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WITH KENNEDY (Doubleday, $5.95) is PIERRE SALINGER’S account of his role in the Kennedy Administration. The book lacks the sweep of the magisterial accounts by Arthur Schlesinger and Theodore Sorensen. Salinger never influenced policy and makes no pretense to having shaped history. The value of his narrative, however, arises precisely from the independence of his perspective. Salinger has the detachment of an observer, loyal to his chief but unobsessed by any need to justify a particular position. He writes candidly; he knew nothing about the Bay of Pigs and says so. And he knows how to tell a good story; the account of a day in the country with Khrushchev is funny as well as illuminating.

Pierre Salinger came into the Kennedy entourage at a relatively late date. He had worked with Robert Kennedy on the Teamster investigation and had taken an active part in the presidential campaign of 1960 when he entered the White House as press secretary. His function was communication with the newspapers and, therefore, with the public. He faced the problem of translating the intentions of the new Administration into comprehensible terms, by no means a simple task given the difficulties of 1961.

Kennedy took office burdened by campaign rhetoric. His own ideals and the exigencies of the election had pressed him to create an image different from that of the old, tired, and passive Administration he had succeeded. The responsibilities of power were sobering, while the narrow margin of his victory and his tenuous control over the Congress for two years left little freedom of action in either foreign or domestic policy. The NewFrontier could not immediately realize its hopes of civil rights, peace, or economic growth. The Administration was under constant pressure, therefore, to explain itself. Hence the importance of Salinger’s role.

The book says practically nothing about domestic issues. There is a nice picture of the efforts of the President’s family to maintain some degree of privacy, and there is a lucid and fair description of the White House staff. But the focus of the work is on diplomacy. In those years when the peace of the world repeatedly hung in the balance, Salinger was drawn somewhat unexpectedly into service as intermediary between Kennedy and Khrushchev. Soon after their meeting in Vienna it became clear that one of their greatest problems was the basic one of opening dependable lines of communication between them. Messages that passed through formal channels were simply not reliable. The Foreign Office and the State Department could not always say what they meant when their words were to be scrutinized by other powers and by the public. Only the leaders speaking directly, personally, and informally could convey their precise meaning to each other. Salinger’s account of the gradual development of such media of communication, through newspapermen and other unofficial persons, is fascinating. It may well be that only the existence of these links prevented total disaster at the time of the Cuban missile crisis.

The obligations of a world of continuing danger and of secret discourse produced a troubling conflict between the Administration’s need to act under cover and the public’s need to know what was happening. The clash over the problem of managed news in Vietnam was the most bitter outcome, and at one point it induced President Kennedy to request a newspaper publisher to withdraw an unsympathetic reporter from Saigon. Salinger, in retrospect, is critical of the restrictive policy. Yet he also points out that some journalists were playing a political role; their avowed purpose of bringing down the Diem government led them into questionable collaboration with the Buddhist leaders. The dilemma Salinger and Kennedy faced in 1963 still exists today. A democratic government, committed to total candor in its press policy, confronts an impossible choice between using any methods at its disposal, including some secret operations, and doing everything out in the open, with all the limitations to which such self-denial would subject it.

Every religion demands of its followers some suspension of the rules of evidence. So far as it recognizes the intercession of a divine force in the world of men, it claims exemption from the rules by which ordinary historic events are judged. The career of a prophet is not subject to the criteria of credibility which govern the lives of other men.

In most cases, of course, the issue does not arise. The incidents the believer accepts on faith occurred in times and places so remote that the evidence is beyond the reach of verification. When, however, the critical event happens close by and in the recent past, information is available, and there is a problem of reconciling faith and history.

Mary Baker Eddy, like Joseph Smith, was the founder of an American church which today commands a substantial number of adherents. Exactly one hundred years ago in Lynn, Massachusetts, she passed through an experience that was the starting point of Christian Science. She was thus certainly a historic figure of the known past, who left abundant traces in the records of her time.

ROBERT PEEL in MART BAKER EDDY : THE YEARS OF DISCOVERY (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, $7.50) deals with the formative years in Mrs. Eddy’s life. From a bleak girlhood on a New England farm he follows her through two unhappy marriages to the discovery of the truth and its ultimate exposition in Science and Health. Peel is about the only serious student to have had access to the church archives, and his book contains information available nowhere else. It is particularly good on her family background and on her early years. Moreover, Peel is commendably familiar with the literary and intellectual context within which his subject grew up.

Yet he writes as a believer who has to square uncomfortable evidence with the dictates of his faith. The most notable example is the key event in 1866 which led Mrs. Eddy to the insight fundamental to Christian Science. Peel gives the account accepted by the church. A fall left her permanently incapacitated with a concussion and possible spinal dislocation. Medical treatment was futile. Then “quite suddenly she was filled with the conviction that her life was in God. . . . At that moment she was healed.” In that short experience she glimpsed the great fact she would thereafter try to make plain to others — “namely Life in and of Spirit; this Life being the sole reality of existence.”

Many years later when his patient had become famous, the physician who attended her disputed this account. The injury was superficial, and she needed only a sedative to quiet her nerves. Peel, nevertheless, must reject this evidence, although the official version rests on the reminiscences of Mrs. Eddy and her followers. The fragment of information closest to the event, a letter she wrote within two weeks, is silent on the revelation that should have been uppermost in her mind.

In the zeal to portray the prophetess, Peel obscures the more dramatic story of the woman. The setting is the hill country of New England, economically decadent, drained by the West of its most vigorous elements. Mary passes from frustration to frustration; her health is always precarious, and like her contemporaries, she shows a morbid concern with death. She complains constantly of nervousness. Repressed passion flares out in anger. “I will see them in the bottomless pit before doing it,”she writes when asked to arrange things for her father’s new bride. She is no great intellect; her comments on politics are inane, and her efforts at poetry are banal. She is a woman of deep feelings. Yet Peel must present her as one “in whom an unseen spiritual purpose” is steadily forming.

The sense of intellectual growth is conveyed through a skillful although dubious process of affiliation. Peel quotes Melville’s Confidence Man taking issue with science, and notes that Mrs. Eddy “could have agreed.” But there is no evidence that she knew of Melville or Kierkegaard or the other writers whose words lend tone to these pages.

The revolution of the past generation in the biological sciences has scarcely penetrated popular consciousness and has not significantly influenced public policies that rest upon totally outmoded conceptions. Yet for more than two decades, the study of the relationship of living organisms to their environment has reoriented our thinking about man’s situation in the natural world.

Research in genetics has begun to explain the transmission of traits from one generation to another, and ethology has supplied hundreds of fragments of fascinating information about the connections between livingbeings and their surroundings. The implications are already clear. The view of evolution inherited from the nineteenth century is no longer tenable. Darwin envisioned an orderlyprogression through time, the dynamic force of which was natural selection, the capacity of the fittest groups to survive in the endless competition for space within the environment. The logic of this position led in the social and psychological sciences to behaviorism. Man was a creature of his environment, stimuli from which produced the conditioned reflexes and other learned responses which determined his personal character and his social relations. In this picture, there was no room for “instincts,” a vague residual concept within which were located all the phenomena still unexplained by behavioristic theory.

The new biological sciences have accumulated massive stores of data pointing to the persistence of factors that cannot be explained in environmental terms alone. Some traits transmitted through the gene pools of given populations remain intractable whatever the environment. Furthermore, some forms of behavior are either unlearned or are learned in ways not related to any element in the environment. Whether those be called instincts or some other name, they demand an explanation.

It is the virtue of ROBERT ARDREY’S TERRITORIAL IMPERATIVE (Athencum, $6.95) that it offers a convenient and readable introduction to this information, much of which is buried in learned journals. Mr. Ardrey has enough academic background to be able to consider these matters seriously; and his experience as a playwright has left him the ability to communicate what he knows in a comprehensible, exciting manner. He is at his best in summarizing his own detailed observations or those of the scientists whose work he reports. His own spying on the love life of the Uganda Kob, Tinbergen’s description of the arrival of the herring gulls at their breeding ground. Schmidt’s account of the wanderings of the eels out of the Sargasso Sea are genuinely dramatic. Ardrey’s lively style encases the scientific information in a colloquial narrative spiced with personal reminiscences.

Ardrey’s inferences from this data, however, will not win easy assent. He believes that an innate code governs the behavior of animals, including men. The key to that code and the chief mechanism of natural morality is attachment to a particular territory. The territorial imperative is the guiding element that shapes the actions of all living beings.

Ardrey knows that the conclusion is subject to many qualifications, but his exuberant style runs away with him, particularly when he takes leave of the biological data and applies his judgments to Vietnam, World War II, and the State of Israel. In calmer passages he recognizes that to describe one instinct is not to describe the whole complex organism. If the territorial imperative applies to man at all, it does so in intricate relationship with social and psychological forces of other derivations.

Nevertheless, these data have serious implications for important questions now before us. In the past generation, the social sciences have clung determinedly to environmental theories, whether they dealt with the causes of poverty, of war, of prejudice, or of delinquency. Aggression, for instance, is almost universally explained as a response to frustration. BURN, BABY, BURN!, the vivid story of the Watts race riot by JERRY COHEN and WILLIAM S. MURPHY (Dutton, $5.95), gives the frightening details of the disorders that tore Los Angeles apart in August, 1965. When it comes to an explanation, the authors emphasize, as did the McCone Commission, the deprivations of the district and of its people.

It is certainly worth considering the possibility that instinctive drives will be expressed in aggression, even if every man has a job, and every nation living space. KONRAD LORENZ’S thoughtful ON AGGRESSION (Harcourt, Brace & World, S5.75) has some sobering thoughts on the matter. A distinguished biologist, on whose work Ardrey has drawn, Lorenz explains the instinctive drives that trigger hostile behavior. He is not pessimistic, for he also shows the means by which wolves, dogs, rats, and birds control their destructive impulses and learn to coexist, and he ventures to suggest that analogous responses may apply to humans.

There are no easy solutions. It is worth doing what can be done about poverty because it is easier to change the environment than to deal with those scarcely known forces we call instinctive. But the caution that housing and job programs are not panaceas is not an indication of despair. If we retain the faith, basic to science, that nothing true can ultimately be injurious, we may learn to recognize, even utilize, the drives in man now too often employed in his destruction.

Franco’s destruction of the Spanish Republic tested all the optimistic assumptions of the 1930s that had survived World War I and the Depression. The rational, liberal, and democratic Republic had briefly seemed to draw Spain out of its reactionary past into the modern world. The bitter struggle against it became for liberals the decisive trial of their faith in progress.

In JOURNEY TO THE FRONTIER, PETER STANSKY and WIILLIAM ABRAHAMS (Atlantic-Little, Brown, $7.50) have composed a dramatic dual biography. The two authors combine the talents of the historian and the poet to create a vivid picture of the intellectual turmoil of the decade of the 1930s.

Their subjects are two unusual young men who lost their lives lighting with the loyalist force in Spain. Julian Bell, the son of Clive and Vanessa Bell and the nephew of Virginia Woolf, was born in Bloomsbury and lived in intimate association with the brilliant circle identified with the Quarter. He shared the interwar attitude: literature was life, and life was politics. He wished to write poetry, but suffered from the perplexities of the liberal and allowed his personal life to fall into disorder. War was a justifiable escape.

John Cornford, his friend, was heir to an academic tradition of considerable depth. He was the greatgrandson of Charles Darwin, and the university life of Cambridge was his familiar environment. At the age of sixteen he became a Communist. Spain called him to action. He died on his twenty-first birthday.

Bell the liberal and Cornford the Communist were both, to begin with, pacifists. The civil war totally committed them to action. Products of an intellectual aristocracy which accepted an obligation to help change the world, they could not doubt that Spain was the inevitable place to be.

The account of their lives is deeply moving. These were literate young men accustomed to putting their intimate thoughts on paper, and Stansky and Abrahams were fortunate to have secured access to the surviving documents. Their book brings to life two vivid personalities and their milieus.

The same war also troubled Americans. Among those who made the pilgrimage to Spain was John Dos Passos, who was upset by its revelations. By then his novels of the 1920s had already made a substantial contribution to the literature of the United States. He had begun with Walt Whitman’s conception of a country throbbing with the vitality of its free people, but had framed that vision within the radical points of reference of his own times. The shock of discovering what the Communists were actually up to in Spain caused him to draw back; and the problems of composing the trilogy, U.S.A., led him to re-examine his whole position. The result was a profound transformation that culminated in the conservatism of his book Midcentury (1960).

JOHN DOS PASSOS’ WOULD IN A GLASS (Houghton Mifflin, $6.95) contains a selection from his works arranged to give a view of our century. The anthology gains substantially from an illuminating introductory essay on the man and his works by Kenneth Lynn. But its unity and coherence derive from the fact that the country here described was always a central character in Dos Passos’ fiction. His technical innovations— the camera-eye, the shifts in narrative focus, the mixture of biography, social documentary, and fiction—and his concern with reproducing the texture of the language reflected his wish somehow to describe the life of the whole people. The collection distills from his novels a panoramic view of the era. they traversed.

A remarkably consistent picture emerges despite the shift in political position of the author. There is certainly a change from radicalism to conservatism. The iconoclasm and passion that imbued the earlier novels give way to anguished uncertainty. But the personal and national values remain resilient; from beginning to end, Dos Passos conveys a sense of the strivings for dignity of the people in all their variety.