Sustained Selectivity

Eisenhower: Portrait of the Hero By Peter Lyon Little, Brown, 937 pp., $15

I had been hoping that the revisionist or New Left historians of the cold war had gone pretty much out of vogue: that they had been consigned as a body to that limbo into which such intellectual has-beens as, say, the economic determinists of the Beardian school and the so-called consensus historians of the Parrington stripe are all tossed sooner or later. Certainly the eager apologists for—nay, the champions of—a Soviet foreign policy constructed upon a domestic foundation of gulag archipelagos and tortured political theory were dealt a blow, as from a Siberian pickaxe, when a certain Robert James Maddox, of wicked instincts, published in 1973 The New Left and the Origins of the Cold War, in which he demonstrated that the deans of revisionism have constructed their cosmology mainly by sleight of hand and the operations of a highly selective imagination. Yet, here is a volume of great heft, published in this year 1974, that is composed as though Maddox had never written and academicians not been diverted in the last couple of years by the distractions of more recent atrocities than the cold war—as, for example, the persecution of the Soviet Jews.

CW

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Chilton Williamson Jr.

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Eisenhower: Portrait of the Hero By Peter Lyon Little, Brown, 937 pp., $15

I had been hoping that the revisionist or New Left historians of the cold war had gone pretty much out of vogue: that they had been consigned as a body to that limbo into which such intellectual has-beens as, say, the economic determinists of the Beardian school and the so-called consensus historians of the Parrington stripe are all tossed sooner or later. Certainly the eager apologists for—nay, the champions of—a Soviet foreign policy constructed upon a domestic foundation of gulag archipelagos and tortured political theory were dealt a blow, as from a Siberian pickaxe, when a certain Robert James Maddox, of wicked instincts, published in 1973 The New Left and the Origins of the Cold War, in which he demonstrated that the deans of revisionism have constructed their cosmology mainly by sleight of hand and the operations of a highly selective imagination. Yet, here is a volume of great heft, published in this year 1974, that is composed as though Maddox had never written and academicians not been diverted in the last couple of years by the distractions of more recent atrocities than the cold war—as, for example, the persecution of the Soviet Jews.