he presented an easy target for revenge...
...This is the problem men like Bowles will always face...
...he watched in dismay the escalation of our Vietnam involvement...
...As Connecticut's U.S...
...Ten years later Galbraith was to write a piece saying how sorry he was that he and Bowles* other liberal friends never bothered to defend him when it mattered...
...Even when Chester Bowles succeeded he failed...
...While no promises were made, it seemed likely that after the election Bowles would be named Secretary of State...
...Bowles quotes a story a friend told him "which had a bearing on my political career": "It concerned an Arab trader who one day wandered into the marketplace looking very sad...
...There stands Jackson, like a stone wall, never to become the commander of all the Confederate armies...
...it is just not remembered that way...
...The predictable liberal possesses even less leverage than the predictable conservative...
...In less than a year he was finished as Under Secretary...
...Although he was engaged in many great enterprises, his impact on our time was less than great...
...Nowadays, with the combination of recession and inflation leading to wage and price controls, many people will argue that similar controls were a failure under opa...
...When asked what had upset him, he said that he had lost his donkey...
...This sense of urgency, of immediacy, made me challenge deeply rooted special interests and habits of mind with a force which produced a bitter and often irrational reaction among those who had a stake in the status quo...
...When asked if he had found the donkey, he replied, 'No, but it just occurred to me how lucky I was not to be riding on the donkey when it got lost.' " Bowles was rarely on the donkey's back when it did find its way, either...
...an anti-Communist President will go to Peking...
...A Hudson River patrician gets elected President and revolutionizes American society...
...a general keeps the Pentagon warlords in check...
...Bowles became Under Secretary rather than Secretary of State because he was predictably liberal, and Kennedy's people thought it would be a political handicap to appoint him...
...Reviewed by David Bernstein Editor, Binghamton "Sun-Bulletin' EVERYTHING UNPLEASANT that must be said about Chester Bowles' political autobiography has been said: that it is atrociously written, filled with cliches, disorganized...
...a public servant with some simple, straightforward, sensible ideas on affairs domestic and foreign who never managed to have them accepted in time to do any good...
...that it is tired, tiresome and apologetic...
...Looking back, Bowles' victories rarely seem to have justified all the sweating and straining, whereas the efforts that failed will always keep us wondering how much better the world might be today had things gone a bit more his way...
...a Southern President puts through most of the civil rights legislation...
...Virtually the first celebrity with impeccable liberal credentials to endorse Kennedy, at a time when others were still mooning over Adlai Stevenson or Hubert Humphrey, he became Kennedy's official foreign policy advisor during the 1960 campaign...
...Here was an able administrator who never got much to administer once he left the postwar Office of Price Administration (opa...
...Whenever I have been confronted with a state of affairs which is contrary to the public interest, I have felt compelled not only to change it but to change it right away...
...His onetime partner at Benton & Bowles advertising agency, who later turned into a political rival, suffered from the same misfortune...
...Actually, the wartime effort to control inflation was remarkably successful once Bowles took charge...
...a kindly, outgoing man whose "years in public life" were more filled with the spite of enemies than with the help of friends...
...Yet he was so consistently, reliably, predictably liberal that he satisfied everyone's curiosity in record time and so was not returned to his seat...
...he pushed, to no avail, for a reordering of foreign policy priorities before such language became popular...
...The sad truth of this decent man's life—not that he wrote a bad book about himself, for someday a stranger will probably write a good one about him—is that his consistency, his integrity, his liberal commitment were his undoing...
...Nonetheless, this was not a betrayal...
...It was simply a reflection of an important reality in American politics: that a politician must have a flavor of mystery if he is to prevail...
...He was passed over, however, in favor of an obscure, cautious loner whom not even Kennedy had heard of until a few days before the appointment...
...Senator in 1949-53, Wil-liam Benton was one of the first to challenge Senator Joseph McCarthy...
...I must admit the following weakness," Bowles writes...
...the first Catholic in the White House makes birth control officially acceptable...
...Had he been a more complicated man, or even less of a man, he might have had a more impressive story to tell...
...Even his good friend John Kenneth Galbraith, asked to write a review of this book, instead wound up lamenting the way the liberals had deserted Bowles 10 years earlier...
...Promises to Keep is so bad that it all but conceals the intense frustrations of the predictable liberal...
...Thus, after having been the opa chief under Roosevelt and Truman, governor of Connecticut, ambassador to India (as he was to be again), and a one-term congressman, Bowles came closest to genuine power with the election of John F. Kennedy...
...As President Kennedy's Under Secretary of State, he tried vainly to invigorate the Department...
...Still, a man is often more interesting for his failures than for his victories...
...He remained downcast for several days, but then one morning suddenly broke into a smile...
...He served a respectable term as governor of Connecticut, but couldn't get himself reelected...
...that it does not do justice to the man himself...
Vol. 54 • September 1971 • No. 17
