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from: Ted Widmer

Halberstam: A Windbag With Periodic Clarity

Posted Thursday, Sept. 6, 2001, at 4:28 PM ET

Dear Sarah,

As usual, all your points are bull's-eyes. I was so busy being a foreign policy geek that I forgot to make stylistic comments, but I noticed the same problems throughout the book. For an important writer, Halberstam is--how to put it delicately?--a windbag. Of course, most of the book is fine, but every now and then he goes into a stream of consciousness monologue that combines the brevity of Henry James with the vivacity of a quarterly report of the Brookings Institution. And there are more than a few malapropisms. It's almost as if he read this into a tape recorder, but forgot to go back and turn it into good writing. When his conversational style works, it works nicely, but there are moments you just have to circle a passage and wonder what he was thinking.

I really enjoyed your examples of clunkers. Then I had to add a few of my own.

10--George Bush has little "flare" for the dramatic (bell-bottoms reference?).

15--"The bright and angry young Republican conservatives in the House, led by Newt Gingrich, had broken with him on that issue, and he had got the tax increase through Congress largely with support from the Democrats. But it would become a not-insignificant wound."

16--"If not everyone loves a sword, then everyone on the winning side loves a swift sword."

160--"The first generation of high-ranking, high-visibility television journalists had made their bones as foreign correspondents." (Huh?)

246--"He [Les Aspin] was replaced in late 1993, after the catastrophic events in Somalia, and a year and a half later, in May 1995, much mourned by a wide variety of people who had enjoyed his friendship, his intellect, and his service to his country, he died of a stroke."

I can't even write out that last one without my computer redlining it. And how many people really "enjoyed" Les Aspin's service to his country?

But now I'm starting to feel bad. I mean badly. I've certainly written a few lousy sentences in my life, which began long ago, and has been filled with great friendships, wide varieties of people, occasional service to my country, not-insignificant wounds, and catastrophic events in Somalia.

I wonder if now it's time to tip the pendulum of criticism back toward where we started. I mean, this book is really quite decent in many ways. Better than quite decent--it tackles enormously complicated foreign policy issues across two administrations and makes them seem comprehensible, even compelling at times. The portraits of Pentagon players are consistently great, and I learned a lot from them. Halberstam is very good at penetrating the culture of large bureaucracies, and I think he also has it right when he explains the tensions between the different floors of the State Department; between White House/NSC and Pentagon, between old guard military leaders and young Turks like Wes Clark, or between the service branches. I'm grateful to have read a good portrait of a guy like John Shalikashvili, who might never have had a book mention him otherwise and who deserves credit for making some things go right in the mid-'90s.

In your first posting, Sarah, you made an important point when you said that reading Halberstam is a lot better than reading the dry-as-dust policy statements routinely issued by foreign policy think tanks and government agencies. Even at his most garrulous, Halberstam is vastly better than that. There is so much unreadable verbiage relating to our military and foreign policy--it's part of a code language designed to keep this information the province of pasty middle-aged men. So I'm all in favor of journalists breaking it down and explaining it to a wide audience.

The more I think about it, the more I like something that at first disconcerted me. It's impressive that he wrote the story of problems connecting George Bush's and Bill Clinton's administrations rather than dividing them. His approach shows not only how big a small regional crisis can be but argues for the unending continuity of foreign policy, regardless of political and personal distinctions. Though he mentions George W. Bush in the final few pages, I wish he had gone on more because it would have shown how the wheel has turned back to the people the book began with (Cheney, Rumsfeld, and all the brilliant strategists who ignored Bosnia then and want to ignore it again today). With more nerve, he might have offered an important critique of Condoleezza Rice, who has shown little backbone where it matters (the Balkans) and too much where it does not (outer space).

To end on a satisfying middling note, I think this book has some important insights about how our flawed democratic system organizes its foreign policy, but it needed the machete-wielding guerrilla-editor you called for last time. Let's face it, as writers get older and more established, they get complacent. I pray that will never happen to me. Fortunately, the person I hired to ghost-write this review for me is completely trustworthy.

Best,
Ted

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from: Ted Widmer

Halberstam: A Windbag With Periodic Clarity

Posted Thursday, Sept. 6, 2001, at 4:28 PM ET
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War in a Time of Peace, by David HalberstamThis week, Slate's Book Clubbers tackle War in a Time of Peace, David Halberstam's examination of America's post-Vietnam military actions. Click here for an explanation of our format and here to buy the book.
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Reader Comments From The Fray:



 [Notes from the Fray Editor: Both posts below are part of an interesting, and continuing, thread.]


 The only reason Vietnam has cast a shadow over all other 'engagements' since then is that the war in Southeast Asia was so poorly managed and executed by the Yale and Harvard grads who occupied Washington during that time. We should never confuse war with politics ever again lest this country wants another civil war. If America finds herself at the brink of war ever again, it's all the way or nothing, there is no "in between."

I'm just afraid that Washington is still populated by Yale and Harvard grads, who have been coddled and supported by their own parents for so long, that their only motivation is power and prestige, whose perspective has been warped by wealth and privilege, and who really no nothing about sacrifice and courage.

--Forward Observer

(To reply, click here.)


 I was there, too, FO. I don't draw the same conclusions as you do.

Warfare goes through ages and stages. Vietnam was the last of the era of wars that started with the American Civil War. They were characterized by heavy industry technology and civilian conscription. They tended to be ideological wars, because ideology and propaganda are how you motivate populations to sacrifice. Because of this characteristic, they tended also to become total wars, i.e., virtually all weapons and tactics available were employed and the distinction between military and civilians was blurred or ignored.

In our lifetimes a new type of warfare has emerged. Not just new technologically, but psychological and politically as well. Its levels of violence are relatively lower than in the old mass-levy wars, but its violence can be in certain ways more shocking because it is inflicted suddenly while an illusion of peace is still preserved, and can end just as suddenly. The violence of this style of warfare is, in theory at least, much more precisely calibrated to make political statements.

I was initially skeptical of this type of war, but it has grown and developed and is being employed or prepared for by a number of countries besides the U.S. Israel is an obvious example; but the Palestinians are also a less obvious one. They can't employ Israel's high technology, but they have found a fairly effective low-tech substitute: the suicide bomber, the ultimate smart bomb. The suicide bomber is, obviously, a political statement. If the Palestinians ever get what they want (and exactly what they want remains elusive to me), it will not be because they killed more Israelis, but because they mastered the military grammar of their particular conflict.

--Yukon

(To reply, click here.)

 (9/5)

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