Reader's Choice

BY OSCAR HANDLIN

Latin America, in the opinion of John F. Kennedy, was the most critical area in the world during his Administration. An underdeveloped economy, soaring population, and the difficulty of developing democratic institutions made that region susceptible to the tugs of Communism on the left and military dictatorship on the right. Whether the countries of the Western Hemisphere will be able to form free institutions will certainly affect their neighbor the United States, which is bound to them not only by geography but also by a century and a half of ambiguous relationships of which the Monroe Doctrine was long the symbol.

The great test of Latin-Amcrican policy came in 1965 in the Dominican Republic. The United States had had ties to that unhappy nation for more than a century. The smaller nation had once voluntarily asked for annexation and later had been temporarily occupied as a quasi-protectorate. It was near enough to Florida to be a threat in unfriendly hands and near enough to Cuba to feel the danger of Castro revolutionaries.

OVERTAKEN BY EVENTS by JOHN BARTLOW MARTIN (Doubleday, $7.95) is an informative account of the tragic events in the Dominican Republic with particular emphasis on the last five years. The book is a historic, document in its own right and a readable, often exciting analysis of an important incident in American history.

Martin’s acquaintance with the island began in 1937 when, as a free-lance writer, he wrote one of the earliest exposés of the Trujillo dictatorship. After a career in journalism, he became a Kennedy speech writer in 1960. In the next year, the President sent him on a mission to report the consequences of the fall of Trujillo. Martin then perceived the necessity of supporting the democratic opposition, although its leaders were “childlike and politically naive, patriotic but of doubtful ability to govern.” Martin also served as ambassador, a post which he retained until after the fall of Juan Bosch. In the spring of 1965 Martin returned as President Johnson’s special emissary in the crisis of the new revolution. He is thus well informed about Dominican affairs. To his knowledge he adds a judicious temperament, good judgment of character, a passionate dedication to freedom, and skill as a writer.

The book is long, detailed, and somewhat disjointed. Most of it was written in 1964 after Martin had left the island as ambassador. His mediating role in the civil war of 1965 made necessary a concluding section on those events, and a chapter of afterthoughts ties the whole volume together.

Much of the story concerns the problem of liquidating the Trujillo dictatorship. The withdrawal of American support had contributed to the downfall of that regime, and the United States tried to help erect a democratic society on the ruins of the old tyranny. The difficulties were epitomized in the process by which Juan Bosch rose to power and then collapsed. Ambassador Martin was a vigorous supporter of Bosch, but the Kennedy Administration could do little to prop up the democratic regime.

In 1965, Martin was sent to make contact with the rebel leaders. Having done so, he attempted unsuccessfully to negotiate a settlement under the leadership of Irnbert. His narrative is the best available account of American intervention.

The book is most fascinating in its portrayal of characters. For Bosch, Martin felt both affection and contempt. Of the sincerity, patriotism, and dedication of the Dominican leader there was no doubt. But neither could one overlook the ignorance, incompetence, and emotionalism that limited his effectiveness. He might have made a difference, for men shape events as well as being shaped by them; yet he was childlike and foolish, “totally out of phase with all other Dominicans, a stranger in a foreign land.”

Every actor in the drama was fallible. “Time and again, in person after person, I glimpsed the infinite capacity of men for evil and selldestruction as they maneuvered for power and as they used it.” Blame for the failure, therefore, could not have been individual. It was no coincidence that throughout its history, the republic was “ruled by men who seemed determined to steal it, or ruin it, or destroy it, or sell it, or give it away.”

“On this tumbled land of city slums and desert dirt, of torture chambers and palm-lined beaches, these people, looking back to Trujillo’s butchers and ahead to the dark unknown, had come unhinged.” Disoriented, men lashed around without any sense that what they did had meaning; “one act was linked to another– not good, not bad, not anything.”

Between absolute authority and total anarchy, there was nothing. Irrationality ruled. The plot to assassinate Trujillo, although successful, was as grotesque and as poorly executed as Bosch’s plan bloodlessly to invade Haiti. The ill-informed masses were available to the highest bidder. “An ordinary turba—riot — cost $150, but if one wanted cars burned and store windows smashed, the cost went up to $500.” A streak of cruelty ran through the whole society. The land was desperately poor; yet pride, corruption, and sell-seeking frustrated the efforts at its redemption.

Could any alternative policy have been more successful? in retrospect, Martin believes that the United States took the least evil of choices. The genuine danger of a Communist takeover in 1965 made intervention an inescapable necessity. Yet the tortuous negotiations which followed showed the difficulties of imposing a solution by force.

The implications of the experience reach far beyond the boundaries of the Dominican Republic. “It used to be said that all power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Today it might be said more trenchantly that all power has limits, and the greater the power the greater the limits.” The conclusion applies to Asia and Europe as well tts to Latin America. Yet power carries with it responsibilities which cannot simply be shrugged off, and recognition of its limits only increases the obligation to use it wisely.

THE HEAT OF THE SUN (AtlanticLittle, Brown, $5.95) is SEAN O’FAOLAIN’S most recent collection of fiction. In an engaging foreword, O’Faolain attempts to draw a distinction between the short story— “concentrated stuff” — and the tale which “roves farther, has time and space for more complex characterization . . . and even more plot.” But although he attempts to locate the pieces in this volume in one genre or the other, the categorization is not really important. Much more significant is the unity of theme that holds the book together.

O’Faolain is a master of his Craft. His plots are simple and generally sharply focused on a brief time interval. The immediate incident becomes the point of departure for a sustained narrative which subtly acquires a general meaning. Yet throughout, the characterizations are sharp; no abstractions, but vivid, carefully drawn personalities people these pages. The writing is uncluttered and precise, sustained by an informed use of language.

The fact that one of the stories is set in Greece and two others in France does not detract from the unity of the volume, which derives from the people who are its subjects. O’Faolain knows the Irish and describes them with insight. These are neither the peasants of the nineteenth century nor the proletarians of Sean O’Casey. Ireland no longer has a dense agricultural population, nor is it oppressed by the old poverty. It lives at the level of a decent, moderate competence. These clerks, small businessmen, and priests have edged out of the traditional past and freed themselves of tragedy; in the process something happened to the capacity for love.

The concern occupies them all, the faded major, the young sailor, the blowsy music-hall singer, the henpecked husband. In “One Man, One Boat, One Girl,” the married man, taken in hand by his wife, is careful not to smile at the reminder of his past freedom on the river before he settled down to become foreman of the works and the father of five. Love for him “is a prison staffed by female wardens.”

O’Faolain writes with wry sympathy. Misfortune can happen to anyone. Is it, he asks, “that all passion is an unhappiness? Are we always looking forward to our joy, or thinking back on it or so drunk with it that we cannot realize it?” He thus skillfully develops a characteristically Irish theme in its modern setting.

PHYSICS AND POWER

RUTH MOORE’S NIELS BOHR (Knopf, $6.95) is a thoughtful biography of a key figure in the history of modern physics. To describe the man, the development of his scientific thought, and its effect upon the world it helped to change was a challenging tusk which called for the ability to make comprehensible the difficult problems of modern physics. Ruth Moore has succeeded because she was not content to describe only the external events of her subject’s life, but went further to trace the successive steps by which he participated in the discovery of the universe of the atom. The book, therefore, does more than tell the story of an attractive human being; it also contributes to an understanding of twentieth-century science.

Bohr was born in Denmark in 1885. His intellectual brilliance early became evident, and he lived in an environment which stimulated and encouraged his scholarly interests. Moreover, movement was still free; he could study without difficulty at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge and with Ernest Rutherford at Manchester. Bohr plunged into the new field of learning that the discoveries of Max Planck and Albert Einstein had revealed. The war in 1914 scarcely made a difference to him; Denmark was neutral, and his own work proceeded without interruption.

In the thirty years after 1910, Bohr participated actively in developing the basic concepts of atomic physics. He remained remarkably productive, and his laboratory in Copenhagen became a center which attracted students from every part of the world. His notable discoveries earned him the Nobel Prize in 1922, and he maintained intimate contacts with the work of his colleagues.

The achievements of these decades were due in part to the intellectual excitement generated by the milieu of the laboratory. Bohr was preeminent in his own circle, but his dedication to science and his personal generosity stimulated others to work together in a common and open process of discovery. Furthermore, the community of physicists was small and international. The researchers and speculative thinkers in every part of Europe and America were aware of each other’s efforts and shared each other’s problems. Discoveries, therefore, came in clusters; each advance touched off the experiments and discussions that contributed to further progress. This setting was a significant factor in the explosion of knowledge in the 1920s and 1930s.

The outbreak of the Second World War was cataclysmic. This time, Denmark did not escape occupation, and Bohr himself was ultimately compelled to flee, first to Sweden, then to England. More important, physics was now harnessed to the military needs of the state. Science became an instrument of power upon which governments eagerly drew in the race to create more potent weapons of destruction. The end result of the advance in knowledge in which Bohr had shared was the atom bomb and its danger to mankind.

The scientists themselves quickly became aware of the consequences of their enlistment in the war effort. Even before the first bomb had been tested, Bohr understood its potential danger. Yet, power once unleashed could not be contained. No one knew until Hitler’s defeat whether the Germans were working on a similar project; it seemed necessary therefore to bend every effort to win the race.

There was an interesting interchange when Heisenberg, the great German physicist, came to Denmark to sound out Bohr. Each suspected what die other knew; and each groped for a way in which to suggest an understanding. Yet neither could speak freely.

Bohr, who advised both the Americans and the British, fixed his hopes on an agreement for post-war control. He attempted to persuade Roosevelt and Churchill to take the Russians into their confidence and to devise a system of international regulation to forestall a future race in atomic weapons. Miss Moore is inclined to blame Churchill for the failure, on the assumption that the Russians might then have been persuaded to consent to an agreement. Yet Churchill’s reluctance to trust Stalin was understandable; nothing in the Communist record justified the confidence that the Soviets would honor their international obligations. Events in Eastern Europe in 1944 and 1945 were scarcely encouraging.

In any case, the competition the scientists feared became a reality from which few could extricate themselves. Bohr’s declining years were clouded by the consciousness that the ultimate product of his great intellectual adventure had been an instrument of destruction more terrifying than any theretofore discovered by man.

For the first thirty years of his life, ALEXANDER CALDER fought against his destiny. His father and grandfather had been sculptors; he studied engineering, shipped as a seaman, drifted into lumber camps, and painted at the Art Students League. He would not take himself seriously. In Paris when he could not keep his fingers still, he made animated toys, learned to use wire to draw in space, and gained a kind of fame as constructor of a mechanical circus. But not until 1930 when he met Mondriaan did he perceive the possibilities of serious abstract sculpture. Fortunately, he still had thirty creative years in which to make his place in American art.

His life thus contains the material for a wonderful book. But his AUTOBIOGRAPHY (Pantheon, $15.00) is disappointing. Though it tells the story, it lacks the sparkle of the artist or of his work. Written in the fiat style of a man talking into a dictating machine, it fails to convey the excitement of his sculpture. Calder, like many other great artists, is rarely introspective; he cannot put into words the kind of problems with which his hands deal when they shape and re-order space. The illustrations are exceptionally interesting but do not compensate for the limitations of Calder’s prose.

FROM THE AMERICAN PAST

THE YOUNGER JOHN WINTHROP by ROBERT C. BLACK III (Columbia University Press, $10.00) is a perceptive biography of the son of the founder of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The book rests upon careful research in English and American sources, and its material is judiciously put together. It is also clearly and gracefully written.

From it emerges the picture of an engaging personality, both English and American, Puritan and promoter. Educated in Trinity College, Dublin, Winthrop had fought the French off La Rochelle and traveled to Italy and Constantinople by the time his father helped launch the Massachusetts enterprise in 1630. The young man followed a year and a half later and became one of the founders of the Connecticut settlement, which he was to serve as governor for some twenty years.

He lacked the single-minded religious zeal of his father, and was rather a dabbler in the many enterprises appropriate to a new country. He speculated in land, helped build an ironworks in Saugus and a sawmill in New London, and made plans which came to nothing for producing indigo and salt. He became a prominent physician; his curiosity and the confidence he commanded were more important than his innocence of medical education. His prescription book reveals that he treated more than 700 different individuals in little more than a decade. Most of his remedies involved chemicals with which he hopefully experimented in the expectation of finding an all-purpose nostrum. Then, too, there was the possibility that some discovery might help locate the mineral wealth the optimistic believed lay hidden in the New England soil. Eager to scan the heavens as well as the earth, he made himself something of an astronomer and brought to the New World telescopes as good as those available in the Old.

In this sense he was a scientist; not that he mastered an organized body of knowledge, but that he was willing to use whatever means were at hand to examine the world about him. A lifelong correspondent of Boyle and Kepler, he was the first American to be elected to the Royal Society.

THE OXFORD COMPANION TO AMERICAN HISTORY by THOMAS H. JOHNSON (Oxford University Press, $12.50) is a convenient reference volume, It covers arts, science, and business as well as politics through a judicious mixture of biographical and subject entries, almost 5000 in number. The standard of accuracy is high, the information is concisely and clearly presented, and the format is handy.