“Let’s Go Witch-Hunter Hunting” .

The Price of Power (University of Chicago Press, $3.50) is a cavalier treatment by Herbert Agar of the last twelve years in America. By reason of large print, a chronology of the period it skims, bibliography and index, it just barely attains two hundred pages and status as a volume in the Chicago History of American Civilization series. The editor of the series feels obliged to admit that this type of writing is not what we ordinarily term history, but he finds comfort in the fact that “for readers of a later day this volume will be itself a historical document”—a thing true of our telephone books.

The book attempts a “Greek chorus” approach to “the drama of our age,” lyric, citing famous poets, lamenting witch hunts, and praising the heroes—Truman or Oppenheimer, Acheson or Eisenhower—with phrases culled from their own perorations. This “seercraft” of history is very popular among Liberals, but it normally takes the form of a sophisticated, Freudian analysis of the complexes that led to McCarthy, the Oedipus-isolationism that makes the Midwest fear Father Europe. Agar’s reading of motives is, like his rhetoric, more homespun, woven of the Truman cloth.

GW

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Garry Wills

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The Price of Power (University of Chicago Press, $3.50) is a cavalier treatment by Herbert Agar of the last twelve years in America. By reason of large print, a chronology of the period it skims, bibliography and index, it just barely attains two hundred pages and status as a volume in the Chicago History of American Civilization series. The editor of the series feels obliged to admit that this type of writing is not what we ordinarily term history, but he finds comfort in the fact that “for readers of a later day this volume will be itself a historical document”—a thing true of our telephone books.

The book attempts a “Greek chorus” approach to “the drama of our age,” lyric, citing famous poets, lamenting witch hunts, and praising the heroes—Truman or Oppenheimer, Acheson or Eisenhower—with phrases culled from their own perorations. This “seercraft” of history is very popular among Liberals, but it normally takes the form of a sophisticated, Freudian analysis of the complexes that led to McCarthy, the Oedipus-isolationism that makes the Midwest fear Father Europe. Agar’s reading of motives is, like his rhetoric, more homespun, woven of the Truman cloth.