The Right Side of the Left
DRAPER, ROGER
Writers & Writing THE RIGHT SIDE OF THE LEFT BY ROGER DRAPER Denis Healey has suffered the fate of being perhaps less popular in his own British Labor Party than in all of its rivals. The...
...Yet it is really quite an epic, or could have been...
...I now [1989] think we were all mistaken...
...As the beachmaster at Anzio in 1944, Healey had a "good war...
...For all of his attacks on the United States, Healey loves it subofficially...
...To cite a few: The Democrats "lost power" in 1968, not 1970...
...Of a 1972 visit to the USSR he writes, "I could see that living standards had improved remarkably under Brezhnev...
...He went from a top Northern grammar school to Balliol College, Oxford, in 1936...
...In 1954, he visited Israel and was, he remembers, "immensely impressed...
...Coming back into the Cabinet on the heels of the 1974 election, he served as Chancellor of the Exchequer until 1979, the year Margaret Thatcher won the election that followed the Winter of Discontent...
...We are told nothing about his decision to get out, apparently in 1940...
...Inside the Labor Party he fought the Bennites and Trotskyists without embracing the Social Democratic delusion that the moderate Left could create an effective "third force...
...To consider the first of many examples, he is in a great hurry to get beyond the facts of his family background...
...The most dangerous problem" of the international financial system "is the gross imbalance in world trade caused by excessive borrowing" in the U.S...
...But it was already obvious that it would be difficult to maintain the ethical traditions of the early Zionist settlers...
...It isn't clear why...
...The Grenada intervention, besides being "a military shambles," typified Reagan's "global unilateralism,"his tendency to intervene "anywhere in the world where he thought international Communism was threatening American interests, without consulting his allies and sometimes in defiance of international law...
...He never uses such language in speaking of other nations, including his own...
...Only the Communist Party seemed unambiguously against Hitler," so Healey soon joined...
...Rafael Trujillo ruled the Dominican Republic, not Cuba...
...As Chancellor of the Exchequer he declined to follow the monetarist dogma that brought the country close to ruin in the early 1980s, and he resisted the most unreasonable demands of the unions without launching a destructive social war against them...
...He praises Neil Kinnock for improving Labor's campaign machinery "more than any leader since the War," but also complains that the Left has kept alive "the image of Labor as a divided party...
...In the late 1940s, he recollects, "I believed that Stalin's behavior showed he was bent on the military conquest of Western Europe...
...Thatcherism," says Healey, "only became possible when the wartime generation was passing from the stage...
...in the city itself we found modern boulevards flanked by big stores with fronts of glass and steel...
...I had never before met such humanity and frankness in a Soviet leader...
...Healey first entered Parliament in 1952, after being proposed as the Labor candidate for his constituency by an affiliate: the Jewish Labor Party, Poale Zion...
...were mainly Jewish journalists," oneofwhom, Sol Levitas of The New Leader, had "assembled round him the cream" of the city's Jewish intellectuals...
...His one example—a quote from Midge Decter explaining the intensity of her feelings toward Israel—mentions nothing that resembles "unbelievers" and does not support his point at all...
...This is no miracle of intellectual rigor, but there is certainly much to be eroded...
...Until the mid-1970s, the idea was respectable even among Conservatives...
...In 1956 he opposed the Suez invasion...
...Yet Healey's influence on Britain's domestic policies and politics has been almost wholly beneficial...
...It isn't clear why here,either...
...another academic...
...There is no such offsetting affection in his ire against Israel...
...during his two terms...
...Denis, born in 1917, was ambitious too...
...When...
...The indictment against Reagan is a familiar one...
...On the other hand, a similar optimism led Healey to write, correctly: "It is not impossible that the Red Army would not intervene to prevent drastic changes in the relationship of Eastern Europe with Western Europe and with Moscow...
...George Bush was a thousand times right in accusing Reagan of 'voodoo economies'" in 1980...
...To Healey and many of his contemporaries, the great lesson of 1939-45 was the importance of "consensus": a rational sharing of the benefits and pains of change by all the groups it may affect...
...Healey does concede that the Jewish State has been "obliged to fight for its life in a hostile Arab world in which Machtpolitik was king," but for him this insight apparently belongs to a purely metaphysical realm...
...After contributing a monthly column to The New Leader while an Opposition Member of Parliament, from 1955-63, he became Minister of Defense on Labor's return to power in 1964, and stayed in that post through 1970 when the Conservatives triumphed...
...In New York, he tells us, "my friends...
...In fact, by 1958 he had come to view Nikita S. Khrushchev as "one of the halfdozen greatest political leaders of this century...
...Admitting that perestroika may fail, Healey assures us that "Gorbachev's new foreign policy, however, is likely to survive, whatever happens to him personally...
...In 1981 Healey even detected a "revival of freedom in the arts...
...Writing before the Tiananmen Square massacre, he asks if the treaty that is supposed to preserve the capitalist institutions of Hong Kong for half a century after China repossesses it, in 1997, "could be followed elsewhere...
...Along with them, Healey entertained what he now calls a "bitter hostility" toward Soviet domestic and foreign policy...
...He was "overawed" by the public school boys who dominated his college: "I sought my first friends among the many American, Commonwealth, or Scottish undergraduates...
...to whom social class was irrelevant...
...By temperament, Healey had more in common with his fellowIrishman, Ronald Reagan, but the author—ever the meritocrat—despises our 40th President, who in 1987 seems to have mistaken him for the British ambassador...
...Rabbinical rhetoric...
...At some point, though, he changed...
...Nonetheless, much of the book concerns issues of worldwide scope and interest...
...We drove into Moscow for a few hours through great new housing estates...
...His infatuation with Mikhail S. Gorbachev is more understandable: "The whole world is now familiar with his personal charm and intellectual flexibility...
...His first visit to the U.S., in 1949, "gave me a love for the country and its people which has survived many political disappointments...
...World War II shaped the author and his generation...
...We never learn any of this...
...Perhaps the real question today is whether it will be followed even in Hong Kong...
...Like his socialism, the author's lifelong romance with the United States started at the university...
...my love only deepened as I traveled the continent more widely...
...Why did his grandfather, John William Healey, a tailor and Irish nationalist, quit an Ulster village and move to England's industrial north...
...Some mistakes have been corrected since the original edition was published in England, but too many were not...
...The Battle of Britain, you may recall, was not won by pure free enterprise...
...The Time of My Life often requires a familiarity with Britain and its politics that many American readers won't have...
...Meanwhile, the White House has virtually replaced the Kremlin in the Healey demonology...
...How did he kindle such ambition in his children, including Denis' father, the head of a technical school...
...He himself continues to feel that "The advantage of consensus as the lubricant of change has been proved a thousand times over...
...Although the author writes very well, he keeps himself at a distance, venturing only occasionally, uncomfortably and uninformatively into his personal life...
...It was," says Healey, showing understandable pride, "oneofthefew periods in postwar British history in which unemployment and inflation were both falling at the same time...
...it is Harvard and MIT that are "just outside" of Boston, not Brandeis...
...The Time of My Life (Norton, 606 pp., $29.95) has few if any equals among recent British political autobiographies, regrettably not a distinguished genre...
...The free-market Economist, whose philosophy he does not share, salutes him as "probably the best Prime Minister Britain never had...
...Star Wars is "technologically impracticable...
...and a mayor...
...Twice he approvingly quotes Leszek Kolakowski's definition of democratic socialism: "an obstinate will to erode by inches the conditions which produce avoidable suffering, oppression, hunger, wars, racial and national hatred, insatiable greed, and vindictive envy...
...Even today, he thinks, it "is still a unique beacon of hope and opportunity...
...Eisenhower is celebrated as "the only President who never allowed America's Middle East policy to be manipulated by the Zionist lobby...
...they use a rabbinical rhetoric which is shrill with hatred of the unbeliever...
...Narrowly albeit predictably, Healey lost a 1980 bid to become party leader, but against the expectations (and hopes) of many people, he did not join the Labor MPs who in 1981-82defected to the Social Democratic Party...
...This is the most personal (and thus the best) part of the book...
...While Healey remains a Labor MP and a "socialist," he does not believe a specific set of economic institutions fundamentally unlike those of capitalism is desirable...
...He largely ignores this period, except to imply that even then he was no Marxist, and to say that his time in the CP gave him "sufficient understanding of Stalinism to reject it...
...Who were his people...
...Why did he leave the Catholic Church...
...Healey left the shadow front bench in 1987 and now seems to be in semiretirement...
...Only one part of the "Zionist lobby" attracts Healey's notice, the neoconservatives: "hard-line Zionists of the radical Right...
...Lyndon Johnson was a monster," Jimmy Carter "an economic profligate...
...Hopes surely do lead Healey into error at times...
...Labor voters may like him equally well, but the party's political and trade-union activists have long distrusted him...
...Hatred of the unbeliever...
Vol. 73 • October 1990 • No. 14
