November 14, 2004
Letters
Self-PortraitTo the Editor:
Tom Carson's review of Bob Dylan's ''Chronicles'' (Oct. 24) punctures a lot of the mystique, but also reveals some basic ignorance of the Greenwich Village folk scene. Having spent the last two years editing the memoir of Dylan's mentor Dave Van Ronk, I can assure Carson that both Dylan's romantic primitivism and his fascination with history were the common coin of that scene. Dylan certainly would have known at 20 that the Cafe Bizarre ''used to be Aaron Burr's livery stable'' -- that is the first thing anyone who played the club remembers about it. Before Dylan transformed the folk world into a mass of self-involved singer-songwriters, it was populated by amateur historians posing as what Van Ronk liked to call ''neo-ethnics,'' and they all treasured both their carefully honed hayseed accents and their links to previous self-mythologizers like Walt Whitman. Dylan's memoir, quirky as it may be, gives a straightforward sense of that time and place.
Elijah Wald
Cambridge, Mass.
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To the Editor:
I guarantee that it was Tom Carson's sharp eye, true ear and 60's instinct that enabled him to nail his deeply insightful and devilishly delightful review of Bob Dylan's creatively encrypted memoir. Dylan, like every great artist and magician, brilliantly misdirects our attention so that we believe what we're seeing is real when we know deep in our hearts it's ''just a shadow'' we're seeing that he's chasing, and we absolutely and truly adore him for the deception.
Bob Levinson
Oceanside, N.Y.
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To the Editor:
Tom Carson's review left me hungering for less. I don't quarrel with his take on the book, but it's overshadowed by gratuitous literary and cultural references that appear designed to let us know he is both intellectual and hip.
Tom Balmer
Portland, Ore.
Presidential Lies
To the Editor:
In his review of my book ''When Presidents Lie: A History of Official Deception and Its Consequences'' (Oct. 10), Gary Hart repeatedly misrepresents my work, casually tosses off false and unsupported allegations, and mangles the historical record. In doing so, he does a considerable disservice both to my book and to your readers. Space constraints prevent me from addressing more than a few representative examples. I will confine myself to the case of the Cuban missile crisis, upon which Hart focuses.
Hart describes the Kennedy administration's dishonesty about its secret missile trade to end the crisis as merely ''a leader seeking to write history in ways favorable to himself, a phenomenon traceable at least to the Homeric odes,'' rather than as a ''betrayal of the public trust.'' Here are just a few of the lies that apparently put Hart in mind of Greek poetry.
Secretary of State Dean Rusk, in testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, asserted that it was ''correct'' when asked to affirm that a ''deal'' or ''trade'' had in ''no way, shape or form, directly or indirectly, been connected with the settlement . . . or had been agreed to.''
Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara responded to the same body: ''Absolutely not . . . the Soviet government did raise the issue . . . [but the] president absolutely refused even to discuss it. He wouldn't even reply other than that he would not discuss the issue at all.''
The national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy, appearing on ''Meet the Press,'' stated unequivocally that the American public knew ''the whole deal'' and that nothing secret had taken place. Bundy also wrote to the French political philosopher Raymond Aron that those ''who would spread rumors'' about a trade involving Jupiter missiles ''must be pretty far gone in their mistrust of the United States.''
Even odder, Hart insists against all available evidence that ''almost everyone in Washington knew'' about the secret deal. If true, this would be big news to, among others, Robert Kennedy, who was so concerned that word of the deal would leak out that when Khrushchev and the Soviets attempted to codify the bargain through a secret memorandum of understanding, he refused to accept it, citing the potential damage it might one day do to his own political ambitions. It would also surprise the historian and Kennedy adviser Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who noted, ''Probably no one except the Kennedys, McNamara, Rusk, Ball and Bundy knew what R.F.K. had told Dobrynin'' (the Soviet ambassador). Finally, if ''almost everyone'' knew about the deal, as Hart claims, why -- as late as January 1989 -- did Anatoly Dobrynin demand that a group of American participants in the crisis, gathered in Moscow for a post-mortem, finally own up to it? Why did Ted Sorensen respond with what he called ''a confession to make to my colleagues on the American side, as well as to others who are present,'' that he had edited Robert Kennedy's diaries that formed the basis of the book ''Thirteen Days'' to prevent the disclosure of the deal, which ''was still a secret even on the American side, except for the six of us who had been present at that meeting''?
Hart goes on to assert that ''Alterman's analysis of the Cuban missile crisis, the weakest of his case studies, suffers badly from questionable assertions like this one: 'Had Kennedy simply dismissed the pathetic notion of a plausible military ''threat'' to the world's most powerful nation from tiny little Cuba, Castro and Khrushchev would have been all but powerless to hurt him.' '' Hart would have been more honest with readers had he pointed out that I was addressing myself here to the pre-crisis period. He would also have been on firmer historical ground had he noted that my source for this observation was President Kennedy himself, who lamented during the crisis, ''Last month I should have said that we don't care.''
Perhaps Gary Hart has credits of which I am unaware, but during the 11 years I spent writing and researching ''When Presidents Lie,'' I never once came across any scholarly historical studies under his name. I would therefore have hoped he might have taken more care before nonchalantly dismissing arguments supported by 91 pages of footnotes containing nearly 1,400 separate entries. I cannot help wondering why someone whose own presidential ambitions were upended by accusations of public untruth would wish to discredit a careful study of the deleterious effects of purposeful lies on the presidency, the country and our democracy.
Eric Alterman
New York
Gary Hart replies:
As an author, I know from personal experience that book reviewing is inherently an unfair exercise. The New York Times may select the wrong reviewer, and the reviewer may form the wrong judgments. If Eric Alterman concludes that my admitted frailties and inadequacies, whether in intellectual or moral authority, disqualify me from reviewing his book, there is little I can do to persuade him otherwise. My guess is that had an eminent personage, say Arthur Schlesinger Jr., for example, reached the same conclusions I did, Alterman would have been equally unhappy, perhaps even more so.
Alterman has made a powerful and compelling argument in support of the proposition that presidential deception in matters of state having to do with war and peace seriously undermines public confidence in government. His arguments that Yalta, the Cuban missile crisis, the Gulf of Tonkin and Iran-contra each led in turn to the other and that, collectively, they encouraged and expanded the cold war are, in my humble judgment, less compelling. And I used Alterman's own words, in the Cuban missile crisis particularly, to justify that conclusion. Despite Alterman's protestations, it is still difficult, if not impossible, to raise President Kennedy's concealment of the trade of Jupiter missiles in Turkey to the level of deception that undermines public confidence in government.
'Chain of Command'
To the Editor:
Michael Ignatieff, who I recall supported the Iraq war, praises Seymour M. Hersh's ''Chain of Command: The Road From 9/11 to Abu Ghraib'' (Oct. 17), but asks, ''How would Hersh control the abuses he so tellingly illuminates?'' The entire book makes the answer clear: he disapproves of all the abuses; he wouldn't ''control'' them. Ignatieff says Hersh admires the precision of the assassination of a Qaeda leader in Yemen but does not address ''the hard question'' of how to eliminate ''a genuine and correctly identified terrorist cadre.'' Hersh does exactly that by quoting a variety of authorities who comment on the many negatives surrounding assassination. Ignatieff writes, ''Hersh confesses that he still hasn't got the whole story.'' He doesn't ''confess'' it; he just says it, like any other modest investigator. Ignatieff doesn't quote Hersh's final lines, which tell us just what the author thinks: for President Bush, ''words have no meaning . . . beyond the immediate moment, and so he believes that his mere utterance of the phrases makes them real.''
Jonathan Mirsky
London
Defending Gish Jen
To the Editor:
We are puzzled by the tone of Craig Seligman's review of Gish Jen's novel ''The Love Wife'' (Oct. 3). Seligman seems angry at Jen's characters, and angry at Jen for creating them.
In our view, the multiple voices that Jen has created enable the reader to do exactly what Seligman finds himself unable to do -- to see from different points of view; to assess the weaknesses and strengths of each character as they are seen through the eyes of others; and to decide, since the author is not giving us a single voice, whom we like and do not like and why. It is unclear how an author can prevent her reader from disliking one of the characters in her book, as Seligman implies. Does she need to point to flaws and remind us of how we are supposed to feel? Are all readers supposed to feel the same way about particular characters?
Finally, Seligman tells us that he lost ''whatever sympathy I had left for Gish Jen,'' as if reading a book has to do with a personal assessment of the book's author.
Nancy J. Chodorow
Berkeley, Calif.
Alice Kessler-Harris
New York
Chez Kowalski
To the Editor:
In his review of ''Kaufman & Co.'' (Oct. 24), Woody Allen writes that in ''A Streetcar Named Desire'' Blanche DuBois says, ''I think I'm going to be sick,'' after she sees her sister's apartment. That's not entirely correct. At the end of Scene 1, when Stanley Kowalski implies that he knows Blanche has been married, Blanche, hearing in her mind the dance music that was played the night her husband committed suicide, answers him: ''The boy -- the boy died. I'm afraid I'm -- going to be sick.'' With that one line Tennessee Williams has charted the play's tragic trajectory. Also, if Sheridan Whiteside had ever moved in with the Kowalskis, as Allen imagines, Stanley and Stella would have relocated to Mississippi, and Whiteside would have been dependent on the kindness of strangers.
Bernard F. Dick
Teaneck, N.J.
The Iraqi Connection
To the Editor:
In his review of ''The Connection: How Al Qaeda's Collaboration With Saddam Hussein Has Endangered America,'' by Stephen F. Hayes (Sept. 19), Gideon Rose dismisses my work. It is far more substantial than Rose suggests.
Fundamental anomalies exist in the official United States explanation for the mega-terrorist plots, starting with the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and culminating in 9/11. Above all, the masterminds of those attacks are said to be a family: Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and at least four nephews (including Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, mastermind of the 1993 bombing).
These individuals are Baluch, a Sunni Muslim people living along the Iranian-Pakistani border. The United States has had virtually nothing to do with them, and they have no evident motive for these assaults -- save that Iraq had extensive ties with the Baluch, using them as spies and saboteurs in its earlier conflict with Iran's Shiite regime.
No other major terrorist group has a family at its core. This family was supposedly born and raised in Kuwait. Their identities are based on Kuwaiti documents that predate Kuwait's liberation in 1991. It is at least possible that these identities were falsified, as Iraq had custody of those documents, while it occupied Kuwait.
Following the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, senior officials in the New York office of the F.B.I. believed Iraq was behind the attack. Reports in The New York Times hinted at an Iraqi connection. Rose (and others) might do well to review that material, before cavalierly dismissing the possibility of Iraq's involvement with this family that twice attacked the Trade Center towers.
Laurie Mylroie
Washington