Wechsler's Anger
Lasch, Robert
Wechsler's Anger Reflections of an Angry Middle-Aged Editor, by James A. Wechsler. Random House. 239 pp. $3.95. Reviewed by Robert Lasch James Wechsler is angry about a number of things: about...
...The liberals are in retreat, no great issues are sharply defined, compromise has become "a soggy stalemate/' and it is time for a new beginning...
...Wechsler is repelled by "the drab listlessness that afflicts our political bodies...
...Reviewed by Robert Lasch James Wechsler is angry about a number of things: about the "age of unthink" personified by today's young beatniks, about the persistent apathy with which too many people contemplate the prospect of nuclear war, about the "deliberate lack of speed" with which Negroes gain the rights that ought to be theirs, about lackadaisical newspapers, about the repulsive kind of young conservatism symbolized by William Buckley, Jr...
...He is unwilling to concede that politics and public affairs are something to be abandoned in this age of suffocating private affluence...
...not to conquer reaction but to hound and harass it...
...And he tells a fascinating story of how J. Edgar Hoover's propaganda machine swung into a counterattack on the Post's unfriendly analysis of J. Edgar Hoover—before the offending series of articles had been published, or even written...
...But most of all the editor of the New York Post is angry about political dullness...
...The young seem beat and the old seem bored...
...But whether it would clarify the function of the liberals is not at all certain...
...And he is unable to believe that "the glib evasion, the discreet retreat, the soft smile," are the last word...
...He finds many who aspire to political leadership "so small and so dull...
...But Mr...
...Wechsler never tires of reminding his newspaper colleagues how most of them declined to get excited when Senator James Eastland attacked the very citadel of journalistic respectability, the New York Times, for alleged Communist infiltration...
...If the electorate is benumbed, he believes it is because the movers and shakers have failed them...
...Throughout this book the reader is made aware of a pervasive ennui...
...Do the dead excitements of a bygone youth translate themselves into discontent with a dull present...
...As one who can claim to be middle-aged if not so angry, I laid down the book with a feeling that Mr...
...Despite a spreading cult of personality, in which the important thing is the image rather than the thought, "politics has acquired a soporific dullness...
...Wechsler is perhaps too irritated by the inherent loneliness of liberals...
...Which makes it all the more necessary for angry middle-aged men like Wechsler to go on being angry...
...He yearns for the realignment of parties that would enroll all the good guys in one party and the bad guys in another...
...Wechsler is not so far gone as many of his generation...
...Possibly because he grew up in the heady days of the New Deal when for a brief interlude liberals were in power, he seems to forget that this is not the natural lot of the breed...
...Although it is nice to be on the winning side at times, and nice for an editor to lead a parade of righteousness with at least a few followers behind him, still the tasks of liberalism are worth doing even without these rewards, and candor compels recognition that most of the time the labor goes unrequited...
...not to consolidate but to create...
...Essentially this is a highly personal book about the reactions of one self-conscious liberal to the men and issues of this decade...
...One finds oneself wondering how much of the author's anger is a disguised middle age...
...If, in the phrase of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., the bland lead the bland, still there has rarely been a time "that clamored so loudly for valor and initiative, for the unconventional political act, the uninhibited word, the unequivocal thought...
...That function is not so much to rule as it is to educate...
...This would be neat and orderly, and certainly it would simplify things for men like Wechsler who find themselves revolted by political association with the Eastlands and the Lyndon Johnsons...
...There is another good chapter on Nixon ("Life of a Salesman") and a fine, indignant essay on the American press...
...There is an excellent chapter on McCarthy, which suggests that we have not yet reaped the full harvest of the brief blight which the Wisconsin Senator visited upon the land...
Vol. 24 • September 2006 • No. 7
