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Sunday, September 1,1963 BOOKS Kennedy Through Sidey And Time JOHN F. KENNEDY, PRES IDENT. By Hugh Sidey. By W. H. SCARBOROUGH The name Kennedy has as sumed all the qualities and then some of the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval—drop it and it can shatter sales records for anything from coloring books to phonograph parodies. The latest field to discover this simple, useful little fact is the historical book trade; the latest entry in these lists is a fat little tome by Time Washington re porter Hugh Sidey, a bright young man who has been fol lowing the President around since 1958 when the junior Senator from Massachusetts began making suspicious candidate-like sounds in the back of his throat. Mr. Sidey has attempted at some length to do a number of things no one ever bothered to say couldn’t be done. For one he has attempted to narrate the history of a Presidential term while it has a year yet to run; for another he has attempted to transmute Time’s imitable prose and "depth” reporting into something more durable than the mildew on last week's issue. What Mr. Sidey does contrive to prove is that a weekly news magazine and its reporters do accumulate a fantastic amount of detail detail that is often very readable immediately after the fact but scarcely relevant to history. There is a school of history and of archaeology that reconstructs civilization from gos sipy letters and fragments of discarded soup bone, but it would seem hazardous for any so ciety itself to hoard its own refuse in an archive and therefrom take its image. It would be a bit too harsh to suggest that Mr. Sidey is doing any such thing, but his type could evolve to that point. It would be more apt to call him a sort of journalistic packrat, incapable of distinguishing be tween the tinsel and broken glass and the diamonds in his burrow. All this notwithstanding, "John F. Kennedy, President” is a comprehensive journal of Mr. Kennedy the man as President during three years of his first term. Mr. Sidey states in his introduction that he has written a narrative from which the in terpretation is essentially insepar Drawing For ‘Weekend Guests’ One Weekend That Should Get Lost WEEKEND GUESTS. By William K. Zinsser, illustra tions by James Stevenson. Harper & Row. 52 Pages. $3.95• You wonder what ominously hovering unpaid bill palled the life of William Zinsser until he buckled under the strain and perpetrated this glutinous little pot-boiler. Mr. Zinsser is a New York free-lance writer who has published with impunity in the Saturday Evening Post, and al so in Life, Horizon, Esquire, Mc- Call’s, and elsewhere. “Weekend Guests” must be a reprint from elsewhere. Even the New York Herald Tribune, for which Mr. Zinsser once wrote criticism end editorials, and which is rivaled tor typographical inaccuracies oniy by the New York Times, would be all but hoisting itself on its own petard to claim this massive typographical error as an egg of its own laying. “Weekend Guests” tells you all about weekend social life among the peri-Manhattan com muter set. It tells you in no un certain terms. It tells you what is wrong with guests, and what is wrong with hosts. It tells you alphabetically, to make sure you get all the symptoms of guestrit is in the right order. It starts with A ("Arriving Friday P.M. is the message on the postcard that arrives Friday A.M.">. Then it goes on to B (“Breakfast is a meal which never ends"). Then it goes .... By the time you get to G (“Glop comes in a plastic bottle and goes with the weekend guest to the beach . . .") you are sud denly struck by the tact that the 5T S] HUGH SIDEY able. What is intended as a means of making his work unique is the point of view, which most often appears to be somewhere immediately behind Mr. Ken nedy’s right shoulder. A safe vantage point if one were to maintain it, but Mr. Sidey wan ders away at points into such things as a reconstructed interior monologue of Joseph P. Kennedy os he digs out his formal dress for the inauguration of his son. Or the not-exactly-gripping ag onies Attorney General Robert Kennedy underwent in deciding to accept his brother’s offer to be Attorney General. Then, too, there are grand his torical moments the confronta tion of Mr. Kennedy and Mr. Khrushchev in Vienna, caught in detail but with lamentably little selectivity. The maturation of a President through ordeal by action too often appears to be a commonplace event, a se ries of eminently mundane hu man actions and responses that are vital to the rest of the world. Even with this burden of import ance Mr. Sidey fails to imbue his narrative with the drama it needs for emphasis. And there are gaps of fact left by Mr. Sidey’s singular point of view, gaps filled by the daily news papers much better. This Is not at all aimed at cast ing a pall on the glamour of John F.' Kennedy’s presidency. More accurately it is to indi cate to Mr. Sidey the essential differences between writing for Time and writing for the ages. initial letters of each of this large, thin, jaundice-jacketed, three - dollar-and-ninety-five-cent book’s 26 pages of text run in alphabetical order. The realiza tion comes as rather a shock. Mr. Zinsser, like the faithful hound who smells smoke, must be trying to tell us something. So you wade through all the remaining 19 pages of glop; about guests and sailing, guests and their hosts’ tastes in interior decoration, guests and country entertainment, boring guests, sleepless guests, guests and their hosts’ children, guests and sports, guests and food, guests and prac tically everything including X ( “X-ray is the only clear pic ture the guest retains of his skiing weekend”). Reaching the end of the book is like finishing a faintly disturbing meal and then discovering that it was lib erally dosed with a spice to which you are allergic. One of the cleverest ways to be clever is to tell people things they already know in prickling terms they would never have thought of themselves, like an Oscar Wilde epigram. But it is a tricky way to be clever, be cause if you make the terms as familiar as the message they de liver the whole thing becomes sort of gangrenous. James Stevenson’s drawings are worth looking at. Some are funny, some are charming, some are viciously cutting. (For Mr. Stevenson, the children might en joy "Weekend Guests.” But not for Mr. Zinsser. Color him dull. —JACD Incredible William Walker THE WORLD AND WIL LIAM WALKER. By Albert Z. Carr. Harper & Row. 289 Pages. By MARTHA ADAMS This title in the 1960’s sounds a bit pretentious. Who was Wil liam Walker, anyway? In the 1850’s when Walker’s name and exploits kept the American pub lic on the edge of its seat for weeks on end it would have sounded less so. Walker was one of a breed of 19th century Americans known as the “filibusters.” The “fili busters”, spurred by various mo tives, made a profession of lead ing expeditions of American ad venturers into the underdevelop ed ports of the world, particular ly Latin America, for the pur pose openly taking them over, establishing diplomatic claims or imposing a certain policy. Be hind them, at various times, stood the United States govern ment, Southern slave-holding in terests, business, the nascent robber barons, idealists and fa natics of American expansion, and local revolutionaries. The object of Walker’s ambi tion was Nicaragua, a strip of Central America which, in the absence of the Panama Canal, offered the shortest and easiest route to the newly discovered gold fields of California and was hotly contested by nations and business empires alike. Walker had a lightning career. He first set foot in Nicaragua in 1855 at the head of 58 men re cruited from the rootless popu lation of San Francisco. Within the year he became undisputed master of the country, created a government and brought it down again. In 1856, he was president himself in defiance of the Amer ican government and high fi nance, the British Empire, and a coalition of Central American states. His name bulked large in the American press and his men were christened “the Im mortals”. Four years later, at the age of 36, he faced a Honduran fir ing squad and oblivion. A look at author Carr’s list of previous works shows that he has a penchant for men of pow er and dynamics. His subjects include Napoleon, Stalin, and John D. Rockefeller, and a gen eral study of dictatorship. Walk er, on a smaller scale, is no ex ception to the list. He was a man of intense per sonality and leadership ability despite his unassuming appear ance and it would seem he was Ferber Found The Magic Was A KIND OF MAGIC. By Ed va Fcrbcr. Doubleday & Co. 335 Pages. $5.75. By JOAN BISSELL ’ “To be alive, 10 know con sciously that you are alive, and to relish that knowledge this is a kind of magic.” These words open the second volume of Edna Ferber’s rem iniscences, “A Kind of Magic.” Beginning where “A Peculiar Treasure" leaves off, “A Kind of Magic” records Miss Ferber’s experiences from 1939 to 1963. These experiences range from building a house in Connecticut to collecting material in Alaska for the novel “Ice Palace”; from touring war-torn Europe in 1945 to motoring across the United States in 1962. This inventory of her life as Miss Ferber defines her au tobiography does not neglect to include her “misadventures"; with humor, she describes her al most frantic and futile at tempts to interest George Kauf man in collaborating on a play about Saratoga Springs; she re calls the Texas wrath that greet ed the publication of "Giant”— one man actually threatened to kill her for "defiling" Texas and Texans; she comments on her “fling" in the theater one week in summer stock during which her performance was de scribed as “adequate.” Recalling her successes, Miss Ferber explains the self-discipline that accompanied the writing of the Pulitzer prize winning no vel “So Big,” and “Show Boat,” "Saratoga Trunk,” and "Cimar ron.” A gregarious person, she forced herself to decline all so cial invitations and “barricaded" herself in a room without a view. Thus, her only distractions were the characters she created in her novels, characters who some times became so strong that they threatened to take the plot into their own hands and run away with it. The solution was to kill off such characters, as she did Luz in ‘Giant." Since some of her novels were adapted for motion pictures, she met actors and actresses who appealed to her as individuals. Not as piidicized personalities. Working on “Giant," talented young Jamas Dean come to her THE CHAPEL HILL WEEKLY A Filibustering Comet endowed also with a healthy dose of charism. Extremely ascetic in his personal habits, he was above all a man bound to an ideal and a dream. The dream was the creation of a Central American Federation of Guatamaia, Nicaragua, Hon duras, Salvador, and Costa Rica based on the principles of Amer ican democracy and developed economically through American aid. The liberal revolutionaries of Central America shared at least the first part of this dream. One feels from reading Carr’s book that Walker came to vent his energies upon Latin Ameri ca purely by chance. Had cir cumstances far beyond his reach in the recesses British-American diplomacy and the ofiices of Cor nelius Vanderbilt and Wall Street not brought Nicaragua to his at tention he would have spent his life as energetically, but per haps more comfortably, crusad ing for some other cause. He was born in 1826 in Nash ville, Tenn., into a prosperous but rigidly pietistic family. His only escape from the stuffy home life were the tales of chivalry in the romantic literature in which the South then abounded. Carr im putes him with a lifelong “Gala had complex" gained at this time, and Freudianly explains much of his forceful attitude to wards life as a result of too much self-imposed sexual ab stinence. A Medical degree earned at the age of 19 did not satisfy his desire for romantic purity in a career, and traveling to New Or leans he turned to law and cru sading newspaper work. He had the gumption to base a New Or leans daily on a platform of an ti-slavery, and, between duels, made a go of it. The death of a deaf-mute girl he had loved and married in New Orleans drove him on to California in the early 50’s. Again he plunged into a journal istic career which climaxed in prison and the successful unseat ing of the judge who had sent him there. His “filibustering" career be gan in 1853 with a disgraceful unsuccessful invasion of Sonora in lower California with the in tention of setting up an inde pendent republic. Although Walk er’s motives were high, behind him were the eager business in terests which alternately sup ported and betrayed him as it suited their purpose until his death. Failure in Sonora and econom ic warfare in Vanderbilt enter- attention, and she was disturbed over his dangerous love for speed and sports cars. His death and the earlier accidental death of her fifteen-year-old cousin, mathematical genius Gunther Hollander arc regarded by Miss Ferber as examples of the destruction of human potential. Although each chapter of "A Kind of Magic” could be labeled throughout the book is the writ er's concern for human beings. This concern was intensely mani fested when on a 1945 govern ment tour of air bases in Eng land and Germany, she was pres ent at a briefing session of the Eighth Air Force “boys” who looked like youths before a raid, and like old men afterward; when she saw Buchenwald con centration camp with its crema tory; when she reached Nord hausen, home of the sinister V-2 bombs which were built by slave laborers working in the interior of a mountain. He Saw The Flaws In Marx Morton Mandel Bober's book, "Karl Marx's Interpretation of History” is required reading in the Federal Bureau of Investi gation. Dr. Bober, for many years a professor of economics at Law rence College in Appleton, Wis consin, has retired to Chapel Hill and lives with his wife in Glen Lennox. “Karl Marx's Interpretation of History” won not only a prize but world-wide renown for its clear statement of Marx’s philos ophy and its equally clear state ment of the flaws in that philos ophy. “J. Edgar Hoover says, How can Americans fight for their freedom if they don’t know what Communism is?’" says Mrs. Bober. “He says M. M.’s book is a must. During the war the FBI used to ask M. M. which of his students he would recom mend for the Secret Service." “Dr. Bober was famous for his lucidity,” says a UNC facul ty member who knew Dr. Bober at Lawrence. “It's easy to spot the flaws in Karl Marx,” said Dr. Bebsr, and T ■ ■ - —— —— ■■ . i ■ tap* y l , ■ \ jflj f - f/v% A- ij . - s , - ....... i . .. j . ii k , William Walker prises turned him to Nicaragua, fame, and death. The diplomatic, economic, and personal com plexities behind the venture are enough to make the Balkans pale with envy. Carr presents Walker as a product of his age which teeter ed on the brink of the Civil War, romantic, impulsive, and impas sioned. Opposed to him end his kind were the increasingly pow erful money men, cold, calculat ing, and greedy, who came to dominate the nation after the War. He explains Walker's rapid descent into oblivion after his death as an attempt of the na tion off on the money-hungry binge of the 70's, 80’s and 90's to forget the romantic self-denying challenge that was Walker. Carr's biography of Walker is detailed but readable He seeks to present a picture of a time and a man, but really succeeds only with the latter. This is pro- Despite these allusions to w a r and its horror, the tone of this book is one of triumph. To Miss Ferber, our very existence is sound reason for elation: the fact that we are, rather than that we were. Globe-trotting as she did, she met many people; although she has described some of their narrow aways, she always bal ances their "smallness” and prejudiced acts with accounts of compassion and tolerance. Purists may object to Miss Ferber’s omission of commas in sequences of nouns, verbs, and adjectives. At the most, such an omission requires an occasion al re-reading for one to grasp the sense of the sentence. De spite the author’s statement that "this book is meant to be as hap hazard as the March day on which this page is Deing written; rain sun snow wind clouds,” there is chronological unity in her recollections. sat down to talk about wealth. He is very much concerned with wealth because it is one of the key matters in economics. He would prefer to have six months to sit and talk about it, but even so he bears out his former Law rence colleague's comment on his lucidity. Oddly enough, and painful though it may seem, in order for a nation to be wealthy it is neces sary for some people to have trouble paying their bills. "What is wealth?” said Dr. Bober. “Wealth is not money. The United States had a hun dred and eighty million people. India has four hundred million. China has four or five hundred million. But the United States is the wealthiest nation in the world. Why? The answer to this is, because we have more goods and services. We have more ta bles and chairs and fruits. That is wealth goods and Wealth is not money In order for a nation to be wealthy, some people must have more money than others. If everybody had a lot of money, then money wouldn’t be worth anything. If bebly due to the amazing amount of material which had to be crammed into the book to cover the multifarious forces influenc ing Walker’s life and career. One occasionally feels that the style of the book is a bit out of proportion with the subject, that author Carr has not geared down enough from writing about Napolean and Stalin to writing about William Walker and a few years of Nicaraguan history. This unbalance may, however, be intentional to point up the fact that Walker had the makings of a Napoleon and in another situation might have been one. The reader leaves “The World and William Walker” with the feeling that the world would have been little different with out him, but that it is perhaps to shame and the world’s fault aira loss. The feeling is to Mr. Carr’s credit. In Living With dramatic deftness, she recounts a 24-hour visit with the Franklin Roosevelts in the White House, several days touring New Orleans with Louis Bromfield, and chance meetings with Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne in Lon don, with Paul Gallico in Spain, and with Mike Todd in Paris. Unlike the “expose” autobiog raphy that presents its writer as frustrated, lonely, staring at the world through red-rimmed eyes and crying “Why was I born?”, "A Kind of Magic” presents its writer as one person who is glad to be around: Miss Ferber is frustrated but only because she won’t be there to see the wonderful year 2000. She is a spin ster—but not crying in her beer for “the man that got away.” She has no grudge against the world instead, she is still in trigued with the whole business of living. _ you inundate the market with money then you have inflation.” It all seems very simple when put that way. “But don’t look for easy economics,” Dr. Bober added quickly. “It takes a good liead.” Dr. Bober took his B.S. at Mon tana University, his M. S. at Harvard, served in Army Intelli gence in Europe during World War I, went back to Harvard and wrote his doctoral thesis on Karl Marx, won Harvard's Wells Prize for 1925-26. He taught at Appleton and other colleges nod universities, advised the OUA during World War 11, and sub sequently wrote another book, entitled “Price and Income Theory.” “Price and Income Theory” is now a standard text. In It. Dr. Bober approaches a difficult question: “In each country, large or small, rich or poor, individ uals vary in their capacities, earnings and incomes. Why?" When you think about the ques tion, it becomes more puzzling, less answerable, more elusive. Dr. Bober has spent most of his life tracking it down. At Home With JFK And Books By EDMUND FULLER In The Wall Street Journal It is characteristically Amer ican that the selections for the new White House library ere in exactly the same category as the furniture (which every deal er in fine bindings knows to be true in many homes). Like much of the furniture, most books for the White House can be acquired only by gift. Whatever the merit of this policy for chairs, beds and tables, there are cultural implications to applying it to books. Timidity and a lack of vigorous national pride in our working writers, lor instance, are re flected in the list’s absolute ex clusion of living novelists. This would not be likely to happen in any other literate nation. Con cretely, this policy means that non-writers such as Richard Nixon and Robert Kennedy are represented while two of our Nobel Prize winners and many Pulitzer Prize ones are not. The selection includes living critics but not living subjects for crit icism. A live American novelist may be smuggled into the White House in paperback, or invited to dinner, but musn’t be slipped onto the catalogued shelves. A conspicuous aspect of the White House library list, too, is its severe overbalance toward scholarly works, many of which are duplicating. Granted that no two individuals or committees would make the same selection on any premise, still the main quarrel is with the premise. The concept of a "working li brary” seems unsound beyond standard reference works, en cyclopedias, dictionaries. The needs of a President are hard to anticipate, impossible to supply fully and most certainly not con fined to works about the U. S. Moreover, research is perform ; V ? * -v jßSSafc-. s~M bn.... v.-.-. .- s. JIIIIIIIIHIBEIRgBm&I&u.- LAURA MacMILLAN Portrait Index For Historians THE NORTH CAROLINA PORTRAIT INDEX. Compil ed by Laura MacMillan. Uni versity of North Carolina Press. 272 Pages. $15.00. Before the advent of the cam era man depended on the por trait artist for the posterity of his likeness. And while the cam era with its efficiency and speed cut the ranks of portraitists, it has now redressed the damage by making possible the assem bly of a North Carolina photo graph album for the years 1700- 1860. The Index was assembled in Chapel Hill by Mrs. Laura Mac- Millan, wife of University Ken an Professor Dougald MacMil lan. While it is short on text, her labor still tells a significant story of North Carolina, the men and women who helped build it, those who merely visited or those whose descendants found a home here. Since most of the portraits arc in private hands, many who hight have occasion to see them have heretofore not been able to locate them with ease. Mrs. MacMillan has facilitated more than reference with her book; each of the two-hundred odd pic tures is accompanied by the name and importance of its sub ject, the artist who painted it, an approximate date and its present location and owner. It is a book the thoroughgoing historian can ill afford to be without.—WHS. EVERYTHING IN BOOKS THE BOOK EXCHANOE "The teeth's largest sad SMst c—saints Beak Otars" AT FIV* POINTS BCRIUM, N. CL Am ma■! hi 11 mmm — —— ed for him by others. Far too much of the available space is taken up by works which the President or any mem ber of his family or staff could request from the Library of Con gress at need. There are acres of books on the present list which no one will read end few will have occasion to use for study or reference. There is much deadly bibliographical and archive stuti. It will keep the White House dust ers busy. Surely a richly representative world library of the humanities— fiction, non-fiction, poetry and drama—would grace the execu tive mansion. A heavy weight ing toward American writing would be proper—an exclusive American chauvinism is absurd. If it is fitting that the Execu • tive mansion of the richest na tion and leader of the Free World have a library, then on whatever premise the books are selected, they ought to be bought, not begged. By soliciting books as gifts the Government is directly competing with count less under-financed schools and colleges which need the gift of many of these items far more urgently than does the White House. This writer would feel happier about that trifling ex penditure of his tax dollar than about a great many things for which it is spent. This library list conjures up for us "Imaginary Conversa tions” in the vein Walter Savage Landor used in the 19th Century. The White House. Evening. He: If Pablo isn’t playing to night and Marian isn't singing and the reception for King Saud is postponed, what shall we do? She: Let’s get something to read from the library. He: Good. (Scene shifts; the librarian is hovering helpfully.) I feel in the mood for some stor ies by John Steinbeck. Librarian: Unfortunately, Mr. President, Mr. Steinbeck is still living. She: I’m sure if" John knew that you wanted. . . . He: Haveans, no! That would be awful. How about Thurber? Librarian: Well, yes, he’s dead —but unhappily hasn't been do nated yet. She; (scanning shelves) “Six Crises,” Richard Nixon. C He: No; I was there. She: (scanning) "How the Other Half Lives," “The Prison Community," "Police Systems in the U. 5.,” "The Dixie Fron tier?’ “Prejudices—6th Scries,” ''Laughing in the Jungle.’ “The Americanization of Edward Bok,” “The N. Y. Tribune Since the Civil War,” "Black Boy.” Librarian: If you want fiction, let’s see what's here: “Little Women,” “Uncle Tom's Cabin,” "The Call of the Wild,” “Equal ity.” "The Late George Appley.” She: (still scanning) “The Coming of the White Man,” Elea nor Roosevelt's story. “Major Campaign Speeches of Adlai Stevenson,” “Guide to the Re cords in the National Archives,” “A Report on American Univer sity Presses.” Librarian: Here’s a new gift; General de Gaulle has contribut ed "As Others See Us.” A small voice: I want “Peter Rabbit.” Librarian: I’m awfully sorry, but it isn’t an American book. 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