The Week

■ sunburst of the week: It was on New Year’s Eve, 1956, recalls Michael Harrington in the New York Times Book Review, that, at an Upper West Side party, after singing “Auld Lang Syne” and the “Internationale” with a man who turned out to be a Communist lately stunned by Khrushchev’s revelations about Stalin—it was, we say, then and there that, Mr. Harrington confesses, he “began to perceive a complex truth that a number of former Communists were to prove for me in the years to come: that it was possible for people to rationalize away or blind themselves to some of the most monstrous political crimes of the century and yet remain good and decent individuals. Indeed”—now try to keep your eyes open, reader, and clutch the nearest bannister for support—“many of them, motivated by a genuine belief in a fraudulent ideal, manifested courageous idealism in support of popular movements.” Mr. Harrington goes on to articulate a number of other complex truths, but unaccountably neglects to name the dates and sites of their occurrence to him.

■ President Nixon’s legendary voyage to Communist China is the subject of two recent interpretations. H. R. Haldeman (in his book, The Ends of Power) makes a big to-do about the Soviet plans to flatten China’s nuclear plants with a pre-emptive nuclear strike in 1969; he says the American rapprochement with Peking made it impossible for Moscow to bomb China without risking a harsh confrontation with Washington. William Safire (in the New York Times, Feb. 16) says Nixon began cozying up to Mao shortly after taking office early in 1969, apparently without reference to any Soviet plan of attack (which, according to Haldeman, came to a head later in the year). The whole episode belongs in the We’ll Probably Never Know category, but at least this much can be said: those who regard this as a smart balance-of-power move usually criticize severely two related policy decisions. The Chinese move required our “tilt” toward Pakistan, a Chinese client, and it also required the show-of-strength “Christmas bombing” of the North Vietnamese Soviet client on the Chinese border. Except in the sentimentalists’ world, to say A one must in such matters say B and C as well.

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■ sunburst of the week: It was on New Year’s Eve, 1956, recalls Michael Harrington in the New York Times Book Review, that, at an Upper West Side party, after singing “Auld Lang Syne” and the “Internationale” with a man who turned out to be a Communist lately stunned by Khrushchev’s revelations about Stalin—it was, we say, then and there that, Mr. Harrington confesses, he “began to perceive a complex truth that a number of former Communists were to prove for me in the years to come: that it was possible for people to rationalize away or blind themselves to some of the most monstrous political crimes of the century and yet remain good and decent individuals. Indeed”—now try to keep your eyes open, reader, and clutch the nearest bannister for support—“many of them, motivated by a genuine belief in a fraudulent ideal, manifested courageous idealism in support of popular movements.” Mr. Harrington goes on to articulate a number of other complex truths, but unaccountably neglects to name the dates and sites of their occurrence to him.

■ President Nixon’s legendary voyage to Communist China is the subject of two recent interpretations. H. R. Haldeman (in his book, The Ends of Power) makes a big to-do about the Soviet plans to flatten China’s nuclear plants with a pre-emptive nuclear strike in 1969; he says the American rapprochement with Peking made it impossible for Moscow to bomb China without risking a harsh confrontation with Washington. William Safire (in the New York Times, Feb. 16) says Nixon began cozying up to Mao shortly after taking office early in 1969, apparently without reference to any Soviet plan of attack (which, according to Haldeman, came to a head later in the year). The whole episode belongs in the We’ll Probably Never Know category, but at least this much can be said: those who regard this as a smart balance-of-power move usually criticize severely two related policy decisions. The Chinese move required our “tilt” toward Pakistan, a Chinese client, and it also required the show-of-strength “Christmas bombing” of the North Vietnamese Soviet client on the Chinese border. Except in the sentimentalists’ world, to say A one must in such matters say B and C as well.