THE CRISIS OF CONFIDENCE

From one of our most prolific sons of Harvard, and Kennedy family intimates, these are magisterial essays which seek to reassess our institutions and values in a time of widespread anxiety about both. The questions dealt with are open-ended: American violence; the role of the intellectuals; the origins of the Cold War; the lessons of Vietnam; the youth revolt; the future of our politics. Most of the essays have been previously published, and Schlesinger offers few insights here that he has not presented elsewhere. Weak as a popular social analyst (youth culture; TV overkill) where he speaks mainly as a concerned citizen, he has most to say when pursuing his historian's craft. In his remarks on American foreign policy since World War II, he expounds, with considerable effectiveness, the current liberal position. Rejecting the revisionists' image of America as an imperialist society incurably bent on expansion, he argues that the Cold War was not the product of our evil design, but rather the result of almost inevitable misunderstandings between two powers with different visions of international life. The interpretation is sensible, and will draw less fire than his view of Vietnam, which he sees as a case of good aims (the protection of world order and of the democratic idea) grotesquely perverted beyond all reason. Schlesinger's views on both foreign and domestic issues are informed by a moderate, bounded faith in America's history and liberal traditions. His confidence is not likely to seize the radicals at whom many of his remarks are directed; and his solution to our problems—a more restrained and self-critical liberalism—will not appeal to them either. But it will strike the right note among the embattled ADA-ers for whom he speaks.