Hendrik Hertzberg's Politics is nearly as long as the other three books under review combined, and easily as rewarding. Its title is a homage to Dwight Macdonald's great magazine of the same name, published between 1944 and 1949. Macdonald, his predecessor at The New Yorker, taught him, Hertzberg avows, "just how good--how vigorous, how funny, how exhilarating--an engaged, indignant political polemic could be." He spends most of the "Author's Note" to Politics explaining why he admires Macdonald and why he himself does not measure up to his (and my) hero. The generosity and the modesty are both characteristic. Hertzberg indeed doesn't quite measure up to Macdonald: He's apparently never flirted with ideology or dallied with literature. Still, taking all in all, I'm not sure any other recent American writer comes as close.

There aren't enough indignant political polemics here for my taste--there hardly could be, in these wretched times. But what there is is exhilarating. Clarence Thomas's performance at his nomination hearing is given its due: "display[ing] both a coarse contempt for the very concept of evidence and a stunning readiness to slash at the fabric of democratic trust...he has forfeited his honor and besmirched his country."The case for Clinton's impeachment is annihilated: "What, exactly, is the justice that has been obstructed?...Obstacles may well have been placed in the path of an unaccountable prosecutorial bureaucracy that for obscure reasons has developed a single-minded obsession with discovering at any cost, and publicizing in sniggering detail, precisely what sexual acts were engaged in by the president and the former intern. One can only hope so. But in what sense does the promulgation of details of this kind constitute justice?" Hertzberg's comments on the 2000 election are splendidly scathing; less predictable but equally useful are his criticism of the cowardly way the news organizations that subsequently sponsored an ambitious study of the uncounted Florida ballots presented their findings, and his sharp reproach to Gore, who went missing after the inauguration and "essentially left voiceless those"--a majority of the voters--"who had placed their trust in him."

As these examples suggest, what really riles Hertzberg are violations of democratic procedure. Hence his noble devotion to proportional representation, the subject of three long and wholly persuasive essays plus a short, forceful defense of Lani Guinier. Likewise his proposals for abolishing filibusters and establishing Congressional term limits. Hence also, I suppose, his halfhearted effort to justify Nader's exclusion from the presidential debates in 2000--what other Gore supporter would even have bothered?

Hertzberg praises Macdonald's "fearlessness." In one respect, Hertzberg appears to me less than intellectually fearless. His understanding of the cold war, the Vietnam War and American foreign policy generally, though at the left margin of respectable opinion, remains within the bounds of conventional wisdom. "Why the War Was Immoral," published on the tenth anniversary of the Vietnam War's end in The New Republic (where Hertzberg was twice editor), argues that it was fought with "good intentions," for a "moral aim," the aim of "saving South Vietnam from communism...at a lower cost in suffering and death than the cost of a communist victory." This is the conventional liberal view, wrong for two reasons. The first is that the war was, as Macdonald recognized, "illegal." The reason Macdonald gave--"we did sign the UN covenant"-- was correct, and if more liberals had had the courage and wisdom to say so then, they would have had an easier job of arguing against the invasion of Iraq in 2003. As Macdonald also recognized, the official US pretext for intervening--to defend the South against the North--was false. When the United States first intervened in force, the southern insurgency was still largely indigenous. Hertzberg does not acknowledge this.

The second reason Hertzberg's argument is inadequate goes to the central meaning of the cold war. The United States aimed to save South Vietnam and the rest of the Free World from Communism. Why? Because Communist regimes were invariably harshly repressive? They were; but so were many non-Communist regimes that the United States supported economically, diplomatically and militarily without exerting on them the slightest real pressure for political reform. What the United States has never supported, however, or even tolerated, is a regime that is unwilling to enter into "normal" trade or financial relations with American business. A country, to put it simply, in which no profits can be made by Americans. The presence or absence of profit opportunities, not the presence or absence of freedom, is what has traditionally determined American policy toward other regimes.

I am glad Hertzberg has never understood this. If he had, he would have said so, persistently and emphatically--he is morally, if not intellectually, fearless. In that case, he would have had, I suspect, many fewer opportunities to write about everything else, and the abundant harvest of graceful, amusing, discriminating and public-spirited prose collected in Politics might not have come to be.

• « Previous
• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• 5

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 75 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.