THE STANDARD READER
The Standard Reader Contributing to the Debate In the first years of The Weekly Standard, we had a policy that no book by anyone on the masthead would be reviewed. It seemed sensible at the time:...
...Are we really prohibited from mentioning that Joseph Epstein will publish in the next few months both a story collection with the perfect title Fabulous Small Jews and a book-length essay called Envy...
...A well-told and fast-reading account of Frum's year working in the White House, The Right Man is particularly good on the way in which the attacks of September 11 crystallized into actuality all the best of Bush's potential—a potential many commentators had denied the president had...
...It has begun to seem absurd that we're the only magazine that can't comment on all this writing, apart from a small "Book of the Week" plug...
...It seemed sensible at the time: a way to avoid dedicating every-other week's review section to contributing editor PJ...
...The pivotal location of Western Europe in the struggle of the Cold War long obscured this fact, but it is obvious now—or, rather, obvious once Kagan points it out...
...We notice, with some irritation, that David Frum's The Right Man: The Surprise Presidency of George W. Bush (Random House, 303 pp., $25.95) didn't wait for our approval before reaching the bestseller list...
...Bottum...
...This is not a promising situation...
...Americans these days are from Mars, and Europeans from Venus...
...Frum begins his book with the first words he chanced to hear in the White House—one staffer saying to another, "Missed you at Bible study"—and builds from that opening a clear picture of the seriousness of the Bush staff and the moral courage granted to the president by his faith...
...O'Rourke, who was publishing comic masterpieces at a rate only slightly faster than the average person can read...
...But our friends keep scribbling away, writing major and important works—and not just our contributing editors: Senior editor Christopher Caldwell, for instance, recently co-edited with Christopher Hitchens a superb collection of essays called Left Hooks, Right Crosses: A Decade of Political Writing (Thunder's Mouth, 352 pp., $16.95...
...Shortly to join Frum on the bestseller list, we trust, is contributing editor Robert Kagan's just-published Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order (Knopf, 103 pp., $18), an expansion of his widely discussed Policy Review essay on the contrasting American and European visions of international order...
...But, as Of Paradise and Power shows, Kagan also understands that we must not sever—or allow the Europeans to sever—our ties to the set of common Western beliefs...
...The struggle of relatively weak Europe in recent years to impose international treaties, courts, and supra-national organizations on the United States is only the latest example of an old, old pattern...
...The first book to appear by anyone who has participated in the administration, The Right Man paints Bush not as a brilliant man—but as a clear and good man...
...Kagan notes that international law has always been a tool militarily weak nations use to attempt to curb strong nations...
...Arguing that "Europe is not really capable of constraining the United States," Kagan understands what led Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld to dismiss France and Germany as "old Europe...
...Unfortunately, Kagan observes, the difference between America and Europe is rapidly hardening into a permanent divide—not merely a jockeying for position, of the kind that world history has always known, but a complete and perhaps novel disagreement about what nations and power are for...
...The "surprise presidency" of Frum's subtitle refers not to Bush's election, but to the stature he revealed when events demanded it...
...It may be, of course, that our contributing editors don't actually need our praise...
Vol. 8 • February 2003 • No. 21
