[In the following review, Radosh finds Trilling's interpretations of events in the 1960s in We Must March My Darlings shallow and simplistic.]

Our cultural history continues to be packaged by decades. This season has already brought us Morris Dickstein's sympathetic treatment of the 1960s' culture in Gates of Eden; and now we have a very different assessment of that decade from Diana Trilling, whose political and cultural vision developed in the 1930s, framed by the Spanish Civil War on one hand, and the betrayal of the Socialist dream in the Moscow purge trials of the 1930s on the other.

Although Mrs. Trilling's volume We Must March My Darlings is essentially a collection of previously published responses to the decade, with some significant additions and updating, she still manages to address herself to the right questions, and is often a good enough polemicist to make us attend to even her weakest arguments. But on her own terms—her claim that “I did my best to look beneath the appearance of things, especially the things which announce themselves as virtues”—she fails to convince.

On one level, Mrs. Trilling's work is about the relation between culture and politics. The opening selections focus on two figures from the 1960s—John F. Kennedy and Timothy Leary. The juxtaposition is as striking as its rationale is cheap. The Kennedy piece is a mawkish, uncritical paean to the former President, almost embarrassing in its naivet‚. Mrs. Trilling adores Kennedy, since she sees him as a “President who satisfied the desire of intellectuals for a government approximate to their own vision.” To Mrs. Trilling, there are no conservative intellectuals, radical intellectuals, or liberal intellectuals. There are simply intellectuals, a group evidently forming a class-in-themselves; “us.” These people hold in trust the values of a culture, and they insure its continuity through history. John F. Kennedy is therefore praised as a President who “believes in history and in the continuity between past and future,” enough so that even the skeptical young believed in him.

Timothy Leary, on the other hand, worked to destroy the young's belief in the social order. Leary was a foolish and peripheral figure in the 1960s, and although Mrs. Trilling's dissection of him is incisive, her indictment of a whole movement in the name of this one marginal individual is ignorant if it is not dishonest. She attacks with some reason the often spurious and phony radicalism of the counterculture, and she warns of the need “to resist the seduction of rebelliousness for its own youthful sake.” But despite these points, Leary remains the all too narrow launching pad from which her attack on the 1960s takes off. To her credit, Mrs. Trilling is content to be an intellectual, a book person. But having no direct or extensive experience of the 1960s quite ironically makes her prey to clichés from the media: she contrasts her own generation's dedication to revolution that “had been social and political” with a ludicrous view of the 1960s “revolutionaries” who were content to take an acid trip and then believe they had caught a glimpse of the future—the same old media cartoon.

With much justification she asks, “How can any enlightened person of whatever age take this psychedelic leader with intellectual seriousness and assent in an ideology so barren of ideas?” Are his followers, she inquires, “the best, the brightest, of their generation”? But she does not detect the irony in her words. The best and brightest of her own generation had taken America down the path of both the imperial Presidency and the liberals' war in Vietnam. Yet her own political commentary contains only praise for official liberalism (or at best lukewarm criticism), always combined with sermons upon the sins of the Left. “I have joined no marches or demonstrations,” she tells Robert Lowell. And the very title of her book, taken from a stanza of a Whitman poem, is meant ironically: she will not become involved in a “united front with anti-Americanism,” by which she means that anyone who speaks against American atrocities in Vietnam speaks in the spirit of anti-Americanism. Proud of being a rationalist, as she calls herself, one wonders what sort of American atrocity it would take to shake her from this most irrational knee-jerk patriotism.

To Mrs. Trilling, the war was merely stupid and wrong, but loose talk about American imperialism was simply that, loose talk, mere rhetoric. The war was a mistake—its escalation an error, but, she clarifies, “not its inception.” As Christopher Lasch points out, Vietnam was a war waged by the Kennedy liberalism she admires, and so one could not expect her views to be any more critical than they are: “The war is more than a general expression of American culture,” Lasch writes; “it is also the particular expression of a particular class which has for too long played the dominant role in our affairs … it was a liberal war, the culmination of twenty years of cold war carried out under liberal auspices and reflecting the traditions of a ruling class supposedly enlightened, mature, and superior to the grosser strains in American life.”

Mrs. Trilling speaks for those who carried out that war, and on behalf of the myth which sees the official repositories of our culture as more enlightened than they really are. At the same time she would have us believe that the Left is and was composed of the historically and culturally benighted. As usual a sliver of experience suffices to bolster this view: upon returning to Radcliffe in the spring of 1971, she makes much of finding that “the nonhistorians, many of them staunchly left wing in their politics … gave sign of almost total ignorance of the historical background and source of their beliefs.” Virtually none of the students she asked could answer her questions about the Spanish Civil War—the turning point for her own generation. Mrs. Trilling may have a point, yet her own sense of history seems to have stopped with the discovery of the horrors of Stalinism. The following passage strikes me as so remarkable that it must be quoted in full:

… the makers and recorders of the history of recent decades prefer not to recall that our “enlightened” acquiescence in Stalinism carried well into the White House, to the point … when the war ended, despite America's overwhelming military ascendancy, [Franklin D. Roosevelt] trusted Stalin's assurances at Yalta and yielded to the Soviet Union what should never have been countenanced: millions upon millions of Poles, Hungarians, Rumanians, Bulgarians, and ultimately Czechs and Germans too, were permitted to come under the domination of a brute alien force. … The Soviet empire was doubled in size … had our opinion-forming class not for so many years blindly played the Soviet Union's game Russia would not only not have achieved her present strength in Europe; she might not have been able to back North Vietnam as she did and there would have been no Vietnam War for us to become engaged in unwisely as we did.

Her historical ignorance here is no less embarrassing than that of the students she found at Radcliffe. She reduces the complexities of Yalta to the Republican right wing's canard about “Twenty Years of Treason” and buys other shopworn and long-discredited notions as well: does she really attribute the long Vietnamese nationalist movement's perseverance to the Soviet Union? Can she even acknowledge the crucial time when the United States made the decision to support French colonialism in Indochina? Or is the French colonial rule over Vietnam just another clich‚ of the Stalinist Left? She misreads the goals and policies of the wartime policy makers, greatly inflates the power and importance of the pro-Communist Left, and does not understand the history of Vietnam. If contemporary Radcliffe students were to obtain their standards on historical accuracy from Mrs. Trilling, one would expect to find them mouthing slogans in ignorance of facts.

Which brings us to the much noted Hellman/Trilling controversy. Mrs. Trilling was right about the nature of Stalinism, and Miss Hellman and others of her generation were wrong. But an understanding of Stalinism does not assure equal wisdom when it comes to understanding American repression. Indeed, Mrs. Trilling asserts that “liberal anti-communism was not, and still is not, the recommended path to professional success.” One wishes she would direct this to the scores of entrenched liberal anti-Communists whose access to power and privilege has remained constant. It was not, after all, the “anti-anti-Communists” (non-Communist radicals) whom John F. Kennedy invited to dinner at the White House. After some rough going at the hands of blacks, students and other powerless groups in the late 1960s, Mrs. Trilling and her sort are more firmly in fashion than ever. These essays and others like them now fill many of our periodicals and are the bitter fruits of her generation's temporary discomfort at the hands of the “young barbarians.”

For Mrs. Trilling Stalinism remains the enemy—a hydra-headed creature as much a threat in the New Left as it was in the old—even when contemporary experience tells us otherwise. In the updated version of her contribution to the 1967 Commentary symposium “Liberal Anti-Communism Revisited,” Mrs. Trilling repeats what is by now a familiar litany: her generation saw no contradiction “in having been opposed to both communism and McCarthyism.” What Mrs. Trilling actually stood for and apparently still does is what I'd call anti-Stalinist McCarthyism. The responsibility for McCarthyism is laid at the door of left-wing intellectuals who refused to realize the truth about Stalinism—a highly dubious and irresponsible reading of history, but one which nicely serves Mrs. Trilling's conviction that the accouterments of the McCarthy era witch hunt were not without merit. She describes HUAC as “a duly constituted Congressional committee” whose investigations did not reveal that “whoever it put under scrutiny was thereby certified to be innocent.” Mrs. Trilling does not let us know—perhaps she would prefer to forget—that she supported the McCarran Committee's harassment of Owen Lattimore. She acknowledged at the time that he was neither a spy nor a Communist, simply an “independent” thinker whose ideas rationalized Soviet foreign policy. The danger, she then wrote, was not from McCarthy but from Left intellectuals who sought to rally the public around the issue of civil liberties.

By Mrs. Trilling's logic, to assume that McCarthy's victims were innocent was to become an apologist for Stalinism. Indeed, she once argued that since ideas “might lead to acts,” they should be treated as such, making prosecution for dangerous ideas a permissible method of protection against Communist subversion. Down the line, Mrs. Trilling argued during the McCarthy era that McCarthy's victims brought their persecution on themselves: “Had Dr. Oppenheimer not once been sympathetic to communism, there would have been no Oppenheimer case.”

A truly critical intellectual might have begun a reassessment by reviewing her own prior nonsense. That Mrs. Trilling seeks to repeat her old arguments with updated versions of them is indeed sad. The refrain she used for Oppenheimer is repeated in essay after essay. She reminds those on the Columbia faculty who condemned police lawlessness in the demonstrations of 1968 that “were it not for student lawlessness the law would never have been called to the campus.” More of the same: Eugene McCarthy made a mistake in condemning Mayor Daley and the Chicago police after the 1968 Chicago police riot, since he “failed to name the provocateurs of violence [the New Left] who had deliberately invited retaliation.” In all cases, the victims are responsible for their own victimization.

As a cultural commentator Diana Trilling is so polarized that her thinking lacks all resilience. She undermines her own best arguments. Certainly, New Left radicals incorrectly read the university as a microcosm of capitalist society. While leaving the social order intact, some of them moved to destroy the very base that served as their sanctuary. Mrs. Trilling realizes that the would-be revolutionary's claim that “all universities are representative of their societies” is fallacious. Yet her anger is reserved for the student rebels alone, not for the society whose anger they mimicked and whose irrationality they often aped. She complains that the “existential” revolution was “subverting the intelligence and self-interest of our better-educated” classes, and she is incensed at the “literary-intellectual fellow travelers of the revolutionary young,” apostates from her own group of once liberal anti-Communists. Never does her anger extend to the ideology or policies of the Kennedy or Johnson administrations. Mrs. Trilling, like the cultural revolutionaries she despises, also rejects theory and politics—in favor of the status quo. To condemn the false counterculture while approving the culture of the society at large is basically to vitiate whatever valid criticisms she has of the self-proclaimed revolutionaries and to demonstrate the bankruptcy of her liberalism. Unlike critics such as Peter Clecak or Christopher Lasch who write, as Lasch says, “to construct an ad hoc defense of liberal culture … that would still be distinguishable from a defense of liberalism as a political ideology,” Mrs. Trilling writes in defense of a bankrupt ideology as if it is indistinguishable from liberal culture.