Reader's Choice

BY OSCAR HANDLIN

WAGING PEACE is the apt title of the second volume of DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER’S memoirs of his White House years (Doubleday, $6.95). From the moment in 1956 when Ike decided to run for a second term until January, 1961, when he left office, his primary concern was the quest for peace. He was eager to avoid the risk of war because of his experience and because he well knew how much more damaging the instruments of modern combat had come to be.

Domestic affairs were, therefore, rarely in the forefront of his consciousness. The one major achievement of his second Administration was enactment of the first civil rights law since Reconstruction. In other matters, Eisenhower labored under handicaps. Congress, controlled by the opposition, was no longer cowed by the magic of his name and was altogether unresponsive to his leadership. Illness limited his capacity for action. And the knowledge that he would not run for reelection blunted presidential power. The suggestions for governmental reform, in the “Afterthoughts” to this volume, are the rather unrealistic reflections of Ike’s frustrations during his second term.

His greatest effort in these four years went into diplomacy. Neither he nor Secretary of State Dulles after 1956 had any illusions about liberating the captive nations or rolling back Communism. The response to the crises in Hungary and Suez, the long trips to the Far East and to Latin America, and the visit with Khrushchev at Camp David were aimed at avoiding a conflagration and at relaxing the cold war tensions. All this ended in sharp rebuff. In 1960, the Li-2 incident turned the Paris Summit Conference into a farce, Laos and the Congo were in disorder, France was edging away from NATO, and Castro was in possession of Cuba. There had been no war. But the danger of war was closer than ever before.

Waging Peace is a full and meticulously detailed account of the second term, better written and more coherently organized than Ike’s earlier efforts. It does not always jibe with the accounts given by other members of the Administration — Sherman Adams and Emmet Hughes, for example — and when the documentary evidence becomes available, historians will have to reconcile some important discrepancies.

Meanwhile, the book can be read with profit. Its high point is the straight-faced account of Khrushchev’s visits with the President. The ebullient Russian head of state, ready to cut loose from protocol when it was to his advantage to do so, was a disconcerting guest. Eisenhower’s amazement and perplexity, even in retrospect, enliven these pages.

The deficiencies of the memoir reflect Ike’s unwillingness to contemplate the possibility that he might have been wrong at any point. He insists that the Ef-2 incident had no effect; the summit meeting was in any case doomed. The Russians had long known about the U-2 overflights and only made the fuss they did because they sought a pretext for breaking off negotiations. Indeed, Eisenhower claims, the spirit of Camp David never existed, and the possibilities of a détente were always slim. In the anxiety to justify the error of permitting an overflight on the eve of the conference, he downgrades the major concern of his Administration.

Nor can he see any fault, writing almost a decade later, in the handling of the Suez crisis. The Hungarian revolution had just cracked the Soviet hold on Eastern Europe, and the Russians had responded with a brutal invasion when the Israeli, British, and French attack upon Egypt began. The UN condemned both aggressions and ordered the withdrawal of all invading forces. The Russians, of course, disregarded the injunction, while the United States forced its allies to obey. The result strengthened Communism in Eastern Europe and encouraged Nasser in further designs to expand his influence. “Colonel Nasser, who had remained in power only through the restraint of the West,” Ike notes in pained surprise, “failed to seize this opportunity for true statesmanship, thereby depriving his country of the assistance and cooperation of all self-respecting governments.”

Ultimately, Iraq would be lost to the West, the United States would have to intervene in Lebanon, and the French would conclude that they could not trust the United States to protect their interests.

Perhaps that assumption explains the President’s inability to communicate his position clearly to others. The intimacy with which he addressed the English Prime Minister covered up a lack of comprehension that bore tragic results at Suez. Khrushchev’s visit to the United States, it appears from this book, was the product of an invitation the President did not intend to extend. Again, Harold Stassen in 1956 left a conference with Ike thinking that it was all right to oppose Nixon’s bid for the vice presidency, and then discovered that it was not. A fantastic sequence of misunderstandings with Governor Faubus led to the use of troops in Little Rock. These instances, too numerous to be coincidental, reflect either a fuzziness of intention or an inability to communicate.

The President also seems totally disingenuous about the diverse personalities with whom he dealt. General Franco was personable and agreeable and reputed to be one of the finest bird shots in Spain. Indeed, everyone Ike met was a nice chap; De Gaulle, Ibn Saud, Ayub, Nehru, even Khrushchev were pleasant when he called on them or when they visited him. There is no revelation, however, that he understood, or was understood by them.

The value of this book lies in the candor with which it states these judgments and explains the policy of the second term. Eisenhower holds staunchly to the verities of his past: public housing and government spending are bad, the balanced budget is good, and the United States made no mistakes in its quest for peace between 1952 and 1960. The complacency of these attitudes goes far to explain the eight years of Ike’s presidency and the legacy inherited from that period.

Only in retrospect can we realize how large a part of American energy in the decade of the 1950s continued to go into liquidating the domestic and foreign problems of World War II. The nation, having only recently concluded one trying conflict, found itself deprived of the fruits of victory by the threats of a new antagonist. Confusion about purposes and goals made room for the demagogue who played upon men’s fears for his own sinister purposes.

SENATOR CHARLES E. POTTER’S DAYS OF SHAME (Coward-McGann, $5.95) is a valuable account of the McCarthyite interlude. The Republican senator from Michigan, a member of the committee over which McCarthy presided, here tells the dismal story of its work. The book focuses on the notorious CohnSchine Army hearing, hut encompasses the whole development that briefly made the junior senator from Wisconsin a power in American life.

Senator Potter makes no excuses for himself. “All six of us who served under McCarthy’s chairmanship must carry on our records forever a great share of the responsibility for the whole disgraceful performance, particularly we Republicans.” Explicitly and implicitly his condemnation extends to all those who abetted the demagogue or who silently stood by. It is worth recalling that the Senate, even in its censure vote, took only the narrowest ground for criticizing McCarthy and evaded a good part of its responsibility for the conduct of its member. The disgraceful episode revealed how little Americans comprehended the problems of the post-war world.

The United States was also ill prepared for the uncongenial task of occupying conquered territories. The only precedent, Reconstruction in the South, offered little basis for optimism about the capacity of a democracy to govern a hostile population. Yet in 1945, Americans in Japan assumed the responsibility for ruling a people totally alien in race, religion, and language. The hatreds of four bitter years of war and the shock of atomic attack certainly increased the difficulty of the task.

On the whole, the Occupation proceeded smoothly, and the United States and Japan emerged from it on better terms than they had been for decades. WALT SHELDON has described the Occupation in interesting detail in THE HONORABLE CONQUERORS (Macmillan, $6.95). Into a narrative dealing with the general development of American policies, he has inserted a series of loosely connected individual stories that give a personal impression of what the contact between victors and vanquished involved. The combination of the two perspectives offers scope for the treatment of small as well as large questions: the sexual adventures and misadventures of the occupying forces, the black market, corruption, Army censorship, land reform, and industrial reorganization. Unfortunately, Sheldon never adds up the details, and he leaves the story without a conclusion. Significantly, for instance, there is no summary estimate of General Mac Arthur’s regency. The materials for a judgment about the effectiveness of American economic, political, and social policy are tucked away in various chapters of this running chronicle, but the judgment itself is not rendered.

During the same years, China turned from an ally into a foe. The United States discovered in Korea the strength of its new antagonist and also how little it knew about the Chinese people despite a century of contact with them. PEKING: A TALE OF THREE CITIES by NIGEL CAMERON and BRIAN BRAKE (Harper, $15.00) has only slight direct relevance to contemporary events. Yet it offers an effective introduction to a world remote from our own, with which we shall have increasing concern.

This is a beautiful book. Its lavish photographs convey a luminous sense of the physical environment within which Chinese leadership operates and also zoom in on the day-to-day life of the people. The text, by the former correspondent in Asia of the London Daily Mail, offers a lucid history of the city, although its concluding chapter may be unjustifiably optimistic.

Two features emerge with startling clarity. The layout of the city encourages the separation of the rulers from the ruled. An immense distance cuts off the inner governmental city not only from the remote provinces but from populous Peking itself, and the decisions of emperors in the past or commissars in the present need take little account of events outside the walls. Furthermore, a deeply ingrained tradition views Peking as the center of the universe, which can be made safe only by war against the hostile barbarians who threaten its outer edges. How far Communism has altered and how far it has confirmed this attitude remains to be seen.

STARTING OUT IN THE THIRTIES (Atlantic - Little, Brown, $4.95) is the second volume of ALFRED BAZIN’S reminiscences. Kazin was only nineteen in 1934 when John Chamberlain of the New York Times secured him entrée to the literary circles of New York. This was the Depression decade; the genteel tradition had crumbled, and social criticism, often Marxist-oriented, was dominant. The young man moved into a world equally excited by talk of revolution and literary achievement.

Starting Out in the Thirties, however, deals less with the literature or ideas of the period than with the personalities Kazin encountered. Some, like V. F. Calverton, now evoke only faint memories. Others, like Mary McCarthy, have gone on to greater eminence. Kazin’s vivid sketches of these people are set in the context of his own effort at selfanalysis. He himself was still livingin the home of his Jewish immigrant parents in Brownsville, so that his relationship with the uptown publishing world involved a fascinating intersection of cultural forces.

The common theme was loneliness. Kazin draws into his narrative the somewhat incongruous figure of his maiden Aunt Katie because her tragic life mirrored the need of his contemporaries for love as a shield against loneliness. Much of their revolutionary fervor expressed resentment against a world which denied them the security of that love.

In the year in which Kazin went to see John Chamberlain, Maurice Schwartz, the idol of the Yiddish stage, was drawing crowds to Yoshe Kalb, dramatized from the novel by ISRAEL J. SINGER. A new edition of Maurice Samuel’s translation of the novel (Harper, $4.95) throws light on the world of Eastern European Jewry, from which Kazin sprang.

Yoshe is an innocent, isolated from a corrupt community by his own purity of heart and dedication to the spirit. The inhuman conventions of his society force him into a loveless marriage, and the starved passion of his mother-in-law draws him into destructive adultery. He is not permitted to enjoy even the peace he briefly finds by playing the servile fool. The setting is the court of a Hasidic rabbi in Austrian Poland before 1914, where gross materialism, sensuality, and greed have drained religion of all spiritual qualities. There remains only a web of superstition, in which the selfish few prey upon the credulous many.

Singer writes within a powerful naturalistic tradition; his characters are the creatures of their appetites, and their environment is unqualifiedly earthy. Undoubtedly he exaggerates, yet his picture is a helpful corrective to the nostalgic sentimentality of the audiences of Fiddler on the Roof who seek in a bygone era the meaning absent in their own lives. Yoshe was as lonely and lacking in love in his world as Kazin’s contemporaries were in the New York of the 1930s.

HODDING CARTER’S so THE HEFFNERS LEFT McCOMB (Doublcday, $3.50) is a brief dramatic account of an actual incident in Mississippi’s long hot summer of 1964. The Heffners were an all-American family— white, Anglo-Saxon, Episcopalian, middle-class, of Southern descent. Their eldest daughter was Miss Mississippi of 1963. Yet the aroused fury of the town drove them away from their home and out of the state. The act of nonconformity which brought on this retribution was a spontaneous supper invitation to a minister and a college student, both white, who happened to be in McComb working on a civil rights projects.

Hodding Carter knows his Mississippi and knows also how to tell a story simply, firmly, and effectively. His precise day-to-day narrative of how the least indication of dissent cost the Heffners their friends and their business and subjected them to the danger of vigilante action is a frightening reminder of the effects of inequality on the whole society. The Heffners were respectable and well connected. Yet they were, in the end, almost as helpless, almost as hunted, as any Negro. This is the civil rights problem in its old familiar form.

Newer, more difficult questions are now being raised in the Northern cities about the future of Negro life in America. FREEDOM — WHEN? (Random House, $4.95) by JAMES FARMER, national director of CORE, is worth reading for its reflection of the confusion of the Northern civil rights movement. The Congress on Racial Equality was founded in 1942 as an offshoot of the pacifist Fellowship of Reconciliation. Its membership was then preponderantly middle-class, white, and ideologically committed to the goal of complete equality and to the tactics of nonviolence. It had little influence until the spontaneous bus boycott in Montgomery and the sitins in Greensboro demonstrated the power of nonviolent direct action. Since 1960, CORE’S membership has doubled every year and has now become predominantly Negro.

The change has subtly altered CORE’S emphasis. Increasingly it becomes a mass movement which seeks to represent the black urban ghetto. Farmer devotes a whole chapter to the sensible argument that desegregation will not dissolve the Negroes’ identity or lead to a merger with whites. Rather, increased freedom of individual choice will stimulate solidarity and develop separate institutions. Negro Americans will constitute a group united by common antecedents and common cultural traits like many others in our society.

But neither he nor the members of CORE have yet adapted their tactics to these revised objectives. A healthy community recognizes obligations as well as rights; it is aware of its internal responsibilities, and it depends upon stable leaders. In these respects, Negroes still have a way to go to understand their situation in a pluralistic culture.

The bitter campaigns in Chicago, Boston, and New York against racial imbalance in education and housing, for instance, rest on the false belief that there is some inherent value in intermixture. The insistence upon direct action and the complaints about police brutality in New York, Chicago, and Boston as well as in Bogalusa and Selma reveal an inability to differentiate between situations where democratic procedures are available and those where they are not. The summer explosions in Los Angeles and Chicago show that in the trying years ahead much depends upon whether people like James Farmer can make the transition from idealistic agitator to responsible communal leader.