Reader's Choice

BY OSCAR HANDLIN

JOHN HER SET’S TOO FAR TO WALK (Knopf, $4.95) is unusual among recent college novels, most of which have focused upon the problems of the professor driven to drink or sex by the intellectual inadequacies of the modern university. Horsey shifts attention to where it. more properly belongs, the student, in whose life the cultural deficiencies of our educational system are most acute.

John Fist, the hero of Too Far to Walk, is an Ivy League sophomore who has done well in his first year, but suddenly loses all sense of purpose. He falls into a slump which disorganizes both his studies and his personal life. He feels the need for experience and for freedom; the two are united in his thinking as they are for many college students ol his generation. His fumbling search for meaning leads him to a search for sexual adventure, to rebellion against his family, and finally, to drugs. Then the awareness dawns that none of these escapes will satisfy his needs for identity and purpose. He turns against his tempter: “You sold me illusions. I prefer the real world, crummy as it is.” At the end, John has effected a reconciliation with his parents, announces that he is bringing a nice girl home for the weekend, and is back in the classroom ready to study his Catullus. His misadventures were all for the best, since they enabled him to grow into maturity.

The novel is perceptive in its statement of the problem. The early chapters are well written. Hersey has the reporter’s knack for an interesting narrative, and while thoroughly objective about his subject, he portrays him sympathetically. Above ali, he understands that John’s rebellion arises out of the recognition that his career in college will lead to a dull, stupid, conforming middleclass life. Far from liberating the spirit or opening the mind, education threatens to close off choices and to narrow experience. This is the fear of the most sensitive sector of the college generation of the 1960s.

But Hersey lacks the skill to describe convincingly the resolution of the problem. His account of the LSD hallucinations is poorly contrived, and John Fist’s sudden conversion seems quite arbitrary. If Catullus and the nice girl are the answer, then John was a sap not to have perceived it in the first place.

Hersey’s hero does not choose the course of radical political action that has attracted some of his contemporaries. John Fist is aware of the possibility; he knows a boy who spent the summer in Mississippi, and at times he would not mind trading places with him. But John also knows that the civil rights worker is a kidlike individual — “everything is so simple for him, so clear.”That judgment contains a clue to the ineffectiveness of American radicalism in the 1960s and also to its attractiveness for some very sensitive and intelligent young people.

THE RADICAE PAPERS, edited by Irving Howe (Doubleday, $4.95), provides the material for an understanding of the current disarray of the political left in the United States. The volume consists of a collection of essays which, in general, reflect the viewpoint of the independent socialist magazine Dissent. The earnest arguments here presented reveal the dilemmas of the radical stance.

The editor’s opening statement proclaims his continued adherence to “the idea of socialism both as problem and as goal.” Yet neither he nor his colleagues can establish a meaningful continuity with socialist writings of the past. Orthodox Marxism is too often frozen in postures assumed a century ago, and the experience of fifty years of Communism in Europe and Asia has not enlivened the hopes of humane, democratically minded observers. In the end, the contributors are compelled to discard such conventional elements of socialism as the nationalization of industry, the abolition of private property, and class war. What remains is a sense of moral outrage, a call for social justice, a longing for “a fraternal society” which will put an end to “psychic insecurity.”

Most of these writers have thus discarded the hard, systematic features of scientific Marxism, although they are reluctant to acknowledge the failure of socialist analysis. They are not, however, Utopians. The essays tell us very little that is positive about the good society other than that it would ameliorate the evils of the present. ”Socialism is the name of our desire,” write the authors of one essay. As a result, no consistent ideology is defined, but only a catalogue of the shortcomings of American society. Yet socialism contributes little to an understanding of the problems of greatest moment today — automation, education, race, nationalism, leisure, and the altered roles of age and youth. The authors generally are honest enough not to look back to the past for solutions; consequently their remarks, more often than not, end on a negative, inconclusive note.

The shortcomings of this approach are most evident in the comments on foreign policy. John Schrecker and Michael VValzer, for instance, have no sympathy with Communism, and yet they believe that American intervention in countries like Greece has crushed ‘‘all modernizing initiative.” They therefore regard the United States, China, and Russia as equally responsible for “imposing the Cold War on the third world.”

When it comes to domestic affairs, the radicals are repeatedly surprised by the resilience of American institutions. The labor unions, which thirty years ago were in the vanguard ol reform, have now been assimilated into corporate life, as Harvey Swados complains. Civil rights threatens shortly also to become an Establishment activity. Tom Hayden petulantly denies that “the social reforms of the past thirty years actually improved the quality of American life in a lasting way.” But that is a young man’s stubborn refusal to recognize change that fails to conform with his own expectations. In actuality, the protests against the unemployment rate are hardly sounded before it sinks to 4 percent. Often the rebels themselves are sucked into the service of the Establishment, and their criticism subsides to issues of pace and method rather than of principle.

Above all, the radicals lack the popular base which sustained the protest movements of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The authors wish to speak for the mass of people as it should be; they know that they cannot speak for it as it is. They are aware too that without some organic relationship to a major historical movement, they will be doomed to ineffectuality or tempted by a theory of a ruling elite.

Hence the call in the essays of Bayard Rustin, Tora Hayden, Emmanuel Geltman, and Stanley R. Plastrick for various forms of coalition which, eschewing ideology, will develop a “community of insurgents" led by the excluded and unqualified, and mobilized to transform society. In effect, this is a call for action pure and simple, a call that arises from the need to rebel rather than from the attraction ol an agreed-upon goal.

The civil rights movement was the ideal vehicle for this intellectually undemanding form of protest. The moral issue of racism was clear and unambiguous, it established a link to a large body of popular opinion, and it offered valid opportunities for direct action that satisfied troubled young people who had their own need for rebellion. But since the march on Washington, that spontaneous movement has fallen under the shadow of government sponsorship; it has become organized and respectable, and it has first the capacity for expressing rebelliousness.

To some extent, the demonstrations against the war in Vietnam have taken the place of civil rights as the medium for radical protest among John fists contemporaries. The absence of any substantial body of popular support and the lack of a rigorous intellectual position make this an appropriate issue for protest.

However, the radical call for a broad united front which would transform American society rests upon a delusion. Even the excluded and underprivileged wish not to alter the basic institutions of the country, but to share in their advantages. And the potential for enabling them to do so is far from being exhausted. Furthermore, the radical emphasis on action rather than ideology exposes Mr. Howe and his colleagues to flanking attacks from extremists further to the left and impatient with all restraints. The unwillingness to cope with these intellectually inconvenient facts impoverishes the radical thought of our times.

A protest of a more, conventional sort is sounded in THE CORRUPTED LAND (Macmillan, $5.95), an exposure of the social morality ol modern America by FRED J. COOK. Mr. Cook is a journalist in the muckraker tradition, who bubbles over with righteous indignation. He has given us an angry survey of the notorious post-war scandals — price-fixing in the electrical industry, Billie Sol Estes, Bobby Baker, and the rigged TV quiz shows. All arc evidences of the pervasive dishonesty that runs through American life.

However much Mr. Cook exaggerates, his defense of virtue is praiseworthy. Precisely because there remains a deep commitment to a morality of honesty, exposures of deviation serve a useful purpose.

It is not so much that the indictment is overdrawn as it is the failure of understanding that limits the uselulness ol this book. Dishonesty is not a recent or a capitalist phenomenon. The United States, like Europe, was, alas, not free of corruption in the simple, rural eighteenth century; indeed, the selfish disregard of the rules is common in many unindustrialized societies. Nor is planning a sovereign remedy. Dishonesty of a scale equal to that which Mr. Cook exposes has been known even in the Soviet Union. We need such reminders of our deficiencies as these, but jeremiads are not the best guides to social action.

ROUL TUNLEY narrows the focus of protest by examining a single abuse in THE AMERICAN HEALTH SCANDAL (Harper & Row, $4.95). The book was evidently written in some haste, and there are occasional factual slips. But the author is a skillful reporter who has a good grasp of the problem, and his essential estimate of the situation is correct. The people of the United States do not enjoy the level of medical care to which the wealth of their society entitles them. A dramatic comparison with the situation in England, Sweden, Denmark, West Germany, Yugoslavia, and Canada reveals that in many respects those countries provide more effective health services than America does.

The crucial factor is the inability to recruit and train enough doctors adequately to serve the existing needs of the United States, to say nothing of maintaining the present physician-patient ratio in a rising population. To keep from falling behind, we need 11,000 new doctors a year; our medical schools graduate 7700. The result is the deprivation of many communities and the woefully limited service to economically vulnerable groups. The spread of abuses in practice, which are amply documented in this book, are also consequences of the shortage. The American Health Scandal furnishes considerable evidence of the personal tragedies and the social waste that sap the nation’s human strength.

The deficiencies are not the results of lack of interest, funds, educational facilities, or scientific talent, but of organization and control. The villain of Mr. Tunley’s account is the organized medical establishment, which has bitterly resisted any innovation that seemed to smack of “socialized medicine” or to threaten its income and status. He himself leans toward prepaid group practice as a remedy. But he is by no means dogmatic in the matter, and he thoughtfully explores alternative modes of improved medical service, maintaining the intimate character of the patient-doctor relationship, and setting limits upon the power of government. Medicare is but the first step of a long-overdue reform; and its most important immediate result may be simply to highlight and emphasize the deficiencies of the present arrangements.

Tunley’s account is somewhat oversimple in its allocation of responsibility for shortcomings. There are historical reasons, apart from the cupidity of doctors, why the medical profession developed around the fee-receiving individual practitioner. And there were, in the past, gains as well as losses from forms of organization which have now become anachronistic.

The reformer eager for immediate action or dedicated to a single idea generally considers the political process intractable, for its dominant features are the balance of contending forces, compromise that takes the edge off conflict, and the unpredictable interplay of personalities. Two significant books illustrate the way in which these features influence the resolution of important issues.

1933: CHARACTERS IN CRISIS (Little, Brown, $7.50) an absorbing account by HERBERT FEIS of the transition from the Hoover to the Roosevelt Administration. Feis had been Economic Adviser to Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson and stayed on to serve under Cordell Hull. Feis was in a strategic position to observe an important aspect of the transition between the incoming and outgoing Presidents. The story of the London Economic Conference is particularly absorbing, for its failure doomed efforts to deal with the worldwide depression on an international basis. The personalities of the participants were certainly crucial in the debacle. This account makes lively reading, verging as it does on comedy, as when a drunken senator takes to the knife in defense of his tariff policy.

DAVID J. ROTHMAN’S POLITICS AND POWER (Harvard University Press, $6.95) is an incisive study of the history of the United States Senate in the post-Civil-War era, when it occupied a pivotal place in the operations of the federal government. The Senate in these years was often the butt of reformers’ attacks as a rich man’s club and as the instrument of special interests who used its power for their own ends. Ultimately, that line of criticism would produce the Seventeenth Amendment and the direct election of senators. This careful study shifts attention away from these lurid accusations to the transformation of the Senate into an instrument of modern democracy. Professor Rothman draws effective portraits of such powerful individuals as William Allison and Nelson Aldrich. But his chief efforts go to a demonstration of how the development of the party system reshaped the Senate so that it could deal effectively with national problems. His striking reinterpretation clarifies an important phase of the history of American institutions.

CORNELIUS RYAN’S THE LAST BATTLE (Simon and Schuster, $7.50) is excellent retrospective journalism. The author has examined the relevant Russian, American, German, and English documents and has interviewed literally hundreds of survivors to assemble the materials for his exciting account of the three weeks after April 16, 1945, when Hitler’s capital was reduced to rubble.

Berlin had never been a Nazi city; the Führer had resentfully planned to rebuild it and rename it Germania. By the spring of 1945, it had been drained of manpower. Its population consisted largely of women; it was burdened by an influx of refugees from the eastern provinces already occupied by the Soviets; and its industry depended upon more than one hundred thousand slave laborers. Resistance to the advancing Allied and Russian armies was futile, for only boys of filteen and men in their seventies were available to man the defenses.

A wave of suicides spread throughout the city; the Berliners’ only hope was that the invaders from the West would arrive before those from the East. Hitler’s unwillingness to believe that the attack would come and his determination to go down fighting to the end exposed the city to total destruction by the Russians.

Ryan is a skillful narrator. He has an eye for the realistic detail - how, for instance, the zoo keepers took care of their charges under attack. He weaves intimate humaninterest items unobtrusively into the exposition of the larger issues of the story. The sequence of events thus remains clear and becomes all the more comprehensible because presented in personal terms. Ryan makes a conscientious effort to be fair, although his view of the Russians is far from favorable, as his pages on the cases of rape show.

The general outlines of the story are familiar. The author treads on controversial ground only in the discussion of the Allied decision to leave Berlin to the Russians. Churchill, aware of the long-term political consequences, wished to push on to capture the city. Roosevelt, already approaching death, was still reluctant to accept the evidence of Red deceit. The Allied commanders in the field were unwilling to suffer one hundred thousand casualties for the prestige of holding the German capital. Only Stalin knew what he wanted and was ruthless enough to pay the cost.