Reinhold Niebuhr; Candor in the Corridors of Power

Karl Paul Reinhold Niebuhr was an American theologian, ethicist, commentator on politics and public affairs, and professor at Union Theological Seminary for more than 30 years. Wikipedia

Born: June 21, 1892, Wright City, Missouri, United States

Died: June 1, 1971, Stockbridge, Massachusetts, United States

Spouse: Ursula Niebuhr (m. 1931)

Siblings: H. Richard Niebuhr

Quotes

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.

Forgiveness is the final form of love.

Irony can turn into tragedy, and Reinhold Niebuhr addressed that possibility in the last sentence of The Irony of American History: ‘If we should perish, the ruthlessness of the foe would be only the secondary cause of the disaster. The primary cause would be that the strength of a giant nation was directed by eyes too blind to see all the hazards of the struggle; and the blindness would be induced not by some accident of nature or history but by hatred and vainglory.’

翻譯年糕

David Bromwich: Self-Deceptions of Empire

‘Nations,’ wrote Niebuhr, ‘will always find it more difficult than individuals to behold the beam that is in their own eye while they observe the mote that is in their brother’s eye; and individuals find it difficult enough.’

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JOURNALS 1952-2000 by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. 書介

分類：book review

2007/11/18 15:00

Books of The Times

Candor in the Corridors of Power

By JANET MASLIN

Published: October 1, 2007

In 1962 the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. was able to comment with equal assurance on both of the Monroes within his orbit: Marilyn (as in “Happy Birthday, Mr. President”) and James (as in Monroe Doctrine). What’s more, he made these unrelated remarks closely enough in time for them to appear on the same page of the 894-page new volume of his journals.

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Inger Elliot/Penguin Press

Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

JOURNALS

1952-2000

By Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.
894 pp. Penguin Press. $40.

This arch, irresistibly revealing book manages to be both showstopping and doorstopping, what with its vast range of subject matter and unfettered private sniping. Mr. Schlesinger, who died on Feb. 28, appears to have spent almost five decades patiently squirreling away aphorisms, aperçus and other people’s back-channel conversations, confident that one day he would have a posthumous bombshell to his credit.
Although “Journals: 1952-2000” has been greatly and speedily pared down by his sons Andrew and Stephen Schlesinger, who took on this project less than a year ago and have cut the material to one-sixth of its original length, its ambitions seem clear. The author, who could be described as either a treasured historian or “the power-loving stablemate of statesmen” (his own sardonic phrase), did not intend this as a profound, analytical work or a deeply personal one.
Instead, candor and spontaneity are its highest priorities, even at the expense of consistency. Thus these journals place the author’s second wedding and the release of the Pentagon Papers on the same footing. They are lumped together, in the language of an overscheduled but determined diarist, as “two events of more than routine importance in recent weeks.”
The tone of the journals is sharply incisive, frequently scathing and unburdened by any need to emphasize moral balance. Mr. Schlesinger could sound equally moved by the Kennedy administration’s disastrous policy decisions and its glittering social spirit. On April 18, 1961, he recorded both these items: “I cannot banish from my mind the picture of these brave men, pathetically underequipped, dying on Cuban beaches before Soviet tanks” and “J.F.K. was in superb form at lunch.”
But at the expense of such deplorable juxtapositions, this book skitters freely through a huge variety of memorable topics. And the compression may be more a consequence of editing than of Mr. Schlesinger’s haste. In any case, “Journals: 1952-2000” presents the bird’s-eye view of a prescient Washington insider, busy gadfly and bon-mot artist extraordinaire. The Ford-Carter presidential election, he writes, sounds like the work of Sinclair Lewis: “Babbitt vs. Elmer Gantry.” The names of the Nixon courtiers Elmer Bobst, Jack Drown and Bebe Rebozo make him mindful of Evelyn Waugh. When carried away with flattery, Mr. Schlesinger could overplay his verbal skills to the point of rebutting claims of Al Gore’s woodenness this way: “They mean that he is as graceful as a willow, as handsome as a birch tree and as sturdy as an oak.”
The threads of friendship and enmity running through this book are long ones. They lend a novelistic sense of character to Mr. Schlesinger’s most enduring connections. His recollections of Henry Kissinger date back to 1960 and describe the wary but unbreakable link between two master manipulators. “I like Henry very much and respect him, though I cannot rid myself of the fear that he says one sort of thing to me and another sort of thing to, say, Bill Buckley,” he writes in 1969. Still, Mr. Schlesinger becomes (at least by his account) the confidant to whom Mr. Kissinger could confess all manner of scathing thoughts about presidents.
Mr. Kissinger on Nixon: “He really can’t remember whether he has read something in a newspaper or in an intelligence report.” Mr. Kissinger on Reagan: “He is the only president with whom I would rather have someone else in the room when I see him. If you talk to him alone, you can be sure that nothing will ever happen.” And on Dan Quayle: that Mr. Quayle is intelligent and underrated. “I take this to mean two things,” Mr. Schlesinger comments: “that Quayle listens reverently to Henry and that Henry thinks Quayle may be president some day.”
“Journals: 1952-2000” is comparably sharp on tensions between Adlai Stevenson and John F. Kennedy loyalists (Mr. Schlesinger, at his slipperiest, managed to be both); Lyndon B. Johnson’s legacy (in 1969 Mr. Schlesinger has “a horrible fear that five years from now he will be one of the most beloved men in America”); student radicals (Mr. Schlesinger has “the suspicion that 20 years from now most of the people in the room will be quiet insurance brokers or real estate men”) ; the Nixon-Humphrey election (“this is really the battle of the minnows”); Jimmy Carter (“smiling like a complacent basilisk”); and the composition of the Clinton cabinet. “Have you considered a sex change?” he says the new vice president, Al Gore, asked him, after telling Mr. Schlesinger, who had his own muted political ambitions, that Madeleine K. Albright had been appointed as ambassador to the United Nations.
In these recollections, Mr. Schlesinger described such a far-reaching circle of acquaintance that it ranged from Reinhold Niebuhr to Mick Jagger, from Gina Lollobrigida to the children of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. (These children are variously described as “handsome and haggard,” “that wreck of a man of talent and potentiality,” “that charming cipher,” “a meaningless, aging man” and “a hopeless slob.”) Although Mr. Schlesinger can be scorching (of President Bill Clinton’s fund-raising methods in 1996 he writes, “this may have been legal, but it is aesthetically displeasing and historically disgusting”), his language more often affects Jane Austen’s sunny politesse. “Amiable” and “agreeable” are among his favorite modifiers; almost any host is found to be “in excellent form.” In trying to codify the groovy neologisms of hippies (“‘put on,’ meaning to kid”) he takes on an even more antiquated tone.
The lively, confiding voice of these journals is also dutiful, conscientious, ever aware of history, eager to record after-dinner conversations for posterity’s sake. There are times, as when the Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner says, in 1975, that recession “greatly contracts one’s scope for frivolity,” that Mr. Schlesinger seems to do something of which he accuses Ben Bradlee’s profanity-laced memoirs of John F. Kennedy: putting his own language into others’ mouths. But by and large, steadily allotting about 18 pages a year (1999 is unaccountably missing), this book creates a moving and monumental 48-year chronicle. And Mr. Schlesinger, who would have turned 90 on Oct. 15, was still throwing off sparks when, in 1998 during a preliminary hearing on the prospect of a Clinton impeachment, he told a subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee that “Gentlemen always lie about their sex lives.” He was pilloried for this and accused of flippancy.
“I have not enjoyed such a fusillade for a third of a century,” he noted happily. “It makes me feel young again.”


為你查字典
━━ n. 通廊, 廊下, （狭い）ルート; 限定された空路［ルート］; 回廊（地帯） (the Polish ～).
corridors of power　〔英〕 （the ～） 権力の回廊 ((重要な政治決定をするグループ)).

pol・i・tesse

［n. （形式的な）礼儀正しさ.

fusillade Show phonetics
noun [C]
a large number of bullets fired at the same time or one after another very quickly:
a fusillade of automatic fire
FORMAL FIGURATIVE A fusillade (= sudden large amount) of questions greeted the president at this afternoon's press conference.