THE WEEK

• Mental illness, says Dr. Gunnar Gunderson, president of the American Medical Association, may possibly be contagious. Could that account for the recent election? Come to think of it, we may go along with the Democrats in their call for a vast mental health program.

• General Albert C. Wedemeyer has challenged so many reputations and exploded so many cherished beliefs in his book of war memoirs, Wedemeyer Reports!, that it remains the miracle of the age that he wasn’t done to death at the outset by a cabal of hired assassins posing as literary critics. His success would seem to prove that the way to avoid such treatment is to take on such a formidable array of foes that book review editors can only respond with popping eyes and wide-open mouths. We note, with considerable pleasure, that the General’s extremely well-documented case against those who maneuvered us into, through and out of a great war without producing any tangible improvement in our world position vis-à-vis totalitarians has made such a tremendous impression that the book has gone into four printings (45,000 copies) within a week of publication. Combining boldness with politeness, General Wedemeyer has put across some points that historical “revisionists,” laboring futilely for thirteen years, have been unable to get a hearing for outside of the extremely restricted news-letter circuit. Fighting a rear-guard action for the conformists in the New York Post, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. has dutifully tried to hold back the tide. But the waters have poured through all around him. For the General, we propose whatever may be the literary equivalent of an old-fashioned Roman triumph.

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• Mental illness, says Dr. Gunnar Gunderson, president of the American Medical Association, may possibly be contagious. Could that account for the recent election? Come to think of it, we may go along with the Democrats in their call for a vast mental health program.

• General Albert C. Wedemeyer has challenged so many reputations and exploded so many cherished beliefs in his book of war memoirs, Wedemeyer Reports!, that it remains the miracle of the age that he wasn’t done to death at the outset by a cabal of hired assassins posing as literary critics. His success would seem to prove that the way to avoid such treatment is to take on such a formidable array of foes that book review editors can only respond with popping eyes and wide-open mouths. We note, with considerable pleasure, that the General’s extremely well-documented case against those who maneuvered us into, through and out of a great war without producing any tangible improvement in our world position vis-à-vis totalitarians has made such a tremendous impression that the book has gone into four printings (45,000 copies) within a week of publication. Combining boldness with politeness, General Wedemeyer has put across some points that historical “revisionists,” laboring futilely for thirteen years, have been unable to get a hearing for outside of the extremely restricted news-letter circuit. Fighting a rear-guard action for the conformists in the New York Post, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. has dutifully tried to hold back the tide. But the waters have poured through all around him. For the General, we propose whatever may be the literary equivalent of an old-fashioned Roman triumph.