Political Booknotes Reviews

...He's playing Bismarck...

...The reasons, as Haldeman describes them, are worth noting...

...Almost every entry in the Diaries could have made the front page of The Washington Post the next day...

...For the two days that follow, we are told that Nixon's two other top foreign policy advisors, Secretary of State William P. Rogers and Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird, balked at the president's invasion plans...

...My second favorite entry comes from November 1972, after Kissinger, in a famous interview with Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci, took sole credit for the opening to China...

...The next section focuses on America, which is followed by a grouping on that most vexing of American dilemmas: race...

...Importance to the magazine's history...

...With its commitment to the world of ideas as well as the realm of public policy, TNR holds a unique place in our national discourse...

...The magazine began in 1914 as a beacon of Progressivism, a last monument of the Age of Reform...

...Yet at the same time, the arrival of Peretz—besides bringing in fresh blood and new money—helped bolster the magazine's always-strong connections to academe...

...Leon Wieseltier on the Holocaust Museum is at once magnificent and maddening (oh, what a high horse that man can ride, especially when, as is often the case, he's right...

...According to Haldeman, Nixon "obviously is extremely displeased...

...Everyone will have his own favorite passages...

...This is bad news," he says three times, and one almost expects to hear a cock crowing...

...without lying, which he won't do (President agrees...

...The press, instead of presenting reality, promotes the image handed to it, whether favorable from supporters or adverse from critics...

...There is hardly a major event from the Nixon years that this book doesn't illuminate in some way...

...Haldeman's handwritten notes, which run to 1,000 or more yellow legal pages, have been on file in the government-controlled Nixon archives outside Washington for years...

...Representativeness of the debates or issues...

...There's nothing here from America's greatest living journalist, Murray Kempton, a TNR editor in the mid-sixties...

...Taylor Branch is eloquent on the observance of the first Martin Luther King, Jr...

...Intrinsic excellence...

...Democracy, of course, is a nasty, chaotic business, and the Oval Office is where it all gets played out day after day...

...Worse, though, are the exclusions...

...This is the fourth anthology of selections from the magazine, the others having appeared on the 20th, 50th, and 60th anniversaries of its founding 80 years ago this November...

...Well, part of what makes the magazine so refreshing is its obvious inability to contain within its covers the loose baggy monster that is liberalism...

...At the other end of the political spectrum, the 1986 editorial, "The Case for the Contras," argues for military aid to the Nicaraguan opposition with a Blivenesque obliviousness, most egregiously so when it declares that "The future of Central America hinges on [the contra aid vote's] outcome...

...Political Booknotes The New Republic Reader: Eighty Years of Opinion and Debate Dorothy Wickenden, editor Basic Books, $28 By Mark Feeney George Orwell made no secret of his frequent irritation with the New Statesman—which in fact didn't keep him from declaring his even greater irritation over the occasional Saturday when it failed to arrive in his mailbox...

...And Charles Merz's account of Warren G. Harding running for president, "The Front Porch in Marion," remains as deadpan devastating as it must have been at the time...

...The first section, "The New World Order: 'After the Revolution,'" includes everything from Virginia Woolf on the movies to Ronald Steel on Kissinger's memoirs...

...The move emphasized the magazine's orientation toward politics and its sense of newsiness, attributes that would distinguish TNR as other "serious" publications found themselves increasingly subject to the academicization of intellectual life in postwar America...

...I'll cite just two...

...Summing up the meetings that day, Haldeman wrote: "President] made clear he understood basis of both Rogers and Laird in meeting...

...Of course, Wilson soon enough found himself chafing against the magazine's restrictions of space, of reach, and of ideology...

...Like National Review, it is ultimately about ideology, not politics...

...She has arranged the book by category rather than chronology...

...Or as the Basic Books catalogue rather grandly puts it, "a composite portrait of the development of twentieth-century liberal ideology...

...Laird's concern is described as sheerly bureaucratic...

...What's good here can be very good, and what's bad is rare...

...Kfissinger] pushing too hard to hold control...

...The Haldeman Diaries H. R. Haldeman Putnam, $27.50 By Walter Plncus It is almost impossible to get an unvarnished look at an American president in action, particularly in this age of television and public relations...

...Jean Daniel's interview with Castro includes his receiving the news of John F. Kennedy's assassination...

...The anthology does not shrink from showing the magazine in a bad light...

...Of course, one might argue that in doing so Peretz was simply following tradition...

...Bob) Haldeman met with the president and carefully took notes on conversations that went on for minutes or hours and that ranged from the future of the lira to the choice of wine for state dinners...

...Still, there's an awful lot of material that would appear to have been included simply for the sake of name-dropping...

...Amid all the variousness is a consistent, wearying tidiness...

...The best monument to The New Republic is still the rather flimsy one that comes in the mail every Saturday—or, if you live where I do, every Monday or Tuesday...

...Certainly, the Reader boasts a glittering compendium of names— Rebecca West, Randolph Bourne, John Maynard Keynes, Bertrand Russell, Winston Churchill (with a cable marking the first anniversary of FDR's death), W. H. Auden, John Dewey, John Dos Passos (famously proclaiming, "Hoover or Roosevelt, it'll be the same cops"), Margaret Sanger, Gunnar Myrdal, Lewis Mumford—but it's the names themselves that do most of the glittering, rather than what they've written...

...involvement in World War II— surely a consequence, at least in part, of its ardent support of entry into World War I. Having Henry Wallace as editor for a brief period after the war only made things worse...

...Something similar is going on in the Reader...

...It's all very irritating: both the publication and its postal delivery...

...holiday, and Michael Kinsley's 1984 anatomization of the role of "the gaffe" in presidential campaigns (a gaffe being something that "occurs not when a politician lies, but when he tells the truth") is as amusing as it is insightful...

...This isn't necessarily a bad thing, or, for that matter, a good thing...

...Almost every day for four and a half years, Nixon Chief of Staff H.R...

...It's not that Wickenden has done her job badly...

...It is maddening, wayward, obstreperous...

...But the newly published Diaries provides a vastly more convenient way of gaining access to those Nixon conversations—a record of the way the Oval Office works that may never again be matched...

...And that leaving-out means an all-the-harsher scrutiny for whatever makes the cut...

...But this is a curiously leaden birthday present to a con-foundingly lively magazine...

...A case in point is The Haldeman Diaries...

...Even more problematic was the magazine's opposition to U.S...

...This for the man who, during the twenties and thirties, lent more distinction to TNR than any writer in its history...

...But there are also ground-zero insights into how Washington really works, how bureaucrats and courtiers act when the cameras are gone and they think no one is paying attention...

...Compounding the offense, the Reader reprints only half the essay (when it ran in TNR, it did so in two parts...

...Yet even granting that she could provide, in her words, only "a tiny and skewed sampling" here, the anomalies are striking...

...The anthology concludes, suitably enough, with a category bearing the none-too-edifying title, "Fights...

...For all that readers may lament the magazine's often snarky tone and two-decade-long creep rightward, they have no other recourse if they want a generally liberal weekly journal of opinion...

...As thankless tasks go, anthologizing is the literary equivalent of balancing the federal budget: For every item included, scores more— or, in this case, hundreds—get left out...

...More significant, the emergence of Partisan Review during the forties, the newfound seriousness of The New Yorker under William Shawn during the fifties, and the arrival of The New York Review of Books in the sixties meant the back of the book came to suffer eclipse as the front had...

...As [Nixon] followed Kfissinger] into the [National Security Council] meeting, he turned back to me with a big smile and said, "K's really having fun today...

...That's a real White House at tough decision time...

...The twenties and thirties saw its growing radicalization—or quasi-radicalization...

...That's a real loss to the American political system...

...or from Sidney Blumenthal, whose reporting of the '84 presidential race revitalized campaign coverage...

...He later in the day told me I should let Henry know that obviously the EOB [Nixon hideaway office] and the Oval Office and the Lincoln Room have all been recorded for protection, so the P has a complete record of all your conversations...

...It was at once too conservative for those increasingly Marxist times yet too fellow-traveling to serve as a true liberal alternative...

...but very upset about" a document that makes Kissinger's shop "responsible for implementation [of the invasion], says that must be Secretary of Defense responsibility...

...There is, however, one exception: Richard Nixon...

...But it is a different thing...

...and 1974, when Martin Peretz bought the magazine...

...Bruce Bliven's "Letter to Stalin" might qualify for a thirties version of TNR's current feature, "Suck-Up Watch" ("It is in one sense a real tragedy for the world that you, with your remarkable abilities and intelligence, should never have traveled outside the borders of the USSR...

...He doesn't want to say we're sending United States troops into Cambodia, but he can't say otherwise...

...In her lengthy introduction, Wickenden never addresses her criteria for inclusion...

...Laird trying to figure P's position and be with it, without his prerogatives cut...

...It ran in Cyril Connolly's Horizon two months before its TNR publication...

...Alexander Bickel's tough-minded, and darkly prescient, uncredited editorial on Roe v. Wade remains as pertinent today as when written 21 years ago...

...We get Tom Geoghagen on the relationship between the 1972 Democratic platform and the Port Huron Statement rather than far more notable efforts by him on labor or the culture of American Catholicism...

...The simple explanation for this is that his is the only White House whose presidential papers (and tapes) were seized by the government before there was a chance to remove the most embarrassing material...

...As Dorothy Wickenden notes in her introduction to the Reader, TNR editors have tended to be "primarily young men from Harvard unhindered by self-doubt...

...One is hard pressed to decide whether those capital letters are more terrifying or hilarious...

...Mark Feeney is editor of The Boston Globe's Focus section...

...In theory, a TNR anthology could double as a shadow history of 20th-century liberalism—or, more to the point, TNR's idea of what such a shadow history might be...

...A 1960 editorial hailing JFK's nomination asks with brush-cut earnestness, "And why not a Taste Cultivation Program...

...For that matter, the most famous item in the Reader, Orwell's "Politics and the English Language" appears under questionable pretenses...

...Laird not really opposed...

...As Haldeman portrays these events, which would have a lasting, disastrous effect on millions in that still-troubled Southeast Asian country, Nixon and Henry Kissinger were euphoric as they planned the surprise attack...

...Rogers playing against any move, in reaction to Senate, establishment press, etc...

...There were two key dates in shaping TNR as we today know it: 1950, when it moved from New York to Washington...

...The first is Haldeman's version of what went on behind the scenes when the decision was made, in April 1970, to launch what became known as the "incursion" into Cambodia...

...Rogers' "real problem was his testimony this afternoon on [Capitol] Hill...

...Walter Pincus is a reporter for The Washington Post...

...Orwell would have understood...

...Himself a member of the Harvard faculty, Peretz opened a pipeline to Cambridge that both enhanced relations with the professoriat and— more significant—brought a steady stream of bright young editors and reporters who have helped the magazine maintain a sharp (sometimes too sharp) rhetorical edge over the past two decades...

...The most memorable pieces tend to come from lesser lights...

...The Nation...

...Otis Ferguson, who was enlivening the magazine with pop-culture criticism two decades before anyone realized such a thing even existed, does not appear...

...With the coming of the Depression, TNR seemed to falter...

...Not a few of us feel the same way about The New Republic...

...And only two pieces come from Richard Strout, who so gracefully manned the TRB column from 1943 to 1983, and just one from John Osborne, whose "Nixon Watch" columns put him in the very front rank of commentators on that most commentated-upon of men...

...It's not, to be sure, a tidiness of belief (no collection that contains both Andrew Kopkind and Charles Krauthammer can be accused of that), but instead a tidiness of aim—that aim being the attempt to capture in one not-so-small book the nobly lurching march of 20thcentury liberalism...

...does try to cast things in a rosier light...

...Certainly it highlights the Nixonian traits we have learned to hate over the years—the verbal putdowns of blacks, for example, and his nervous fear of liberal Jews, especially those in the media...

...Perhaps most perplexing of all, Edmund Wilson gets the same number of bylines (two) as Wieseltier...

...as two such disparate items suggest, this section is grab-baggy, at best...

...It is only proper, then, to salute Wickenden, a former TNR managing editor and now Newsweek's national affairs editor, for fighting the good editorial fight...

...The subtitle "What Do the Liberals Hope For...

...and more or less indispensable...