POLITICAL BOOKNOTES
POLITICAL BOOKNOTES Who Got Einstein's Office? Eccentricity and Genius at the Institute for Advanced Study. Ed Regis. Addison-Wesley, $17.95. Had anyone suggested a year ago that...
...Pauli won the Nobel prize for his exclusion principle, a theory that, among other things, explains why a table, or any piece of matter, doesn't just collapse—matter is, after all, mostly empty space...
...One of the most profound impacts of the war was the way it both directly and indirectly drove huge numbers of academy graduates out of the Army...
...Most of them had nowhere else to run...
...By selecting only West Pointers who remained in the service, Prashker ignores the vast segment of the long, gray line that stampeded out and whose stories are equally, if not more, compelling...
...The reader won't come out knowing all there is to know about the partial width of the cross section of semileptonic vector meson decay, but he will get enough to satisfy his curiosity, while keeping his attention...
...Not many people were in a position to make large philanthropic donations that year, but the Bambergers had just sold their highly profitable department store the summer before (they received their $25 million, much of it in cash, six weeks before Black Thursday...
...It appears likely that Iran-backed fighters in Beirut may be forced to strike a conciliatory note as well...
...We are treated, for example, to an interminable account of the difficulties of catching a cab from the train station in Peekskill to West Point...
...Will you give for Vietnam...
...If nothing else, this is a welcome development for those Westerners, captivated like so many others by Beirut, who have been paying for their attraction to the city by being shuttled for months or years, in blindfolds, from one safehouse to another...
...The Bambergers hoped the institute would be a haven where a select group of natural scientists, mathematicians, social scientists, and historians would spend their days thinking great thoughts, unmolested by the outside world...
...Rick Atkinson...
...The pictures, taken by the American photojournalist Eli Reed during a period of heavy fighting in 1983, also show how life goes on amidst the slaughter...
...He is shrewd enough, however, to focus not on the commanders at the top, but rather on platoon leaders and company commanders...
...Almost alone among Arab cities, Beirut enjoyed a free press and easy commerce with the libertine West...
...A sea-change in attitudes toward authority and toward West Point's venerated values—duty, honor, and country—led to the massive cheating scandal in 1976, in which 150 cadets were expelled...
...The result, of course, was the death of 241 American servicemen, and dozens of individual tragedies...
...As president of the American University of Beirut, he returns to his native city to continue the work his missionary parents had begun and is murdered on his way to work in 1984: "He was born in the same hospital where he was pronounced dead" Taken together with the photos, Ajami's essay paints a vivid portrait of a place where the center cannot hold...
...As to the question posed by the title, you'll have to read the book...
...Kurt Godel, the mathematician popularized in Douglas Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach, came to the institute in 1940, but after his permanent appointment in 1953, he virtually stopped publishing...
...It would be nice to believe that the current physics vogue stems from a genuine interest in science...
...Beirut was a place where you "could ski in the mountains in the morning and swim in the afternoons," a city that "lived by iLts wits" and enjoyed a freedom and prosperity bred of silk, trade, and cultural diversity...
...Although comprising only 1 percent of the officers in World War II, military academy graduates accounted for more than half of the division commanders and included such celebrated figures as Eisenhower, Bradley, MacArthur, and Patton...
...It also conjures a bit of the magic that kept men like Kerr returning to resurrect the dream of a Muslim/Christian citystate by the sea...
...Duty, Honor, Vietnam, however, has more serious shortcomings...
...But in Duty, Honor, Vietnam, the interviewer-as-character is gratuitous...
...One gets the impression that the institute hasn't been an "intellectual hotel" so much as a rest-home for geniuses...
...unmolested by grant-writing (a permanent member's salary today is about $90,000...
...Zapped by the same one-star twice...
...Colonel Robert A. "Tex" Turner, currently the academy's director of military instruction, describes the unalloyed joy of being a battalion commander in the 1970s: "Christ, there I was, out in the foxholes, taking PT tests with them, walking 40-, 80-kilometer raids with them, doing all that—which I'd set up, I'm sorry to say...
...Flint brushed past them, snapping, "I already have...
...In Ajami's narrative, America appears as the last in a long line of innocents who thought that some sanity could be restored...
...Norton, $19.95...
...In the early 1970s, West Point had difficulty attracting qualified young men because of the national opprobrium toward the military...
...As one of Orson Welles's characters put it, "Switzerland had 500 years of peace and all they produced was the cuckoo clock ." Anyone who has tried to "get ahead" on work at the beginning of a long vacation will understand the problem...
...That has also meant unmolested by teaching (the institute has never conferred degrees...
...For centuries, the one-time Phoenician port was a refuge for religious dissidents and ethnic exiles from across the region: the Druze, Shi'a Muslims, Maronite Christians, Armenians, and finally, Palestinians...
...Feynman," a humorous autobiographical work by Nobel laureate Richard Feynman, hit The New York Times's best-seller list...
...Regis's new work therefore has a well-tested market...
...The academy's 47th superintendent, Major General Samuel W. Koster, was forced to resign in disgrace after an investigation tied him to the My Lai massacre of 1968...
...Where the author is genuinely a part of the story, intrusion is warranted and even welcome—Neil Sheehan's A Bright Shining Lie comes to mind...
...Vietnam was hard on West Point...
...Chaos, by James Gleick, made the best-seller list earlier this year...
...At the peak of the Vietnam war, 21 of the 30 top army officers in the war zone were academy graduates, including, of course, William C. Westmoreland, class of 1936...
...The profiles are disjointed, and are set in wan, prosaic terms...
...For a time prosperity provided a common thread...
...Eli Reed, Fouad Ajami...
...That is partially because they are an obvious symbol of the officer brethren...
...I couldn't believe it, but that's a true story...
...Ironically this depressing volume appears just as some good news for Beirut may finally have broken...
...The first permanent member was Albert Einstein, whose fame was unrivaled, but whose best work was already behind him...
...Ivan Prashker...
...Prashker's group portrait shows, for a certain breed, there is no higher calling than commanding other men in the dark of night...
...One explanation for the institute's lack of brainy breakthroughs may be that its scholars usually don't become prominent enough to deserve appointments until they're old—and perhaps burned out...
...If it does little to change our image of Beirut, this book does add depth and pathos to a story without clear villains or heroes...
...and even unmolested by other institute members (there have been remarkably few collaborations at the institute...
...We see a beauty queen, Miss Lebanon, at home with her mother, or a family picnicking by the Mediterranean, just a few feet from the rusted hull of a half-sunk ship...
...Prashker has tapped our fascination with the products of "that rockbound highland home" by profiling a dozen officers who fought the war and whose links to West Point permit an examination of how Vietnam subsequently affected the military academy...
...Prashker has little sense of scene-building and consequently few of the battle anecdotes convey a sense of vivid immediacy...
...As Black Jack Pershing decreed in 1917, "The standards for the American Army will be those of West Point ." Another reason for the spotlight is that West Pointers have so dominated the upper ranks of the Army...
...that is, given no outside stimulation, a person doesn't concentrate harder, he dozes off...
...the demonstrators asked...
...Wolfgang Pauli did important work on particle physics there...
...The scientists we meet spend a lot of time trading clever quips with their Nobel laureate colleagues and flying around to sexy places like Switzerland, to check on the particle accelerator, or Sweden, to pick up The Prize...
...Perhaps so, but unfortunately, it has nothing to do with the larger story Prashker set out to tell...
...Along with the biography, there is also a decent amount of science in this book, explained in a clever and patient way that tells the by-now-curious reader what these people have actually thought about...
...While there are intriguing glimpses of the emotional ferment within some characters—as when one colonel's wife reveals that she considered divorce during the strained early years of marriage—these inner lives are seldom developed in a way that compels the reader's involvement...
...Nicholas Martin Beirut: City of Regrets...
...But when ambitions clashed—abetted by the West and Middle Eastern states—a fight to the death was the only available option...
...Roy K. Flint, currently West Point's dean, recalls being confronted by antiwar demonstrators who held out coin boxes before a Christmas Eve service at the academy chapel in 1972...
...The text, written by a Shi'a Muslim who now teaches at Johns Hopkins, shows how Beirut became the theater in which blood feuds were played out: between Iran and Iraq, between Palestinians and both Israel and Syria...
...The cocksure ebullience that prevailed at West Point in the mid-1960s, when instructors posted placards in their offices that declared, "War is my business and business is good," gradually gave way to a dour realization that there was very little to cheer about in this war...
...Other geniuses followed...
...Tony Horwitz Duty, Honor, Vietnam: Twelve Men of West Point...
...Arbor House/William Morrow, $19.95...
...Goddam, it was beautiful ." There are also telling vignettes about the pain of being an officer after the war had gone bad and the military profession had fallen from public esteem...
...This is a book of the Beirut that the West has come to know since 1975: a free-fire zone where alliances shift by the hour and where killing is so stylish that teenagers wear their AK-47s like Calvin Klein jeans...
...Lebanon, a French consul wrote in 1913, is a land without patriotism, in which each official is ready "to set his country on fire to light his cigarette' In the essay accompanying this collection of photographs, Fouad Ajami, a Lebanese-born professor, shows Beirut as a patchwork of competing dreams, doomed to tear apart...
...How nice that this work shows a genuine interest in ideas...
...The book is a history of the Institute for Advanced Study, the private research institute founded in 1930 by Caroline Bamberger Fuld and her brother, Louis Bamberger, in Princeton, New Jersey...
...But the 000h-aaah tone of many of the recent releases suggests the fascination is with celebrity—the idea of genius, not the ideas of geniuses...
...But Regis also raises the theory, advanced by others, that the institute's very isolation is the cause of this sloth...
...Not everyone fell asleep at the wheel...
...Finally, in search of a unifying element to bind his dozen officers together, Prashker regrettably settles on himself...
...The problem is that, after they arrive, the institute's great thinkers often stop producing great thoughts...
...It wasn't the only one...
...Iran's retreat from its war with Iraq bodes ill for the revolutionary fundamentalism that the Ayatollah Khomeini brought to the region in 1979...
...On another occasion, Prashker complains about being kept waiting on two occasions while the colonel he hopes to interview is tied up in conference with a brigadier general: "Don't you know that that goddamn general had Rimer in his office on the floor until almost 11:30...
...Yet by focusing on only a dozen men who remained in the service and are certifiable success stories—nine reached the rank of full colonel, one is a brigadier general, two are lieutenant colonels—Prashker skews his sample in a crucial and unfortunate fashion...
...Had anyone suggested a year ago that generalinterest books by and about theoretical physicists would become wildly popular, the response would undoubtedly have been, "Surely you're joking" That changed when "Surely You're Joking, Mr...
...Malcom Kerr, for one...
...Regis's scientific judgments aren't always as good as his explanations—he implies that Robert Oppenheimer ("the father of the atomic bomb") was as important to experimental physics as Pauli was to theoretical physics (a dubious assertion)— but that takes little away from the book...
...By describing the ties they maintain to their alma mater, he shows the war's profound impact on West Point and the Army at-large...
...West Pointers in combat have always attracted an attention that is disproportionate to their numbers in the Army's officer corps...
...Not only did the academy lose many of its cherished sons—about 300 West Pointers died in Southeast Asia—but when Americans grew weary of the conflict, their hostility inevitably was directed at the academy, as though it was the casus belli rather than an instrument of the war...
...Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time entered its 29th week on the list in midNovember, at which time it was ranked number one...
Vol. 20 • December 1988 • No. 11
