F. s. MEYER
America in Britain’s Place, by Lionel Gelber (Praeger, $5). “Damn you, England,” shrilled John Osborne, A.Y.M., recently. “You’re rotting now, and quite soon, you’ll disappear.” Don’t bet on it. This choppy but sensible study of Anglo-American coalition diplomacy, written from a Canadian’s middle ground, traces Britain’s neat trick of yielding place to the U.S., yet remaining up front in Western policy-making. Lapses there have been, notably the great divergence over Suez; Mr. Gelber argues plausibly that Washington would have done better to follow Whitehall against Nasser than to team up with the Kremlin against its “colonialist” allies. And he coins a delightful phrase to describe UN meddling—”moral imperialism.” But Britain, for the most part, has had little difficulty making its influence felt on U.S. policy; the sticky part is deciding what U.S. policy is. While saying some predictably solemn things about McCarthyism, Mr. Gelber also asks a number of shrewd questions about the way policy is made and stated on these shores. Who speaks for America? What with Adlai, Bobby, Chet, Arthur and Dean on the wicket all at once, it’s the sort of question to trouble orderly minds bent on self-preservation. r. whalen
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