Books in Brief

The Fourth Floor, by Earl E.T. Smith (Random House, $5.00). The memoirs of an American Ambassador to Cuba who watched, with the impotence of a Greek chorus, the rise of Fidel Castro to power during the crucial years 1957-1959. Smith details his vain attempts to convince the State Department that the bandits of the Sierra Maestra were untrustworthy, anti-American, and heavily infiltrated by the Communists. He narrates his equally fruitless efforts to solve the Cuban crisis with a government of national unity. In these pages, the men who appear as the chief American gravediggers of Cuban freedom are our old friends, William Arthur Wieland and Herbert L. Matthews. The arrogant presumptions and leftist preconceptions of the mutual benefit association known as the American Foreign Service also played a role in the tragedy. These memoirs cast unexpected light on the ways President Eisenhower’s Ambassadors were ignored, short-circuited, deceived, humiliated and insulted by the faceless bureaucrats, whose habitat is the Fourth Floor of Foggy Bottom, and by the CIA.N. WEYL

The Private Man, by T. A. Mclnerny (Obolensky, $2.951. At first sight conservatives tend to welcome a book with a title like this. According to Evelyn Waugh’s preface, it is supposed to raise problems which vex conservatives all over the world. Yet, although the book is short, it very soon managed to vex this reader. The author pontificates about matters he treats very superficially—there are 31 chapters in less than one hundred pages—and he presents a catechism tacitly imposing on the reader a self-search as to whether he qualifies for the title. That Mr. Mclnerny feels he must tell the world what he thinks of every subject, from social security to good taste, is his privilege. But even a private man’s book is public property insofar as it owes us explanations, not pontifications. The author sets up an ideal man (according to his personal tastes) whom he then identifies as a social, political, cultural type. All those he dislikes constitute by definition another type, another category, in this case, presumably, the “Public Man” (whose publication he announces for January).T. MOLNAR

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The Fourth Floor, by Earl E.T. Smith (Random House, $5.00). The memoirs of an American Ambassador to Cuba who watched, with the impotence of a Greek chorus, the rise of Fidel Castro to power during the crucial years 1957-1959. Smith details his vain attempts to convince the State Department that the bandits of the Sierra Maestra were untrustworthy, anti-American, and heavily infiltrated by the Communists. He narrates his equally fruitless efforts to solve the Cuban crisis with a government of national unity. In these pages, the men who appear as the chief American gravediggers of Cuban freedom are our old friends, William Arthur Wieland and Herbert L. Matthews. The arrogant presumptions and leftist preconceptions of the mutual benefit association known as the American Foreign Service also played a role in the tragedy. These memoirs cast unexpected light on the ways President Eisenhower’s Ambassadors were ignored, short-circuited, deceived, humiliated and insulted by the faceless bureaucrats, whose habitat is the Fourth Floor of Foggy Bottom, and by the CIA.N. WEYL

The Private Man, by T. A. Mclnerny (Obolensky, $2.951. At first sight conservatives tend to welcome a book with a title like this. According to Evelyn Waugh’s preface, it is supposed to raise problems which vex conservatives all over the world. Yet, although the book is short, it very soon managed to vex this reader. The author pontificates about matters he treats very superficially—there are 31 chapters in less than one hundred pages—and he presents a catechism tacitly imposing on the reader a self-search as to whether he qualifies for the title. That Mr. Mclnerny feels he must tell the world what he thinks of every subject, from social security to good taste, is his privilege. But even a private man’s book is public property insofar as it owes us explanations, not pontifications. The author sets up an ideal man (according to his personal tastes) whom he then identifies as a social, political, cultural type. All those he dislikes constitute by definition another type, another category, in this case, presumably, the “Public Man” (whose publication he announces for January).T. MOLNAR