Volume 1 - Issue 8

Volume one, number eight I February 18, 1968

''The perillas~ with apparently only · minor ·a ssistance from North Vietnamese units~ ••• made major ~n

assaults on 86 provincial capitals "The National Liberation Front is not a political entity and uncounted numbers of district

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expressing the will of the people of South Vietnam ... or any

towns and American and Vietnamese substantial element of the South Vietnamese population. It airfields•••• A total of five Vieteona;is a facade fabricated by the Hanoi regime to confuse the issue battalions~ all recruited in the and elaborate the myth of an indigenous revolt."

Mekona;- Delta area and the

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George W. Bait Undersecretary of State, January 30,1966.

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provinces around Saia;-on~ were believed to have been committed to the attack on Saia;-on.~ New York Times~ February 4~ I988.

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21 The New Journal I February 18, 1968

3

The talking computers

by John Adams and Tim Bates

4

Wolfgang Leonhard

by Jonathan Lear

9

Trumbull sculpture photographed

by Christopher Little

10 The Cold War and America's foreign mythology

by Rand Rosenblatt In Comment: The teach-in returns to Yale, McCarthy supporters start looking for a New Haven primary, the Charities Drive focuses on the urban crisis, and Douglas Cole discusses what the Drama School did to Pirandello's Henry IV.

Teach-ins The article that begins on page 10, "The Cold War and America's foreign mythology," is a complement to a piece that ran in this magazine last fall, "The success and tragedy of Richard Lee," by John Wilhelm. The Richard Lee article confronted the so-called liberal assumptions that have been the more or less dominant mode in domestic affairs since 1932. The Cold War article similarly deals with the language, policies and assumptions of postWorld War II foreign policy. It is the confluence of Vietnam and the urban crisis · that has brought us to this point of necessary re-evaluation, to what seems to be the end of an era. In both articles, the writers not only argue that those liberal assumptions are no longer valid, but that they were never truly valid.

If this is the case, then the normal process is to seek new assumptions that promise better solutions, to define a new vocabulary and to suggest new avenues of action. This need, appropriately intellectual and quite proper to the university community, is finding a response in the Yale community, and one of the clearest demonstrations has been the recent series of teach-ins.

They proved that it's possible to bring people together for useful discussions that succeed at presenting information defining problems and suggesting alternatives.

The most obviously impressive was the last, held on Monday, February 12. The subject was billed as the draft, but the 23 professors covered a wide range of topics.

Some were polemical, but many points of view were presented. In the middle were the liberals, men like political scientist Robert Dahl and James Tobin, former member of the Council of Economic Advisors, for whose generation World War II had been the war and who now find their basic assumptions about liberal democracy severely tested.

But the other teach-ins--Conscience and the Draft, held on January 28, and The Pueblo Crisis, held on January 3(}.were no less valuable. From the perspective of a psychiatrist, Dr. Robert Lifton discussed the "circles of self-deception" that government leaders impose upon themselves and also the process of "psychic numbing," by which people close themselves off from the human suffering they inflict. Law professor Clyde Summers thought the Coffin indictment had raised a fundamental problem for which he saw no quick solution: can a man test a Jaw through the legal system without putting himself in jeopardy if he loses? Harry Benda, chairman of the Council on Southeast Asian Studies, pointed out that

Korea and Vietnam are not interchangeable, that the Vietnamese communists are quite indigenous to their country. One of the most moving speakers was John White, now a Yale MAT and a local high school teacher, who--from coded messages reviewed while on duty with the Navy as a nuclear weapons officer, and from what he himself admitted was an uncertain conversation with a chief petty officer months later-suggested that the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution showed disturbing signs of having been a put-up job.

The teach-ins also have another value, that of responding to a specific crisis or situation, aS in the case of the Pueblo.

Normally, a crisis suddenly blows into the headlines. Washington gets grim, and the only analysis you can get in the midst of the event is that of Eric Severeid, gloomily blowing air bubbles, or that of Marvin Kalb, solemn-facedly quoting State Department officials. At such a time, it's useful to hear from somebody like Benda who can bring special competence and perspective to bear.

Daniel Yergin

Drive The urban crisis is at the core of this year's Yale Charities Drive. Two thirds of the proceeds are going to agencies in New Haven which run small but promising projects. The Drive is supporting the Dixwell Legal Rights Association and the Hill Action Group, which will use the funds to construct a sewing machine center in the Hill area. The Drive is also aiding the Hill Arts Co-operative, a stage company that has become the greatest outlet for creative expression in the Hill area, the service fraternity Alpha Phi Omega, and the U.S. Grant Foundation, which provides personal tutoring for students in New Haven.

The remaining third of the Drive's funds will go to agencies working in cities abroad. Accion. which provides services in such slums as Rio de Janeiro's Favela Varginha, will receive funds for self-help projects. The World University Service will use Yale's contribution to build a hostel for student housing in Manila, and the Drive will also support Yale-in-China's efforts in Hong Kong.

McCarthy The Yale Citizens for McCarthy committee has begun working for a New Haven primary. Undergraduate and graduate groups have joined, or are trying to create, organizations in 12 of New Haven's 33 wards. They are conducting a preliminary poll to determine the depth of potential support for the McCarthy drive to oppose a unanimous Johnson convention. Although no one in Connecticut can remember a similar development, the election law provides the opportunity to challenge the town committee's slate of state convention nominees with a signed petition of five per cent of the party's registered voters. The state convention selects national convention delegates. In New Haven, five per cent would be about 1300 signatures, and McCarthy supporters seem confident of their ability to force a primary, which would be held on April 9. The question now, they say, is how much beyond that five per cent they will be able to go, and whether they can in the space of two months build an organization capable of

in any way challenging Arthur Barbieri's strong Democratic machine. The New Haven McCarthy for President Committee is counting on Yale for a great deal of help in the next two months, and the Yale committee, headed by Jim Woolsey, is trying to meet their needs. An office has been set up in Room 16 in Pierson College, and each undergraduate college has its own group working more or less autonomously in a specific ward. Smaller groups are also traveling to New Hampshire on weekends, and a large registration drive will begin shortly for graduate students and new faculty. The only names that can now be added to the primary Jist are those of new or transferred registrants.

Michael McConnell Yale '66

Volume one, number eight February 18, 1968 Editor: Daniel H . Yergin Publisher: Peter Yaeger Executive Editor: Jeffrey Pollock Designer: Ronald Gross Photography Editor: Herman Hong Advertising Manager: Jeffrey Denner Associate Editor: Jonathan Lear

Henry "Have you seen Henry IV?" is the question I cannot answer after leaving the Yale Drama School's latest production. I am not sure I have seen Pirandello's play, but I am certain I have seen Kenneth Haigh.

I have seen him move with astounding and chaotic energy through a kaleidoscopic range of moods, expressions, vocal tones, shifts in pace, physical postures and psychological attitudes. He plays the madman with superb frenzy, pushing us into amazement and embarrassed confusion at the unpredictable, puppet-like contortions of a personality gone to pieces, a man fragmented by the impulse to live out three different lives: the historical, fixed life of an eleventh-century emperor; the lost and irretrievable life of his youth; the present and unbearable life of a graying, frustrated man. A lunatic mannikin at one end of the scale, a bitter philosopher at the other, a frustrated and vengeful lover somewhere in between, Haigh shuttles erratically back and forth from one point of the spectrum to another, marking his lightning-like shifts with changes in posture, voice, facial expression, even the focus of his eyes. The effect is dizzying, unnerving, wildly comic and pathetic by turns, and overwhelmingly grotesque. It is not unlike the effect of the insane antics of Peter Brook's actors in his production of Weiss's Maratl Sade; and perhaps it is close to the sort of thrill the Elizabethans experienced when they visited insane asylums for amusement. Close, perhaps, but never quite the same. For in the Yale Theatre we never forget that this madman is an actor, this figure is Kenneth Haigh. The pyrotechnics of his performing style seem to light up not the deep psychological recesses of the nameless man who has decided to persevere in the costume role of Henry IV, but the virtuoso skill of the actor playing that actor. Can a star performer be "too good" for the good of the play? Can virtuoso acting distract from that which is acted? Can style and form obscure content? These are questions that Pirandello himself was fond of asking, questions be himself posed explicitly in his experimental trilogy of "the theatre in the theatre," of which Six Characters in Search of An Author is best known. The Yale production of Henry IV poses them anew.

Haigh's portrayal of the central role is in keeping with the entire production's elaboration of a characteristic Pirandellian habit: superimposing the comic mask on the tragic mask. The elaboration pushes the manic and farcical dimensions of this continued on page 14

Circulation Manager: Jean-Pierre Jordan Copy Editor: Alan Wachtel Classifieds: William M. Burstein Contributing Editors: Susan Braudy Michael Lerner Staff: John Boak, Paul Bennett, Jennifer Josephy, Lawrence Lasker, Chris Little, Howard Newman, William Rhodes, Barney Rubin, Sam Sutherland

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J I The New Journal I February 18, 1968

Language and the talking computers

by John Adams and Tim Bates John Adams, a junior in Yale College, is m~~joring in Mathematics and Philosophy.

Tim Bates is a sophomore in Yale College.

The scientist collected a ream of print-out from Yale's computer. He leafed quickly through the results to the last page and then began circling letters in red as he mentally converted the cryptographic computer output.

"You can see," he apologized, "we haven't worked out the order of the negative. The 'n' should be between the 'z' and the 't'." The word should have been "wasn't," but it came out "wanst."

As it read now, the response was a meaningless tongue-twister, but it was close to being correct.

The sentence circled in red was not simply the computer's mindless response to a program. It marked a step closer to having a computer "think" like us, for in this simple example the computer had selected the word order, tense and mood of the sentence. The machine was not simply "talking" English; it was "thinking" English. Its teacher is Sydney M. Lamb, associate professor of linguistics at Yale.

"We're trying to study the language system people have within their brains," Lamb explained. "We have a model of the information which makes it possible for man to speak English. We put this information into the computer and turn it on, and hope the computer will produce English. Later, we'll get it to understand English."

His hands floated descriptively through the air as he searched for a more expressive, though not technical, definition of his project. "You know the brain's language structure is in the form of a network. We're trying to figure out what the properties of that network are."

Describing the process of communication in the brain consists of two parts.

"First, we have various questions about how the network is organized. Second, we have questions about how signals move through the network."

Lamb's hypothetical network-that is, his description of the brain's language structure--consists of a series of strata.

His book Outline of Stratificational Grammar states that languages possess at least four strata. E nglish has six: three major components, each composed of two strata. The lower strata are concerned with speech sounds; the middle are basically grammar, though elementary-school ideas about right grammar and wrong grammar are supplanted by something closer to actual usage; the higher strata deal with concepts and meaning.

The process of speech involves movement of impulses from the top strata to the bottom while the process of understanding is just the opposite. For instance, concepts are represented by points htgh in the network; they are connected to the words and phrases lower in the network which stand for these concepts. In speaking, impulses are sent down along the connections from meanings to another level where the grammar of the sentence is formed. Still lower, the network connections lead to muscles of the speech mechanism. "Of course," smiled Lamb, "we don't try to put that part in the computer." Likewise, those without ESP must reverse the process when they bear the sentence, going upward from sounds to concepts.

"So far, this is true only in theory. W e are only beginning to make the theory operative in the machines."

Lamb, who graduated from Yale in 1951, majored in economics. "I'm sure;â&#x20AC;˘ he said, "what I learned in econ inftuenced

my approach to linguistics." He did graduate work in linguistics at Berkeley.

T here he ran a project designing a computer system to translate from Russian to English, the same two languages used in his present studies.

In the fall of 1964 he returned to Yale, "because I was an Old Blue and liked the people here in linguistics very much, and it was time for a change." But because all the "bugs" are not yet ironed out of his work and because of more basic differences of analysis with other groups of linguists, Lamb's work at Yale has not escaped criticism. "We are controversial.

We have yet to be accepted. The main difficulty is that people don't understand what we're doing. It's just a matter of time until they become familiar with o ur concepts. There is not much literature on this yet."

"Our competition," he went on, "is lead

by Professor Noam Chomsky at MIT. The trouble with his theory is that it can't account for the fact that people speak."

Chomsky and the "transformationalists" h ave modernized linguistics by setting for themselves the admirable goal of describing, with systematic precision, all the sentences that people can speak. Previously, linguists tried to classify and describe various facts about a language without constructing a unified whole.

"Chomsky's system lacks psychological reality because it fails to provide any account of the way a person can express his thoughts through the use of language.

His model relates only to sentences, not to people." Lamb grinned as he found a clincher. "You see, we know people can speak."

Recently, Chomsky has adopted some stratificational concepts, but in Lamb's opinion he has not included enough. H e distinguishes "deep structure" from "surface structure" (how the sentence sounds), but does not distinguish these levels as sharply as the stratificationalists do. Chomsky has phonetic features in his "deep structure," as well as in his "surface structure." Lamb's deep structure, which he calls the sem em ic stratum (the sem- is from semantics), consists of network connections. In Lamb's system, phonetic features are found only at the bottom of the network.

Their dispute does not rest solely on the abstract concepts of bow to describe a language system. Lamb sees Chomsky's system as lacking from a more practical standpoint. One of the goals in linguistics-just as in the other sciences-is to account for the data with the sim plest possible gramm ar, "without a lot of ad hoc rules, devised to cover a multitude of particular situations." In his recent review of Chomsky's book, Aspect of the Theory of Syntax, Lamb attacked the transformation (process-description) approach on this central point, seeing the system as "per-

haps its own severest critic, in that it demonstrates very effectively the needless complexity forced upon the grammarian by process description."

"Maybe we can bring out the d ifference between the two systems with a nonlinguistic example," said Lamb. "A 'process description' would say man is descended from the ape. I would say no, they're both derived from a common ancestor." Lamb would refuse to give prior ity to any mem ber of the same stratum, but would rather say they are both derived from a point above them in the network.

"I have another example. In baseball, there is the high-level concept of a strike.

I would say that it has three manifestations: a swing-and-a-miss, a called strike, or a foul ball. A transformational description would call a swing-and-a-miss a 'basic' strike, and then proceed to derive the other two by transformations."

Computer projects on linguistics are springing up throughout the country, though few exhibit true linguistic sophistication. Most try to overcome the problems of accurate description of language by adding enough machinery to "cover up" deeper weaknesses. I BM, for example, exhibited a Russian-English translator at the New York World's Fair. "It produced," commented Lamb, "a quite primitive translation. It's being used now by the Air F orce. Linguists tend to frown on it."

The University of Chicago and the RAND Corporation are both doing computer-aided linguistic research. Another important project is located in Grenoble, France, and the Prague school of linguists is a lso doing considerable work, as are several R ussian algebraists. One of Lamb's former students, now at the University of W isconsin, is training a computer to simulate a linguistic field worker. "When a linguist encounters a new language," Lamb said, "he learns it, analyzes it and then constructs its grammar. This guy is trying to program a computer to do what a linguist does to analyze a new language.

"However, there is nothing like our project, nothing with these particular goals." When attained, Lamb's goal of modeling the brain's language network will open up new areas for computer use.

Lamb considers an important product of his studies to be linguistic automation.

Scholarly and scientific information could be placed in computer storage, and this information could be retrieved through high-speed computers.

"Also, if the computer can understand English, we may simplify the process of communication by allowing people to talk to computers in ordinary language," added Lamb. In fact, the old dictum of tenure could be rephrased to "program or perish." The published book would be replaced by a session with a computer that would make the information available to all.

But what could be done along these lines for English could also be done for Russian, French or any other language.

Seen from this aspect, machine translation would be simply a corollary to more general advances in linguistic automation. " H owever, the application I'm most interested in is the understanding of the brain. The most striking feature of our system is that it may indicate something general about the operation of the human brain. I would hope to be able to extend this project to discover how man's brain organizes knowledge in general."

41 The New Journal I February 18, 1968

Comrade Leonhard had defected....

by Jonathan Lear When in 1925 Lenin's widow, K.rupskaya, saw that the Fourteenth Party Congress was packed with Stalin's flunkies, she feared that the rule of a single strong man would violate communist ideology.

Stalin dealt with her simply; he said, "If you don't shut up, I will appoint another widow for Lenin."

While the students who had filled the large lecture auditorium for History 63b were laughing at the anecdote, Wolfgang Leonhard pulled out a cigarette from his right inside coat pocket and, from his left pocket, a cigarette holder. The students, quieting down, watched and waited; slowly Leonhard fit the cigarette into its holder and then, with the audience now perfectly silent, resumed his discussion of how Stalin corrupted early communist ideology.

For Leonhard, who returned to Yale this semester after a two-year break, the history of Stalin is in part a carefully researched and clearly analyzed piece of scholarship, reflecting the standards one would expect of a leading student of communism. But the history of communism means something more to Leonhard, for it has to do in a fundamental way with his own private history.

Leonhard is an intellectual, and it is interesting to note that decisive changes in his life frequently arose from lectures.

Perhaps the most decisive of all was a lecture that he was scheduled to deliver but never did almost two decades ago.

The failure was the result of Stalin's corruptions and the discrepancy they revealed between the ideology and the practice of communism.

On March 15, 1949, students were waiting, notebooks open, in the large lecture hall of the Karl Marx Academy of the German Communist Party for Comrade Leonhard to deliver his talk on the preWorld War I workers' movement. But no Comrade Leonhard strode into this room.

Students shuffled their notebooks, and the suspicions of faculty members began to rise.

A check was hastily made. There could be no further doubt; Comrade Wolfgang Leonhard bad defected from East Germany. But to where? There was nothing in the West Berlin press. A few weeks later the answer came, but in a broadcast from Radio Belgrade; Wolfgang Leonhard had defected to Yugoslavia, to a communist state not under Stalin's sway.

While there had already been a number of East German defections, Leonhard was the first Soviet-educated official to escape. Most defectors had fled to the West; Leonhard has chosen another form of communism.

In the spring of 1935, Leonhard's mother, a member of the German Communist Party, fled from the Gestapo into Sweden. Once safely settled, she offered her 13-year-old son Wolfgang the choice of emigrating to England or to the Soviet · Union. A member of the Young Pioneers since age 11, Leonhard had no hesitation in choosing the Soviet Union.

Arriving in Moscow, Leonhard and his mother settled in a furnished room at 26 Gorky Street. In September. 1935, Leonhard entered the Karl Liebnecht

School for German students and soon became a Soviet Young Pioneer. The Young Pioneers taught Leonhard to jud' similar events differently, depending on their context. A rise in prices in a capitali!t country reflected the exploitation of the workers, but a rise in Soviet prices was a contribution to the establishment of socialism.

In the summer of 1936, the summer when the great purges began, Leonhard left his mother and went to live in C hildren's Home No. 6, a privileged home for children of Austrian emigres. When he left for school be did not realize it would be the last time he would live with his mother. One October day they walked together to a candy store near the N ikitskj Gate. Since Leonhard was having a little trouble doing homework in technical· drawing, his mother promised to help him when she visited the next day. At the appointed time Leonhard arrived, b ut waited alone. After half an hour, be went to her little room near the Nik itsky Gate, thinking that she might be ill. No one came to the locked door. Neighbors told the 14-year-old Leonhard that his mother had left on an assignment.

The curriculum of the school rad ically changed in the next few weeks. Men who 1 had been held up as examples of the revolution now emerged as anti-Soviet Trotskyites. While vacationing with his ( school shortly after exams, Leonhard received a postcard that revealed his mother's fate. Inscribed "K.R.T.D.-5 years," the card reported that his mother had been arrested and convicted of "counter-revolutionary Trotskyite activity."

Leonhard was unable to reconcile his vacationing in the Crimea with his mother's imprisonment in a concentratiOO camp near the Arctic Circle; he withdreW from the group's excursion.

Back in Moscow in August, 1937, and n_ow attending a Russian school, Leonhard saw the mass arrests spread through all levels of Soviet society. In school one daY the lecturer, leaving the main hall, noticed two men who were obviously from the NKVD. "They've come to get you, Karl," joked one student to the teacher.

"You shouldn't joke about such things: you know very well that in the Soviet .

Union innocent people are never arrested. said the teacher.

I The two men approached, asked the teacher his name and then said to him, "You are under arrest. We are representJtives of the NKVD." While this would have shocked students only a year earlie!

by March, 1938, they accepted it alroos! indifferently.

Wolfgang and his classmates vacationed at Yeysk on the Sea of Azov in the s~ of 19 39. The mass arrests and the reign \ of NKVD terror bad terminated as abruptly as it had begun. One day J..,eOit hard's political tutor, Igor Speransky, excitedly called all his students together~ He had been in town that day and fidset. nervously with the proof of the next daYs newspaper. Speransky dumbfounded all the politically aware students as he read in solemn tones that Russia had siglled 1 non-aggression pact with Germany.

"Ah, what a pity," said Egon Dirnbacher, the youngest of the students.~ we shall certainly never be allowed to~ Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictatot· In preparing to enter the Moscow_.al!d Teachers' Institute for Foreign Lang.in September, 1939, Leonhard couldn't

Jl'lbe New Journal I February 18, 1968

bdp noticing how the alliance with GerIDIDY bad changed the curriculum. A year •tier the most significant event in luisian history was Alexander Nevsky's clefeat of the Teutonic Knights in 1242.

Now it did not receive so much as parentheticaJ mention, and in its place Peter lbe Great's formation of the Prussian State in 1701 was emphasized as the foundation of the Russian-German

alliance.

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After a year's preparation spent in studying Marx, Engels and Lenin, Leonbard applied for membership in the Komsomol, the Communist Youth I.Aque. At an earlier time, his mother's lll'elt by the NK.VD would surely have aduded the possibility of membership, bat by autumn, 1939, it was not held qainst h im. Apparently the members of lbe Komsomol maintained the same mental separation between ideology and everyday personal events as Leonhard.

They justified the purges as a n abstract hiltorical necessity, to which some inDOCent people would have to be sacrificed.

A hush of astonishment fell over the lecture hall of German emigre students 11 they listened to their lecturer on that Monday evening in June, 1941. For a JeW now Leonhard and all other German lbldents in Moscow had been required to llteod special political lectures on Monday Mnings. But this lecture seemed quite different. The speaker said that the character of the war might change drastically.

Trained to pounce on the slightest inlluendo, students knew there had been no IDelltion of this in Pravda. This speech portended grave alteration. The speaker WU Walter Ulbricht. Six days later Nazi lloops invaded the Soviet Union.

During this week Leonhard and his hllow students feverishly prepared for IDal examinations. On the morning of Juoe 22 most students awoke at 4 a.m. to cnm in a few extra hours study before the ...._Working on the assumption that a IDOd night's sleep helps more than study, Leoabard planned to get IJP around 9 in 1IMI morning. The commotion made sleep ibpossible. Leonhard awoke to banging Oil his door and to cries, "Molotov is going folpeak." All sat around the radio and lleUd the Deputy Chairman of the Council elf People's Commissars declare war and demand victory against "the German '-ist rulers." The word fascist bad not beea used for almost two years.

On August 14 Pravda announced, "A few days ago, our troops withdrew from Saaoleiisk." This meant that Nazi troops -..e near Moscow. The Soviet govern.._ decided to send all German emigres deep into the Russian interior. After a llriea of deportations, Leonhard accidentIIJ met Walter Ulbricht, who was visiting Glrman prisoner-of-war camps outside of ~nda. Leonhard stayed in Kara~ until a summer day in 1942, when ~received the following telegram: "Comrade Leonhard is to come at once loUfL., It was signed "Vilkov." l..eoohard didn't know a Vilkov, and Uta lay eighteen hundred miles away. ...

• ctid know that the Com intern, the ~organ of international commun- . had its base in Ufa, but he couldn't ~d why he had been so mysterilllly IUIDmoned.

Ia a few weeks the long chain of briefing ...... ftnally reached its last link, and ~·;res arrived at the Comintem School, in Kushnarenkovo, about 40 miles ....._of Ufa. Immediately Leonhard .... taken to the secretary, who forbade

him to write letters, to tell any students who be was or to say anything about his previous life. Leonhard adopted the name "Linden" and joined the German group, which turned out to be a reunion with many of his childhood friends from Children's Home No. 6. When he met his best friend , Helmut Gennys, they could only exchange aliases.

One boy in Leonhard's dormitory refused to take the secretive procedures too seriously. He had lost an arm fighting at the front, and told his classmates all about it, contrary to rules. Yet he seemed to be the only one allowed to break rules.

Zharko, as be was called, always occupied the center of attention with his cheerful flaunting of authority. Later be revealed his identity as the son of Tito.

After a rigorous morning's exercise, students spent the rest of the day and night in seminars and lectures on political theory and practice. Leonhard learned how to compose a "politically correct" pamphlet quickly on any subject presented. His teacher, Klassner, would argue a tight case for Nazi ideology, and the students would try to refute it. Roles would then be reversed. Leonhard learned to print propaganda leaflets by any clandestine technique from photo-offset to hand-molded clay.

At this time, Leonhard first encountered "criticism and self-criticism"- a brutalized form of the T-groups now popular in American psychology-when be stuck up for a younger friend who was being bullied by another student. The next day the German director, Klassner, called all three students to his office. Leonhard thought he would serve merely as witness, verifying the facts, but Klassner directed a flow of cold, unemotional criticism against Leonhard. Struck by the accusations of betraying Bolshevism and the Revolution, Leonhard hardly noticed his fellow students entering to testify against him. One girl recounted statements Leonhard had made almost every day since h is arrival. After she testified that on October 6 Comrade Leonhard said the Spanish girls were very pretty, Klassner spoke of the revolutions that failed over love. For hours Klassner blew up every tr ivial statement into serious anti-revolutionary sentiments, while Leonhard sat numbed.

At last the director of the entire Comintern School, Mikhailov, called upon Leonhard to speak. Students pounced upon his weakly stammered confession as insincere, superficial and unbecoming a Bolshevik. With no decision reached, the meeting ended. Leonhard spent the night awake in bed with the strongest feelings of impotence he ever experienced.

The next day Klassner instituted another session of criticism and self-criticism, in which each student had to deliver a speech condemning Leonhard. Again no decision was reached. Had these psychological barrages led him down the path toward redemption, Leonhard could well hav~ been molded totally into a cog in the Stalinist machine.

By May, 1943, word spread among the students that they would soon take their final examinations. But two weeks later a new excitement relegated all these to the past: a decree of the Presidium dissolved · the Comintern.

The Comintem, heart of international communism, existed no longer. Mikhailov, the director of the Cornintem School, immediately justified the action to the students as fundamental to communist theory

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61 The New Journal I February 18, 1968

and emphatically denied rumors of its being a concession to Britain and America.

Students like Leonhard remembered Stalin's oath over Lenin's grave--"We swear to you, Comrade Lenin, that we will not spare our lives in our efforts to strengthen and extend the league of workers of the whole world, the Communist International." They bad their doubts.

Leonhard spent the next few weeks in Ufa with twelve others on a special assignment of putting the Comintern archives ip order. In sorting out material from the American Communist Party his eye fell upon an article, "Rakovsky's Surrender,"

by Leon Trotsky. "I didn't believe my eyes," said Leonhard. "For the first time in my life I saw a Trotskyite newspaper. I couldn't have been more startled. Even at the Comintern School where we could read bourgeois and even fascist literature, one thing was always prohibited: Trotskyite literature."

After a year away, Leonhard returned to Moscow, a graduate of the Comintern School in July, 1943. Installed in the elegant Hotel Lux, the former residence of the highest Comintern officials and now the home of Institute-205, the secret successor to the Comintern, Leonhard began to work on the newspaper Free Germany.

All editorials derived from the highest authorities, and therefore an editorial proof advocating an armistice with Germany in September, 1943, no doubt surprised Leonhard. This editorial con-

tradicted the previous policy of demanding complete surrender of the Nazi regime.

The editorial had passed two proofreadings and the final make-up when the editor deleted it. A number of years later Leonhard learned that in September, 1943, the Soviet Union had sent out peace feelers to Germany. When the editor destroyed the proof, he destroyed the only printed evidence that hinted at that possibility.

The Red Army began to push forward; when it reached the German border in August, 1944, 150 prominent German emigres met in the Moscow Committee of the Party building. Walter Ulbricht spoke of a new Germany, and these men spent the next year in preparation for the return to their homeland and the building of the new government.

An American Douglas aircraft in an airport outside of Moscow waited to take the first 10 German emigres, known as the "Ulbricht Group," into Germany. When Leonhard boarded this plane at the end of April, 1945, only Ulbricht knew the ultimate destination or the mission of the group. After landing in German territory held by the Russian army, the group drove two hours to Bruchmiihle, the political center of General Zhukov's army.

On the day the Wehrmacht capitulated in Berlin, May 2, 1945, the Ulbricht group began to recruit a new city government.

Wolfgang Leonhard, age 23, needed to find a new mayor of Berlin-Wilmersdorf.

Mayors, by Ulbricht's order, had to be bourgeois anti-fascists, while the deputy

mayor and men in charge of personnel and education should be members of the Communist Party. In this way a seemingly democratic government would remain under communist control. Said Ulbricht, " It's got to look democratic, but we must have everything in our control." Finding bourgeois mayors proved a difficult task, and many a Russian commandant would walk down the street and, seeing a face that struck his fancy, appoint him mayor.

Just before the British occupation of C harlottenburg, a few senior officials asked Leonhard to join them in a special mission to Berlin Radio. Party authorities believed tapes of Molotov's conversations in Berlin in 1940 to be buried in secret archives, and Leonhard had to recover them before the British did. When they arrived at the station, the tapes had already been seized; not by the British, but by the Soviet NKVD. Establishing the ideological basis of the German Communist Party required a tremendous output of pamphlets and propaganda, and Leonhard became an official in the Propaganda Department of the Central Comittee (Agit-prop).

One evening while meeting with his censor and superior, Anton Ackerman, Leonhard discovered a fundamental change in Party policy. Ackerman spoke excitedly of the possibility of developing an independent road to socialism in Germany.

He argued that Germany in 1945 could follow a peaceful path to socialism without regard to the Russian example. The

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intervention of the Soviet Union should be only a period of transition.

Leonhard enthusiastically attached biJn. self to the idea of an independent development of socialism. Ideologically, Marx justified the belief, and Leonhard soon learned that it was also the best dec1sion politically.

In the elections of October, 1946, the Communist Party (SED) suffered a serious defeat in the Berlin elections, receivingles~ than 20% of the popular vote. Leonhard realized that the ultimate cause of the defeat was Russia. While the official dogma espoused independent development, the average voting man identified the SED as the "Russian Party," dependesl on the Soviet Union, as it in fact was.

A friend of Leonhard's from the Com¡ intern School, who now broadcast over East German radio, told him to give up the idea of a separate road to communism, for a change in party line was in the offing.

The second Party Congress of the SED in September, 1947, confirmed the shift.

As he sat in the German State Opera, Leonhard looked down on the speaker's platform and the destruction of his cherished ideals. Speech after speech reaffirmed ties with the Soviet Union and asserted the necessity of following the Soviet road to communism.

When offered a faculty position at the Karl Marx Party Academy, Leonhard welcomed the opportunity to step back from disheartening politics and view it from a theoretical vantage. Teaching as a

71 'lbe New Journal I February 18, 1968

member of the history department, Leonbard's doubts increased. Thoughts once buried deep in his unconscious began to emerge: the arrest of his mother, the terror of the purges, the arrests of his teachers, the criticism at the Comintern School and, above all, the demands and needs of the German people that were being sacrificed for the sake of Soviet policy.

Western literature had little effect on Leonhard or other communists. Often imprecise, Western newspapers maligned what even communists in doubt held sacred. However, one article in Neue Zeitung, the American paper in Germany, injected new doubts. Leonhard could not attack the article, which described Stalinism as the antithesis of Marxism and the present USSR as a betrayal of the October Revolution. Yugoslavia's break with the Soviet Union on June 29, 1948, completed the long chain of events that led to Leonhard's break with Soviet communism. The Cominform (Communist Information Bureau of the Soviet Union) published a manifesto accusing Tito of Trotskyism. Up until that time Tito himself had been weeding out Trotskyites from the party, and the charge seemed utterly groundless. As Leonhard plodded through each accusation, he became more iafwiated. The accusations stemmed not from Trotskyism or capitalism but from tbe attempt of a communist country to pursue a policy independent of the Soviet Union.

Yugoslavia replied with a point by point refutation of the Cominform statement. To Leonhard the refusal to "admit errors" was a repudiation of the servile criticism system upon which Stalinism rested.

The SED dealt the coup de grace to Leonhard's alignment with the party when it passed a resolution condemning Yugoslavia and reaffirming the necessity of German adherence to the Soviet example.

The party denounced the theory of a Jeparate road to communism.

For the first time Leonhard thought leriously about leaving Germany. He COUld share these thoughts with only one J)enon: his mother. In August, 1948, after twelve years of imprisonment in the Soviet COncentration and prisoner-of-war camps, lbearrived in East Germany. Leonhard, who had been trying to obtain her release for years, received word of her arrival by telegram. After overcoming their separations of time and experience, Leonhard revealed his plans to escape to Yugoslavia.

His mother decided that she too must escape.

Leonhard's attachment to Yugoslavia did not go unnoticed. The bulletin board ~the P arty Academy carried a criticism Ill November questioning his loyalties and asking him to take a stand on the question Of Yugoslavia. Little time remained. Allbouah extremely careful, Leonhard talked toone person too many about Yugoslavia, IOd one spring day in 1949 the director of tbe Party Academy ordered Leonhard to l"eport for criticism.

He sat through charge after charge by his colleagues; be recited a non-committal IDswer of the sort be had learned to ~annulate at the Comintero School, hop. . to pin enough time to escape. He ~.The director announced that ~~decision would be made by the ~umburo in a few days. l..eoobard walked slowly out of the ~ building and back to his room. In ~utes he packed a few items into an lllconspicuous briefcase and left in a

chauffeur-driven Party car. The word on Leonhard had obviously not yet filtered down to the lower echelons. After a call to his mother he made the long-planned call that procured a car which took him to the border between the Soviet Zone and Czechoslovakia. The journey across the border had to be made on foot, and an experienced guide waited to lead him on the four-kilometer hike. Posing as a Czech, Leonhard then traveled by sled to the train for Podmokly, where a contact supposedly awaited him. No one met him there, so he decided to travel to Prague on.his own. Arriving at 10:30 p.m., Leonhard went to the house where he had planned to go if the Podmokly contact failed. He knocked on the door. No one answered. Desperate, he decided to go back to the train station rather then risk waiting in this unpopulated area. He racked his brain for a relevant teaching of the Comintern School, but no solution appeared. He could only risk everything by trusting a total stranger at the train station. He picked the right stranger: a Czechoslovak communist, sympathetic to Tito. Leonhard slept at the Czech's home; the next day he made the contacts that had previously failed.

On March 25, 1949, Wolfgang Leonhard arrived in Belgrade, Yugoslavia.

A few weeks later, Radio Belgrade broadcast in twelve languages Leonhard's condemnation of the Cominform resolution and his praise of Yugoslavia's break.

The defection of such an important party figure forced the SED to take decisive action. Four days after the broadcast, on April26, 1949, the German Communist Party officially expelled Wolfgang Leonhard. The Politburo announced that Leonhard had been connected with the Yugoslav military mission and had therefore indirectly served American capitalist interests. All faculty at the Karl Marx Academy repeatedly met to practice criticism and self-criticism, denouncing Leonhard and blaming themselves for not discovering his deviance sooner. One lecturer delivered a special lecture on the "Leonhard Case."

Leonhard spent the next year writing two booklets on Yugoslav communism and broadcasting over Radio Belgrade.

In May, 1950, Leonhard met the leader of this communist country free of the inhuman, bureaucratic qualities of Stalinism.

The afternoon spent with Tito in his garden discussing ideological problems of communism remains deeply embedded in Leonhard's memory. Until their meeting, Leonhard knew only leaders of the Stalinist mold. Tito had a vast library filled not only with political works but also with plays, poetry and fiction, all quite different from the party manuals that lined Walter Ulbricht's office. Tito di~played a remarkable sense of humor, in contrast to Ulbricht's humorless espousal of straight party decisions.

Tito reflected reform communism, an attempt to free communist ideology from dogJDatism, return to the humanism of Marx and look at the problems of our times from this starting point.

Leonhard left Yugoslavia for West Germany in November, 1950, not for political reasons, but to write and speak in his native language. He did not defect to the West, nor did his standard of living improve. In fact it fell drastically. Earning just enough money to live by working in a publishing office, and living in a oneroom cubicle, he did not adjust easily to

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81 The New Journal! February 18, 1968

his new life in the West. But in his spare time Leonhard wrote.

Child of the Revolution, Leonhard's autobiography, appeared on the stands in 1955. Since that time it has sold half a million copies in German and has been published in nine languages. In September of 1955 a tall, overly polite man, a British expert on Soviet Communism named Carew Hunt, visited Leonhard and, in what Leonhard considers typical English understatement. invited him, if be had nothing better to do, to come to Oxford.

Shortly thereafter, Hunt extended Leonhard's invitation, again if he had nothing better to do, from three days to two years.

At St. Anthony's College, Leonhard researched and wrote his second book, The Kr.em/in Since Stalin. During this period he broke further away from his remaining Comintern-ingrained preconceptions of the West. Marx and Engels were no longer prophets, but great thinkers and revolutionaries. The freedom of scholars to discuss any issues most impressed Leonhard.

Returning to West Germany toward the end of 1958 to work as a journalist on Soviet affairs, Leonhard accepted a position with Die Zeit, the liberal intellectual weekly. In European intellectual newspapers each columnist is a specialist in one field. Leonhard wrote solely about matters in the Soviet Union. He far prefers this system to American journalism where, as he puts it, columnists, almost ·

as olympian gods, comment on everything.

Soon newspapers in Switzerland and Austria carried his column; radio and television stations asked for regular appearances. In 1963 Leonhard first traveled to America to spend a year of research at the Russian Institute at Columbia.

While in America he delivered one lecture at Yale in 1964. This lecture so impressed members of the history faculty, especially Henry Turner, then director of undergraduate studies, that be convinced John Morton Blum to try to get him to stay. The history department, eager to expand in the areas of Russian and eastern European history, invited Leonhard to teach for one semester, an offer which he accepted for the semester beginning in January. 1966.

The excitement Leonhard generated among undergraduates, graduates and faculty has rarely been matched. Blum tried to persuade him to return. Though he felt the double lure of journalism and life in Europe, Leonhard was so impressed with the American students' ability, frankness and diligence, qualities he finds lacking in European students, that he immediately agreed. After further correspondence, Yale hired Leonhard to teach every spring semester from 1968 unti11970.

Decisions after that are as yet unmade.

Manderscheid, a little West German village near the Luxembourg border, serves as Leonhard's home when he is not at Yale. In a quiet European manner, all but

incomprehensible to Americans, Leonhard spends the non-Yale portion of the year with his attractive wife Yvonne, writing and researching.

In this semi-seclusion, Leonhard continues to work on his next book, tentatively entitled The Political Theory of Communism. He is attempting to describe how the original political conceptions of Marxism changed.to Leninism, then to Stalinism and finally resulted in the Moscow-Peking split. In Wolfgang Leonhard the impuse is very strong to understand these crucial changes fully and, at the same time, to ensure that his personal actions remain in accord with his beliefs.

Currently such journals as Time and Newsweek, as well as various political officials, occasionally consult Leonhard on Soviet affairs. Believing that a thorough knowledge of communism is tremendously important, he speaks with any responsible organization, but does refuse to deal with secret agencies. · On occasion Leonhard has visited the Soviet desk of the US State Department where he has found brilliant men totally knowledgeable about and sensitive to every aspect of the USSR, but of low rank.

He wonders if the knowledge and insight of these young Soviet experts filter up through the successive layers of the bureaucracy to the top.

Leonhard believes that within the Soviet Communist Party, the war in

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Vietnam is hindering the moderates' attempts to build peaceful bridges with America. It aids the conservative hardliners who ridicule serious notions of coexistence. Because America concentrates so much on southeast Asia, the Sov~ts have been building their influence in such areas as the Middle East, which America has neglected. Leonhard also feels that the US is seriously neglecting western Europe, where the Soviets are riding a wave of distrust against America.

When asked about his present political beliefs, Leonhard rose from the couch in his apartment, poured two more Scotches, and began to clean his cigarette holder.

Conveying to an American student the synthesis of a life's search required some effort. · "Critical realistic co-existence," Leonhard maintained, is fundatp.ental to his · ·political view of East-West relations.

Communism should not be a threat, but instead should present a challenge f or non-communists, a challenge of resolving problems better. One should study com· munism intensely, learn about its pro~ lems, see the real differences between East and West and then try to find ways to live in the same world. Such an approach ' transcends both Cold War attitudes and the illusion of solving problems by merely being nice. Strong emotional opposition to communism strikes Leonhard as a dangerous sign that knowledge is lacking.

This doesn't quite answer the question.

"Critical realistic co-existence" seems more like a tool that can help one form a political belief than a political belief in itself. Leonhard's whole life, demanding that action conform to intellectual belief, has developed this tool, and it seems be should have some overall ideological belief.

In fact Leonhard is convinced there is no clear ideology that will answer all p<>litical, social and economic problems of all times. The more Leonhard has traveled-four times in Asia and three times in Africa-the more skeptical be has become of all ideologies. The communists may have come closest to providing an all-encompassing ideology, but even they have failed to produce solu~ to all problems.

One should combine realistic solutions for a given country at a given time with certain personal ideals. Three basic ideals govern Leonhard's thought: First, the overcoming of social injustice and the striving for social equality. This equality would be in different stages in different countries, such as Sweden and Ghana.

Second, political democracy in the most flexible sense of the term, unbounded the models of western Europe or Allle[l(2He rejects any form of democratic pre- _.A scription. For him the different forms, sas a two-party system or a five- to nineparty system, depend on the given situa· tion in a given country. Third, the greateSI possible intellectual tolerance, which again can be judged only in a concrete situation.

Leonhard dislikes ideas as recipes tor all countries at all times. For America to insist that all developing nations must have "free elections" seems to him as Ull" realistic as Russia's trying to nationalitt,,~ industries which do not exist. One shoUJU use ideals only to the extent which is pragmatically possible in a given n~~ Jl In a sense, then, Wolfgang Leonhlll"" a man of ideals, is also a man without ideology.

br

Rap Brown will be there.

And Lurleen and George, and the KKK and Elvis, and maybe Joe McCarthy.

A multi-media prcx:luction of Eugene Ionesco's play at the University Theatre.

February 22 to 24. Phone 865-4300.

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All D'Arcangelo: Here and Now 1964

hthe '

Reg Butler: Girl 1958 Roy Gussow: Mutual1963

Alexander Calder Multicolor 1962 Joae De Rivera Construction 31 No date

g. n.

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photographs by Chris Little

Walk in, turn left, and enter the foyer. In front of you hangs a swirling canvas covered with orange volcanic eruptions, streaks and blobs of black flotsam, and overhanging colloidal clouds suspended in a dense dirty blue underlayer. A small strip of paper says "Sea Picture With Black" by Helen Frankenthaler.

Behind a glass front is an irregular quadrilateral within a pentagon. The glass ripples, faster and faster, bands of light and shadows multiplying and racing to escape from the whirlpool.

Paintings and sculptures are now on display in the home of Trumbull College Master Ronald Dworkin. On loan from the private collection of Mrs. Susan Morse Rilles, wife of professor emeritus of English Literature Frederick Hilles, they are works by contemporary French, English and American artists in a wide range of styles. The exhibition began on December 9 and will end February 17, and is open to the public from 3:00 to 5:00p.m.

The gallery is part of a continuing experiment designed to bring students and art into closer touch with each other. Last year Trumbull presented an exhibit from the Leo Castelli Gallery as well as a selection from the San Francisco Poster Show, and Master Dworkin hopes to obtain a gallery of Robert Rauschenberg's drawings of Dante's Inferno in the near future.

The Rilles exhibition is displayed in the Dworkin's living room, dining room and entrance foyer, and along two flights of winding stairs. The unusual setting is extremely effective in putting the viewer at ease and enabling him to examine the art from various sides, angles and distances, and in relation to its surroundings. The dining room, for example, features a bizarre table setting with two diners, including a detached plaster hand clutching a fork. '1be Great American Nude S69" and "Dark Portrait" are among many provocative works on the upper floors.

J . A. Fincke Yale College

10 I The New Journal I February 18, 1968

The Cold War and America's foreign mythology

by Rand Rosenblatt Rand Rosenblatt, a student in th.e Law School, has studied at the London School of Economics and at Harvard.

Containment and Revolution, edited by David Horowitz, Beacon Press.

On January 30, 1968, the National Liberation Front launched strong attacks on Saigon and thirty-four other major cities in South Vietnam, surprising the Americans, overpowering the South Vietnamese troops and holding key urban positions for longer than a week. According to TheNew York Times, the attacks taught "the facts of life about the war" to all Americans from the President on down. Our government's recent claims that we had pacified much of th~ country, retrained the Saigon army and broken the morale of the enemy simply evaporated. Most of the resulting criticism in Washington focused on strategic mistakes, but some implied a much broader concern: that the assumptions behind our commitment to fight communism and "subversion," not only in Vietnam but all over the world, were again being starkly tested.

The test was familiar because the American government has held tight to a certain approach to world affairs, and has refused to confront a fundamental criticism of our costly and violent policies: that these policies derive from long-standing mythl> about the history of the twentieth century. An analysis of these myths, made strikingly relevant by the latest crisis, is presented forcefully in a new collection of essays, Containment and Revolution, edited by David Horowitz. Each essay focuses on a specific aspect of the Cold War, and each attempts to revise orthodox American ideas about the struggle's origin and significance. As a whole, the essays attack three dominant myths: first, that American policy, as embodied in both the Cold War and in counter-insurgency fighting, is a response .to "foreign aggression"; second, that our enemies are fanatically determined to attack American interests; and third, that the motives of our global anti-communism are based on a disinterested concern for democracy and peaceful progress.

In attacking the long-accepted myths behind our present policy, Horowitz's authors join a small group of dissenting historians known in the profession as "revisionists." Conventional American history explained and still explains the Cold War as America's response to Russian aggression in Eastern Europe.

During the 1950's and early 1960's a few historians, notably William Appleman Williams and D. F. Fleming, marshalled impressive evidence to show that the United States, not the Soviet Union, had been the first to repudiate her war-time agreements. Christopher Lasch noted in a recent article in The New York Times Magazine (January 14, 1968) that the academic establishment effectively smothered this critical work for years, thereby lending its own detached and scholarly support to the Cold War. But the Vietnam war has given our past a new urgency; the treatment of disturbing historical questions is finally beginning to move from left-wing journals into Foreign Affairs and The New York Times.

Horowitz's collection repudiates orthodox history and political science in method as well as in interpretation. Implicitly it rejects the theory, quite popular among "policy-oriented" professors, that decisions can be understood only in terms of the details of administrative practicethe kinds of information the President receives, whom he has to "persuade," and so on. While these factors ioftuence the details of the decision, they say nothing about the policy-maker's own beliefs and ideas, how he came to have them and how

these ideas affect his reaction to events from "the outside." To understand how government leaders came to hold certain ¡beliefs, and what sign.ificance these beliefs have, you have to know something about the real forces operating at numerous levels of their society and over a long period of time.

Horowitz admits that analyzing the Cold War in terms of long-term historical development is still a highly unorthodox procedure. Most professors of international relations are only now painfully freeing themselves from the clutches of "systems theory" and "game theory," which define the Cold War as an abstract bargaining contest occurring in an historical vacuum. Other theorists close to the government have used aspects of historical analysis to make a limited point. Thus Henry Kissinger, Richard Neustadt and even W. W. Rostow have criticized the weakness of Washington's operational, short-term approach to world affairs as the result of an historical American bias toward technical, engineering and military skills rather than political or diplomatic skills. But their "critique" is merely a proposal to make American political management of the world more efficient, begging the question of why we should manage the world in this way at all.

The crucial difference between the approach in Horowitz's collection and that of the orthodox professors is that the professors draw narrow limits around the "historical structures" they investigate, while Horowitz's contributors do not.

An analysis of administrative practices, diplomatic tradition and political heritage is common enough in the universities, but most attempts to link these factors to economic interests and social structure

are dismissed as "dogmatic Marxism" or "conspiracy theory." Instead, the professors rely on explanatory concepts, such as "the political realm" or "the national ethos," which cannot be analyzed except in¡ their own terms. The task undertaken in Horowitz's collection-to analyze the Cold War in terms of long-range historical development-is difficult and not uniformlY achieved. But the collection as a whole performs two great services: the presentation of disturbing evidence, and its interpretation in the light of a critical theory unbounded by the limits of orthodox "permissible explanation."

The first two essays, by Isaac Deutscher and William Appleman Williams, are the best in the book. Deutscher's "Myths of the Cold War," originally delivered as a speech at the Berkeley Teach-In on Vietnam in May, 1965, approaches the Cold War from a very special point of view: that of an historian deeply committed to the ideals of both socialism and freedom. Deutscher explodes the orthodOX American explanation of the Cold War by making three points. First, the USSR was practically prostrate in 1945, with its industry and population in shambles. Even if Stalin had wished to "conquer" all of Europe militarily, he was in no position to do so. Second, many top American officials knew that there was no real threat of a Soviet attack; Kennan held this position and opposed NATO from the start, and even bard-liners such as James Byrnes, John Foster Dulles and James Forrestal seemed to understand it at times.

Deutscher's third point exposes the basic hollowness of the American position. }'lot only was Stalin not capable of conquering Europe or even of substantially aiding internal revolutions; he did not want

Ill The New Journal! February 18, 1968

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revolutions to triumph in other countries.

Considerable evidence shows that the commumsr successes in China and Yugoslavia, far from being part of a "world-wide conspiracy," occurred in spite of and in opposition to Stalin's policies. The failure of the popular revolution in Greece, and the easy re-establishment of bourgeois democracy in much of Western Europe, can be explained partly by Stalin's refusal to engage in any serious revolutionary IUbversion.

If there was no real threat of Soviet attack or Russian-controlled subversion, Ylby did American officials unanimously act as if there were? Deutscher analyzes American policy in terms of fear and arrogance: the fear of any revolution, Plrticularly a purely internal one, and the arrogant belief that capitalism was the only "rational" system, and hence the only OOe entitled to respect. These two strains 0!- American policy came together dramalicaUy in the case of China: ... when it turns out that even backWard China, the China that the west had kicked around and trampled upon a century, that even backward China IS developing its nuclear industry, we [are told] that perhaps if a few bombs are dropped on China's nuclear installations, the growth of that giant will be properly interrupted at the right time.

Quite apart from the wickedness, the Pn>found inhumanity of such talk ...

'What a nonsensical illusion it is, that by dropping a few bombs you can really ltop the industrial growth and modernilation of the greatest nation in the lrorld. Once again, arrogance ... and lrishful thinking combine to produce IOinething that future historians will

!or

cite as examples of the degeneration of the human mind.

This way of thinking is not confined to generals who have staked their careers on the efficacy of war as a solution to political problems. David N. Rowe, professor of political science at Yale, suggested to the House Subcommittee on the Far East in February, 1966, that the United States buy up all surplus Canadian and Australian wheat, so that there would be mass starvation in China. These are his words: Mind you, I am not talking about this as a weapon against the Chinese people.

It will be. But that is only incidental.

The weapon will be a weapon against the Government because the internal stability of that country cannot be sustained by an unfriendly Government in the face of general starvation.

Nor is Rowe alone among academics in expressing such apocalyptic ideas. Noam Chomsky's excellent article, "The Responsibility of the Intellectuals" (The New York Review of Books, February 23, 1967), analyzes some implications of Dr. Rowe's thought and shows bow widespread such ideas are in the social sciences.

Deutscber¡s critique of them is eloquent and probably correct in the very long run. But in castiagting these ideas as arrogant illusions, Deutscher sidesteps the key point made by Horowitz in his introduction: that American opposition to revolutions, however much laced with myths and illusions, rests on real forces and interests, and that American power, even if sent to destroy an enemy who never attacked, can do irreparable damage.

These points are forcefully brought out in William Appleman Williams's essay,

"American Intervention in Russia: 19171920."

Williams's thesis is that the American approach to world affairs was more or less "codified" by 1900. Expansionist politicians and businessmen, educated in a generation of laissez-faire capitalism, promulgated the "free-market-free-men" doctrine: human freedom was to be achieved through the operation of free markets. Not "Empire and annexation," but the "Open Door" became the slogan of American foreign policy. Pragmatically, the "Open Door" allowed the vast economic power of the United States and European countries to penetrate underdeveloped societies and control them as thoroughly, for economic purposes, as any overt Empire. Thus Hans Morganthau describes our traditional policy toward China as one which favors "what you might call freedom of competition with regard to the exploitation of China." In 1917, this fundamental American policy, a central tenet of-Wilsonian liberalism, was confronted with the Bolshevik Revolution, which challenged both its practice of free markets and its central premise, that capitalism produced free men. The outcome of that confrontation, Williams argues, was a direct result of the dominant American ideology; it also set the terms of international relations for the twentieth century.

Within this general framework, Williams uses three levels of historical analysis to explain the American reaction to the Russian Revolution. First, he sketches the ideological background of the American leaders: their commitment to free enterprise, their hatred of socialism and their conviction that the national interest was best served by using government power to advance American economic interests.

On a second level, he shows how the orthodox American ideology affected the government's perception of the Bolsheviks.

Wilson's ideals included the right to "selfdetermination," but only within the limits of free enterprise and constitutional government as conceived by the West.

There was no question of the Bolsheviks' hostility to this system. Nor was there any question of Washington's hostility to the Bolsheviks. Wilson and his Secretary of State, Robert Lansing, did not consider, even briefly, the possibility of a temporary alliance with Lenin, even though there is evidence that the Bolsheviks were willing to keep up some pressure on Germany on the eastern front. Despite important military needs in France which made an alliance with the Bolsheviks advantageous, the only question Wilson considered concerning the Russian Revolution was how best to defeat it.

On a third level, Williams attempts to explain specific historical events in terms of his general analysis: that the United States opposed the Russian Revolution primarily because it challenged the principle of private property, and hence was a threat both to the American concept of freedom and to American economic and political interests. There is much evidence that American policymakers actually thought about the Russian Revolution in these terms. In early December, 1917, Lansing castigated the Bolsheviks as "dangerous idealists" who did not believe in nationality and private property, and then advised Wilson to pursue a policy of breaking the Bolsheviks by supporting "a military dictatorship backed by loyal disciplined troops."

On the basis of this and similar evidence,

Williams argues that by December, 1917, a few weeks after the Bolshevik Revolution, Wilson had made a decision to oppose the Bolsheviks as social revolutionaries with all the means he could spare. Wilson's hesitation over the next few months is interpreted as a result of his inability to resolve two crucial and related problems. The first was a strategic question: would direct foreign intervention unite the Russian people behind the Bolsheviks and thus undermine the very aim of the policy, the defeat of the revolution? The second was a moral dilemma: how could Wilson reconcile his deep moral and political aversion to the Bolsheviks with his deep commitment to the ideal of self-determination?

The eventual solution found by Wilson and his advisers was to create a myth which bas influenced official American thinking for most of this century. An attack on the Bolsheviks meant interfering in inter-nal Russian affairs and transgressing the right to self-determination; to smother these embarrassing problems, the American government simply defined them away. The Bolsheviks were German agents and were trying to impose a foreign political domination on the Russian people. The presence of various bands of Czech and German soldiers in Siberia and the existence of supply depots at the Arctic ports served as additional flimsy pretexts for Allied intervention. Thus under both the general war policy against Germany, and to protect the Russian right to self-determination, Wilson was justified in attacking the Bolsheviks. The internal revolution, arising out of circumstances and doctrine, was presented to the American people as an external"invasion," a subtle case of "aggression" to be met with the moral and military force of the democracies.

Williams's necessarily brief sketch of the actual conferences, dispatches and decisions contrasts sharply with the detailed account presented in George F. Kennan's two-volume history, SovietAmerican Relations 1917-1920, which covers the same period and interprets the same evidence. Kennan's work gives the impression of chaos not only in Russia but in Washington as well. Far from deciding to oppose the Bolsheviks on any grounds, Kennan implies that Wilson was drawn into intervention by the force of events. Isolated by bad communications and by his own maddening uncertainty, Wilson left his representatives in Russia to act without guidance, and then made his own policy in a vacuum. The actual decision to intervene was not a conscious plan to crush a social revolution, nor was the public carefully deceived with distorted information. The whole situation radiated distortion, and Wilson merely followed the path of least resistance.

Lansing and the President were partly the victims of misinformation ... [and] one senses that their vulnerability to this information was enhanced by the difficult position in which they found themselves. For men unwilling to face up to the awkward reality of Soviet power but desperately anxious to find a means of escape from the endless importunities of the Allied governments and of public opinion that they "do something" about Russia, the thesis that the Czechs, an Allied force, found themselves opposed in Siberia by [German forces] came as

121 The New Journal! February 18 ,1968

the perfect answer to all perplexities.

It was human-if not entirely

justifiable-that they should have aU owed themselves to be convinced of the validity of this thesis, and should have sponsored it before the world.

Kennan's explanation of the decision to intervene is based on his deep immersion in the documents and dispatches of the period. Unfortunately, it reads like an abstract summary of those documents, and by simultaneously abstracting from them and neglecting their historical context, Kennan distorts their meaning. Why were Lansing and Wilson so unwilling to "face up to" the reality of Soviet power? Why were these ordinarily shrewd men, successful in the rough competition of law and politics, so willing to accept unreliable information and to believe in the illusion (also dear to the hearts of Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson) that the Russian people (among others) would arise with a spontaneous feeling of anti-communism as soon as the armed forces of Western democracy made their appearance on the scene? What were the ideas of Wilson and Lansing, and how did they affect their handling of the situation? Kennan hardly touches on these matt~s. In his epilogue Kennan describes the intervention as one of the worst mistakes in American diplomatic history. But his explanation of this colossal failure is curiously unsatisfying: "the deficiencies of the American political system," the "h ysteria of militancy" of World War I America, the "congenital shallowness" of official Washington's approach to world policy. All of these "explanations" raise more questions than they answer, and none casts any light on why the American government ignored a whole spectrum of possibilities and concentrated, with a single-minded if badly organized purpose, on giving effect to its hostility to the Bolshevik regime.

The effect of Williams's analysis is to extend the historical framework of the Cold War and the war in Vietnam much further back in time than most historians would consider relevant. In Williams's terms, America's commitment to suppress social revolutions in the name of freedom was not first made in 1947 with the announcement of the Truman Doctrine and aid to Greece. It began, rather, with Wilson's decision to intervene in Russia, which implicitly accepted "anti-Bolshevism" as a valid principle of American foreign policy: that we had a right, or at least a duty, to crush political movements whose principles did not agree with our own. Internationally we made the first step in adopting a policy of "permanent counter-revolution," and in doing so reinforced the dangerous American tendency to equate freedom with similarity to the United States, and to define Utopia as a linear projection of the status quo.

The facts in Williams's short essay do not "prove" his broad explanatory theory.

Many are ambiguous, and a search of primary sources suggests that on many issues, Kennan's picture of enormous confusion and misinformation is more nearly correct than Williams's implication of hard-headed calculation. But the ambiguity and confusion do not "disprove" Williams's theory either-they simply suggest that many actors in the day-to-day events did not have their ideology consciously in mind. The broad historical context of their actions, traced by Williams

through quick sketches of economic, political and cultural developments, is crucial to any significant explanation.

His essay provocatively adds a dimension to historical analysis which avoids the arbitrary and the abstract, and helps us to understand the origins of a painfully consistent American approach to world affairs.

The next five essays in the collection trace the details of the evolution of American policy through the Second World War, the civil wars in Greece and China, and the war in Vietnam. One essay departs from the general theme of international conflict to look at an aspect of American domestic politics: Senator Taft's "conservative critique'' of the early Cold War program.

John Bagguley's "The World War and the Cold War;¡ like Deutscher's essay, is dedicated to destroying the myth of Russian aggression in Eastern Europe after World War II. He argues that the Soviet Union bore the brunt of the fighting throughout the war, and thus earned the right to a sphere of influence in Eastern Europe in the same way that the United States earned undisputed hegemony in the Pacific. The United States and Britain recognized Russia's right as late as October, 1944, when Churchill negotiated his famous "percentage partition" of the Balkans. Stalin honored the agreement, giving Britain a free hand to crush the left-wing Greek resistance movement. But after President R oosevelt's death, the "hard-liners" in Washington and London mounted a strong diplomatic attack to deprive the Soviet Union of its assigned share.

Unfortunately, Bagguley neglects the larger historical framework which Williams used in analyzing Wilson's intervention, and which Horowitz set forth as the unorthodox approach of the collection. Bagguley's investigation of war-time policies is a substantial piece of historical research, and it would be unfair to criticize him for not covering American decision-making as well. But be does advance an explanation of why the United States launched its diplomatic attack on Soviet interests: that we wanted to deprive Russia of her slice of the pie, and that we used the rhetoric of "no spheres of influence" to serve that end.

The metaphor of three men quarreling over the spoils may be a fair summary of much of this history, but it leaves too many problems unresolved. Like Kennan's explanation that Wilson "bad to do something" about the Bolsheviks, it begs the question of why the Americans felt threatened by Russia, and why the "something," in Wilson's case, was military intervention, or. in Truman's case, diplomatic attack.

A similar failing is apparent in Henry W. Berger's "A Conservative Critique of Containment: Senator Taft on the Early Cold War Program." Taft opposed parts of Truman's policy because be did not share the government's ill-founded fear of imminent Soviet attack, and because he wanted to avoid the heavy taxes on American free enterprise required by expensive government programs. But he, like Truman, identified freedom with free enterprise, and emphatically included both in his conception of the national interest. Thus he supported the Marshall Plan as an altruistic gift in the American tradition, and also because it "might help us in the battle against Communism."

There is nothing in the evidence Berger

131 The New Journal I February 18, 1968

presents which suggests that Taft would DOt have supported a "counter-insurgency" dfort if be felt American economic interests or prestige were sufficiently at stake.

Todd Gitlin's "Counter-Insurgency: Myth and Reality in Greece" and John Oittling's "The Origins of China's Foreign Policy" continue the approach of raising disturbing evidence against orthodox history and elucidating what might have been the "real purpose" of American policy. Both authors question the American thesis that the Greek guerrillas and Chinese communists were fanatic radicals, ioftexibly bent on destroying all democracy and educated people, opposing the United States and serving the wishes of the Soviet Union. Close examination in both cases suggests that the revolutionaries were flexible, often making considerable efforts to win the good will of the United States, and that it was the American (and in Greece, the British) who reacted with the doginatic hostility and cruel violence which is supposed to characterize our

enemies.

Gitlin identifies several myths which surround the history of the Greek civil war. They include the ideas that the Greek JUel'rillas were fanatic terrorists under Stalin's control; that they refused any coalition or compromise with other Greek poops; and that they began and prolonged the civil war, thus denying to Greece the benefits of peaceful and progressive reform. By marshalling a host of facts and judgments (some by British officers themselves), Gitlin refutes each myth in turn. He further establishes that terror was used first and most extensively by the British and right-wing Greek forces, and that this military attack forced the Greek Resistance to transform itself from a popular, multi-party movement into a defensive, disciplined band with its own means of terror. Thus, the British, supported by the Americans, played a classic theme in Cold War history: projecting tbe fear of what the enemy might do as a l'elponse to Western action as a description of what be was actually doing, thus iuatifying the attack and generating the lllticipated response.

John Gittings makes a similar case in

Ida analysis of the origins of China's t

!'Oticy toward the United States and the Soviet Union. Standard American history holds that the Chinese Communists were inflexibly committed to their role as JI'IPpets of Russia; thus the United States bad "no choice" but to quarantine the IDainland and support Chiang Kai-shek.

Gittings argues that the Chinese Commulliat policy toward the United States was Dot "inevitable," but evolved mainly as a reaction to the history of American Qploitation and the reality of American holtmty. As early as August, 1949, Secretary of State Acheson had concluded lbat although the Communists bad the IUpport of the Chinese people, they were 'torlting "in the interests of a foreign ~er," and hence it was only a matter of ~before the Chinese people would hie against the foreign yoke. In any Clle. the acid test for the Americans ..._bow the Communists treated ~go property interests"-a forgone CIGIIclusion in a land which had suffered lara century under exploitation in the lillie of "free trade." The parallels with ~¡s attitude toward the Bolsheviks -obvious. The myth of foreign control, ~-illusion that the people love only a ..._enterprise system, the primary

concern with private property-these elements in the American position doomed an already very difficult relationship.

Richard Morrock's "Revolution and Intervention in Vietnam" applies the analysis sketched by Horowitz and developed by Williams to the current war in Vietnam. Once again, the evidence is interpreted to attack the orthodox liberal history and to establish that the United States did not enter Vietnam because of a mistake, but as a result of a conscious definition and calculation of the national interest.

The 1\beral story contains the elements first presented by Woodrow Wilson in 1917-18 and developed in our policies toward Greece, China, Guatemala, Cuba and the Dominican Republic. Once again we are told of a struggling parliamentary democracy (Diem), menaced by armed terrorists acting in the interests of a foreign power. Once again the United States aids the beleaguered defender of freedom and free enterprise, and then regretfully intervenes herself. The war goes badly; perhaps our original strategy was a mistake. The liberals devote themselves to proposing various compromises which would allow President Johnson to negotiate this way out.

Morrock's analysis, based on facts the liberals smother and on an historical context they ignore, interprets the situation very differently. Morrock describes the strong Viet Minh position in the South in 1954, and the widespread abolition of landlordism in the Mekong delta which bad occured under their power. Supported by the United States, Diem attacked the Viet Minh and their accomplishments.

Between 1955 and 1959 Diem generated a savage repression of the Viet Minh and their sympathizers, complete with informers, secret police, mass meetings denouncing the enemy and other paraphernalia of totalitarianism. At the same time, Diem implemented a "land reform" plan drawn up by American professor Wolf Ladejinsky. The plan called for a severe reduction of rents and strict limitations on loan interest and landholding. Aside from problems of enforcement, this superficially progressive plan suffered from a grave defect: under the guise of "regulating" landlordism, it was actually re-establishing the system. For the Viet Minh had broken the old system, and Diem's so-called reforms meant "reducing" rents which the Viet Minh had abolished, selling land which the Viet Minh had given away and re-establishing estates which the Viet Minh had broken up.

It should be no surprise that the Vietnamese peasants, led by Viet Minh cadres, resisted this attempt to undo social change in the countryside. The American officials who decided to increase aid to Diem, and then to intervene with American troops, knew that their goal was to crush what was primarily an attempt to defend and extend a domestic revolution.

As in the case of the Russian intervention, the myth of "foreign aggression" was used to mislead the American people and to justify an attack on North Vietnam.

Far from regarding the long, expensive war as a "mistake," the majority of the American government and military welcomed the opportunity to crush a guerrilla movement, destroy the industrial capacity of a new communist state, frighten China and all potential revolutionaries, and consolidate the American hold on the rest of Southeast Asia. Far

from anxiously searching for a "way out," the American government has avoided negotiations and has set conditions which make negotiations impossible.

The main condition is simply that there should be no communist power in South Vietnam, even in those areas which have almost never been under the control of the Saigon government. For Johnson and Rusk, like Wilson and Lansing before them, cannot face up to the "awkward reality" of communist power. The communists are by definition illegitimate, because they do not hold American ideas about elections and 'p rivate property.

They are to be treated not as a political force, but as outlaws, as "germs" to be eradicated from the body politic. Many American officials and professors use such language, which suggests that "negotiations" can mean only victory on American terms.

The usual liberal response to the radical analysis contained in Morrock's essay and in most of the Horowitz collection is that the United States is not opposed to social reform or even to social revolution. What we are really opposing in Vietnam, the liberals say, is the threat of the violent overthrow of the established government. In other words, the United States stands by its pledge not to interfere with the substantive policies of any nation, but we will guarantee every nation's right to democratic procedure, embodied in "fair elections and freedom from foreign influence."

The history of our policy in this century indicates that this theory is another distorted myth. Lansing claimed to oppose the Bolsheviks because they violated the democratic process; but this chosen defender of democracy was "a military dictator backed by loyal disciplined troops." We have consistently approved, supported and even engineered violent political changes which brought right-wing governments to power: Greece in 1947, Guatemala in 1954, Brazil in 1964, Santo Domingo in 1965, Greece in 1967, Vietnam now. We have always justified such actions by claiming that it was necessary to "restore law and order" so that the democratic process could work again. In other words, right-wing governments are always given the benefit of the doubt; decades of dictatorship will "eventually" yield to democracy. Leftwing movements are never given such grace; they must adhere to the full spectrum of American democratic values (including free enterprise) or be immediately branded as a mortal enemy. As our role in the 1954 coup in Guatemala shows, even an established left-wing government with genuine popular support is not immune from hostile American attention.

The essays in Containment and Revolution undermine the liberal faith in the Cold War because they interpret our worst "mistakes" as evidence of our real nature.

The "blunders" are always in one direction: "misinformation" about left-wing movements, massive diplomatic and military attack where moderation might have led to different and happier results.

Woodrow Wilson and Senator Taft would have been more honest. We are fighting communism because our way of life depens on the strength of our free enterprise, and on our citizens' knowledge that we shall never allow alternative, threatening systems to extend themselves without a bitter fight. The only remaining questions are: does the American social system require this approach to world affairs? H not,

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141 The New Journal ! February 18, 1968

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what can we do to change our foreign policy? If so, is the system worth the price?

Horowitz's contributors, analyzing the Cold War as part of America's long-term historical development, do not unequivocaJly rule out variations in American foreign policy. The American system is heavily weighted in a certain direction: the defense of free enterprise and hostility to social revolutions. In whatever circumstances, there would undoubtedly be conflict between the American government and Russian Bolsheviks, Greek guerrillas, Chinese Communists and Vietnamese radicals; the "real global forces" of American capitalism and strategic policy opposed to the real forces of anti-capitalist movements would demand such conflict.

But many, many problems and bitter battles could have been avoided by what Horowitz calls "more sober and realistic policies." An American government dedicated to the value of peace and possessing tremendous political skill might have been able to avoid the escalation of conflict into Cold War. But no American government has ever been able to do this, nor bas any ever seriously wanted to. The failure began, as William Appleman Williams shows, in the winter of 1917-1918, when American foreign policy was confronted with the Bolshevik Revolution. In May, 1918, a young American diplomat named Felix Cole, stationed at Archangel, wrote a memorandum to the State Department which George Kennan called "the most penetrating and prophetic" Western statement on the prospects of American intervention. Cole predicted that however small the original force, it would be drawn into the internal Russian conflict and demand expansion in size. He argued that the State Department had completely misjudged the "pro-American" feelings of the people, and that the Americans' political allies were mere opportunist office-seekers, isolated from the needs of the people.

Intervention would unite the Russian people against the Americans, for every people detests foreign invaders. Whether or not the Bolsheviks drew pay checks from the Germans was irrelevant. Intervention, he concluded, would be a disaster; "we shall have sold our birthright in Russia for a mess of pottage."

Cole's memorandum questioned the assumed myths on which Wilson's policy was based. But Wilson's government rejected Cole's analysis; what is worse, it rejected his questions. Though critics in every generation have raised fundamental objections to our policy--especially to the liberal faith that the "national interest" requires a militant global defense of free enterprise-no American government has ever seriously opened the question for review. The result is that Cole's analysis is as relevant to Vietnam in 1968 as it was to Russia in 1917.

Horowitz and his contributors assert that the liberal faith in militant anticommunism rest~ on myths about the world, and that these myths in turn rest on the "real forces" of the American economy and society. Their interpretation of our history shatters any complacency that we may still entertain about the effect of American policy on the movement of the underdeveloped nations toward social justice. Our government's continuing global policy, dramatically highlighted in Vietnam, charges an old imperative with new urgency: the myths must be taken apart, and the real forces on which they rest directed toward decent ends.

continued from page 2 play into such heightened prominence that it very nearly smothers the sense of tragic loss and bitter reflection that defines the agony of the protagonist and renders intelligible the mad confusion of identity and of motive that complicates the grotesque plot. Here there is no question, as in certain past productions, of any pretentious wrenclting into a questionable "relevance." Pirandello's underlying insights into the sufferings of the selfconscious personality are relevant enough.

It is more a question of balance and of tact.

Carl Weber's direction appears to have been based on working assumptions which help to explain the texture of this production. One assumption denotes the play as a tragic farce (a favorite genre in a world inclined to affix the same label to life).

Another categorizes the protagonist as a "schizoid individual," to borrow Weber's phrase in his program note. The director sees this case of schizophrenia as an image of a schizophrenic world disrupted and dismayed by the experience of the first World War and the deluded ideals of a rising fascism. The diagnosis of schizophrenia leads in turn to an assumption about the role of Henry IV: it is more lunatic than imperial. The main character, not sane at base, decides to maintain an artificial identity that manifests itself in the incoherent ravings and visibly ludicrous posturings of a madman rather than in the imperial pride and humiliations of the German Emperor Henry IV. To play up the potentially farcical in Pirandello's tragedy is to convert what Pirandello called "humor"-the ironic perception of life's unflattering contradictions-into more superficial comic "business." The temptation is hard to resist, especially in the opening scenes of the first act, which take an awkward length of time to piece together the story of the past ¡ accident responsible for the protagonist's lapse into the illusion that he is Henry IV. Weber has chosen to sketch in the supporting characters of the play in broadly comic strokes, accenting the vanity and sense of self-importance of the Doctor, Belcredi and Matilda. The Countess and her lover spat in the familiar manner of the mutually irritating old couple, and Belcredi directs his sarcastic arrogance toward the Doctor as well. The "I know best" attitudes which typify Pirandello's busybodies are thus heightened into a threeway contest for psychological supremacy.

The raised eyebrows, grimaces, gestures of contempt or indifference take on such comic importance that one is likely to forget what the discourse is all about.

Belcredi's taunting wit and aristocratic nonchalance are rendered with speciaJ skill by Stacy Keach, whose comic timing and playing to the audience give a necessary edge of superiority to the character who is later moved into a relationship of deeper antagonism toward the central figure. But the initial tone established by the comic psychological sparring of the early scenes, and continued almost without change in the opening scene of Act II, tends to dominate audience response to such an extent that, when Henry confronts the others, the laughter continues and deeper ironies are missed. It is amusing to see the know-it-ails taken off guard by the antic emperor, but in focusing on their superficial discomfiture the presentation blurs the more radicaJJy disturbing lines of Henry's addresses to them. The hectic pace with which Haigh speeds through the speeches of his initial scene somehow

contributes to the farcical tempo and also makes those speeches more opaque than they ought to be. It is only toward the end of that act, when Henry points to his portrait and begs to be set free from it, that the significant depths of his disturbance are revealed; the earlier glimpses have been obscured by the dazzling visual impact of an animated ikon reducing his frightened audience to momentary insecurity and dismay.

It is the last scene of the play, however, which is in danger of losing most of its ironic point under the influence of comic tone. Henry seems to have borrowed some of Belcredi's sarcasm in that scene when he rails at the Doctor, and depicts the alternatives of re-entering the modem world. But the more he sounds like Belcredi the less trenchant his insights become. When he accuses life "out there" of being no more than a masquerade, there is more than sarcasm at stake. When he loses control of himself, embraces Frida and stabs Belcredi, there should be no room for any laughter other than his own.

And if the audience does laugh as the wounded Belcredi is dragged away, it is partly because they have been conditioned earlier to relish the discomfiture of the vain, self-assured joker.

Weber's diagnosis of schizophrenia may not agree with all the symptoms Pirandello has provided for his central figure, but it does help to explain some of the production's more startling visual effects. One is tempted, of course, to see the use of the revolving stage as a kind of emblem for the split personality. The play opens with an unexpected shift of scene, and the thematics of deceptive appearances and disquieting uncertainties are suggested before a word of dialogue is uttered.

Closer to the personality of Henry himself is the device of "split" blocking in the first confrontation scene. Belcredi and Matilda are set at opposite ends of the stage, and Henry lurches and stumbles between these two points as his mind moves from theme to theme. Weber's modification of Henry's costume in this first encounter also reflects a concern for r visualizing the dividedness of Henry's ego: instead of having him wear the sackcloth from the start, Weber has the servants help him into and out of it as his mood demands, accenting the restless uneasiness with which he is tormented even within the limits of the imperial role itself.

One of the deeper sources of Henry's agony is his realization that in the twelve years of his unconscious madness he has been cheated out of youth and out of love.

He awakes to find not only his hair grown gray, but his whole inner being gray, decayed, finished. He makes that torment explicit in the final act, and its force is what then leads so directly to the impulse that brings on the castastrophe. But when that statement is made, Robert Taylor's set also takes on a new meaning: its gray and shabby tones are the reOection of Henry's "real" identity; the medieval trappings which lend it some color and life are the exact counterpart of Henry's costume role as emperor. Color, life, vitality come onlY by way of the mask. Thorn Peterson's costuming echoes and reinforces the theme. The modem world's costume is formal black and white, or in the case of Frida's:dress, a neutral and pallid gray.

The medieval costumes provide the visual color and warmth that are so lacking bOtb on and under the surface of the modern¡ world characters. Kathleen Widdoes as Frida puts life and meaning into an em¡

e

JS 11be New Journal I February 18, 1968

Yale Film Society

blrrassingly small role, as she moves from die static and shadowlike girl in gray of die first act into the warmth and gaiety of "Countess Matilda of Tuscany" in the .econd. She springs into life and color by donning her mother's old costume and by playing a role that is not her own. By such touebes as these, Pirandello's variations on the masquerade theme are brought to convincing realization. It is a shame that die make-up artist could not have helped die cause by giving Jeanne Hepple's Matilda the appearance of an aging woman aot quite successful in combating the effects of time. Pirandello puts such stress on the apparent contrast in age between mother and daughter that it is ridiculous to cancel out that stress by presenting us with two women who look equally youthful.

Henry h imself is the mainstay of the play, and in the central scene, in which he discloses to his servants the surprising news that be has been consciously acting the emperor's role for the past eight years, this production sets itself free from the problems of comic texture and tone and allows as to get closer to the heart of Pirandello's lrlgic protagonist. Haigh keeps his audience in continual uncertainty about the ment of Henry's sanity, but he manages to punctuate Pirandello's themes with more clarity here at the same time. The roots of Henry's despair are revealed to lbe uncomprehending servants: the torment of human incommunicability. the iasecurity of life, the seductive fixity and l'rustrating repetitions. The scene is itself an emblem of its content. Henry suffers at the thought of incommunicability, and his futile attempts to explain his insight to the servants mirror that idea. He arranges the servants into a stylized and ludicrous tableau, a grotesque emblem of the fixity tbat art can bestow upon humanity. He dittates a self-flattering account of his ~ to a .servant playing a scribe, "as if It were true," and in this act the unreality ofhistory itself is imaged. Weber has directed the scene with ingenuity and tact; here the Pirandellian ironies are suggested lrithout distraction or dilution. And here ' Kenneth Haigh achieves the art beyond an. the capacity to make us forget he is lbere for the moment, and to feel somelhing of the anxiety that afflicts the namelas man he plays. . The contemporary theatre-going public • one that pays its ritual homage to im~ of Absurdity, that finds its excitement II the bizarre mingling of comic and tragic llloods, that is confirmed in its restless llllcertainties and frustrations by staged lletaphors of meaninglessness. The Yale Drama School company has provided an tlperience for that public in Henry IV. Douglas Cole AssoCiate Professor of English

Letters lo the Editors:

1'be advertisement in support of Coffin's ltand on Vietnam which appeared in the laltissue of The New Journal (February 4, ~)was, I suppose, intended to bring ~~~der to the conclusion that we :-uadn't be in Vietnam. It is hard to ~how anyone could possibly think -•Uch an article could have any effect ~verona rational human being; this statement could refer to all ~brought up against government talicy by our mob of liberals. . In building up the image of inhuman, lilllaloraJ conduct in the war in Vietnam,

f!dnk

these critics of course miss the entire point.

War will always be essentially immoral; in the heat of battle on the personal level it would take a saint to react only rationally. It is no real news that atrocities are committed every day in Vietnam; it takes only a nodding acquaintance with human nature to realize this fact. I agree with the article that work can be done to improve the situation. Perhaps people from the Yale community who are concerned with this problem can enter the service and bring about a minor revolution in policy.

Then again, however, some people don't think we should be in Vietnam.

They don't seem to see that the immature communism of China and North Vietnam may be a real threat to our way of life.

Have they ever documented their opinions with facts or special knowledge? If they do have such proof in support of their attitudes, why don't they voice it, rather than appealing to the emotions, concentrating on such peripheral (though important) matters as the atrocities committed in Vietnam?

If indeed this is all they are really complaining about, wouldn't it be better to encourage young men of the Yale community to bring more reason into this war by enlisting as officers, rather than influence them to resist? One would hope that our liberals are capable of presenting some rational arguments for their opinions in the future.

A series of four s hows Friday, February 16 Introduction: 3 short films Alan Resnals' NIGHT AND FOG (1955) Chris Marker's THE KOUMIKO MYSTERY (1964) Jean Rouch's AU PAYS DE MAGES NOIRS (1958) Saturday, February 17 Chris Marker's LE JOLI MAl (1961) Paris during the Algerian Crisis

TIHIE FRENCIHI NEW WAVE PART I

Friday, February 23 THE ELUSIVE CORPORAL (1961) Jean Renoir's moving plea for freedom Saturday, February 24 MURIEL (1963) Resnais' most haunting, chilling film Also, two special showings Tuesday, February 20 Marcel Carne's CHILDREN OF PARADISE Tuesday, February 27 Jean Renoir's RULES OF THE GAME

Milton Shaw Yale College

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The 1968 Yale University Charities Drive ¡ offers a diversified approach to the urban crisis

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Favela Virginha-Acao Communitaria do Brazil, one of twelve agencies supported by YUCD Will you view or participate?

February 12 to 16 in Yale College February 19 to 23 in the Graduate Departments

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