Random Notes

■ Last of the January Crop: The Rosenbergs were innocent, so was Hiss; so was Bruno Hauptmann, the Lindbergh kidnapper—and so was Boss Tweed, according to Tweed’s New York: Another Look (Anchor Press/Doubleday, $12.50) by Leo Hershkowitz. Next thing you know, Abe Beame will be exonerated. … If you liked his recent NR review of A Welfare Mother, you’ll absolutely love John Greenway’s The American Tradition: A Gallery of Rogues (Mason/Charter, $8.95). . . . Kay Summersby Morgan, who served as General Eisenhower’s driver during World War II, finished Past Forgetting: My Love Affair with Dwight D. Eisenhower (Simon and Schuster, $9.95) before she died a year ago. Actually, the affair was never consummated because Ike, Mrs. Morgan says, was impotent. . . . Robert M. Crun- den is the editor of The Superfluous Men: Conservative Critics of American Culture, 1900-1945 (University of Texas Press. $14.95), an anthology of the writings of people like T. S. Eliot, Santayana, and H. L. Mencken, all chosen to exemplify Crunden’s thesis that conservatism is not static but innovative. Bless you, Mr. Crun- den! . . . Matthew J. Bruccoli, the author of a biography of John O’Hara, has pasted together An Artist Is His Own Fault: John O’Hara on Writers and Writing (Southern Illinois University Press, $8.95). . . Lawrence Thompson received a Pulitzer for the first two volumes of his Frost biography, but died before he could complete research on the third and last. His protégé at Princeton, however—Mr. R. H. Win- nick—finished off that research and wrote the book: Robert Frost: The Later Years, 1938-1963 (Holt, Rinehart, $16.95). . . . In The Fall of Public Man (Knopf, $15), Richard Sennett argues that the “other- directed” man is actually growing more “inner-directed”: that impersonal civility is being replaced by so-called “intimacy” and “authenticity.” . . . The Luparelli Tapes: The True Story of the Mafia Hitman Who Contracted to Kill Both Joey Gallo and His Own Wife (Playboy Press, $8.95) by Paul S. Meskil, crime reporter for the New York Daily News, recounts how Luparelli delivered on the first contract, but defaulted with the second to the FBI.

■ The Liberal Imagination: Alva Myr- dal, wife of Gunnar Myrdal and the Swedish delegate to the Geneva Disarmament Committee, discerns the truth: “Behind their outwardly often fierce disagreements . . . there has always been a secret and undeclared collusion between the superpowers. Neither of them has wanted to be restrained by effective disarmament measures,” when they can go “gaming over a passive Europe” and bullying the underdeveloped countries. All this and more in The Game of Disarmament: How the United States and Russia Run the Arms Race (Pantheon, $15).

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■ Last of the January Crop: The Rosenbergs were innocent, so was Hiss; so was Bruno Hauptmann, the Lindbergh kidnapper—and so was Boss Tweed, according to Tweed’s New York: Another Look (Anchor Press/Doubleday, $12.50) by Leo Hershkowitz. Next thing you know, Abe Beame will be exonerated. … If you liked his recent NR review of A Welfare Mother, you’ll absolutely love John Greenway’s The American Tradition: A Gallery of Rogues (Mason/Charter, $8.95). . . . Kay Summersby Morgan, who served as General Eisenhower’s driver during World War II, finished Past Forgetting: My Love Affair with Dwight D. Eisenhower (Simon and Schuster, $9.95) before she died a year ago. Actually, the affair was never consummated because Ike, Mrs. Morgan says, was impotent. . . . Robert M. Crun- den is the editor of The Superfluous Men: Conservative Critics of American Culture, 1900-1945 (University of Texas Press. $14.95), an anthology of the writings of people like T. S. Eliot, Santayana, and H. L. Mencken, all chosen to exemplify Crunden’s thesis that conservatism is not static but innovative. Bless you, Mr. Crun- den! . . . Matthew J. Bruccoli, the author of a biography of John O’Hara, has pasted together An Artist Is His Own Fault: John O’Hara on Writers and Writing (Southern Illinois University Press, $8.95). . . Lawrence Thompson received a Pulitzer for the first two volumes of his Frost biography, but died before he could complete research on the third and last. His protégé at Princeton, however—Mr. R. H. Win- nick—finished off that research and wrote the book: Robert Frost: The Later Years, 1938-1963 (Holt, Rinehart, $16.95). . . . In The Fall of Public Man (Knopf, $15), Richard Sennett argues that the “other- directed” man is actually growing more “inner-directed”: that impersonal civility is being replaced by so-called “intimacy” and “authenticity.” . . . The Luparelli Tapes: The True Story of the Mafia Hitman Who Contracted to Kill Both Joey Gallo and His Own Wife (Playboy Press, $8.95) by Paul S. Meskil, crime reporter for the New York Daily News, recounts how Luparelli delivered on the first contract, but defaulted with the second to the FBI.

■ The Liberal Imagination: Alva Myr- dal, wife of Gunnar Myrdal and the Swedish delegate to the Geneva Disarmament Committee, discerns the truth: “Behind their outwardly often fierce disagreements . . . there has always been a secret and undeclared collusion between the superpowers. Neither of them has wanted to be restrained by effective disarmament measures,” when they can go “gaming over a passive Europe” and bullying the underdeveloped countries. All this and more in The Game of Disarmament: How the United States and Russia Run the Arms Race (Pantheon, $15).