General MacArthur and President Truman: The Struggle for Control of American Foreign Policy
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This book was first published in 1951 as The General an...)
This book was first published in 1951 as The General and the President after President Harry S. Truman relieved General Douglas MacArthur in the midst of the Korean War―a memorably explosive incident in American political history. But its significance extends far beyond a dramatic episode in the nation’s past. This literate and ironic work continues to be an invaluable guide to the conflict between civilian and military authority, and it illuminates later and currentcontroversies over the role the United States should play in Asian affairs.
This new edition is graced by a remarkable introductory essay by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. The text is reprinted from the 1965 republication under the title The MacArthur Controversy, that is, the book as originally written with a few tenses altered and a few topical allusions deleted.
General MacArthur and President Truman will be of special interest to students of American diplomacy, politics, and culture and to all concerned with the relationship between the armed forces and larger society.
Inquest: The Warren Commission and the establishment of Truth
(The eminence of its members and the authoritative appeara...)
The eminence of its members and the authoritative appearance of its Report caused nearly universal acceptance of the conclusions of the President's Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy, commonly known as the Warren Commission. On the other hand, among the minority who refuse to believe that the case is closed, many adhere to the view that the Commission, acting consciously, conspired to stifle the truth. This disturbing book espouses neither of these positions. Mr. Epstein, a young scholar at the time of publication, began this book with the intention of writing a case study of the nature and activity of an extraordinary government commission. He accomplished this task brilliantly. But in the course of interviewing nearly all members of the Commission, and many members of its staff, he discovered that the official version of the Kennedy assassination failed to contend with serious contradictions presented by the evidence. Inquest clearly traces the process by which this official story came into being; it does not indulge in theoretical speculation about a deliberate suppression of crucial evidence. Mr. Epstein instead proposes an explanation based on the concept of "political truth": the Commission, sincerely convinced that the national interest would best be served by the termination of rumors, and predisposed by its make-up and by the pressure of time not to search more deeply, failed to answer some of the essential questions about the tragedy. Inquest includes previously unpublished government documents and illustrations. Although the author's revelations are startling, he nowhere makes unsupported claims; his style is cool and objective. A sober, new view of the way the Commission dealt with one of the central events of our recent history, this book was destined to induce widespread discussion and debate.
Richard Halworth Rovere was an American political journalist. He was also a literary critic.
Background
Richard Halworth Rovere was born in Jersey City, N. J. , the son of Lewis (formerly Louis) Halworth Rovere, an electrical engineer born in France, and Ethel Josephine Roberts, a native of Jamaica. Although Rovere envied colleagues whose ethnic identity was clear, his mixed and mysterious heritage, British and Swedish, French or Italian, presumably black, and possibly Jewish, left him "deprived of self-knowledge" but gave him a detachment useful in his profession. His father's insistence that Rovere's boyish assertions be backed up with evidence and his mother's love of poetry inculcated in him a passion for accuracy and words. Apart from frequent visits to Washington, D. C. , and travels to other points on the globe, Rovere lived his entire life in New York City and its environs. With his parents moving about once a year, he grew up primarily in the Prospect Heights section of Brooklyn.
Education
He attended the public schools. Viewing school as a "rude intrusion" on his life, Rovere was so indolent a scholar that his despairing parents sent him at age fourteen to the Stony Brook School in Stony Brook, N. Y. , in hopes of rescuing him for college. He continued his academic slump, "had a brief seizure of fundamentalist Presbyterianism, " and went out for the football team. Neck surgery following an injury during football practice confined Rovere to a hospital bed for several weeks in his junior year and changed his life. He did some serious reading, devoured periodicals, honed his writing style, and became an editor of the school's newspaper. After an unhappy semester at Storrs Agricultural College (now the University of Connecticut), Rovere in January 1934 transferred to Bard College at Annandale-on-Hudson, N. Y. , where he drifted until radicalized by the Great Depression.
Career
In his third year at Bard College Rovere became editor of the Bardian, transforming it into "an Annandale Pravda. " In 1936 he joined the Communist party as Dick Halworth and met and admired its leading literary light, Granville Hicks, but loathed its insufferably dull catechistic cell meetings.
An unemployed college graduate in 1937, Rovere did household chores for room and board at the Hickses' primitive home in Grafton, N. Y. In the spring of 1938, on Hicks's recommendation, Rovere commenced an editorial job with New Masses, a weekly that slavishly followed the Communist line.
Disenchanted in the late summer of 1939 by the Nazi-Soviet pact and chagrined that he had tolerated the totalitarianism of the American Communist Party, Rovere quit the New Masses and broke with the party. Over the next two years he supported himself as a freelance. For a brief period in 1942 Rovere was an editor with the Nation and in 1943 for Common Sense, but by early 1944 he was again free-lancing. In May 1944, after he had portrayed Thomas E. Dewey as the "Man in the Blue Serge Suit" for Harper's, Rovere realized his ambition to join the staff of the New Yorker.
Over the next four years he profiled political and nonpolitical subjects, including two shyster lawyers whose bizarre story was reprinted as Howe & Hummel (1947). While covering the 1948 presidential campaign, Rovere was asked by William Shawn, managing editor of the New Yorker, to write a "Letter from Washington" every three or four weeks, "not to chronicle the action but to find meaning in it, and to find out what the best-informed and most reflective people thought about it. " Rovere welcomed the security that came with having his own department. As a transient from exurban Dutchess County, N. Y. (where he and his family had moved in 1946), observing Washington through the monocle of the New Yorker, Rovere enhanced his detachment and relied not on personal contacts with public figures, but on "material that is fixed in the record and cannot be repudiated. "
For thirty-one years Rovere's columns were models of penetrating analysis, objectivity, clarity, wit, and style. The "Letter from Washington"--concentrating on politics, economics in a broad sense, and foreign policy--was critical from a liberal perspective, but not partisan. Rovere's more pointed political commentary appeared as separate articles or as books. His General and the President (1951), written with Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. , harshly criticized Gen. Douglas MacArthur and warmly supported Harry S. Truman's Korean policy. Rovere's Affairs of State (1956) pictured a pious and duplicitous John Foster Dulles and an irresponsible Republican party held in check by Dwight D. Eisenhower, whose chief virtue was his inaction; his influential Senator Joe McCarthy (1959) portrayed a con artist whose considerable talent made him a dangerous demagogue; Goldwater Caper (1965) had sympathy for Barry Goldwater the man but contempt for his ideas and supporters and suggested that the huge Democratic majority in 1964 was more a tribute to the fallen John Kennedy than a compliment to Lyndon Johnson; and Waist Deep in the Big Muddy (1968) was "an outburst of anger and torment, a prolonged cry of pain over Vietnam" and a rejection of his earlier support for intervention in Korea.
Rovere wrote in 1962 his famouse essay, American Establishment and Other Reports, Opinions, and Speculations. A spoof with phony footnotes, it ridiculed C. Wright Mills's Power Elite. Ironically, many readers missed its satire. With repetition the "American Establishment, " to Rovere's amusement, achieved the status of received truth. The article was taken seriously by the extreme left (who rushed it to Fidel Castro), the political center (with the Library of Congress searching for the article's fictitious sources), and the extreme right (with the article confirming the conspiracy notions of the John Birch Society). With tongue in cheek, Rovere uttered a phrase, imagined a type, and invented a hypothesis that in the 1960's intruded into every discussion about who governed.
Rovere was also a literary critic. His introduction to the 1950 Modern Library edition of Light in August contributed to the William Faulkner revival, his perceptive introduction to the Orwell Reader (1956) acknowledged his debt to George Orwell, and his Esquire article "The Question of Ezra Pound" (September 1957) helped gain that poet's release from a mental hospital. Rovere was never more amusing, perceptive, and influential than in his Esquire essay, which was reprinted in the collection American Establishment and Other Reports, Opinions, and Speculations (1962), a book that identified the "American Establishment" as Ivy League clubmen in three-piece suits. A spoof with phony footnotes, it ridiculed C. Wright Mills's Power Elite. Ironically, many readers missed its satire. With repetition the "American Establishment, " to Rovere's amusement, achieved the status of received truth. The article was taken seriously by the extreme left (who rushed it to Fidel Castro), the political center (with the Library of Congress searching for the article's fictitious sources), and the extreme right (with the article confirming the conspiracy notions of the John Birch Society). With tongue in cheek, Rovere uttered a phrase, imagined a type, and invented a hypothesis that in the 1960's intruded into every discussion about who governed.
In the 1970's Rovere's earlier neck injury again caused problems. After a surgeon botched the removal of a malignancy from his neck, Rovere spent the remaining five years of his life "in unceasing, racking, accelerating pain. " During his last three and a half months, in the Vassar Brothers Hospital in Poughkeepsie, N. Y. , Rovere twice underwent surgery to achieve cervical fusion (to repair a "broken" or technically "dislocated" neck). He died in Poughkeepsie.
Achievements
Richard H. Rovere was remembered as a writer of the most penetrating and respected commentaries on American politics. His column "Letter from Washington" in magazine "The New Yorker" was very famouse.
In addition to his column, Mr. Rovere wrote more than half a dozen books. Perhaps the most widely acclaimed was “Senator Joe McCarthy, ” published in 1959, two years after the death of the Republican Senator from Wisconsin.
Quotations:
Rovere recalled: "I was a Brooklynite, not a New Yorker, and I was less a Brooklynite than a proud defender of whatever part of the borough I happened to live in".
Connections
On December 20, 1941 Rovere married Eleanor Alice Burgess. They had three children.
