ASSAYING OUR TIMES
NYE, RUSSEL B.
Assaying Our Times The American Establishment, by Richard Rovere- Harcourt, Brace and World. 308 pp. $4.95. Reviewed by Russel B. Nye Richard Rovere has been a staff writer for The New Yorker...
...Lyndon Johnson, Edward Teller, and Richard Nixon are out...
...This Establishment, "a more or less closed and self-sustaining institution that holds a preponderance of power in our more or less open society," is made up of "a rather small group of highly-placed and influential men who embody the best of Conventional Wisdom and can be trusted with substantial grants of power by any responsible group in the country...
...In a section titled "Matters Mainly of Fact," Rovere includes a profile of a New York ward boss, notes on the Tru-man-Dewey campaign trains, an account of a particularly confused conference on the Island of Rhodes, a brief piece on Newbold Morris' investigations in the waning days of the Truman Administration, and a frightening memento of the McCarthy madness called "The Kept Witnesses," in which we are reminded that the Department of Justice once kept eighty-three professional witnesses on its payroll in instant readiness, a number of them with conveniently selective memories...
...The New York Times defines the boundaries of the Establishment's ideological tolerance, which lie between Dwight Eisenhower on one side and Walter Reuther on the other...
...Reviewed by Russel B. Nye Richard Rovere has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1944 and has been a commentator on the passing scene for a number of other periodicals, The Progressive among them...
...It is precisely here, one feels, that Ro-vere draws back from commitment, and here that the observer-reporter takes over...
...Newsweek is in and Time out...
...Reinhold Niebuhr is in, but not Billy Graham...
...It is unfortunate that Rovere evidently decided to give the game away in his imaginative footnotes, for otherwise he might have had the best deadpan journalistic spoof since Mencken's bath-tub-in-the-White House story...
...A Few Enthusiasms and Hostilities" comprises sketches of men of whom he approves (Justice Holmes, George Orwell), disapproves (John Foster Dulles, General MacArthur, Sidney Hill-man,) or simply dissects (Harold Ickes, Sherman Adams, Arthur Vanden-berg...
...Nelson Rockefeller, Thomas Dewey, and Adlai Stevenson are in...
...As it is, after reading his essay it will be difficult for anyone with a sense of the ridiculous to read William Buckley, Billy fames Hargis, or Fred Schwarz with a straight face...
...The remainder of the volume skims over a wide range of topics...
...It explains perhaps why his comments on the recent past remain brilliant reporting rather than something deeper, broader, or more positively engaged...
...Delineating the shape of this Establishment and listing its membership Is, as Rovere does it, a fascinating game, at which anybody can play...
...His essay on Ezra Pound is by far the most sensible estimate of that poetic genius and crackpot penned by anybody, and his tribute to George Orwell is a critical study of the highest order...
...It is hard to pin down the per-sonnel of the Central Executive Committee, but, Rovere suggests, you will be on the trail if you look for Republicans who would be held over into Democratic administrations, and vice versa, with everybody's tacit approval—John J. McCloy was most certainly once its Executive Chairman, and the present incumbent might well be Douglas Dillon or Dean Rusk...
...Summarized perhaps by his remark that "the essence of political judgment is the appraisal of potentials," Rovere's own credo seems to be that one shouldn't get too far out or stay too close in, bite off less or more than one can chew, be wearisomely consistent or wildly unpredictable in one's ideas, and most of all, one must be wily, shrewd, and always on the inside...
...The short biographical sketch is Rovere's best form, and I know of nobody writing today who is likely to surpass him in it...
...The final section, "Judgments Reserved," is a scattering of notes on recent political books and events, in which the author most nearly defines, in a short piece called "On Political Sophistication," his own point of view on political life...
...There exists, he says, an inner inner elite that controls American domestic and foreign policy regardless of the political complexion of the reigning administration...
...It is bad taste to be more conservative than Eisenhower or more radical than Reuther, which is why neither Barry Goldwater nor Jimmy Hoffa will ever make it inside...
...This volume is a random collection of twenty essays, reviews, and reports of people, books, and events in the news since 1946, a kind of chrestomathy illustrating Ro-vere's knowledgeable, incisive brand of journalism...
...He finds traces of its influence in national affairs as far back as Theodore Roosevelt (who may have been its first President) and he believes that it has passed judgment on every President since T. R. except Harry Truman, who got in by accident...
...Apparently jaded by the various conspiracy theories put forward over the past two decades (MacArthur's, McCarthy's, the New Conservatives', J. Edgar Hoover's, C. Wright Mills', and so on), Rovere offers one of his own that is credible enough to be taken seriously on even-numbered days and fanciful enough to be read as an inspired parody in between...
...The title essay is by far the most provocative in the book, and well worth the price of admission...
...Nevertheless, Rovere's journalism is just about the best of its kind around today...
Vol. 26 • August 1962 • No. 8
