THE STANDARD READER
The Standard Reader Anti-Anti-Communism, Yet Again A than G. Theoharis has made a career out of the FBI. He produced a book called J. Edgar Hoover, Sex, and Crime, another called The Boss: J....
...In Chasing Spies, he insists the KGB had few nefarious purposes in America...
...The effect is like going to a keg party with the most outrageous lecturer from film school...
...Behind Thebes is a former Army doctor who resembles a Mississippi Mengele...
...Going further still, they impugn the beliefs that big government—or protests against patriarchy and the free market—can adequately address women's problems...
...But it works well within the story—which is, in its way, a retelling of Aeschylus' Seven Against Thebes: a crew of men determined to bring justice to a hideous kingdom...
...Brookhis-er is also deft with the less well-known story of how John Quincy's own son, Charles Francis, helped keep Britain out of our Civil War...
...Expect to see, from many authors in the coming years, books that argue how the FBI failed in counterintelligence but promoted the politics of McCarthyism...
...No one does gunplay with greater relish or more loving accuracy...
...Most of them are firearms experts, with strong followings in the gun-trade press, and all that's needed to draw them into the adventure is exactly what Earl has to offer: the chance to test themselves and their firearms against some real bad guys...
...Bruce Kuklick's account of the growth of philosophical thinking in the United States ranges from Jonathan Edwards and Charles Hodge to Hillary Putnam and Richard Rorty, all in the span of 326 pages...
...Writers such as Martha C. Nussbaum and Norma Jean Almodovar may still argue that the issues of abortion, sexual harassment, reproductive technology, self-defense, prostitution, and pornography play a distinctive role in women's lives and demand attention...
...The book is witty and graceful, telling the familiar tale of John Adams's role in the Declaration of Independence and his service as president—as well as that of his son, John Quincy Adams...
...Theoharis has recently published a book with the title Chasing Spies (Ivan R. Dee, 320 pp., $27.50), about Hoover's fears of communism from the 1940s on...
...This is an author who knows "the impact of a .30-06 with a quarter value wind drift and the proper way to regulate the rate of fire on the gas pipe under a Browning Automatic Rifle barrel...
...well, you get the idea...
...The roots of the Adams family lie in Puritan New England, Richard Brookhiser insists, for that's the only way to explain their constant striving for election—in both senses of the word...
...Indeed, to the untrained eye, this proof of Soviet spies looks like justification for the FBI during the Cold War...
...all the Soviets really wanted was to keep track of Russians living here—Orthodox priests, Tsarists, Trot-skyites, etc.—who might threaten the Communist revolution back in Russia...
...The greatest fear of a widely published intellectual historian is that he will either have to think of something new to say or risk repeating himself...
...Athan Theoharis is not the author to carry this thesis through to mainstream acceptance...
...The old party line, of course, was that there weren't really any Americans spying for the Russians during the Cold War...
...And these Venona cables, analyzed in such books as Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev's The Haunted Wood and John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr's Venona, have made it nearly impossible to continue to hold that old line...
...But their work is nonetheless worth noticing, for it represents a step back from the abyss of radical feminism...
...All is illustrated by well-chosen detail...
...the search for spies was a boondoggle invented by power-hungry anti-Communists—especially at the FBI...
...As it happens, they have a very thin notion of natural law—defined for them by self-ownership, personal responsibility, and consistently applied choice...
...The idea of such a place, complete with an English version of an Arbeit Macht Frei sign, will strike the reader as hyperbolic...
...Rachel DiCarlo Pale Horse Coming by Stephen Hunter (Simon & Schuster, 487 pp., $25...
...Theoharis has stumbled on the answer: Turn the fact that the spies were real into an additional indictment...
...He may also underrate John Adams as a president, failing to give him sufficient credit for maintaining Hamilton's economic program...
...Bottum Books in Brief America's First Dynasty: The Adamses, 1735-1918 by Richard Brookhiser (Free Press, 244 pp., $25...
...But it was Theoharis's subtitle that caught our eye: How the FBI Failed in Counterintelligence but Promoted the Politics of McCarthyism in the Cold War Years...
...The protagonist may be a soldier tracking a killer across the ruins of occupied Germany, a spy threading his way through the Spanish Civil War, or a state trooper looking for the perpetrator of a massacre at a pancake house in a forlorn prairie town...
...If a woman says she ought to be able to choose, then she must extend the same 'ought' to every other human being," McElroy explains...
...But the book he's produced is a delight to read, brilliant, penetrating, and written with style...
...government began declassifying its intercepts of old Soviet cables...
...A disclaimer in the introduction states that the intention of the book is neither encyclopedic nor thematic, but rather an attempt to write a popular book about the social and political conditions that shaped the philosophical endeavors of American theologians, academics, and a few gifted amateurs...
...Although the radical and gender feminists have dominated women's politics in recent years, other types of feminists exist, and Wendy McElroy has gathered some of their writing in Liberty for Women...
...Mark W. Davis...
...But it is in exploring the big, simple themes of courage, guilt, and manhood in a world of horrific risks that Hunter shines...
...Take this description of John Quin-cy in the 1790s: "All his life he would be a serious drinker—as an old man he would correctly identify eleven out of fourteen Madeiras in a blind tasting— though unlike his brothers he stayed this side of alcoholism...
...He is a stickler for accuracy, whether he is depicting Stalin's hidden hand in the internecine wars of the left in the Spanish Civil War or describing a wound left by a hollow-point bullet...
...Brookhiser's next volume, reportedly on Gouverneur Morris, should be an event...
...But then, in the late 1990s, the U.S...
...Not only did the FBI "promote the politics of McCarthyism," but it simultaneously "failed in counterintelligence"—as the existence of spies demonstrates...
...But another set of readers know a different Stephen Hunter—who, for two decades, has been turning out hard-bitten thrillers...
...He gives slightly short shrift to William James and John Dewey, but probably because he feels he has already said quite enough about them in his previous extensive writings on Pragmatism, which he acknowledges as the most important and uniquely American contribution to philosophy...
...Ever since his first novel, The Master Sniper (about Hitler, an exceptional sniper, and a high-tech rifle), Hunter has produced page-turners that transform research into living backdrops...
...Brookhiser may err in not discussing the Petition of Right and the English Bill of Rights, assuming that readers know what these are and why, in light of them, John and Samuel Adams saw George III as a breaker of covenants with his subjects...
...Otherwise she is claiming a privilege rather than a right...
...Still, though Theoharis's Chasing Spies is a failure, his subtitle has all the hallmarks of success...
...This is a man obsessed with America's domination— he believes—by J. Edgar Hoover...
...A pledge to a friend leads him to Thebes, where he becomes a white slave at the prison farm, subject to its torture house and submersion in its river of drowned men...
...Hunter is emerging as one of those rare writers, like Martin Cruz Smith or Robert Stone, who can drive a massmarket thriller to literary heights...
...Katherine Mangu-Ward Liberty for Women: Freedom and Feminism in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Wendy McElroy (Ivan R. Dee, 320 pp., $30...
...The prison farm has a purpose: It is meant to be known across the Negro South as a rumor of fear, a word to shut down any thought of (as it was said in those days) "stirring things up...
...Though not quite as impressive as its billing—"the American counterpart to Bertrand Russell's A History of Western Philosophy"—the book is a well-researched introduction for the reader interested in an overview of American philosophy...
...But these "individualist feminists" deviate from their radical and gender counterparts by refusing to relegate women to a class apart from men...
...Kuklick is neither complimentary nor optimistic about the current state of philosophy, as he makes clear in his biting treatment of thinkers like Quine and Rawls...
...Washington Post movie critic Stephen Hunter can toss off a reference to Cahiers du cinéma, then turn to a joke about zee French...
...He produced a book called J. Edgar Hoover, Sex, and Crime, another called The Boss: J. Edgar Hoover and the Great American Inquisition, another called From the Secret Files of J. Edgar Hoover, another called...
...Jonathan Leaf A History of Philosophy in America, 1720-2000 by Bruce Kuklick (Oxford University Press, 326 pp., $30...
...Earl escapes and pulls together an argumentative band of brothers—gunmen brought together not with any promise of reward or appeal to idealism...
...Instead, the individualist feminists argue that natural law "grounded in or based upon fact" should be employed in addressing these topics, giving the same individual rights and freedoms to everyone...
...Their leader is Earl Swagger, an exMarine with a talent for violence and a boatload of survivor's guilt...
...In America's First Dynasty, Brookhiser examines the legacy of American Calvinism in a time of waning Congregationalist faith...
...Even setting aside the fact that "keeping track" of dissidents included blackmail, intimidation, and murder, there's something peculiar in this exculpation of the KGB when it comes from an author who's made his living by attacking the FBI for spying on Americans...
...And then there's Henry Adams, whom Brookhiser considers a great writer with immense faults...
...So what's a man to do, if he's unwilling to abandon bashing J. Edgar Hoover...
...Horror and honor abound in his latest effort, Pale Horse Coming, a dark tale about a pair of 1950s lawmen who stumble on the "Thebes State Penal Farm (Colored)" in Mississippi...
...Every once in a while, you come across something like this, which perfectly expresses the attempt to forge a new party line...
Vol. 7 • May 2002 • No. 33
