Reader's Choice

BY OSCAR HANDLIN

ROBERT SHAPLEN’S THE LOST REVOLUTION (Harper, $5.95) illustrates the virtues and defects of American reporting on foreign affairs. Twenty years of experience in the Far East as correspondent of Newsweek and of the New Yorker qualify Shaplen for the task of describing two decades of conflict in Vietnam since 1945. He is reliable on matters of detail, and his instincts are decent. But his book fails to present a whole picture of the struggle for Southeast Asia that now engages the United States.

Shaplen believes that the United States missed three opportunities to guide the movement for Vietnamese national independence toward non-Communist goals. In 1945 and 1946, Americans could have helped Ho Chi Minh take control as a national rather than as a Communist leader. Between 1947 and 1953, they could have compelled France to compromise with him. After 1954, the United States could have ousted the ruling cliques in Saigon and reached an understanding with the North. As a result of the failure to grasp these opportunities, Ho did not develop into a Tito, able both to effect a successful social revolution and to serve as a bulwark against Chinese imperialism. Instead, Americans became embroiled in a futile war against him.

Shaplen’s argument depends upon an erroneous view of Tito, who supplies his analogy, of Ho Chi Minh, who is his hero, and of the situation in Vietnam, which is his subject. The casual comparisons of Vietnam with Yugoslavia are misleading. Tito’s successful resistance to Stalin depended upon the presence in Greece and all along the border of Eastern Europe of a powerful American force in a position to contain the Soviets. Without a comparable base of strength in the Far East, no dissident group could oppose the Chinese Communists. The more appropriate analogy is Czechoslovakia, where a small Red nucleus captured the nationalist movement and then subverted the state.

Furthermore, Shaplen takes too literally Ho’s sweet talk of 1945. Those professions of friendship for the West were but examples of “tactical flexibility,” which was the term Communists gave their duplicity. In 1945, the Communist Party still found some use for the United Front policy and still hoped to gain control of France and Italy, where it was the largest single political force. At that moment, Ho, weak at home, was ready to take aid from any source. But when the Party line throughout the world shifted, he shifted along with it, for he always subordinated nationalism to the revolutionary Marxism that was his life’s work.

Above all, Shaplen consistently accepts the claim that the will of the people gave the Vietminh a moral right to rule. He thus refers to the French reassertion of control in Saigon in September, 1945, as a coup d’etat. Actually, Ho’s Vietminh was only one of several competing groups struggling for power, and its tactics revealed how little it depended upon popular approval. From the very start, Ho’s followers relied more on terror than on persuasion. Assassinations and other acts of violence were directed not only against the French but also against any dissenting element in the population.

In any case, the chronology shows that the decisive points in Vietminh history were not the products of internal popular support. Ho’s revolution started spontaneously and without external assistance, but it had to hide behind nationalist fronts until November, 1949. The Communist victory in China that year made aid available across the northern border and allowed Ho to come out into the open. He succeeded in crushing the French after 1953, when the Korean armistice took pressure off the Chinese northern flank. He stepped up the campaign in the south after 1961 because the Pathet Lao and Cambodia then opened supply routes to him.

The deficiencies in Shaplen’s analysis are significant because they arise out of the shortcomings of the journalist who sees the events before him without placing them in an adequate context.

The reporter who puts down what he is told without critical comment may be accurate but misleading. Shaplen writes that Ho visited the United States before 1914 and was known to reminisce about Harlem and the abject poverty of the Negroes he saw there, and to declaim against the irony of the Statue of Liberty. No doubt this is a correct report of what Ho said. But is it not also significant that Harlem before 1914 was neither a Negro center nor depressed?

Again and again, there are records of unverified interviews the value of which cannot be assessed but which are set down as unqualifiedly reliable. One can be sure that Shaplen gives an accurate report of what the non-Communist guerrilla Hoang said. But we cannot be sure that Hoang was not a Communist or that he was telling the truth.

Shaplen’s comments on South Vietnam are subtly biased by misleading comparisons, explicit and implied, with the North. A secondhand report that Ho Chi Minh had never looked so pudgy and pink is taken as evidence that there was some undernourishment but no famine above the Seventeenth Parallel. There is sharp criticism of the inadequacy of land reform as administered by the Saigon regime; but there is not a word about the total failure of Hanoi’s program in 1956. The political crises in the south from the summer of 1964 onward are taken as demonstrations of the country’s inability to create a strong and vital government, in sharp contrast to the dynamism of Ho Chi Minh’s regime in the north. Shaplen acknowledges that under that regime some non-Communists were killed and imprisoned and others simply dropped from sight, a rather mild way of describing the reign of permanent terror to which one million refugees testified. But he does not understand that the reshuffling of ministries in Saigon was evidence of the effort to avoid a dictatorship and to work out a pattern of responsible civilian government under the immense handicaps of war.

Above all, this account lacks a sense of context. Shaplen would have had the United States force reform upon France before 1953, upon Diem after 1954, upon the junta after 1963. There is no awareness of the larger purposes of American policy, which treated allies as equals and which relied upon persuasion rather than compulsion. Until 1954, measures such as Shaplen advocates would have jeopardized the defense of Europe; after 1954, they would have exposed the United States to charges of colonialism. What he regards as weakness and lack of purpose were, rather, aspects of a policy which seriously aimed to help the people of Vietnam work out their own destiny.

Whether Americans will succeed in that aim or not remains to be seen. They have made tragic errors in formulating and executing policy in the two decades since the defeat of the Japanese. But despite the flaws in the performance of the United States, the record, even as set down by an author who does not fully understand it, testifies to the remarkable restraint and the commitment to legality by the United States in Southeast Asia.

A prodigy and a genius, of impeccable Afrikaner ancestry yet a double first at Oxford, Jan Hofmeyr was destined for political leadership. He painfully inched his way toward emancipation from inherited prejudices. A devout Christian who wished to preserve South Africa for Western civilization, he realized that his goal was unattainable except through recognition of the central principle of the brotherhood of man. The dominant element in his society refused to follow him and instead took the disastrous course toward apartheid.

Paton, who was himself involved in some aspects of the struggle, tells the story with understanding and compassion. He is above all interested in the interplay of personal character and political power; and the analysis of Smuts, Malan, Hertzog, and Verwoerd, as well as of Hofmeyr, reveals the reactions of diverse human types to a common problem.

American readers will be particularly interested in the divergence, since 1945, of their own experience from that of South Africa. In the same twenty years in the United States, the prospects for genuine equality steadily improved, although substantial problems remain even in 1965.

In SOUTHERN JUSTICE (Pantheon, $5.95), LEON FRIEDMAN has assembled seventeen essays that cast a dismal light on the administration of the law in the Deep South. Each chapter is the work of a practicing attorney with direct experience in courts which are absorbing the shock of historic changes in the relationships of the races. The result of the collaboration is by no means a dry legal analysis, but a forceful, often dramatic statement of the problems of rendering justice in communities which conspire to deprive individuals of their rights.

The American legal system depends upon local consent. Its development has rested upon the premise that this was the best safeguard of the liberty of all. Legislation and administrative action may be centralized, but in the last analysis, power is exercised by local officials through courts manned by juries which reflect community sentiment. However, the assumption that there will be an accord between the law of the land and the actions of each specific community collapsed almost a century ago when the Southern states deliberately undertook to nullify the constitutional guarantees of Negro equality.

The unfortunate results are exposed in this volume. Even the judges, abstractly committed to the rule of law, feel local pressures, either because of the process of their election, or in the case of the federal officials, because senatorial courtesy puts their selection in the hands of representatives of the locality.

There is no simple remedy. A more forceful federal presence will help, as will a greater awareness by the bar of its responsibilities in the judicial process. Negro votes may also compel white Southerners to recognize that every element in the population has a common stake in preservation of the law. It is one of our own tragedies that the mutual interest in justice has been so long obscured.

Waste of talent has been another tragedy of color, GOING TO MEET THE MAN (Dial, $4.95), JAMES BALDWIN’S most recent collection of short stories, is a disappointing indication of the deterioration of a writer of genuine ability. None of the stories in this volume show the sharp perceptions, the economy of language, and the tightly knit structure of his first novel. There are moving passages in “This Morning, This Evening, So Soon,” but the narrative is inadequate to sustain the brooding, introspective mood the author wishes to convey. Only in one story, “The ManChild,” does a character come alive. The others are peopled by caricatures, often derivative. The white jailer in the title story is a figure straight out of Erskine Caldwell; and Sonny, the Negro musician, is a fantasy who might have been conjured up by Norman Mailer. The nightmarish images of violence, homosexuality, and miscegenation cover up the limited range of emotions about which Baldwin writes. The self-pity and hatred of which his rage is compounded are comprehensible, but they sap his power of expression.

Among the few aristocracies America has produced, the New England Brahmins have endured longest. Sustained by mercantile wealth, they have repeatedly shown the capacity for political and intellectual leadership. Their self-proclaimed characteristics have been rigorous adherence to a moral code and stern rationality derived from their Puritan antecedents.

IRVING STONE’S THOSE WHO LOVE (Doubleday, $6.95), a biographical novel of Abigail and John Adams, accepts this view of Yankee character. As in his earlier works, Stone has been industrious in research, and he is commendably accurate in matters of detail. It is in his capacity as a storyteller and in his own understanding of character that he fails.

Stone’s narrative covers some forty years of the married life of John and Abigail Adams, a span within which the American Revolution unfolded and the republic was established. This account manages to drain the story of the excitement it had in actuality and buries great personal and national events beneath heaps of irrelevant trivia.

The writing misses entirely the flavor of the times. Stone’s cardboard characters are passionless and speak a stilted, correct language far removed from that which John and Abigail actually used in communication with each other. Abigail speaks to John in a sample love scene: “’I’m not shrewd, John, it’s just that I come from a long line of successful merchants and landowners. They always lived well, but they were never known to spend a pound when they could make do with shillings.’ He took her in his arms, kissed her fondly.” These are stereotyped images of the Puritans, not the live and vibrant beings whose words ring out without restraint in their surviving letters and diaries.

It is not acquaintanceship with the facts that Stone lacks, but the novelist’s capacity for making the people and events he treats credible. He needs the support of history to hold his reader’s attention because his characters and his story do not ring true as fiction.

A more persuasive picture of an aristocrat of this genre emerges from EDWARD C. KIRKLAND’S CHARLES FRANCIS ADAMS, JR. (Harvard University Press, $5.95). This Adams was the great-grandson of John and Abigail, the brother of Henry and Brooks Adams, both more famous than he. Charles Francis was a lawyer and businessman, for a time president of the Union Pacific Railroad, a conservative reformer who dabbled in politics, an amateur writer of local history — a man, in short, who displayed all of the superficial qualities of the Yankee aristocrat.

Yet this distinguished biography, digging sympathetically beneath the surface, reveals a passionate man who cared deeply about many things, including the making of money. Adams was a gambler, ready to speculate in real estate and stocks with the daring, although not the flamboyance, of a Jay Gould or a Dan Drew. Whatever his concern about the Puritan heritage, Charles Francis Adams was a complex man whose character was subtly influenced by America’s gilded age.

Another type of aristocrat emerges from the pages of an excellent translation of EçA DE QUIEROZ’S brilliant novel THE MAIAS (St. Martin’s Press, $6.95). We have had to wait too long for adequate English versions of the works of this distinguished Portuguese writer. This gem of a book lacks the bite of The Relic, which appeared in English a few years ago. But it combines a powerful love story with a subtle delineation of Lisbon aristocracy at the end of the nineteenth century. Carlos da Maia, the central character, moves within a world that locates him by his family position and that hems in all experience with meaningless convention. The love affair which punctuates his lackadaisical existence has an infamous quality to begin with, for it involves, he thinks, the seduction of an innocent married woman. As his relationship to Maria unfolds, he discovers more horrible aspects, which nevertheless do not end the connection.

The affair terminates only when the death of his grandfather creates a family crisis. And neither partner suffers in a society which knows the concepts neither of sin nor of punishment. In the end, Carlos subsides in the safe and aimless life of his class, accepting what comes without hope or disappointment.

The Maias offers a nice contrast in aristocratic styles. The Portuguese great families, who wore emotion on their sleeves, were essentially passionless; weighed down by a sense of futility, they flitted from experience to experience to compensate for the lack of purpose in their lives. Eça’s vivid re-creation of this society makes comprehensible a personality type alien to the United States, yet linked to us by the humanity of its failings.

It is tempting to seek a connection between the absence of an American aristocracy leisured in the European sense and the retarded condition of the arts in the New World. A society dedicated to enterprise and achievement may discourage the flow of talent and energy into callings that seem unproductive, and the absence of a stable group of patrons may choke off any impulse toward creativity. The defenders of American culture have, in the past, argued that a large popular audience could take the place of an aristocracy and sustain authentic democratic art. But the record does not altogether sustain their argument.

HOWARD TAUBMAN’S THE MAKING OF THE AMERICAN THEATRE (CowardMcCann, $8.95) does not deal explicitly with this issue, but provides thought-provoking material for its consideration. Mr. Taubman, the drama critic of the New York Times, knows his subject thoroughly; he is judicious in his judgments, and he writes clearly and dispassionately. His story will interest today’s theatergoers for its evocations of performances from the recent past. It also supplies a basis for understanding the recurrent problems of the theater in the United States.

About half the book is devoted to the period before 1920. From meager colonial beginnings, the theater grew rapidly as patriotism, the rise of cities, and the development of transportation built up its audience. By the end of the nineteenth century it was the most popular of all American cultural media. Yet the outcome was a thoroughly commercial institution dominated by a “hit-orflop psychology" and given over to the feverish pursuit of the isolated production.

Pressures for change at about the time of the First World War led to a period of hope in the 1920s and 1930s. Permanent companies capable of developing polished repertoires, experimentation in forms, and realism in writing were indications of a vitality that spilled over into the commercial theater and raised its level of achievement. But the renaissance proved short-lived. A decline set in which brought the theater to its nadir in the early 1960s.

Taubman doggedly remains optimistic. Decentralization, community arts centers, a new relationship to the universities, and perhaps government support may yet give the theater the stable base it lacked in its earlier development in an unaristocratic society.