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PARTISAN REVIEW
exception, is surely justified. Does Dickstein believe that morality
should not only, like charity, begin at home but always stay
there? Does he think it proper
to
protest conditions in El
Salvador, or, perhaps, South Africa, because they are not great
powers or historic nations but draw the line at the Soviet Union
just because it is? Kennan is inclined to subordinate the domestic
affairs of nations to world political considerations, the opposite
bias to that of leftist ideologues who tend to treat foreign policy
as a mere reflex of internal class struggle or right-left, liberal–
conservative contestation. To his credit, Dickstein is inconsistent
in acknowledging that
Partisan Review
has a duty to open its
pages
to
East European dissidents and emigres who scarcely
shrink from "systematic condemnation" of Soviet communism.
I agree with Dickstein that "we need the counterpressures
created by a peace movement, if only
to
remind us of the actual
horrors to which our war games and scenarios might lead,"
having said this myself in almost the same words in the Spring
issue of
Partisan Review.
Our fellow editor, Wieseltier, said it too
last January in his long, sensible, and immensely informed
discussion of nuclear policy in
The New R epublic
to which
Dickstein refers. So Brooks and Dickstein have no credible com–
plaints about
Partisan Review
on this score. Dickstein's com–
plaints ultimately concern issues of ancient history. I think he is
right that William Barrett's 1946
Partisan Rev iew
editorial re–
printed in his
The Truants
bears little relation to the present po–
litical situation in this country, but neither do the books by
Hellman, Gornick, and Navasky, which are preoccupied with the
same old controversies though taking the opposite side. Dick–
stein's attitude towards the anti-Stalinist liberals of several
decades ago who reviewed or reacted to these books seems to be
"cette animal est tres mechant, quand on l'attaque il se defend."
For all of the books he mentions were directly aimed, naming
names of individuals and journals, at the people who responded
to them: Diana Trilling, Nathan Glazer, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.,
James Wechsler, William Phillips, former communists criticized
by Gornick for refusing to take a "romantic" view of their politi–
cal pasts, and the anti-Stalinist left in general.
As O'Neill documents, the anti-Stalinist left made no contri–
bution to McCarthyism, although some individual members
were slow or insufficiently vigorous in actively opposing it, as I
