Mary McCarthy-The Blinders She Wears
Fallows, James
Mary McCarthyThe Blinders She Wears by James Fallows Last March the New York Review of Books published two articles about the Americans who had been held as prisoners of war in North...
...Its job, she says, is to make clear to Lyndon Johnson that the war had to stop, and then to leave the details to him and his friends in the Pentagon...
...There must have been more, but I could not be sure what it was until I read, “The Way It Went,” the new preface to The Seventeenth Degree...
...In fact, the more of this kind of publicity he got, the better his strategy worked...
...1883...
...Because Pure Sensitivity, untainted by fact or research, can go only so far, and then it runs into things that are actually different than they seem...
...As part of this argument she states that “Americans who are serious in opposing the war should be refusing to identify themselves with the U. S. government, even a putative government that would...
...Even those who honor “objectivity” and cringe at such cliche labels as “advocacy writing” and “the New Journalism” often know that the best, the truest, writing occurs only when an author has something important to tell-some truth which he, like the novelist, wants to present to the readers in a way which will make them understand things they have not understood before...
...It was almost a question of the torture...
...What would officials say,about the catastrophe...
...They’ll have to fire me...
...In the preface to The Seventeenth Degree, she says: “The...
...There is an extremely revealing illustration in Mask of State, when she decides at one point that the time has come to balance her portrayal of John Mitchell by reproaching him on his grammar: “In hindsight,” Mitchell now said (a favorite barbarism with him...
...One of the articles was by Anthony Lewis, and it reached a conclusion not easily swallowed by those who regarded our participation in the war as misguided or immoral: that the Americans were, indeed, tortured by the North Vietnamese, and that the inconvenience of that fact is not a good enough reason to ignore or disbelieve it...
...It is also the quality that enabled Daniel Ellsberg to make sense of that great set-piece, the Pentagon Papers...
...But this was less a matter of asking questions the committee didn’t answer than sitting in her Paris apartment with the Ervin committee transcript and speculating about the missing pieces of the puzzle...
...I said...
...in the North “wherever you go you are met with smiles, cheers, hand clapping...
...Shortly afterwards she dismisses him as a powerless ninny and does not let us hear from him again: “Wilson’s querulous objections got shriller...
...After deciding to go to Vietnam she decided “as a matter of courtesy” that she should pay a call on the late Charles Bohlen, then Ambassador to France and her husband’s nominal boss...
...She comes armed with the kind of relevant experience that enables her to interpret wisely...
...Having executed that formality, he became very nice...
...You’re writing nonsense...
...Her notorious knife-work on David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest (included as a bonus essay in The Seventeenth Degree) is the clearest illustration...
...She might, if she had tried, have examined these complexities and described them in terms that Bohlen, West, and the thousands of others in their position would have recognized as true, and which, therefore, might have helped them understand exactly how they were trapped and what they had to do to escape...
...Those countries are better suited to retard impersonal modem technologies than is the West, because “variety of manufactures, encouragement of regional craft, ought to be easier for communist planners whose enterprises are not obliged by the law of the market to show a profit or perish...
...The best qualities of old-fashioned American representatives abroad were being exhibited in ‘Chip’ Bohlen’s gay and efficient helpfulness...
...With the motives already supplied, she need not endow her characters with the wrinkles and subtleties of the human world...
...What clearly interested her more as a witness- He she than the men and their activities was offered to bake him a cake...
...i~ captors had warned omitted it entirely from his reports him that he would be punished again for The New if he failed to play the Grateful In his New YO& Review article Prisoner for her...
...The question here is, what about the author herselPHer husband, James West, was as she wrote those words an American diplomat, and as such more than slightly identified with the American government and its foreia policy...
...Perhaps because she has seen too little of the people she tries to immobilize within this formula, she can forget that they, no less than her husband, are complicated human beings with parts of them pulling toward honor and parts holding them back...
...the Watergate book is called Mask of State, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich...
...I was in too much pain...
...If, on the other hand, he lacks the experience, the writer can still make something of the set-piece by roaming abroad from its borders to find the pieces of evidence not conveniently included in the package...
...Greater miracles have happened: Mary McCarthy’s friend, Hannah Arendt, had watched Adolf Eichmann on trial for his life and had seen in him not the embodiment of evil but an illustration of “the banality of evil...
...to foresight...
...But finding the answer would mean tracking down the witnesses, talking with them and their families, leaving the courtroom in search of the facts...
...He professed inability to understand Baker’s questions, and used up Baker’s time...
...He acknowledged the talk skimmed the surface in forced the POWS’ opinion that journalists had discussions of Bibles, sweets, and been naive: “I think the men undervague hopes for peace...
...In Mary McCarthy’s words the clearest distinction between friends and strangers seems to be whether they are proper subjects for ridicule and abuse...
...Rather, the contrary...
...They were published as reportage in The New York Review, then re-issued as books, and now form part of The Seventeenth Degree...
...She missed the first week of the Medina testimony because of her husband’s vacation plans...
...One year later Silvers asked her again...
...and “the bewildered demand, ‘Why is he writing this book...
...But if he is interested in helping authors understand the mistakes that are making them produce bad books, he will have to inquire more deeply, so that he can criticize in terms that will ring true to the author...
...That a schoolman so preternaturally gifted with ‘hind-sight’ should have been so defective in ‘fore-sight.’ ” It would be hard to find a better word for whatMitchell was trying to say, or a clearer indication that for Mary McCarthy sloppiness with the facts is not so serious a defect...
...That means that while her political writing has its virtues, it is generally a lesson in what to avoid...
...countenanced brutality ? Mary McCarthy’s hatchet has been Since Mary McGrthY would cer- bloodied before, and she counts such tainlY have said something about the figures as J. D. &finger, Truman torture if She had suspected it Was Capote, and David Halberstam among going on, the implication is that she her victims...
...Unless defenseless victim...
...Anyone who has looked far enough into the Oxford English Dictionary to find definition number one of “hindsight” has probably also seen definition number two: “Seeing what has happened and what ought to have been done after the event...
...Sometimes high-quality work does grow out of a set-piece, but when that happens it is usually because the writer has one of two qualifications...
...Was shezsomehow “refusing to identify” herself with him, or he with her?.How had she applied the prescription she recommended to others...
...estimate the difficulties, and the The publication of fisner’s book efforts made to get a Sense Of the cannot have been a happy Occurrence truth, but there is something to their for Mary McCarthy, for if he was feelin...
...trouble with trying to be a reporter is that events either hurry ahead of you or else lag behind...
...The matter-of-fact description of inhuman acts, the dogged intransigence about inconsequential points of “honor” for himself and his country, are parts of one consistent view of life...
...The reader cannot do that for himself...
...Mary McCarthy ends the book urging the anti-war movement to stop wasting its time talking about “solutions” to the war...
...Doing so requires not only scrupulous fidelity to the who-what-where detail, but also a much greater effort of inquiry...
...Instead of going to a land she’d never seen and attempting to judge events by the quick glances she allowed herself, she might have stayed with people whose motives she understood as they understood them...
...7.95...
...If so, she was bending the rules, in a game that two can play...
...These insights ring true because she knows what she is talking about...
...Accordingly, Risner WiS handled the POWS’ revelation says that during the Mcarthy visit with Some @ace...
...The sensitivity which produced this response is not to be ridiculed, but the role of the tactful guest is not the role of the journalist...
...She must have been aware of the complexities that made her husband hesitant in 1966 and which bound many of his colleagues long afterwards...
...Clearly no one saw the gnarls of James West’s dilemma with more love and toleration than his wife;* she realized that while he had been pressed into the service of an end he despised, he had neither lost his humanity nor forfeited her respect...
...James R. West, now 59 years old, joined State in the early 195Os, having served for six years in the Air Force (which he left as a Major...
...One of the more egregious instances arises in her discussion of the economics of communist states...
...The McCarthy visit was only one in James Fallows is an editor of The Washington Monthly...
...perception gained by looking backward...
...The Story She Missed I came across one of the most puzzling of the unanswered questions when I was re-reading Vietnam some time ago...
...What is he trying to say?’mayjbecome, in the course of pages, ‘Why, for God’s sake, am I reading it...
...In the Watergate book, she does, in fact, try to do more than report her initial reaction to the event...
...She is a marvelous source of questions: throughout the Vietnam books she asks: Whoever thought of this program...
...Worse even than describing public officials in terms appropriate only to a highschool civics course or a sermon (“pays for his sins,’’ “heroic stature”) is Mary McCarthy’s active hostility to those writers who have tried to add just the element that she lacks...
...Her portrayals of the Watergate principals are some of the most sympathetic yet to appear...
...he was diminished in the public eye and probably Answer to the April puzzle: his own...
...The sudden loss of heroic stature made him seem pathetic, a deflated windbag still tiresomely huffing and puffing...
...To use literary criticism as a parallel: if a reviewer confines himself to pointing out the good books and the bad, he will have provided some service to his readers...
...Educ...
...The bare bones...
...Now even though he was not publicly dissenting himself, he had removed the shackles and agreed to take the risk...
...leading their captors to wonder about and then she objects to his description American university education...
...I think I would almost rather assassinate such a man, if put to the choice, than fell him with an awkward question...
...Mary McCarthyThe Blinders She Wears by James Fallows Last March the New York Review of Books published two articles about the Americans who had been held as prisoners of war in North Vietnam and who are now telling their stories in print...
...and Mrs...
...This kind of talk would mean nothing to Mary McCarthy if someone said that her husband had not resigned in 1966 because of American markets or the flow of U. S. capital-or that his later conversion mainly depended on those things...
...In concede the point...
...In the North, her hosts present her with an aluminum ring...
...If she meant that Mitchell had used an awkward preposition with “hindsight,” she could simply have said so...
...He had three children to support, as well as alimony payments to make, and had spent most of his life in government service, first in the Air Force and later with government agencies...
...But to sit across a desk, deferential notebook in hand, from some powerful personality you disapprove of, who would start lighting your cigarettes, beaming at you, seeking your sympathy for his difficult position...
...She insists again and again that the book is pointless, boring, stupid: “I cannot think who will be benefitted by The Best and the Brightest...
...Risner says in his book that the visits were generally occasions for brutality against the prisoners (the North Vietnamese being apprehensive about the prisoners’ performance), and that he underwent a particularly gruesome round of torture immediately before Mary McCarthy’s arrival...
...Was he a secret dove...
...That person is not there...
...in the North, a group of school children not only radiant with health (“No acne in North Vietnam”) but also well-mannered nearly to a fault (“You would not find such a w ell-disciplined class in America today”-has she forgotten her Catholic upbringing...
...Rather than have photographs of his family displayed before the previous delegation, a TV crew from East Germany, Risner had tom them up and hid them in his toilet pail...
...But she could not go in 1966...
...he served there as an information officer...
...Fawns on and usuaUy college degrees, which must be Vietnamese officer...
...Mary McCarthy does not judge her husband as history will judge him, she did not judge Bohlen that way, and I doubt that she, any more than the rest of us, is able to apply these harsh standards to herself...
...She says that even if aback myself by a stiffness of phraseolow she’d suspected that torture was going and naive role-thinking, childish, like the on, the ‘‘highly perceptive and intelfihandwriting...
...She allows herself to write things like (in North Vietnam) “to question facts, figures, catch small discrepancies would be to abuse this...
...The second article was by Mary McCarthy, and it dealt with only one of the POW books Lewis discussed, Robinson Rimer’s The Passing of the Nigh t (Random House, $6.95...
...He locked horns with Weicker, and made him very angry, and used up Weicker’s time . . . . well-prepared, and a wall-eyed disaster for the committee...
...The third major essay in the new book is Medina, originally published in 1972, an account of the 1971 trial which led to the acquittal of Ernest Medina, William Calley’s commanding officer at the time of the My h i massacre...
...The minute you start feeling like anybody’s guest, you are dead as a journalist, and that is part of what happened to Mary McCarthy in Vietnam...
...It sucks your will in a hurry...
...If she did not reverse the course of @story at that moment, she would still come closer than she ever could by calling them liars and imperialists...
...What were things like before...
...She admits a physical aversion to the ring, and realizes that “quite a few of the questions one does not, as an American liberal, want to put in Hanoi are addressed to oneself...
...She engaged so heavily in fussiness about grammar at the Medina trial-where the soldiers were e x pr e ssing themselves hadly - that Gloria Emerson of The New York Times was provoked to reply, “Who do you think was sucked into the Vietnam war, Miss McCarthy, our Harvard and Princeton boys...
...Trul...
...In Vietnam, even when I knew the right ‘probing’ question, I generally could not bring myself to utter- it...
...It reminded me of school, when you have to listen respectfully to the principal as she carries out her duty, which is to point out to you the error of your thinking, even though she knows you *Although the late Edmund Wilson, after reading her satire of him in A Charmed Life, might not agree that love and toleration were the traits she brought to her spouse...
...But the details she selected in the one country were so different from what she reported from the other that, even with the considerable differences between North and South Vietnam taken into account, the contrast was implausibly overstated...
...But the Risner article was didn’t notice...
...Well, then, I can’t go...
...When dealing with the substance of the book she makes clear that she is, most angry about its best feature: Halberstam’s attempt to get inside the characters and understand how they viewed the maelstxom around them...
...Yet she dismisses Halberstam’s attempts to portray the American officials not as war criminals but as men whom ambition and environment had led to a certain point...
...To question facts, figures, catch small discrepancies would be to abuse this open, naive (from a Western point of view) trust...
...Everything was bleeding, but I didn’t notice that...
...this spring, she is publishing books on both Watergate andVietnam” (a unique accomplishment), and she is a star political correspondent for The New York Review of Books...
...In South Vietnam, she prefers the blunt-spoken Marines to the mealy-mouthed PR men...
...For an hour we debated about Vietnam...
...Yet something enables this gracious woman to make some of the most graceless comments imaginable, often with a strong, bullying tone...
...there are few disclosures of the ordinary kind, that is of facts not generally known...
...Besides, people reveal themselves spontaneously...
...It is obvious by now that the Administration’s greatest weapon during the Ervin hearings was John J. Wilson, the aged fireplug of a lawyer who seemed always to be rebuking the senators for their offenses against his clients, Haldeman and Ehrlichman...
...A year before he, like most of the others, had placed the shackles on himself...
...The James West of 1967 was a far rarer case, for he had come nearly the full distance...
...prepare, as they say, to sit the war out...
...there is nothing surprising in these personal histories...
...What Mary McCarthy wanted to say was that we must leave the war...
...commenting, rather than jeopardizing their careers...
...Instead, she has dealt exclusively with strangers, and has ended up producing series of political caricatures that ring true to no one...
...In the South, Mary McCarthy shows us a leper colony...
...In both countries she applied her renowned skill in rendering detail...
...There are hateful masses in the South...
...By that time Foreign Service Officers everywhere were commenting sourly about the stupidity of the warcommenting, that is, to their friends and their families, and not to those on the outside...
...Arguing is one thing...
...That was the decision he had come to...
...Far from was with would have denied being an elite or members of an “establish- it, for how could such a man have ment,” they were somewhat pathetic cases of mental malnutrition...
...But carelessness with the truth is all the more grievous for a writer who hopes to do more than present the bare, sterile facts in a box-score manner...
...It gave her time to speculate-for example, about the witnesses who were testifying to different stories than they’d told at the Calley trial...
...In Mask of State, she naively builds Sam Ervin into a figure of quite implausible and un-human nobility, instead of recognizing from the beginning that he, like other real people, has his frailties and his blind spots, even though he is on balance one of the better men in public office...
...We had forgotten it all in our affection for his love of liberty, Shakespeare, and the Bill of Rights...
...How much of the insider’s story did Mary McCarthy capture...
...The Vietnamese, beginning with peasants eagerly showing you where their fields had been bombed, had an earnest, disarming conviction that’you would give them total credence...
...The misunderstandings that occur in Mask of State, are generally of a slightly different type: mistaking the ploys and double-whammies one side was using against the other for the real, unrehearsed historic action...
...One cannot3magine her dismissing her friends with the brittle wit that so dominates her prose, or singling out in them those tell-tale signs of character (especially weak chins and fleshy hips) she is quick to discern in strangers...
...The case suggests some interest*NOW included in the new book, The Seventeenth Degree, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich...
...I The Limits of Pure Sensitivity Prime among Mary McCarthy’s virtues is that she will tell you what she sees...
...Maybe...
...and she herself, separated by thousands of miles from the people and events she describes, may begin to think that fidelity to the truth, to even its awkward twists, does not make much difference...
...Zealot...
...Risner, who spent seven years in captivity, has apparently never flinched in his devotion to the old American virtues-neither in prison nor on his return to the States...
...But there are ugly ,implications in the fury with which she lashed back at Risner...
...The book’s vacuity established, she then goes on to steal all his best yarns and illustrations and sprinkle them throughout her review...
...Servile...
...Nonetheless, virtually all her political writing works from set-pieces: the trips to Vietnam, the Medina trial, the Watergate hearings, the books by Halberstam and Risner...
...Well, every good man pays for his sins, and Senator Sam paid for a lifetime of being a hawk...
...He did what a good lawyer is supposed to do for his client: he ate the opposition alive...
...Wilson is introduced as a grotesque, one of those alarming night creatures likely to crawl out from odd corners of the capital: “John L. Wilson, the dean of reactionary lawyers in Washington, a querulous dropsical old party with a mean City Hall mouth and a shrill ungoverned temper recalling Rumpelstiltskin...
...Wilson, of course, could not have cared less how he looked on TV, or to Mary McCarthy...
...Ervin is a hawk...
...she says no...
...Black Hats and White Hats In her eagerness to participate by going to Vietnam, Mary McCarthy took the wrong turn at the crucial junction...
...Having seen the way the war worked from the inside, Ellsberg was able to write “What Nixon Is Up To,” which The New York Review published in 1971, before Ellsberg was a celebrity...
...Mary McCarthy goes about her work with Halberstam in the fashion of the anti-pornography crusader who provides illustrations at his lectures...
...XVII...
...Passersby stop to wave at your car on the road...
...no...
...Mary McCarthy undertook Vietnam and Hanoi as her personal effort to do something about the war...
...If Mary McCarthy wanted to understand how the war happened and why appeals to logic and good conscience were not stopping it, there was the story for her to tell...
...At least half the people in the State Department stood in James West’s shoes when he told his wife, in 1966, that he opposed the war but that he wasn’t ready to lose his job...
...Mary McCarthy’s political writing shows the other side of the story: the damage that can be done by a novelist with insufficient care for the facts...
...I could not invest his life in my desire to go to Vietnam...
...I think it is significant that the only “sympathetic” portraits in Mary McCarthy’s political writing (apart from those in North Vietnam) come from the Watergate hearings...
...It may be that, living in Paris, she has no one to check her excesses...
...Mitchell’s case is the most notable, but Kalmbach, Haldeman-in fact, virtually everyone but Ehrlichman and Magruder-are all treated more compassionately than they have been by any other writer...
...He too managed to see two principle of right and wrong...
...There were no bad feelings between us...
...She cannot be blamed for having missed the truth the first time, although she may have been mistaken to draw belittling conclusions from the evidence (“naive...
...She The One have been blows the dust off her old notebooks taken aback by the low mental attainments to find unflattering characterizations of the pilots, who have officer rank (the me [this is Risner] was a lieutenant colonel) eyes, somewhat SqUkEllY...
...She is almost excessively charitable in criticizing her friends’ work...
...It was the American peasantry, who are very rarely among our great talkers...
...Her experience is not deep enough for her to make sense consistently of what she’s shown, and she is almost never willling to step beyond the confines of the formal set-piece presentation...
...evidently Mary McCarthy will not do it either, for she provides no further enlightenment on this point...
...Interesting question...
...her own husband might have been said to have changed from cowardice to courage within a .year...
...I wanted desper- most favorable impression Of how the’ ately to protect my family, by not letting Prisoners were being treated...
...On arrival in North Vietnam, Mary McCarthy was, she says, confident of her ability to find the truth and bring it home...
...This is the difference, as commonly understood, between “book reviewers” and “critics...
...cf OED: “The backsight of a rifle...
...The explanation may be that in a sense Mary McCarthy did get to know these people...
...you expected him to stamp his tiny foot like a thwarted Fury when overruled...
...The Seventeenth Degree, is a collection of old writings with a new introduction...
...It is said that when Edmund Wilson, her husband for a time, was teaching Mary McCarthy to write, he would stand her in front of a store window, let her look for 30 seconds, and then turn her around and make her describe the contents...
...Vietnam and Hanoi were the products of trips in 1967 and 1968 to Indochina, the first to South Vietnam and the second to the North...
...Those who know her (I do not) say that she is a charming and gracious woman, unfailingly polite, always solicitous of the feelings of others...
...Her article The her book, Hanoi,* she devoted a little New York Review is a defensive and more than two pages to a discussion quite Petty reply to Rkner, intended of the two unnamed prisoners she had as far as I can tell, to demolish met...
...Her commentary has a larger significance *The Vietnam book...
...a writer were expert in detecting the Your Joints Pull and are almost dis- medical signs of abuse, he might find located...
...The temptation to over-simplify is as dangerous when she raises a hero as when she exposes a villain...
...a man SO ill at ease with words as to’be in no condition for trading debating points with anybody...
...But, apart from one tour of the Watergate Hotel (where she was staying), she makes no attempt to stir from her seat...
...Are you sure...
...She dropped out of the Ervin hearings early because it was time to return to Paris: “Those who watched on television during late September (I was no longer in America) said the low point came...
...I found what I could from the State Department...
...POWs in Hanoi, but the interview was Soon thereafter, Risner met Mary so confusing that eventually he McCarthy...
...he thought there had been pressures...
...The same procedure on my ankles...
...The worst mistakes she has made sin-ce then are precisely those she might have avoided by staying to tell her husband’s story...
...no one could have been more committed than Daniel Ellsberg, after all, and yet when he decided to talk, his Papers on the War carried great persuasive weight...
...On June 30 of last year he voluntarily resigned from State, but he continues in his OECD position...
...She might well have given it a book, in which to explore why her husband had changed, what forces had imprisoned him before, why so few others had changed along with him, how more might be set free...
...the North Vietnamese were pioneer stock making their way with fortitude and bold resolve...
...childish”) rather than withholding judgment as Lewis had done...
...In fairness to Mary McCarthy, she has not overlooked this accomplishment...
...With passing time, “I found my claim to being a disinterested party starting not exactly to disappear, but to s-rink from showing itself, as if ashamed...
...will do what you have determined to do anyway...
...AS the Cat and others get their dirty hands on skilled a journalist as Anthony Lewis those pictures...
...Vietnam has been fastened on as a symbol of the rights of U. S. capital to flow freely throughout the globe and return home...
...she can’t the difference between them and her: remember it- He thinks she asked to see him specifically...
...You start balancing the pain against the was expressly designed to convey the value of they want...
...After four or five of his outbursts, Ervin and the rest were so buffaloed that they began directing their tactics with the primary goal of preventing Wilson from yelling...
...These are the very lines of inquiry for which her training as a novelist would have best prepared her...
...The “enemy” will be senselessly cruel and so the officer must senselessly resist: He was really brutal tearing the skin off my shoulders and neck and cutting them deep...
...He has shown some mastery of the art of diplomacy within the State Department, having managed to spend nearly all of the past 20 years stationed in Paris...
...Why aren’t there more of these moments...
...they are, after all, questions of career, motivation, choice...
...They do not sit still and wait for you to join them like the characters in a novel...
...a series of meetings between the prisoners and foreign observers, who mainly came from Eastern bloc countries and Western anti-war groups...
...Bohlen could have been called a tool of the imperialists...
...He would let her go: “But are you going to resign...
...The very pointlessness of these gestures-the confessions of a man in captivity could not have been counted for much-actually reinforced my faith in the plausibility of his account...
...she shows no awareness that missing the .truth, whether innocently or not, is a matter of some gravity...
...Combined with her over-simplifications, her cavalier, I di dn’t-wan t- to-ask at ti tude, it suggests that the consequences of her carelessness are never brought home to her...
...When they bend YOU UP like thaty everything Protests...
...It would be very hard to the first in which she’d attacked a gaunt, sguirrel-famd older man led in to see of Risner: ‘‘tight lined face, wilted fault her for this miSperCeptiOn...
...Robert Silvers of The New York Review had first asked her to go to Vietnam in 1966, by which time she was already racked by loathing for the war and abhorrence for the bombing...
...Those pictures were had not been able to detect tue sacred...
...Having selected his “setpiece,” the writer then trims his own curiosity-often automatically-so as to prevent it from extending beyond the bounds of the set-piece...
...To be persuasive in this fashion requires not less attention to the facts but more...
...185 1. Mayne Reid, Scalp Hunt...
...Just the kind of question the reader might like to have answered for him...
...Now and then in the Vietnam and Watergate books she sticks in an awkward fact, like* sand in the oyster, just to l6t you know it has not escaped her notice...
...Hell, no...
...In his case, she could presumably recognize the difference between historical abstractions and daily realities...
...No doubt the North of Ho Chi Minh and the South of the fastturnover dictators possessed some of the features Mary McCarthy attributed to them, but the comparison was so out of balance as to lose its verisimilitude...
...She ends with a long section apportioning blame among members of the White House gang, matching names with crimes...
...Her two books on the war are a good place to start in an evaluation of Mary McCarthy’s writing...
...In glaring contrast to Saigon, Hanoi is clean-much cleaner than New York, for example...
...indeed, she acknowledges it before dismissing it as trivial: “This kind of understanding, while it allows for the mixture of motives and the conflicts present, no doubt, in everybody, does not do more here, at best, than elicit sympathy for the actors as they looked to themselves, rather than as history may look at them...
...Things were different for her husband...
...When she has it in her heart to make someone look a fool, she can be a quick woman with the dictionary and the encyclopedia, and she can dance tight circles of erudition around her victims...
...If John Wilson seemed t.0 be making a fool of himself, with his clients’ approval, she might have asked a lawyer or even another reporter about what was going on...
...as well, for it indicates another wrinkle in the rough connection between political writing and political reality...
...I did not feel he was constraining me, only presenting me with an ineluctable fact...
...She writes off Halberstam’s rich, if overwrought, characterization of Robert McNamara by saying: “The Vietnam policy required false figures to sustain it, and he was loyal.’’ As for the motives of the cast as a whole, she has a simpler explanation than Halberstam’s, with all its complications and “turning points”: “I believe that our investment and markets are at stake in Vietnam...
...She obviously enjoys being on the scene of the political story of the day, but she feels no compulsion to be there long enough to ask all the questions and find the answers...
...Maybe they won’t...
...Switching the Brain to Automatic “Set-piece” writing, which is increasingly the dominant mode of political and literary criticism, means that the author confines himself to one discrete topic, one occasion for writing-be it a book to review, a play to criticize, or a journey on which to report...
...But Nixon had not . . . The White House played on the old warrior’s patriotic sentiments, emphasizing the need for national unity in the impending showdown...
...She needs someone to shake her at these moments, to say Stop...
...trust ” and (in explaining why she didn’t interview major government officials) “I hate embarrassing someone I am talking to...
...Sometimes the questions go unanswered for a different reason: not that it would take extra legwork, but that she’s embarrassed to ask...
...Her understanding was not confined to her husband, but embraced other officials she knew...
...George V. Higgins, in a superb article in the April Atlantic, captured the importance of Wilson : Whenever the committee got close to his clients, or to the President, who had some interest in how they did, he went into his best crusty-old-lawyer number...
...If she had run to John Kennedy in 1963 or Lyndon Johnson afterwards and said that the flow of U. S. capital was going to trap us in Vietnam, they would not have heard a word...
...Economic planners from Bulgaria to, yes, North Vietnam could tell her that when they are choosing their projects, they-like their brothers the capitalistsrely on cost-benefit analyses to determine where to put their money...
...America thought Wilson was outrageous if he was keeping the ogre from his clients’ door...
...This magazine has published several articles exploring the ways journalism can more fully embrace the truth of public affairs...
...She watched Mitchell as he squirmed on the stand, and she could see that while he was patently lying, he was taking no pleasure in the act...
...Glued to Her Seat No one can know everything, but what makes these misperceptions the more alarming is that Mary McCarthy does not take the one step that could prevent them...
...xxi, When you squint through her hindsights...
...Only so much to conclude: that James West had not resigned from the service of his government during the war, but neither had his government fired him for his wife’s dissent...
...Knowing these men as she did, Mpry McCarthy must have realized that labels slapped on from the outside could be terribly misleading...
...Mary McCarthy’s importance as a political writer is no longer to be overlooked...
...Her conclusions are logical enough-Nixon is the likely culprit, and should be removedbut they are neither more profound nor more provably true than those reached at dinner-table conversations in half the households of America each night...
...In 1962 State “seconded,” or loaned, him to the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, which is also located in Paris...
...It seems that Mary McCarthy was more aware of the delicacy of her husband’s position than any of her wartime writing revealed...
...She gives it one sentence in The Seventeenth Degree: “What had changed was that a whole year had passed and U. S. policy was the same...
...I. F. Stone is one of the very few who have navigated this second course successfully...
...it was because of her husband: If I went, he said;he would have to hand in his resignation...
...printed or in round, labori- gent” North Vietnamese official she ously joined cursive letters...
...emphasis in original) But only by trying to understand people as they understand themselves can a writer ever really hope to reach them...
...If the mounds of unanswered questions are not to be taken as a sign of laziness, they at least suggest that Mary McCarthy has not fully comprehended that journalism is a serious business...
...Yes...
...she might even have offered this illustration of its proper use from her own works: “which hindsight finally concedes might have been the best plan . . .” (Hanoi, p. xxiii) But obviously she meant to ridicule the word itself-why else trot out the OED...
...He may, on the one hand, bring to the set-piece such a body of experience and reflection that the specific topic becomes an occasion for rich speculation...
...The most important story of the war is contained in these two conversations...
...The Seventeenth Degree and Mask of State are full of these deceptions, cases in which Mary McCarthy, for one reason or another, is not able to draw valid conclusions from what she sees-and, far from reserving her opinion, goes on to interpret the situation boldly and incorrectly...
...It is the old problem again of not asking enough questions, caused this time because Mary McCarthy knows too much before she starts examining her characters...
...Her attitude and performance realize the worst fears of the enemies of the “New Journalism,” who predicted that writers who embellished the facts might fail to include the facts at all...
...She says in Medina that the trial itself was a colossal bore...
...They may call it “people’s gain” rather than “profit,” but they’re talking about the same thing (as the paucity of “regional craft” in most socialist states indicates...
...The first words of Vietnam are, “I confess that when I went to Vietnam early last February I was looking for material damaging to the American interest and that I found i t . . . .” Unfortunately both books suffered from a deficiency which severely limited their worth as either literature or as polemic-a lack of objectivity so profound as to make even sympathizers wary...
...He got into legal arguments with Ervin, and used up Ervin’s time...
...While Mary McCarthy was able to see through Mitchell’s crimes to his character, she could not do as much for her “war criminal,” Medina...
...Perhaps if she had been able to watch McNamara and Bundy under similar duress, she might have seen past the facade...
...Rare Compassion The style of the onslaught is in itself off-putting...
...Eight years ago she was exclusively a novelist and literary critic...
...It was as if my trip was a sacrifice we had made jointly: he, too, had wanted it for me...
...But she does not attempt to find the answers...
...Far from merely over-simplifying strangers, she withers them, mocking their integrity and deriding their intelligence...
...For this he was tortured, as he had been for previous refusals to tell foreign delegations that the U. S. should abandon the war...
...Reviews might be better for the inclusion, but automatic habits of mind (“I’ll knock off that review this afternoon”) prevent most writers from thinking of it...
...Mary McCarthy’s case illustrates the more subtle difficulty, which is that even when writers make strenuous efforts to leave their writer’s-den-whether by going to Vietnam or covering the presidential campaign-they can often switch their brains to automatic and let the set-piece do their thinking for them...
...An Erudite Bully Even with Mitchell, her capacity for understanding is less than complete, because she hits him with a few low blows...
...What provoked her to write about him was not so much the substance of his book-she alludes only to one threepage section of it-as the fact that the two of them had met once, in 1968, when he was a prisoner and she was touring North Vietnam to report for The New York Review...
...at least the soldiers won’t lie to you...
...she lavishes care on John Mitchell, especially, to absolve him of the worst sins and present him as a pathetic victim done in by his own ideas of loyalty...
...South Vietnam was peopled by the greedy and the diseased...
...So when disappointment hits, it hits her hard, as when Ervin agrees to the Stennis tapes compromise and Mary McCarthy suddenly remembers that Ervin is a “hawk”: How could this old man, looking benign and dreamy in the Oval Office rogues gallery, have welcomed a Trojan horse into so long and stoutly defended territory...
...he is, in Mary McCarthy’s words, “a widelyadmired hard-liner and Nixon zealot...
...Perhaps because he spoke so little at his trial, perhaps because the war was still going on and the book was part of her campaign against it, Medina is caricatured as baldly as any of her figures, and rather less fairly (she called him impassive at the trial, said he showed “no traces whatever of the crime or its aftermath,” but neglected to mention that he nearly disintegrated in tears at the end...
...Several months ago I wrote an article suggesting that a novelist’s eye and understanding would improve most writing about public affairs (“Will Editors Ever Love Flaubert...
...It means especially that the writer must avoid the strait jacket of set-piece journalism...
...telling even a bit of the truth, she had Mary McCarthy was less to missed something big in the North...
...Instead, she charged off to the war zone and wrote Vietnam and Hanoi...
...In this case she does not know what she is talking about...
...But if she had tried to understand why they fell into the next-election trap-the President’s fear of “losing” Vietnam before the next election-she might have made something click inside their heads...
...In the cases of these, her friends, she could not help but know that the truth was more complicated...
...Such is the difference in sanitation that while the South cannot keep even its hospitals clean, even the pigs in the North are housed in “clean pigsties,” a notion that adds considerably to previous understanding of what “pigsty” means...
...Ervin succumbed...
...To give the most notable example, there is nothing prohibiting book reviewers from including more factual material, original research, even talks with the authors, in their essays...
...Mary McCarthy’s writings show too clearly the dangers of thinking otherwise...
...The Ellsberg comparison suggests the real defect in Mary McCarthy’s work: that she was practicing set-piece journalism without taking any of the necessary precautions against the hazards of the genre...
...The public officials she describes are often one-dimensional, robot-like figures who march heedlessly forward with large keys labeled “Imperialism” or “Repression” protruding from their backs...
...There it was...
...Even Richard Nixon, who seems so split between his pious and his unscrupulous personalities that the one must lie to cover up the other’s activities, is susceptible to such reasoning: Melvin Laird knew his man well enough to convince him that our “honor” would be intact with Vietnamization, and Patrick Moynihan nearly kept him convinced that a guaranteed annual income would enhance his Administration...
...The answer, I am afraid, is that most men have a fatal weakness or-to stay in Troy-an Achilles heel, and Nixon had found Ervin’s...
...the metal it is made of came from an American plane they shot down...
...ing questions about Mary McCarthy...
...Unfortunately Mary McCarthy is qualified by neither of these tests...
...She frequently expresses pique at the burdensome necessity of actually showing up at the affairs she is to cover...
...What did it matter if Mr...
...She knows that Vietnam was caused by French-American imperialism, and that My M- made manifest the fundamental brutality of American life, and that the public ability to absorb the Watergate scandals “can be explained by the residue of guilt left over from Vietnam, guilt unadmitted by the majority and therefore all the more in need of relief...
...The fault cannot simply be traced to her political commitment...
...She wonders: “Had they changed, along with their testimony...
...I was taken of her as “large...
...But she did not do that...
...It is hard to explain your feel- it impossible to pierce the surface of ings after you have been in pain like that for the formal pow presentation-which a long time...
...I said...
Vol. 6 • May 1974 • No. 3
