EMINENT AMERICANS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 932, 21 June 1957, Page 12

EMINENT AMERICANS

THROUGH THESE MEN, by John Mason +f yee Hamish Hamilton, -English price N this book of biographical notes and character sketches, an eminent American dramatic critic turns from the Broadway stage to the Washington arena. He has selected "these men" as outstanding examples, in their respective fields, of America’s policy makers and opinion moulders. They include Eisenhower, Stevenson, Henry Cabot Lodge, Supreme Court Justice Frankfurter, Walter Lippmann and J. Robert Oppenheimer. The date of publication in America, early last year, was obviously timed to catch the rising tide of interest in the November Presidential election. In a way, this is a pity, because a good deal of the section devoted to the 1952 Party Conventions and campaigning is now as out of date as the commentaries on the 1952 Olympic Games. But although ‘Stevenson has retired to his Chicago law office, Ike is still very much with us, and readers will find in the outline

of his_development as a political figure, a clear parallel with the growth of American policy during the last four years. Similarly, the career of Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., Chief United States Delegate to the United Nations, reflects with startling clarity the revolution in American foreign policy from _ stubbornly defended isolation to dynamic participation in external affairs. The names of Walter Lippmann and Felix Frankfurter are less well known to the New Zealand public. Yet each of these almost institutional figures-the "phil-osopher-journalist" and the judicial radical-represents a vital current in the turbulent stream of American thought and behaviour. Through These Men is sprinkled with apt quotations and spiced with the quizzical wit characteristic of the Saturday Review of Literature, with which the author has been associated for many years. The fault, if any, lies in its scrupulous impartiality. It lacks bite. One cannot escape the feeling that, for all his interest in the larger drama, Mr Brown has never really left his comfortable seat on the aisle. Only towards the end of the book, when he deals with the tragic Oppenheimer affair, does he permit his detached liberalism to spill over into outraged partisanship. And only then, for me, did his characters actually

come to i1fe,

Henry

Walter