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the potentiality of conversion . The Vietnamese accepted the principle of
human change , so important to the ideas of progress and revolution .. 'Unlike
Western liberals , they do not accept difference, but they accept change
axiomatically as a revolutionary possibility in human conduct- which
Western liberals do not; that is why liberals have to be tolerant of difference,
resigned to it."
But Americans also believe in conversion. Westmoreland used to talk
about the missionary spirit which drove the Americans forward in Indo–
China. The restless , unquenchable need of Americans is to find converts or
customers . Perhaps both . Unfortunately, American conversion does not
include hope for a better future unless one is prepared to wipe out the past.
But the more important lesson that McCarthy learned turned out to be
profoundly dislocating to her because it seemed to make light of her bourgeois
life. She came to Hanoi basking in her relative financial freedom and "the
freedom to write exactly what I wished." In the atmosphere of Hanoi this
freedom, and her overstuffed suitcases, turned out to be faintly irrelevant.
Mistakenly, in my view, she ended up questioning her freedom to write what
she wanted when it had no effect . ••A free press is livelier than a government–
controlled one, but access to information that does not lead to action may
actually be unhealthy, like any persistent frustration , for a body politic. " If
her freedom was empty , she wondered whether her subjectivity existed, her
I-ness. Was there a Mary McCarthy who was something more than a bundle of
roles and obligations, pretensions and illusionswhich she picked up in her life
from others? Was she living a lived life? "Nothing will be the same again, if
only because of the awful self-recognitions ."
Ms . McCarthy's reportage and analysis is less successful in
The Mask of
State: Watergate Portraits .
Six of the chapters of this book were written for
the
London Observer
and rwo for
The New York Review of Books .
The
moderate socialist. Mary McCarthy. dedicated the book to a constitutional
conservative , Sam Ervin .
It
deals with the characters of Watergate, especially
as they appeared to her during the Senate Watergate hearings . The articles
suffer from a somewhat impatient quality as if McCarthy knows the truth
about these men and their situation. She approaches them like an angry
citizen who wants to ride them out of town on a rail. Yet what is missing from
the book is why it happened. She does not relate Watergate to the Indo-China
war, or to the problem of executive fiat, or to the problem of international
corporations which see politics and crime as indistinguishable.
She does not spell out the state behind the mask. Nor does she tell us
what the Nixon clique had in mind, what their moves and "plays" were in
trying to get hold of the bureaucracy and wrest power from an establishment
which Nixon said in 1972 had lost the will to rule. In other words , McCarthy's
Watergate portraits do not describe the cracks in the wall of state on which
these hapless , banal men were hung.
