Reader's Choice

by Oscar Handlin

The twentieth-century expansion of government created formidable problems for American democracy. The time was gone when Jackson could credibly inform Congress that the duties of all public offices were so plain and simple that anyone could qualify for their performance. The growing technical complexity of state functions made it increasingly difficult to assume that any man could do any job. Decisions often depended upon trained intelligence. Yet the civil service, despite the optimism of reformers, never recruited an adequate corps of men capable of making those decisions. It was more likely to produce timid bureaucrats unresponsive to the changing needs of politics. Moreover, the great sprawling departments swelled steadily, and as often impeded as furthered action. Few Presidents or governors could consult intimately with the department heads in the Cabinets. Those officials were either absorbed in the management of their affairs or were political appointees designed to give an Administration the strength it needed in the country.

Hence, the growing inclination to depend upon the advice of kitchen Cabinets, of groups of disinterested advisers without official position and therefore without bureaucratic or political commitments. Most Chief Executives learned to use such consultants frequently.

The hostile critics of the New Deal often ascribed an insidious acl visory role to Felix Frankfurter. In the words of Fortune, Frankfurter was “the most influential single inchvidual in the United States” in the 1930s. He was accused of having staffed a good part of the government with his tools and of having exerted a sinister influence on the President.

ROOSEVELT AND FRANKFURTER: THEIR CORRESPONDENCE, 1928-1945 edited by MAX FREEDMAN (AtlanticLittle, Brown, $17.50) is a document of first-rate historical importance.

It shows that Frankfurter was fully as important as his enemies charged. But it also shows that his role, far from being malign, was constructive and a vital contribution to FDR’s ability to meet the problems of depression and war.

The heart of the book is a careful rendition of the intensely interesting and informative letters which passed between the President and his adviser. The editor, who was for many years Washington correspondent of the Manchester Guardian, has provided helpful explanatory notes along with a thoughtful introduction appraising the relationship between Roosevelt and Frankfurter.

The characters of the two men complemented each other. Roosevelt needed Frankfurter’s assistance. Not himself an intellectual, the President respected intellect, and was able to take advice because he was also capable of rejecting it. In critical matters, he refused to be oppressed by personal relationships, for he could be utterly ruthless when he deemed it necessary. He liked praise and wished to be admired, but he never allowed flattery to sway him on issues which counted.

Frankfurter was, as Freedman notes, “an artist in adulation; and sometimes, forgetting the artistry, he laid on flattery with a trowel.” Read in succession, the notes and telegrams to Roosevelt seem cloying in their sycophancy, as they assure the President that he was “continuing where Jackson and Wilson left off.” The messages were intended to create a good impression, but the wish to keep his name before the President rarely distorted the advice Frankfurter gave or qualified the honesty of his opinions.

The two men had in common an understanding of power. Both began their careers under Wilson, and both perceived the implications of extended government authority during the First World War. Their careers diverged in the 1920s when Frankfurter went to teach at the Harvard Law School and Roosevelt remained in New York State politics. The two men drew together once more when Roosevelt became governor; and the correspondence between them remained active until the death of the President. Its volume declined somewhat after Frankfurter mounted the bench and moved to Washington, for he was then able to deal with the President personally or by telephone.

Frankfurter’s function was to make ideas and people known to Roosevelt. The opinions transmitted dealt with every kind of subject, ranging from detailed political maneuvers in New York City to high questions of national economic policy and diplomacy. Frankfurter was widely read and held strong views and, in addition, funneled to the President the opinions of others. Frankfurter did not even scruple to pass on letters given to him in privacy. “The Lord, I hope, will forgive me for breaking the confidence imposed by a trusting young man in letting another than myself see the enclosures and your eyes were the very last for whom they were intended.” The frequent comments on his Supreme Court colleagues also violated convention. His first loyalty was to the President.

Frankfurter thus became the intermediary between FDR and an amazingly wide circle of scholars, lawyers, and men of affairs, conservatives as well as liberals. Jean Monnet, Joseph Kennedy, J. M. Keynes, Harold Laski, H. L. Stimson, O. W. Holmes, Louis D. Brandeis, and Harlan Stone were among the names which appeared frequently in this correspondence. There was time and energy to discuss even the candidates for the Harmsworth professorship in American history at Oxford.

Roosevelt often turned to Frankfurter for help in staffing the Administration. The advice that came back to Washington was useful because it was disinterested and because the base in the law school gave Frankfurter a vantage point from which to identify promising young men. In time his people occupied important places in many agencies, and their communications kept him and the President informed about what was going on.

As a result, Frankfurter became directly, though sometimes secretly, involved in many controversies among the cliques that formed and reformed in Washington. He participated in the ill-fated courtpacking plan of 1937. In an anonymous editorial in 1935 he attacked the Supreme Court and set the mood for the struggle to come. A barrage of communications thereafter egged the President on. Frankfurter was also influential in urging Roosevelt to run for a third term.

There is evidence that some aspects of this relationship troubled Frankfurter, particularly after he became a judge. He was concerned about the extent to which his duty on the bench conflicted with his role as confidential adviser; and he destroyed 300 intimate notes that had passed between him and FDR. Yet balancing the weight of his various obligations, Frankfurter felt that his largest duty was to the country, which he could serve through the President. He thus played an important part in the transition of American government to modernity.

The adaptation of old political forms to new conditions is the theme of Louis HEREN’S THE NEW AMERICAN COMMONWEALTH (Harper & Row, $7.95). The book, by the chief Washington correspondent of the London Times, is a thoughtful evaluation of American politics in operation. The system of government, Heren shows, has retained the formal constitutional basis of the eighteenth century. But subtle adjustments in practice since the New Deal have permitted the country to sustain its responsibilities in the modern world.

Heren looks beneath the surface of constitutional provisions to examine the way in which institutions actually work. The system still retains the outward form of 1787, in the calculated balances of federalism and of the separation of powers, but the functions of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches are not precisely those envisioned by the Founding Fathers.

The presidency, endowed with enormous powers from the start, has increased its influence immeasurably in the past thirty years. In some ways the President is the counterpart of the medieval monarch, exercising enormous authority and checked only by the counterpressures of the numerous baronial interests about him.

Congress by contrast has generally been unable to prevent the erosion of its legislative power. The Chief Executive as party leader formulates the measures to be acted on and controls the budget. Seniority and the multiplication of staff in the committees have further altered the House and the Senate. Nevertheless, the congressman has an important job, not as legislator but as intermediary between Washington and the people represented. His ability to balance the demands of his constituents, the national interest, and regional concerns has made democracy work on a continental scale.

The changes in the Supreme Court are most dramatic of all. From a bastion of conservatism in the early decades of the twentieth century, it became a source of revolutionary power which has operated to expand freedom in the United States enormously. Surely it was one of history’s little ironies that the liberals of 1937, with Frankfurter, fought to circumscribe the power of the judiciary, which in the next thirty years proved to be their most powerful instrument of social change.

Against the background of this analysis of government, Heren describes the uses of power. His account of the national security policy which unites the functions of diplomacy and defense is particularly enlightening. The deepest impression left by Heren’s observations is of the enormous stability maintained by the most sophisticated political system in the world.

Heren writes with lucidity and wit; his book is distinguished by accuracy of observation and also by the understanding that is the product of reflection and comparison.

The reporter who is both perceptive of detail and yet capable of setting what he sees in perspective is rare indeed. American jour nalism encourages the eyewitness account, although all too often the man on the scene can make out only a fragment of the picture. This limited view is the reason for the failure of PAUL JACOBS’ PRELUDE TO RIOT: A VIEW OF URBAN AMERICA FROM THE BOTTOM (Random House, $5.95). The body of the book describes the poor of Los Angeles, and particularly of Watts. The focus is upon contact with government through police, welfare, health, and education, and the emphasis is upon the deficiencies in what has been done to offset the inequalities induced by poverty. In these matters Jacobs is an accurate, if indignant, observer.

His conclusions are that “we are a racist country,” that “the minority poor live inside a pen without an exit gate,” and that “nearly every official in government is convinced that the urban crisis is beyond any solution.” Those judgments reveal the absolute lack of any sense of development. Ten years ago was the year of Little Rock. In the intervening decade the United States has passed through a radical social revolution the extent of which has only begun to be apparent. But the reporter who sees merely the scene before him is in no position to measure change.

DAVID HALBERSTAM’S ONE VERY HOT DAY (Houghton Mifflin, $4.95) is a novel about the old war in Vietnam, about the period when the Americans were advisers and the fighting was still the responsibility of the Vietnamese. This is not an ideological tract, but an honest, tightly written story which does not preach but lets its implications sink in through the development of plot and characters.

The action is simple, and the novel is sparsely peopled. A company sets forth on a routine patrol through the Mekong Delta. The men and officers are Vietnamese, but they are accompanied by two American advisers. They run into an ambush. There is a brief fight. Some are killed. The rest return to their base. In the course of the narrative, occasional flashbacks fill in the personal backgrounds of the main participants.

The Vietnamese setting is skillfully portrayed: the oppressive heat hangs over the dreary landscape; the villages, empty of men, are potential traps; and the peasants, weary of war, have lost all hope that there might be any desirable goals to their lives and think only in terms of limited immediate advantages. Captain Dong is the typical official; well connected in Saigon, he has no interests but self preservation and advancement. Lieutenant Thuong, on the other hand, is more complex. He has no illusions, and is swayed not by sentiment but by pride and a sense of responsibility. He is able to rise to the crisis of the attack and helps save the company.

The difficulty of communication complicates all dealings with Americans. The failure is not one of language alone but springs from the width of the cultural gap between the two groups. The Vietnamese officers cannot quite understand why the Americans are helping them, any more than their own apathy and disorder are comprehensible to their advisers. The old men and women in the villages are totally bewildered. One of them confuses the patrol with the Vietminh and thinks they are still fighting the French.

The Americans are all officers and professionals. They are there because they have a job to do. Lieutenant Anderson is competent, strong, and dedicated. He has gone to the trouble of learning Vietnamese, yet his knowledge does not really bridge the distance between him and the Vietnamese.

The central figure, Captain Beaupre, expresses the dominant emotions of the Americans. He is always tired and impatient. There arc no clear lines on the map, and there is therefore no purposeful advance or retreat, only a repetitive round of wearisome and boring circlings. Beaupre is also afraid, not of death but of the heat and of his lust for water and of the possible collapse that will prove he is all used up.

Beaupre imagines that this war is different from the others in which he has participated — Korea, Germany, and Normandy. Yet in most respects he echoes the familiar complaints of earlier American fighting men. The boredom and the fear, the impatience with the allies, and the fury at breakdowns in the system were always the normal reactions of people forced into combat with values derived from a peaceful society. The difference in this war comes from the need for restraint. Beaupre must be polite to Dong, full power cannot be deployed, there will be no unconditional surrender, and the most desirable outcome of it all will be not utopian but a choice of the lesser of evils.

The suspicion of conspiracy, in Europe as in America, arises out of a desire to simplify complex phenomena. Most men find it intolerable to acknowledge that some of the important events of their lives are the results of causes that are not fully known. The unwillingness to concede that evidence may be partial and inconclusive induces even the rationally minded to imagine that hidden connections explain what is otherwise inexplicable. Hence the long, and often tragic, history of efforts to uncover secret plots against the well-being of society.

These fears in France often focused upon the Jews. Anti-Semitism there rose to its apogee after the Dreyfus case and left its mark down into the Vichy regime. THE JEWS by ROGER PEYREFITTE (BobbsMerrill, $7.50) is a fictional effort to expose the follies of anti-Semitism. Originally published in 1965, it sold 200,000 copies in France; if wide circulation and extensive discussion were enough to counter a myth, the book should have had a good effect. Unfortunately, the novel may actually have heightened the suspicions it sought to quiet.

The plot is simple. A young Catholic girl intends to convert to Judaism in order to marry Baron de Goldschild. Her bigoted mother wishes to prevent the marriage, and with the aid of a convenient Jesuit rehearses a long roster of antiSemitic accusations. The narrator, a friend of the family’s, is doing research on the subject and becomes an intermediary in the discussion. In the end, the accusation of nefarious Jewish influence is reduced to the absurd by the revelation that all the famous families of the West have Jewish ancestry.

Ridicule is a dangerous technique, and when it is overly subtle, backfires. Thus, much of the argument revolves about plays upon names. Is Jean-Paul Sartre one of them? Well, if his first name were actually Jean-Loup and the Loup were spelled without a “p,” it might be the Languedocian form of the definite article. The name would then be le Sartre, meaning tailor (sartor in Latin), a common trade among Jews. The logic, in a sense, is funny, except that it rests upon and confirms a stereotype. The book, whether it is mocking common prejudices, or describing fictional characters, or referring to real people, repeats and gives currency to a variety of erroneous beliefs. It may therefore unintentionally sustain the fears its author hopes to dispel.

The tragedy of the Kennedy assassination has given rise to widespread conspiratorial theories in the United States and in Europe. The effort of the Warren Commission to provide a decisive answer to the doubts about the guilt of Lee Harvey Oswald was doomed to failure. More than a century after Lincoln’s assassination there remain unanswered questions about the events in Ford’s Theater. Given the nature of the case and of the evidence, no more definitive answer was possible about the crime in Dallas.

Challenges of the accuracy of the Warren Commission Report appeared shortly after its publication, and numerous assassination buffs have been poring over the data ever since. They have been able to find fault with the report. They have not yet come up with a convincing alternative explanation.

Two recent works add to the literature. SYLVIA MEAGHER’S ACCESSORIES AFTER THE FACT (BobbsMerrill, $8.50) is an elaborate systematic compilation of the evidence, in which the Commission is criticized for two kinds of failings: there are occasional internal inconsistencies, and the investigators failed to follow up all the lines of inquiry which, in retrospect, might have been significant. These errors of judgment persuade the author to argue for a new disinterested investigation, although she herself propounds no alternative theory.

JOSIAH THOMPSON’S SIX SECONDS IN DALLAS (Bernard Geis, $8.95) is bolder. Thompson argues that there were four shots and three assassins, none of them Oswald. The conclusions rest upon analysis of the photographs as well as the juxtaposition of unreconciled statements by observers. The analysis remains speculative, however. Thompson can score points against the Commission, but his own conjectures are open to similar criticism. The disagreeable prospect is that we may never succeed in allaying all doubt and that these uncertainties will continue to generate conspiratorial theories.