To the Editor:
I have seldom read an article whose tone was so profoundly offensive as Henry Fairlie’s on “Johnson and the Intellectuals” [Oct. ’65]. With a few of his minor points I have no quarrel: I quite agree with him that intellectuals should try to make clear when they are performing in their literary or scholarly or artistic roles and when they are expressing their opinion as citizens; I also think he is right in maintaining that if an intellectual accepts high public office he thereby takes temporary leave of his privileged status; I will even grant that President Johnson may in a sense be preferable to President Kennedy in that his direct political motivations are less obscured by the appeal of “style.” Beyond these small areas of agreement, however, I find almost nothing to be said for Mr. Fairlie’s essay. It is badly organized, repetitious, and full of misinformation and logical inconsistencies.
Herewith three of the more important:
- Mr. Fairlie is described as being at work on a book about American politics. Surely a man who can describe as a “national habit” the “solemn importance which is attached to the intellectual in the public life of this country” is depressingly ignorant of our recent history. The “solemn importance”—if such it be—is a very recent phenomenon indeed. It is certainly less than a decade old: if the intellectuals have seemed to be riding high in the past few years, it is only in contrast to the way they were kicked around during the previous decade (and how they may be manhandled again, if the current wave of know-nothing nationalism continues to gather momentum).
- It is a staggering (and tasteless) exaggeration to say that the American intellectuals were “raped” by Kennedy. Some served him; most supported him to one degree or another; on occasion, a number opposed him vigorously. It was not so much his “style” that endeared him to them; it was rather the promise he held out of a new reasonableness and humanity in domestic and foreign policy. At his death most of this remained promise rather than performance. And when Johnson began to make it a reality—at least on the domestic front—the intellectuals quite understandably rallied to him. There was nothing surprising about the fact that on his arrival in our country last March, Mr. Fairlie should have found relations between the two “becoming strained.” The previous month, the President had begun the bombing of North Vietnam; the month following, he intervened in the Dominican Republic. It was quite simply his actions—rather than the lack of panache with which he performed them—that lost him his intellectual following.
- The most outrageous, however, of Mr. Fairlie’s assertions is the charge that in the campaign of 1964 the intellectuals “deliberately undermined” the Republican party by a “campaign of frivolous irresponsibility.” Far from helping to “whip up” a “stampede,” most intellectuals remained commendably rational about the whole thing. While they saw Johnson’s faults quite clearly, they found him infinitely preferable to his opponent. In this they behaved no differently from any normal, well-informed, liberal-minded citizen. The intellectuals did not destroy the American two-party system—all else aside, they were not nearly potent enough for that (I am reminded of the sudden flush of pride to which I succumbed when a few years back I read some right-wing publicist’s lament that people like myself had broken Joe McCarthy’s “great heart”). The explanation of what happened last year to the opposition party is much simpler and scarcely ranks as arcane knowledge: the Republicans simply committed suicide by nominating an impossible candidate.
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So much for setting the record straight. Above and beyond these points of bare fact, what is so disheartening about Mr. Fairlie’s essay is the view of public life it presents. It parades a callow cynicism that may be understandable in schoolboys trying to prove their manhood, but is unbecoming in a grown-up. Surely Mr. Fairlie knows that there is more to politics than the “bribery” of “self-interested blocs.” To cite only the English statesmen he mentions—Churchill, Attlee, Macmillan, Wilson—all of them have been no strangers to ideal motives. Every statesman worthy of the name has known an agony of choice that is ultimately moral in nature. And the same is true of writers and professors.
It is here that Mr. Fairlie misses the real point. At the end of his essay he tells the American intellectuals to go and tend their own gardens. But what if politics and international affairs are not their professional “field”? What are they to do then? Are they to remain silent? That is what most German professors did in 1933 (and what their French counterparts refused to do during the Algerian war). Unfortunately, it is the course most American intellectuals followed Under the threat of McCarthyism. We shall not make that mistake again.
H. Stuart Hughes
Department of History
Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts
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To the Editor:
I have always found the inverted pontificating of Henry Fairlie distasteful, but never before so preposterous as in his article in your October issue. He roundly asserts that the intellectual, his undefined bogeyman, should keep out of politics altogether unless he quietly merges into the establishment. Politics is reserved for the politician as such, the expert who knows the facts and understands the mores of governing. Does Mr. Fairlie then think that political decisions are made solely or mainly in the light of the facts? Doesn’t he know that prestige and prepossessions, pride and pressures, and the impulses of power weigh heavily in the political balance? The errors and follies of power are the commonplaces of history. So you mustn’t protest, because you’re an outsider, perhaps an intellectual as such. On such terms we would have no more protests by the sufferers from certain policies, no more revolts of the oppressed. On such terms, indeed, there would never have been an American Republic. (Besides, some of the leaders of that republic were actually intellectuals.)
I happen to have high respect for much that President Johnson has accomplished. Must I then be silent or perhaps agree with his intervention in Santo Domingo, because I am not a politician as such?
Robert M. MacIver
Chancellor
New School for Social Research
New York City
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To the Editor:
Mr. Fairlie believes that intellectuals and politicians are two different breeds, who have difficulty understanding each other. Fine. But he leans so far over to make the point (one that was made quite well by Plato 2,400 years ago) that he falls on his ear and looks ridiculous.
So intellectuals must realize, must they, that “At all times, and no matter who exercises it, power is ugly and brutalizing. . . . Power is safe only if it is exercised without enchantment, without claim to reason, and without pretense to virtue.” (Italics mine.) I suppose Moses, Jesus, Joan of Arc, Harry Truman, Pope John XXIII, and our high-school student-body president were all turned into ugly brutes by the power they exercised. I suppose a politician who gives a reason, any reason, to vote for him has betrayed his profession. When Mr. Fairlie flips off such absurd generalizations is he acting the part of the dizzy intellectual, thrashing about outside his academic specialty, or is he only being an unrefined politician, using words merely for their polemical effect?
That Mr. Fairlie does not really mean what he says about the irrelevance of reasoned criticism to political policies is revealed by two curious assertions at the end of the article. First he pokes fun at the intellectual’s concern for “the ‘real’ national interest” (in quotation marks), a concern no sensible politician would dare harbor; yet further on, it turns out that Churchill’s pragmatic resistance to Hitler did, in fact, serve “Britain’s real national interests” (no quotation marks this time!). And, secondly, Mr. Fairlie somehow manages to blame American intellectuals for the lopsided Johnson victory and the consequent foundering of the Republican party. Did intellectuals have some special obligation to vote for Goldwater in order to prevent our present “distortion of the political process”? And how does Mr. Fairlie, as an intellectual, know it’s a distortion? Has raison d’état whispered into his ear a brutalizing word?
Lee C. McDonald
Department of Government
Pomona College
Claremont, California
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To the Editor:
Mr. Fairlie’s plea for “untarnished” intellectual activity sounds like the dying gasps of those seemingly high-minded German intellectuals of the early 20th century who in making a radical separation between Vernunft and Macht (reason and power) abandoned the political stage to unreason. Mr. Fairlie’s assumption of the total exclusiveness of intellectual and political pursuits is, in fact, a dangerous self-fulfilling prophecy. One need not argue that politics can be made moral and rational to hold that at certain times it is imperative for those who consider moral and rational ends to speak out against the excesses of unreason.
Mr. Fairlie argues that intellectuals are spoiled by power and begins his article by saying that he will speak of those who are critical of President Johnson. Then, however, he cleverly switches his ground, and in giving examples of “impaired” intellects, speaks not of intellectual critics but of establishment figures like Sorensen, Schlesinger, White, and Bundy. He then argues that intellectuals should not take a stand on issues outside of their field. But what of the specialist on Southeast Asia? Why is he not qualified to attack American policy on Vietnam? Mr. Fairlie says of Hans Morgenthau that his judgments are based on vast “frameworks of historical prediction.” But has it occurred to him that President Johnson’s belief in the incontrovertibility of the domino theory is also based on the vaguest kind of historical prediction? . . . It is impossible for the intellectual to be unpolitical in our age. For as Albert Camus has pointed out, to desist from criticism is tacitly (and effectively) to support the political status quo. . . .
Myra and Eugene Lunn
Berkeley, California
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To the Editor:
. . . Three cheers for Henry Fairlie’s brilliant exposé of the defection of the intellectuals. . . . Overexposure to the strong light of politics seems to have addled their wits. . . .
I recall hearing one of those typical academic pontificators last summer—he was about 32, and a professor at an Eastern university—remonstrating vociferously against President Johnson and the war in Vietnam. Later on, he was sent to Vietnam on a fact-finding mission; while there, he was interviewed on television and appeared visibly shaken as he admitted that he had been forced to change his mind and support the President but—and he asserted this in all sobriety—his analysis of the existing military situation precluded military victory for the U.S. . . .
It is truly . . . pathetic, but I suppose necessary, for intellectuals of Hans Morgenthau’s stripe to have been publicly demolished, as Morgenthau was by McGeorge Bundy. But perhaps it will have served some useful purpose.
Although we will never know, it seems clear that had President Kennedy been able to sign into law only a fraction of the domestic policies President Johnson has “brought home,” he would have been worshipped as a Messiah by the prostrate intellectuals. . . .
Melvin A. Benarde
Rutgers University
New Brunswick, New Jersey
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To the Editor:
While a good deal of what Mr. Fairlie says is very much to the point, like his observations on the intellectuals’ bedazzlement by Kennedy’s style and its consequences, he is not so acute in other areas.
At the end of his article, for example, he concludes that “the intellectual cannot engage in current political discussion and hope, at the same time, to think deeply or precisely.” This . . . follows . . . from his comparison of the respective performances of Mr. Bundy and Professor Morgenthau on the CBS teach-in, to the latter’s presumed detriment. In Mr. Fairlie’s view, Mr. Bundy, having left the groves of academe, is now “cool,” able to look at matters with the proper short-run attitude, and as long as this style is maintained long-run considerations don’t matter much. . . . If this is so, and it seems presented in fairly iron-clad terms, . . . any “intellectual” contributions (i.e. criticisms) of immediate affairs, particularly in foreign policy, are ipso facto useless. In fact, however, if Mr. Fairlie will read Professor Morgenthau’s recent analysis of the Vietnam mess in the New York Review of Books he will find it as stylish and persuasive a discussion as is available. If Professor Morgenthau’s, and similar views, are informed by a genuine passion and concern about the matter, I do not see that such supposed lack of “style” is a fault. Bismarck, for instance, was a master of short-run, cool-headed opportunism; the long-range consequences of this ought to be apparent. Moreover, having discredited, or rather dismissed, the “intellectuals’” role (what this term means is never really indicated) in immediate affairs of state, why then bother to add, as Mr. Fairlie does, that “he [the intellectual] should . . . inquire into the long-term meaning of America’s huge power . . .” and so forth? There seems at least some sort of unresolved contradiction here.
No one pretends that President Johnson has an easy task in Southeast Asia—or elsewhere. No doubt he “inherited” the mess; de Gaulle inherited Algeria, too. The point is that until students, intellectuals, etc., made clear their disagreement with the administration on Vietnam, Johnson and his advisers were well on the way to labelling the isolated protests as implicit treason, and I don’t think I am exaggerating. The conduct of some of our own forces there hardly gives all of us comfort, either. . . .
Paul J. Hauben
Department of History
Michigan State University Lansing, Michigan
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To the Editor:
Had he not said he was an Englishman, one might suspect Mr. Henry Fairlie of being a Martian. Despite its elegance and wit, his analysis of the political process manages to be both rigid and nihilistic, all in the guise of realism, in that curious combination sometimes found in the texture of totalitarian thought.
Surely American intellectuals were right in supporting Johnson when it appeared possible that control of the world’s greatest power might be taken over by a lunatic fringe. And to speak of Johnson’s domestic program as a “bribe” to the liberals is rather like the Communist labeling of Roosevelt’s New Deal as a bribe to the workers. American liberals are right in supporting, in the main, Johnson’s domestic policies, and they are right in criticizing portions of his foreign policy. They are not thereby rendered impotent; one suspects that their cries are having an effect on American foreign policy. It is doubtful, for example, that Johnson, in any new crisis of the Dominican type, would again shoot from the hip. Essentially, Mr. Fairlie is attacking American liberals because they are liberals and not alienated radicals, because they are sufficiently mature politically to enter the political process rather than snarl at it from without.
Certainly, it is the intellectual who should be concerned with national aims and who should urge them upon governments. Great and long-term aims may turn out to be at least partly foolhardy and subject to surprising change, but they are rather preferable to no aims at all. To see the political decision-making process as Mr. Fairlie does—as a mindless series of day-to-day responses—can only result in well-meaning governments’ finding themselves one day, after a chain of such small responses, in the midst of a holocaust, without ever knowing how it happened.
If they will avoid arrogance, intellectuals can help inject expertise and morality into government. Mr. Fairlie’s program for American intellectuals—that they sulk in their tents and/or indiscriminately seek allies in unprincipled absolute opposition to Johnson—is not expert and it is not moral.
Maurice L. Farber
Department of Psychology
The University of Connecticut
Storrs, Connecticut
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To the Editor:
I have read with some displeasure Mr. Fairlie’s recent essay enjoining intellectuals to return to their towers and leave practical politics to the practicing politician. It is not clear what role if any the author allows to intellectuals in the political life of the nation; but it is clear that unlike others, intellectuals suffer from a number of uncommon disabilities which serve only to corrupt the fair game of politics: vanity, an overheated imagination, an obsessive fastidiousness, an overwhelming interest in style as opposed to substance, perverse aestheticism, an affinity for sweeping theories of historical determinism, and so on. I find this indictment of the intellectuals (who, I suppose, are considered as a homogeneous class) extraordinary, as I do Mr. Fairlie’s view of the inviolability of day-to-day politics. It is my conviction that this kind of pseudo-realism in politics can only perpetuate a grand error, the separation of homo politicus from homo rationalis and the divorce of the latter from the community or polis which nurtures him and to which he must contribute. Here Mr. Fairlie seems to have fallen for a stereotype of the intellectual, as he has of politics, where ideas are only ideologies or instruments of power, and where the rightness of actions is narrowly defined in terms of their efficacy in promoting the ends of power. That power is a necessary condition of political authority, I do not deny. Nor do I underestimate the danger of introducing rigid moral considerations into the political arena. But just as the philosophy of consensus is not to be identified with a subtler exercise of power, so the term “moral,” or “right,” is not to be stigmatized as the property of impractical idealists. It seems not to have occurred to Mr. Fairlie that the appeal to utilitarian considerations is an appeal to “moral” principle, too, and that the moralist must weigh the obligatoriness of an act with its proximate and ulterior consequences. The use of stereotypes of this kind does the public a great disservice, for it obfuscates issues which may only be sanely judged when the stereotypes which generate passions have been relinquished.
Robert Rosthal
Department of Philosophy
The University of North Carolina
Greensboro, North Carolina
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To the Editor:
Mr. Fairlie’s article is ridiculous—it is cruel to have exposed him to your readers. . . . But you will take the punishment yourselves and I am merely writing to say I love you anyway, and especially for Osip Mandelstam’s “The Noise of Time” [Oct. ’65].
Kenneth Leisenring
Ann Arbor, Michigan
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To the Editor:
Henry Fairlie’s gifted prose . . . almost, but not quite, conceals the superficiality of his analysis. . . . What concerns the intellectuals is not the aesthetics of the Presidency. Perhaps Mr. Fairlie is too young to remember that one of the great champions of the intellectuals was President Harry S. Truman, whose “style” was reflected in those gaudy Key West sport shirts no self-respecting intellectual would have been caught dead in. No, what bothers the intellectuals is their knowledge that a politician must indeed occasionally act for history, and that to do so requires . . . a full consideration of the alternatives of policy. This is especially true in a foreign-policy crisis. Admittedly, in making his decision, the politician must allow for factors the intellectual can enjoy the luxury of ignoring. But an open mind is all the intellectual asks for in a politician.
Finally, it is interesting to learn that the intellectual in politics is a “national habit” in these United States. Since when? This would seem more true of Mr. Fairlie’s England.
Lawrence H. Berlin
Kensington, Maryland
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To the Editor:
Henry Fairlie’s wrong-headed, unjust, and perfectly delightful assault on American intellectuals was worth my year’s subscription to COMMENTARY. But on one point he was, probably deliberately, misinformed—sartorially President Johnson is not a slob, he is a heretic. He flatly denies the authority of sacred Bond Street and adheres to the Texan infidelity. Judged by that, the manner to which he was born, he is closer to a dandy than to a tramp.
Gerald W. Johnson
Baltimore, Maryland
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[Further correspondence on Mr. Fairlie’s article will appear in our February issue.]
