[In the following review of Postwar America: 1945-1971, Michelson praises Zinn's critique of liberalism, but ultimately finds his account of postwar politics a romanticized version of events.]

If it is true, as one wit said, that a liberal is a radical with a wife and two kids, then that tells us a whole lot about the millstone around the neck of American radicalism. Picture the liberal of the last few weeks. He gets home from his ＄20,000 a year job, kisses his wife, plays ball for 10 minutes with his kids, eats dinner, and then tunes in the PBS “gavel to gavel” rebroadcast of the daily Watergate circus. Somewhat condescendingly and a little self-righteous, he watches Stans, Magruder, Dean & Co. with a faint but distinctive flutter of hope. Maybe, he thinks as he sits and sips his middling good scotch, maybe they will, maybe they can get Him. His fantasies soar: indictment? impeachment? resignation? News flash: Cambodian compromise; the President promises to abide by the Constitution, in 45 days. Thump, back down: a pack of thieves. He sits. He watches. Maybe he writes his congressman. He hopes.

What does he hope for, this right-minded man with a wife, two kids and a mortgage? Does he hope for a society of just and equitable distribution of wealth, for a society where men's minds are not stooped to the grindstone of wage intimidation, for a society where their health needs are guaranteed, for a society free from the manipulation of corporate legerdemain? No, his feet are too much on the ground for such dreams. He merely hopes the thieves will be caught. Less than that even: he hopes that a symbolic thief will be caught. For though he knows that the mechanics of his society demand thievery to ensure both personal “success” and social “progress,” he is not so utopian as to think of changing the machinery. His aspiration is for a scapegoat.

That mythical beast is not dead yet. And didn't the President, a pure product of America, somewhat unwittingly call the shot in his April 30th speech when he told us that the Watergate investigation will prove the machinery liberal enough to reform itself? Heads I win, tails you lose. For whether Nixon wins or loses this most celebrated of his mock-epic “crises” will make no real difference to the corrupt operations of our national machinery. Let's allow ourselves for example a hallucinatory moment and suppose that Nixon and Agnew both resign, and a penitent nation then turns to George McGovern, who wins a landslide victory over William Buckley, Jr. in a special interim election. After he stops the bombing in Cambodia, what will he do? Will he dissolve the CIA? Will he nationalize or otherwise delimit the multinational and other corporations who continue to expand the American commercial and military “empire”? Will the economy be controlled? Will the nation's wealth be even a little more equally distributed among its citizens? Will he even be able to ensure all of them adequate medicine, housing and nutrition? No, all of that, whatever our self-serving rhetoric, is beyond the liberal dream. The American liberal these days dreams of ritual reform. Nixon is the liberal scapegoat not because he is corrupt, but because he is so arrogant and ineptly corrupt that he threatens to blow the mythic cover that enables the machine to operate smoothly.

Howard Zinn's recent book, Postwar America: 1945-1971, helps give us perspective on the melodrama of American liberalism, and in so doing gives us a sense also of the dilemma of American radicalism. Ostensibly a history, the book is really a political argument indicting the domestic and international power drift of an American liberalism in the service of capitalism. What Zinn does sharply is illustrate the great gap between the rhetorical and working creeds of liberalism, and how the United States has become the most effective of modern countries “in utilizing its rhetorical creed, in conjunction with its working creed, to sustain control over its own people and to extend control over other parts of the world.” That, sustaining and extending control, is for Zinn the principal motif of liberalism since 1945. Thus he expands the customary sense of liberalism to include the full mainstream spectrum of American politics.

For this he will be criticized, especially by liberals. All the Presidents from Roosevelt to Nixon fall within the liberal bounds by virtue of their hypocritical commitment to the rhetorical creed best represented by the language of the Declaration of Independence: “all Men are created equal … unalienable Rights … Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness … whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it. …” The working creed, of course, is different:

… all men are created equal, except foreigners with whom we are at war, blacks … Indians … inmates of prisons, members of the armed forces, and anyone without money; that what are most alienable are the lives of men sent off to war and the liberties of people helpless against authority; that whenever members of any group of people become destructive of this working creed, it is the right of the government to alter or abolish them by persecution or imprisonment.

And Zinn's main thesis is that American liberalism, as the agent of capitalist expansionism, has adroitly sustained an ambiguously disguised counter-point between these two creeds to cultivate the myth of the benevolent velvet glove within which operates the iron fist of profit, power and control.

Consider for example his fine exegesis of what we might call the Atom Bomb Allegory, how liberal America's use of “ultimate” power to end World War II was motivated not by military and humane necessity as our rhetorical creed proclaimed, but by the desire to establish American power and commercial interests in the process in Asia. The bomb was used not only to preclude Russia's entry into the Pacific war but also as an unequivocal show of power, an implicit threat to the rest of the world. On that authority America's “sphere of influence” began to infiltrate the globe. To what end? Empire. Zinn shrewdly notes for instance that “the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development was presumably established to help reconstruct war-destroyed areas; but in its own words one of its first objectives was to ‘promote private foreign investment’ all over the world.” Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt's chief adviser, said in 1944, “… it is highly important that business and government have an early meeting of minds as to general policy governing private investments abroad.” The rationale for which was succinctly summed up by the State Department's Herbert Feis, “The United States could not passively sanction … capital … for ends contrary to our major policies or interests … Capital is a form of power.” The language of profit, Zinn reveals, was paramount in the liberal vocabularies of not only top advisers but of Roosevelt himself (a State Department summary of Roosevelt's meeting with Ibn-Saud of Saudi Arabia after the Yalta conference cites him as saying, “that essentially, the President was a businessman … And that as a businessman he would be very much interested in Arabia”) and such principals of his administration as Hull, Forrestal, Wallace and Harriman. The atomic bomb, then, was used not so much as a “humanitarian” end to a vicious war, for which it was unnecessary, but as the beginning of the Cold War with Russia and to prepare the world for the United States to fill the economic vacuum left by the postwar demise of the British Empire.

The pattern of power, control and profit, backed by the moral interventionism of World War II and bolstered by liberal scorn for “isolationism,” became the working principle of American foreign policy. The 1947 intervention in Greece set the model and its subsequent success is by now an old and painful story, leading the United States into Korea, Guatemala, Lebanon, Cuba, the Dominican Republic and at last Vietnam. The Pax Americana, a peace, as Archibald MacLeish put it in the 1940s when he was assistant secretary of State, “a peace of oil, a peace of gold, a peace of shipping … a peace without moral purpose or human interest, a peace of dicker and trade … which will lead us where … dicker and trade have always led.” And it did. At home as well as abroad. The corporation vs. the people; capital is power, and power is the name of the game.

Zinn's valuable service in this book is his incisive analysis of history, showing how liberalism has served the interests of corporate capitalism under the rhetorical banner of preserving the “free world.” But for all the sharpness of its critique, the book suffers finally from political romanticism, the sort of wishful thinking that reveals the frustrating dilemma of American radicalism. In The Politics of History (1970) Zinn presented a theory of “radical history” in which he justified a “value-laden historiography” as a means of helping move the consciousness of the country toward at least some kind of revolutionary sense. I presume he intends Postwar America to be an essay in radical history, and insofar as it helps explode the myth of liberalism it has that tactical function. But when Zinn suggests that the counterculture, for example, or that antiwar protest is revolutionary, he embalms radical politics in liberal imagery:

It was on that Memorial Day weekend that several hundred veterans against the war camped out on the green at Lexington, Massachusetts, the cradle of the American revolution. They were joined by three hundred citizens, and then all were arrested for refusing to leave the green. After getting out of jail, the veterans went to Bunker Hill, spent the night, and held an antiwar rally on the Boston Common the next day. This defection from violence, from war, this rebellion against authority, this suspicion of government, this independence of spirit, came twenty-five years after the passive acceptance by American soldiers in 1945 of the dropping of the atomic bomb on the men, women, and children of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Something important was happening to the spirit and mind of many people in the United States.

Was a revolution—at least the first stirrings of one—taking place in postwar America? Many with a strong sense of history were dubious. …

And yet, there was something qualitatively different this time.

Bracketing American history with Bunker Hill makes for hopeful literature. It should; it's the old liberal fantasy machine, maybe the best the world has ever known. But it is wrong. Radically wrong. For it shows how much the language of radicalism and revolution has become the bauble of liberal fantasies, however “leftist” they may be.

Here for example is Zinn's conclusion: “… it was beginning to be recognized … that the special qualities of control possessed by the modern liberal system demanded a long revolutionary process … The process would have to be long enough, intense enough, to change the thinking of people … To work for the great ends of the Declaration of Independence … did not mean looking for some future day of fruition. It meant beginning immediately to make those ends real.” But consider the fate of such immediate beginnings as we have had. Bobby Seale, to take one highly signifying example, has turned to electoral politics as a Democrat, saying that he has gone “beyond” Black Panther strategies. The Panthers themselves, those who have not been murdered, imprisoned or exiled, seem to have turned their energies to internal squabbles. The SDS has folded. The Weathermen and their “Days of Rage” succeeded only in effecting the election of such reactionaries as Cook County Sheriff Richard Elrod. The bourgeois radicalism of Saul Alinsky proved itself empty of political content. The counterculture has either retreated to the bucolic life or cashed in on a new style. The “ending” of the Vietnam war has neutralized the radical potential of antiwar politics. When a revolutionary commune a few months ago accidentally blew itself up with its own arsenal in a New York brownstone, we were confronted with perhaps the most pathetic possible metaphor of radical masochism trying to cut loose from its liberal albatross.

The liberal maw takes in everything, including its own critics. It seduces the radical will. The dilemma of Zinn's book is therefore the dilemma of American radicalism as a whole. The radical is sick of the liberal fraud, but his means of opposition to it are so puny and have proved so ineffectual that watching Senator Ervin wave the liberal banner on television makes as much sense as doing anything else. And how easy it is to sit in an armchair and be fed our liberal lunch intravenously through the tube. To imagine, while filling in the dots, that one is actively participating in the continuing story of the revolution!