Mary McCarthy-The Blinders She Wears

...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...

...this spring, she is publishing books on both Watergate and Vietnam* (a unique accomplishment), and she is a star political correspondent for The New York Review of Books...

...But only by trying to understand people as they understand themselves can a writer ever really hope to reach them...

...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...

...These insights ring true because she knows what she is talking about...

...Interesting question...

...I found what I could from the State Department...

...Was she somehow “refusing to identify’, herself with him, or he with her...

...In Musk 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...

...In South Vietnam, she prefers the blunt-spoken Marines to the mealy-mouthed PR men...

...and Mrs...

...How had she applied the prescription she recommended to others...

...In the cases of these, her friends, she could not help but know that the truth was more complicated...

...It gave her time to speculate-for example, about the witnesses who were testifying to different stones than they’d told at the Calley trial...

...To question facts, figures, catch small discrepancies would be to abuse this open, naive (from a Western point of view) trust...

...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...

...These are the very lines of inquiry for which her training as a novelist would have best prepared her...

...Her commentary has a larger significance as well, for it indicates another wrinkle in the rough connection between political writing and political reality...

...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...

...America thought Wilson was outrageous if he was keeping the ogre from his clients’ door...

...But she did not do that...

...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 crustyoldlawyer number...

...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 thp genre...

...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...

...One year later Silvers asked her again...

...She admits a physical aversion to the ring, and realizes that “quite a few of the questions w e does not, as an American liberal, want to put in Hanoi are addressed to oneself...

...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...

...in the North “wherever you go you are met with smiles, cheers, hand clapping...

...the North Vietnamese were pioneer stock making their way with fortitude and bold resolve...

...Her notorious knife-work on David Hall berstdm’s The Best and the Brightest (included as a bonus essay in The Seventeenth Degree) is the clearest illustration...

...The bare bones...

...In the South, Mary McCarthy shows us a leper colony...

...her own husband might have been said to have changed from cowardice to courage within a year...

...Maybe they won’t.’ ‘Maybe.’ ” The most important story of the war is contained in these two conversations...

...A year before he, like most of the others, had placed the shackles on himself...

...The temptation to over-simplify is as dangerous when she raises a hero as when she exposes a villain...

...they are, after all, questions of career, motivation, choice...

...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...

...In this case she does not know what she is talking about...

...Ervin is a hawk...

...he served there as an information officer...

...capital to flow freely throughout the globe and return home...

...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...

...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...

...he was diminished in the public eye and probably his own...

...The question here is, what about the author herself...

...Mary McCarthy ends the book urging the anti-war movement to stop wasting its time talking abmt “solutions” to the war...

...Ervin succumbed...

...That means that while her political writing has its virtues, it is generally a lesson in what to avoid...

...Her two books on the war are a good place to start in an evaluation of Mary McCarthy’s writing...

...The sensitivity that produced this response is not to be nuiculed, but the role of the tactful guest is not the role of the journalist...

...and “the bewildered demand, ‘Why is he writing this book...

...In 1962 State “seconded,” or loaned, him to the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, which is also located in Paris...

...Wilson, of course, could not have cared less how he looked on TV, or to Mary McCarthy...

...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...

...there is nothing surprising in these personal histories...

...The sudden loss of heroic stature made him seem pathetic, a deflated windbag still tiresomely huffing and puffing...

...The fault cannot simply be traced to her political commitment...

...Sometimes highquality work does grow out of a set-piece, but when that happens it is usually because the writer has one of two qualifications...

...She gives it one sentence in The Seventeenth Degree: “What had changed was that a whole year had passed and U.S...

...Things were different for her husband...

...Shortly afterwards she dismisses him as a powerless ninny and does not let us hear from him again: “Wilson’s querulous objections got shriller...

...If John Wilson seemed to 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: But, apart from one tour of the Watergate Hotel (where she was staying), she makes no attempt to stir from her seat...

...In fact, the more of this kind of publicity he got, the better his strategy worked...

...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...

...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...

...On arrival in North Vietnam, Mary McCarthy was, she says, confident of her ability to find the truth and bring it home...

...The James West of 1967 was a far rarer case, for he had come nearly the full distance...

...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...

...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...

...The third major essay in the new book is Medina, originally published in 1972, an account of the 197 1 trial which led to the acquittal of Ernest Medina, William Calley’s commanding officer at the time of the My Lai massacre...

...Hell, no...

...What would officials say about the catastrophe...

...Mary McCarthy goes about her work with Halberstam in the fashion of the anti-pornography crugader who provides illustrations at his lectures...

...But she does not attempt to find the answers...

...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 ve r i similitude...

...There are hateful masses in the South...

...She missed the first week of the Medina testimony because of her husband’s vacation plans...

...Now and then in the Vietnam and Watergate books she sticks in an awkward fact, like sand in the oyster, just to let you know it has not escaped her notice...

...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 ffee...

...Eight years ago she was exclusively a novelist and literary critic...

...The White House played on the old warrior’s patriotic sentiments, emphasizing the need for national unity in the impending showdown...

...Worse even than describing public officials in terms appropriate only to a high-school 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...

...In both countries she applied her renowned skill in rendering detail...

...She wonders: “Had they changed, along with their testimony...

...They do not sit still and wait for you to join them like the characters in a novel.’” 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...

...Rare Compassion The style of the onslaught is in itself*.off-putting...

...But the details she selected in the one country were so different from what she reported from the other that, even with the con si d er able differences between North and South Vietnam taken into account, the contrast was implausibly overstated...

...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...

...policy was the same...

...evidently Mary McCarthy will not do it either, for she provides no further enlightenment on this point...

...There were no bad feelings between us...

...I said...

...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...

...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...

...Bohlen could have been called a tool of the imperialists...

...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...

...Yet she dismisses Halberstarli’s attempts to portray the American officials not as war criminals but as men whom ambition and environment had led to a certain point...

...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...

...What were things like before...

...This is the difference, as commonly understood, between “book reviewers” and “critics...

...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...

...Passersby stop to wave at your car on the road...

...Only so much to conclude: That James West had not resigiied from the service of his government during the war, but neither had his government fired him for his wife’s dissent...

...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...

...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...

...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 maelstrom around them...

...public affairs...

...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...

...Those countries are better suited to retard impersonal modem technologies than is the West, because “variety of manufacturers, 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...

...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...

...In glaring contrast to Saigon, Hanoi is clean-much cleaner than New York, for example...

...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...

...This magazine has published several articles exploring the ways journalism can more fully embrace the truth of public affairs...

...Her 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 foreign policy...

...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...

...Well, every good man pays for his sins, and Senator Sam paid for a lifetime of being a hawk...

...Several months ago I wrote an article suggesting that a novelist’s eye and understanding would improve most writing about *The Vietnam book, The Seventeenth Degree, is a collection of old writings with a new introduction...

...We have forgotten it all in our affection for his love of liberty, Shakespeare, and the Bill of Rights...

...Vietnam has been fastened on as a symbol of the rights of U.S...

...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...

...Instead, she charged off to the war zone and wrote Vietnam and Hanoi...

...One of tHe more egregious instances arises in her discussion of the economics of communist states...

...But Nixon had not...

...South Vietnam was peopled by the greedy and the diseased...

...Her understanding was not confined to her husband, but embraced other officials she knew...

...Black Hats and White Hats In her eagerness to participate by going to Vietnam, Mary McCarthy took the wrong turn at the crucial junction...

...capital-or that his later conversion mainly depended on those things...

...The best qualities of old-fashioned American representatives abroad were being exhibited in ‘Chip’ Bohlen’s gay and efficient helpfulness...

...She says in Medina that the trial itself was a colossal bore...

...Because, Pure Sensitivity, untainted by fact ,or resegrch, can go only so far, and then it runs into things that are’actudly different than they seem...

...For an hour we debated about Vietnam...

...Now even though he wasnot publicly dissenting himself, he had removed the shackles and agreed to take the risk...

...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...

...He professed inability to understand Baker’s questions, and used up Baker’s time...

...Economic planners from Bulgaria to, yes, North Vietnam could tell her that when they are choosing their projects, they-like their brothers the capitalists-rely on cost-benefit analyses to determine where to put their money...

...Nonetheless, virtually all her political writing works from set-pieces: the trips to Vietnam, the Medina trial, the Watergate hearings, the books by David Halberstam and Robinson Risner...

...There it was...

...The Limits of Pure Sensitivitv Prime among Mary McCarthy’s virtues is that she will tell you what she sees...

...James R. West, now 59 years old, joined State in the early 1 9 5 0 ~h~av ing served for six years in the Air Force (which he left as a major...

...I could not invest his life in my desire to go to Vietnam...

...On June 30 of last year he voluntarily resigned from State, but he continues in his OECD position...

...Sometimes the questions go unanswered for a different reason: not that it would take extra legwork, but that she’s embarrassed to aik...

...But she could not go in 1966...

...the metal it is made of came from an American plane they shot down...

...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...

...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...

...She frequently expresses pique at the burdensome necessity of actually showing up at the affairs she is to cover...

...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 did what a good lawyer is supposed to do for his client: he ate the opposition alive...

...They were published as reportage in The New York Review, then re-issued as books, and now form part of The Seventeenth Degree...

...prepare, as they say, to sit the war out...

...there are few disclosures of the ordinary kind, that is of facts not generally known...

...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...

...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...

...With the motives already supplied, she need not endow her characters with the wrinkles and subtleties of the human world...

...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 well-disciplined class in America todayy’-has she forgotten her Catholic upbringing...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...government, even a putative government that would...

...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...

...James Fallows is a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly and a member of the White House staff This article was originally published in May 1974...

...Instead, she has dealt exclusively with strangers, and has ended up producing series of political caricatures that ring true to no one...

...commenting, rather than jeopardizing their careers...

...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...

...The reader cannot do that for himself...

...Mary McCarthy undertook Vietnam and Hanoi as her personal effort to do something about the ”war...

...you expected him to stamp his tiny foot like a thwarted Fury when overruled...

...Her experience is not deep enough for her to make sense consistently of what she’s shown, and she is almost never willing to step beyond the confines of the formal set-piece presentation...

...Just the kind of question the reader might like to have answered for him...

...it was because of her husband: “If I went, he said, he would have to hand in his resignation...

...Unfortunately Mary McCarthy is qualified by neither of these tests...

...In his case, she could presumably recognize the difference between historical abstractions and daily realities...

...She comes armed with the kind of relevant experience that enables her to interpret dsel$: Why aren’t there more of these moments...

...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...

...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...

...Well, then, I can’t go.’ I did not feel he was constraining me, only presenting me with an ineluctable fact...

...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...

...I. F. Stone is one of the very few who have navigated this second course successfully...

...She insists again and again that -the book is pointless, boring, stupid: “I cannot think who will be benefited by The Best and the Brightest...

...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...

...With passing time, “I found my claim to being a disinterested party starting not exactly to disappear, but to shrink from showing itself, as if ashamed...

...Having executed that formality, he became very nice...

...Rather, the contrary...

...It seems that Mary McCarthy was more aware of the delicacy of her husband’s position than any of her wartime writing revealed...

...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...

...He would let her go: “ ‘But are you going to resign...

...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, PO 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” (emphasis in original...

...Yes.’ 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...

...What is he trying to say?’ may become, in the course of pages, ‘Why, for God’s sake, am I reading it?’ ” The book’s vacuity established, she then goes on to steal all his best yarns and illustrations and sprinkle them throughout her review...

...How much of the insider’s story did Mary McCarthy capture...

...Knowing these men as she did, Mary McCarthy must have realized that labels slapped on from the outside could be terribly misleading...

...She must have been aware of the complexities that made her husband hesitant in 1966 and that bound many of his colleagues long afterwards...

...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 will do what you have determined to do anyway...

...Was he a secret dove...

...They’ll have to fire me.’ That was the decision he had come to...

...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 197 1, before Ellsberg was a celebrity...

...at least the soldiers won’t lie to you...

...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 that severely limited their worth as either literature or as polemic-a lack of objectivity so profound as to make even sympathizers wary...

...the Watergate book is called Mask of State...

...Are you sure?’ I said...

...It is also the quality that enabled Daniel Ellsberg to make sense of that great set-piece, the Pentagon Papers...

...In fairness to Mary McCarthy, she has not overlooked this accomplishment...

...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...

...She is a marvelous source of questions: throughout the Vietnam books she asks: Whoever thought of this program...

...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 . . . .” In the preface to The Seventeenth Degree, she says: “The trouble with trying to be a reporter is that events either hurry ahead of you or else lag behind...

...He got into legal arguments with Ervin, and used up Ervin’s time...

...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...

...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...

...Her portrayals of the Watergate principals are some of the most sympathetic yet to appear...

...In the North, her hosts present hei with an aluminum ring...

...What did it matter if Mr...

...She knows that Vietnam was caused by French-American imperialism, and that My Lai 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 worst mistakes she has made since then are precisely those she might have avoided by staying to tell her husband’s story...

...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...

...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...

...It was as if my trip was a sacrifice we had made jointly: he, too, had wanted it for me...