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strands of conspiratorial thinking woven into our American culture along
with conspiracism's one redemptive feature, its promise to strip away the
veil of mystification in which, after all, the mighty do sometimes cloak
themselves and their actions. Oliver Stone and others are repeatedly wrong,
infuriatingly so, but not when they assert that power is often wielded secret–
ly and important decisions made without public consultation. Our elected
officials and, more to the point, our unelected ones are not always staunch
upholders of free speech and open debate. The principle of "plausible deni–
abili ty" embraced by the Kennedy adminis tration, and expressed through its
infatuation with "covert" CIA operations, has been documented in grim
detail, as has the FBI's long history of using tactics that arrogantly defy the
nation's democratic precepts. It's true too that the government's massive but
invisible bureaucracy serves as much to obscure policy as to enact it, as
Daniel Patrick Moynihan reminds us in his new book,
Secrecy.
Given these
conditions, some degree of conspiratorial distrust is warranted. Does it lead
to excess? Of course. The eye trained to locate the figure in the carpet is
bound to detect some patterns not really there.
The conservative critic like Pipes runs a similar risk, labeling "con–
spiratorial" any liberal argument he dislikes. Is Gore Vidal really no more
than an educated version of the "right-wing conspiratorial antisemite
[who] cranks out crude tracts with tiny circulation," as Pipes insists, or is
he not instead a provocateur in the familiar native line that includes
Mencken and Edmund Wilson? Is Michael Lind a conspiracist, as Pipes
maintains, or a political visionary whose overstatements are the byproduct
of an exuberantly original mind? So determined to remind us that the
earth is round, Pipes is harder on the flat-earthers than he needs in every
case to be. He has no patience for those who insist, against the strongest
evidence, that Lee Harvey Oswald and Alger Hiss were innocent. But such
protests, for
all
their absurdity, have their civic uses. Democracy is never
imperiled by skepticism, however extreme.
It
can, however, be undone by
passivity. Why should the official truths of the Warren Commission or a
jury of twelve be received as gospel?
One wishes too that Pipes had more to say about the psychology of
conspiracism. What attracts us to simplistic explanations, and why should
they be so rampant today? His reticence is
all
the more disappointing
because the seeds of such a discussion are present in this book. Those often
demonized by the conspiracy-minded, he notes, have been the Jews, along
with "Freemasons, Bri tons, and Americans,"
all
of whom "share two out–
standing characteristics: modernity and idealism." This recalls the sinister
CIA agent in Robert Stone's
A Flag For Sunrise
who composes a single sen–
tence at his typewriter: "The Jew is at home in the modern world." He
elaborates: "We're at the primitive stage of mankind, that's what people
