Washington Post Book Reviews
For You
Saturday September 25, 2010
|
AMERICAN DREAMS: The United States Since 1945
H. W. Brands
Penguin Press
ISBN 978-1594202629
420 pages
$32.95
Reviewed by Charles Kaiser
The story of the United States since 1945 offers a historian the opportunity to mine a rich narrative of steady change and dramatic transformation. With the end of World War II now 65 years behind us -- and all of the 1960s at least 40 years old -- this ought be a good time to offer new information and fresh insights into the political, social and cultural events that re-invented the country in the postwar period.
"American Dreams" appropriately dates the beginning of the modern era to the first explosion of an atomic bomb in the New Mexico desert in July 1945. Here, H.W. Brands, a history professor at the University of Texas, does a good job of making the familiar seem fresh: "Many of the observers were struck by the silence that surrounded the detonation. The astonishing display of light and color took place without a soundtrack -- until the sonic waves reached the observation posts many seconds after the light waves." As J. Robert Oppenheimer, the project's director, wrote: "I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture ... 'Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.' I suppose we all thought that, one way or the other."
Oppenheimer's remark is famous, of course, and the author's one consistent success in this volume is to recall most of the famous quotations associated with most of the important events of these seven decades. Thus, we are reminded of everything from Joseph Welch's chastisement of Sen. Joe McCarthy ("Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?") to President Dwight Eisenhower's sadly unheeded warning at the end of his administration ("The very structure of our society (is involved). We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence ... by the military-industrial complex.") and Norman Mailer's early assessment of John F. Kennedy in Esquire ("His personal quality had a subtle, not quite describable intensity.").
But when it comes to using the past to understand the present, Brands has hardly anything to say at all. For instance, he quotes Walter Lippmann's warnings about the danger of the United States over-extending itself in the 1950s: Our clients "will act for their reasons, and on their own judgment, presenting us with accomplished facts which we did not intend, and with crises for which we are unready. We shall have either to disown our puppets ... or must support them at an incalculable cost on an unintended, unforeseen and perhaps undesirable issue." But the author never connects that wise, 60-year-old warning to our current situation in Afghanistan.
Instead of broad themes about the direction of American history, Brands offers an endless series of mini-portraits of major events, without ever finding a way of tying any of them together. And when he does try to make a larger point, he often stumbles.
For example, he writes that Vietnam "seared itself on the American mind, replacing the Munich syndrome with a Vietnam syndrome. The former had said that when in doubt, America must fight. The latter asserted that when in doubt, America mustn't." That abbreviated summary is fine as far it goes. But then Brands adds this meaningless sentence: "Neither did much to diminish the doubt, the source of all the trouble."
From this distance, it is obvious to this reviewer that the misuse of the Munich precedent led the United States into a costly misadventure in Vietnam, while the "Vietnam syndrome" imposed a welcome restraint on American interventionism -- until the neocon movement insisted on "getting beyond it" so that we could once again waste billions of dollars and tens of thousands of lives (ours and our enemies') in endless interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan. But Brands always avoids those broader judgments.
Sometimes his capsule descriptions of famous events omit important facts and long-revealed ironies. For example, he notes that Lyndon Johnson got rid of defense secretary Robert McNamara when his enthusiasm for the Vietnam War had disappeared. Then the author adds: "But McNamara's successor was no more upbeat. Clark Clifford told Johnson ... that Vietnam had become a 'sinkhole.'" All of that is true, but it omits the main reason Clifford's assessment as the new secretary of defense carried so much weight: It was a complete reversal of what his position on the war had been when Johnson had chosen him to be McNamara's successor just a few weeks earlier.
Similarly, Brands writes that Chicago Mayor Richard Daley "deemed the anti-war protesters the scum of the earth" when they descended on his city during the Democratic National Convention of 1968 -- but he leaves out the long-known irony that Daley himself hated the Vietnam War because the son of a close friend had been one of its casualties.
In the same section, Brands reports that demonstrators provoked the Chicago police with taunts of "Pigs, pigs, fascist pigs," but he never mentions that Freedom of Information suits filed by CBS News led the network to conclude 10 years later that as many as one out of six of those demonstrators was actually a government agent.
Brands does a passable job of summarizing the facts behind major political events, but when it comes to social and cultural change, he never has anything interesting to say. The author avoids controversy so assiduously that his book sometimes reads as if its main purpose were to win acceptance by the Texas Board of Education, which decides what facts are appropriate for high school history books.
The journalist Molly Ivins once wrote, "It is possible to read the history of this country as one long struggle to extend the liberties established in our Constitution to everyone in America." The women's movement and the civil rights movement both get standard treatment in Brands' book, but the gay rights movement is barely mentioned at all. Yet the transformed status of women, African-Americans and gay people during the last seven decades, produced by the struggle Ivins described, is the most important story of change in the United States in the 20th century.
No one would get any hint of that narrative from this volume. At the end of 385 pages of text, all Brands has to tell us is this: "Americans had dreamed since our national birth, and in the twenty-first century we were dreaming still."
Historical judgments don't get any more banal than that.
Charles Kaiser is the author of "1968 In America" and "The Gay Metropolis." He writes the Full Court Press blog for the Sidney Hillman Foundation.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
|
| Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Share | Top |
TURBULENCE
Giles Foden
Knopf
ISBN 978-0307592774
315 pages
$25.95
Reviewed by Wendy Smith
As demonstrated in his Whitbread Award-winner, "The Last King of Scotland," which rendered Ugandan dictator Idi Amin through the eyes of his personal physician, British author Giles Foden has a knack for strong setups. Foden's new novel has an equally striking premise: In January 1944, a young meteorologist is dispatched to gain the confidence of a scientist whose accurate weather-forecasting could be crucial to choosing a date for D-Day.
The younger man, Henry Meadows, is a Cambridge-educated whiz kid who just might be able to understand the system for measuring turbulence devised by Wallace Ryman, a pacifist who does not wish to share his knowledge with military officials planning the invasion of France. Meadows is also arrogant, insecure and socially maladroit. These qualities aren't exactly pluses on such a delicate assignment, but much of the novel's interest comes from exploring Meadows' damaged psyche, slowly unfolded in his own words as the novel's narrator.
Unfortunately, the plot is not as interesting as this premise. Events crawl as Meadows sets up his cover, taking weather readings from a station near Ryman's home in Scotland. During their uneasy encounters, he displays no great skill at winning the scientist's trust and no great sense of urgency about his mission. D-Day recedes into the background in a lackadaisical narrative studded with dull scientific and meteorological exposition.
The framing device, which presents Meadows' story as recollections set down in 1980, further muddies the narrative waters by yanking readers out of the moment to reveal the future of selected characters. A poker-playing American meteorologist and a scientist obsessed with constructing a ship from ice are among the promising secondary figures who remain frustratingly opaque, viewed through Meadows' self-absorbed lens.
An out-of-the-blue death finally sends the action into higher gear, and some of the novel's better scenes occur after Meadows is assigned to a hapless officer charged with reconciling conflicting meteorological data into a coherent recommendation for the Allied commanders. At least this pressing task gets Meadows out of his self-pitying funk -- until, confronted by an angry relative of a man he accidentally killed, he whines, "Was I never to be free of this event from what already now seemed like another life?" After this repellent outburst, it's difficult to feel much excitement when he plays a key role in using Ryman's system to make the vital call about D-Day.
Foden's talent and commitment are evident in scattered moments, including some lovely passages describing the Scottish landscape and lyrical metaphysical musings about the significance of turbulence. But his synthesis of psychology, philosophy and science within the framework of a wartime mission doesn't come off.
Wendy Smith, a contributing editor of the American Scholar, reviews books frequently for the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
|
| Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Share | Top |
|
|
 |
|
| Recent Stories |
 DICKINSON: Selected Poems and Commentaries
HAROLD VARMUS: A DICKENSIAN IN THE LAB
THE LADY MATADOR'S HOTEL
ZERO HISTORY
APE HOUSE |
|
|
|
|
|
| |
