THE DISTORTION OF AMERICA

Historian Handlin acknowledges that these eight articles are polemics--intercessions by a historian into contemporary affairs without benefit of historical distance. (All but one, that is, are reworked journal pieces.) Fair enough; but a historian need not leave the canons of his trade at the door, as Handlin does here. A very few themes are reiterated ad nauseam: the United States has lost its way in the world, falling to assert itself in a context devoid of reason, unwilling to play dirty like the USSR and unable to convince the world by argument; the intellectuals have given up on the country and on progress, a manifestation of their alienation from the citizenry; there is no such thing as neutrality, which is only a facade for going over to the enemy. The most pernicious essay--because written for the Foreign Policy Association in 1968 but substantively unchanged by hindsight--argues that the United States should have pressed the war in Vietnam to an end after the Tet offensive instead of waffling; and accuses the antiwar movement of moral responsibility for the outcome in Southeast Asia, throwing in a condemnation of dissent in the face of majority rule to boot. The Soviet Union is less the target than those whom Handlin thinks pay homage to it--those dratted intellectuals again--despite the USSR's proven inability to attain the abundance it has promised. These are Cold War essays worthy of an ideologue like Norman Podhoretz, not of Handlin the historian.