POLITICAL BOOKNOTES
POLITICAL BOOKNOTES Loyalties: A Son's Memoir. Carl Bernstein. Simon & Schuster, $18.95. Carl Bernstein's parents didn't approve when he left The Washington Post 12 years ago to write a book....
...It's hard to see why he would want to...
...But for all his investigative skills, Carl Bernstein is never able to tell us much about what it meant for his parents to be communists...
...The basic facts are these: Al, a young idealist and law-school dropout, came to Washington in 1937 to investigate railroad price-fixing for the Senate Commerce Committee...
...Raphael undervalues the importance of losing...
...There was a certain cachet that accompanied playing Babe Ruth League baseball or playing high-school basketball, an acknowledgment of masculinity that was denied the president of the student council, the kid who just passed his driver's test, or the guy who helped support his family with a part-time job...
...Capital will be the most important resource of the twenty-first century...
...Failure provokes the epiphanies that force us to confront the future...
...And, of course, women now excel in fields once reserved for men alone...
...Union activities drew Al into the world of the Washington Left, where he met and married Sylvia...
...Young children are instinctive reactionaries, and Carl was no exception...
...Crucial information appears in stray sentences inevitably attached to the wrong paragraphs, while Bernstein pads out the narrative with unilluminating excerpts from FBI files and with transcribed conversations with Bob Woodward and other friends about what he wants to accomplish with this book...
...Failure is necessary because we must be chastened as well as strengthened, taught humility as well as confidence...
...One comfort of Raphael's insightful book is the discovery that we were not alone...
...They are innocent of their own limitations and the rest of us are in danger because of this, just as we were in danger of the occasional cruelties of the big jocks in high school...
...When Al got a job working for the Office of Price Administration in San Francisco, the couple immersed themselves in west coast labor politics...
...None of the men he interviewed seemed to have a particularly welldeveloped idea of just what it is that separates the men from the boys...
...As Thomas A. Leemon observed in The Rites of Passage in a Student Culture, a 1972 book, such rituals placed "a difficult problem of personal growth into a social context ." But as ideas about masculinity evolved—not just bringing home the bacon but cooking it too—the consensus on what made a man dissolved...
...What if only real communists had been rooted out of government—would the firings then have been just...
...Bernstein convincingly portrays these labors as heroic...
...At its worst, Loyalties is a book about writing a book...
...One clear benefit of the chaotic narrative is that it enables Bernstein to cloud the issue he's most squeamish about: what role the Communist party played in his parents' lives...
...In addition to garden-variety worries about a son giving up a prestigious and secure job was a more exotic concern: the book's subject was their own membership in the Communist party...
...The midlife crisis, Raphael says, is the working out, late in life, of problems once resolved by rituals of passage...
...Purges of communists from government posed a tougher question than, say, purges from Hollywood...
...Bernstein answers that "Stalinist crap" is "a pretty legitimate subject for inquiry:" But if this or any other challenge got him a more thorough answer, Bernstein doesn't share it with his readers...
...Packer has no solutions to the questions of African development, but his description of the problem is stark and loving...
...My family says a special prayer during Advent...
...Ours was an impoverished notion of what it meant to be a man, but in an economically depressed former mining town, it was all we were given to work with...
...Progress, it seems, is the nemesis of masculinity...
...When the couple returned to Washington, they did drift away from party politics, but Sylvia remained an underground member...
...According to Al, his membership was "half-assed" and he attended only a dozen meetings...
...the union was...
...I still nurse a small grudge against my high-school baseball coach, who wouldn't let me play in our scrimmages but neither would he cut me from the team...
...I never got a uniform...
...Bernstein writes movingly about growing up subversive: piling into the family car to escape the subpoena-server from the House Committee on Un-American Activities, sobbing hysterically after the Rosenbergs were executed (not so much out of altruism as out of fear that his own parents would meet the same fate...
...Al and Sylvia refused their son's pleadings to join a country club, but after Carl wrote them an ugly note calling them "atheistic Jewish communists" they agreed to throw him a bar mitzvah...
...Al and Sylvia joined this tiny tide...
...That's not to say that Loyalties lacks revelation...
...Most of the current debate on America's waning competitiveness and industrial dominance has centered on the loss of jobs in the auto, steel, and microchip industries...
...University of Nebraska Press, $19.95...
...He quickly got involved in organizing for the United Federal Workers of America, a CIO-affiliated public employee union (later known as the Public Workers of America...
...Whereas the Indians rode into the desert seeking the sacred through fasting and prayer, Raphael's interview subjects—who seem disproportionately drawn from northern California's adventurefitness culture—seize on a hobby at which they can excel...
...The opportunity to win the admiration of one's peers is much greater in competitive sports...
...The identity problem, Raphael would have us believe, is most acute for the young man...
...Is it fairer for an official to promote a well-qualified teacher than to promote a less-qualified friend when, as everyone knows, to fail to help a friend would be immoral, a betrayal...
...What Packer is good at is using an often novelistic approach to catch the paranoia of an isolated volunteer's life and the moral ambiguity of, say, "fairness...
...A communist screenwriter wasn't in much position to do his nation harm...
...This was humiliating and not, to Raphael's mind, a successful rite of passage...
...Bernstein's unresolved feelings about his parents' radicalism probably account for the book's maddening stream-of-consciousness structure, which fuzzes up even the simplest facts...
...Roger Baker The Men From the Boys: Rites of Passage in Male America...
...Jim Naughton...
...High school and college students were left to answer this question for themselves...
...It wasn't until I skimmed the book, after a thorough read, that I understood that Carl had two (I think) younger sisters...
...Al and Sylvia Bernstein had never been completely forthcoming with Carl (or anyone else) about this aspect of their lives, even though its consequences—summonses before congressional committees, scandalous headlines, ostracism by neighbors— caused the family considerable pain...
...But the problem with competition, as Raphael points out, is that someone has to lose...
...We haven't killed our own food for centuries, so that can't be it...
...Simon and Schuster, $19.95...
...In many cases, the accuser was unknown not only to the accused but also to the boards themselves...
...and Russia against Hitler had brought nationwide membership in the Communist party to an all-time peak of between 60,000 and 80,000 members...
...Japan's New Financial Empire and its Threat to America...
...The only feats that could win a guy similar prestige were having a great deal of sex (and talking about it) and drinking a great deal of beer...
...A third alternative, not to write the book at all but to undertake a private investigation to satisfy his own legitimate curiosity, seems never to have occurred to him...
...Once you admit affiliation," he complains, "you get into all that Stalinist crap...
...In fact, when it came to making or not making the varsity, most of us had to lose...
...Asked why she didn't quit outright, she says, "I would have been disloyal" In 1947 Harry Truman caved in to political pressure and created loyalty boards allowing federal agencies to purge "subversives" in government...
...When I was 11, I prayed that I would grow up to be the free safety for the Minnesota Vikings...
...The FBI would simply provide its (highly suspect) assurance that its information was reliable...
...Devising and supervising these rituals was once a profoundly social affair...
...Vintage, $8.95...
...Judging from the muddled result, Bernstein, after much agonizing, finally chose to protect his parents and leave his readers out in the cold...
...The first is to devise our own highly individualized challenges, an approach Raphael likens to the vision quest practiced by various tribes of American Indians...
...On the bench I was more keenly aware than ever that my boyhood was over and my adult life was beginning...
...Becoming the world's greatest rock-climbing, weightlifting guitarist impresses few people who aren't conversant with one of your mediums...
...The nation that controls this resource will have a great influence over world affairs, just as America did in the twentieth century...
...Ray Raphael...
...This was a time when the alliance between the U.S...
...While Carl read from the Torah, FBI agents stood across the street writing down license numbers...
...Al worked tirelessly defending union members...
...Given his parents' continuing reluctance to air their dirty linen, Bernstein had two alternatives once he'd signed his book contract: he could be a good boy or he could write a good book...
...If you repeat it 15 times each night, Jesus is supposed to grant you a special intention...
...Al in particular is exasperating on the subject, tirelessly evading all questions with his insistence that the party wasn't what mattered...
...It's not an issue Bernstein chooses to raise, let alone explore...
...These losses are indeed troubling, but Burstein sees the loss of American competitiveness and dominance in the financial world as far more dangerous to long-range American interests...
...That's not true of the second path—athletics...
...But what if the process hadn't been corrupt...
...Paul speaks of putting aside childish things, but most of us won't do so voluntarily...
...But growing up with athletes as my role models, being too short and too slow to compete beyond Little League seemed like punishment for sins I didn't know I'd committed...
...This is a noble sentiment, but it seems to me it would produce generations of Donald Trumps and Dan Quayles, men on whom life appears to have left no marks...
...Sylvia says joining was a way to demonstrate commitment to antifascism, the labor movement, and rights for blacks...
...Raphael believes that guys basically had two choices and that each was ultimately selfdefeating...
...Al and Sylvia's own decision to join the Communist party cost them dearly—friends and relatives spurned them, and Al ended up in the laundry business for a time...
...he drove his parents crazy by serving as class air-raid warden and brandishing an "I Like Ike" button while his parents wondered whether to compromise and support Adlai Stevenson or back Vincent Hallinan of the Progressive party...
...Soon after arriving as a Peace Corps volunteer in Togo in 1982, Packer had "the feeling of being trapped, vulnerable, in a place where nothing had any meaning and I had none to provide...
...Lacking such rituals, Raphael says, we grow up frightened of definition and duck commitments...
...George Packer...
...But the vision quest model," Raphael writes, "fails to provide any structural support to help us with our personal struggles and so it does little to ensure success in our difficult times of transition ." Worse than that, nobody cares when you succeed...
...The union leaders they met there belonged to the Communist party and badgered Al and Sylvia to join too...
...This may not be one of the major criticisms of progress, but it has left a generation of men struggling (too often in print) with their identity...
...Daniel Burstein...
...He wants society to do more to "ensure our success...
...It takes fewer and fewer of us to defend hearth and home...
...A society that is unclear about its definition of masculinity is incapable of formulating rites through which a boy passes into manhood...
...Timothy Noah The Village of Waiting...
...But I have a different idea about that...
...I grew up instead with the body of Michael Dukakis...
...Richard Lipez YEN...
...Out in the village of Lavie, where he teaches English in a middle school, "each class met me with the same blank, puzzled, or amused stares" His own efforts—raising the level of English, helping promote latrines— seem to him practically worthless, though some readers will disagree...
...Twenty years later I'm comfortable with the conclusion that Jesus did the right thing...
...It teaches us the principal lesson of any rite of passage: we are mortal, but we are not dead...
...The applause of your peers—something that used to be a part of rituals—is gone...
...a communist in government arguably might have been...
...the loyalty boards were truly appalling...
...I kept showing up at the field every day hoping for my chance...
Vol. 21 • April 1989 • No. 3
