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“Allies: The U.S., Britain, Europe, and the War in Iraq” by William Shawcross (PublicAffairs, 272 pages, $20.00) came out in February, before Abu Ghraib and what appears to be a bogged-down phase of the Iraq campaign, but it’s well worth reading if you want to understand the unlikely partnership between President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Veteran British journalist and author Shawcross argues that the invasion of Iraq and the toppling of Saddam Hussein was the right thing to do, putting him at odds with many of his anti-war—and dare I say it—anti-U.S. colleagues.

Shawcross is no cheerleader for everything the U.S. does; on the contrary, his “Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon, and the Destruction of Cambodia” famously attacked American policy in Cambodia during the 1970s, leading to the genocide of Pol Pot. He’s also written books on the peace-keeping failures of the 1990s, media magnate Rupert Murdoch and the Shah of Iran. “Allies” is an important book that is worth reading by those who favored the war and those who opposed it.

In “Allies,” Shawcross reminds us that Bush and Blair are both deeply religious, committed Christians, something that sets them apart from virtually all the world’s leaders, including Bush’s father. In this respect, the two are much like Woodrow Wilson – who also took the U.S. into a war that was widely opposed and, after the war, in 1919, ordered a U.S. expeditionary force to attempt to crush the Russian Revolution at birth – led them to conclude that 2003 was the right year to finally rid the world of Saddam.

As in every war, errors were made, Shawcross says; in Iraq the biggest may have been not closing the borders with Syria and Iran to prevent Arab “terrorists” (Shawcross’s word) from coming into Iraq and fueling the insurgency. The author also discusses the influence of the so-called neoconservatives or “neocons,” on Bush. He concludes that there was no plot to take over the mind of the “cowboy President” – that Bush became a nation builder by the impact of 9/11 rather than some dastardly plot by neocons to advance the cause of Israel, as many anti-Semitic commentators on both sides of the Atlantic have charged.

“The Nuremberg Interviews” by Dr. Leon Goldensohn, edited and with an introduction by Robert Gellately (Knopf, 528 pages, illustrated, $35.00) consists of interviews of 33 Nuremberg War Crimes defendants and “witnesses” by a U.S. Army physician and psychiatrist and is a major contribution to World War II and war crimes historiography. Gellately, a professor of history at Florida State University, is a specialist on the Nazi era, so he provides the proper context for the interviews conducted in 1946 by Major Goldensohn (1911-1961).

The overall impression I gained from reading these interviews confirms the ideas explored in both Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil” assessment (in her book “Eichmann in Jerusalem”) and Daniel J. Goldhagen’s “Hitler’s Willing Executioners.”

With the exception of ideologues like Alfred Rosenberg and Julius Streicher, most of the Nuremberg defendants come across as careerists and bureaucrats. Prime among them, in my view, is Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect and head of the German slave-labor effort after the death in 1942 of Fritz Todt. Virtually alone among the 19 defendants and 14 “witnesses” interviewed by Goldensohn, Speer in one of the briefest interviews admits his guilt, saying the Hitler regime was “criminal.” After his release from Spandau Prison in 1966, Speer would modify this assessment.

If I had to pick out one outstanding interview, it would be the one with Joachim von Ribbentrop, the German foreign minister who signed the pact with Molotov in August 1939 that gave Germany time to start the war, partition Poland and prepare for the war against the Soviet Union in June 1941. But it’s difficult to single out an outstanding interview in this brilliantly edited collection; they all contribute to a picture that reveals the just-under-the-surface dark side of so-called civilization.

In the wake of continuing war crimes and tribunals being conducted almost continuously at The Hague, this previously unavailable collection of interviews gives us a window into the minds of people who become willing executioners, all the while denying their culpability.

“Villages” by John Updike (Knopf, 336 pages, $25.00) is the author’s reminder to famously self-obsessed baby-boomers that they didn’t invent sex, drugs or even rock ’n’ roll. Computer pioneer Owen Mackenzie is in his 70s now—like Updike, born in a small town in Pennsylvania in 1932—and is reflecting on his life in comfortable retirement in Haskells Crossing, Conn.

Mostly he’s thinking about the women he’s known – in the Biblical sense and otherwise — desperate housewives who see sexual potential that their husbands lack in the married-with-children computer geek . Almost without exception, the sexual advances initiated by women in Updike’s 21st novel confirm what Kinsey reported: Most women like a roll in the hay as much as men do.

Updike fans will compare “Villages” with his 1968 novel of suburban sex, “Couples.” There are many resemblances, with much of the horizontal activity in both novels taking place during the birth control pill, pre-AIDS era, when everybody thought any problem could be handled with a pill or an injection.

The “villages” in the title reference Owen’s hometown of Willow, Pa., an adjunct to a bigger city, much as Updike’s hometown of Shillington, Pa., is a suburb of Reading. When Owen and his best friend Ed Mervine leave comfortable jobs at IBM in Manhattan to start a computer software company almost two decades before the first personal computer, they settle on an old gun factory in the village of Middle Falls, Conn.

The name is an apt coinage, since it represents the middle of Owen’s life and shows how he falls from a state of marital grace. Finally, there’s the village of Haskells Crossing, where he lives with his second wife, Julia.

Owen attends MIT on a scholarship, majoring in electrical engineering at the behest of his father who believed that engineers are never unemployed. At the prestigious school on the banks of the Charles River he meets Phyllis Goodhue, who will become his first wife. She’s a rare species at male-dominated MIT, a very attractive woman—one of less than 200 on the 6,000-student campus in the 1950s.

The publisher bills “Villages” as a bildungsroman, a German word meaning education novel. Owen certainly gets educated in every sense of the word as he progresses through his several villages from adolescence to his retirement. It’s a good, solid Updike novel.

“The Power Game” by Joseph S. Nye Jr. (PublicAffairs, 256 pages, $25.00) is a bildungsroman of a different sort. It may even be a roman a clef, to use a word from France. Nye, a former dean of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and a sub-cabinet officer in the Clinton Administration, tells the story of Peter Cutler, a preacher’s son from Maine who meets five people at Princeton University who will change his life.

His first love is Alexa Byrnes, as much of a cool blonde beauty as Updike’s Phyllis Goodhue. She’s intent on carving out a career in Washington, D.C., so she resists Cutler’s proposal of marriage, although she’s a willing sexual partner.

Also befriending the young graduate student are Montanan Jim Bob Childress, a man much like James Carville; Abe Stein, who reminds me of Clinton’s first labor secretary Robert Reich; and Pakistani nuclear physics graduate student Ali Aziz. Aziz introduces Cutler to Kate Ling Chen, whom he marries on the rebound from Alexa.

This is a lot of back story and Nye manages to cram a lot of front story in a book of less than 300 pages. Stein and Cutler join the faculty at Princeton, Ali goes back to Pakistan and Jim Bob goes to work for Sen. Wayne Kent, a potential presidential candidate: When Kent becomes president, Jim Bob Childress recruits Cutler to join the government as an Under Secretary of State.

Kate Cutler, daughter of an immigrant from Hong Kong, opposes the deal; she is on the career track at the university press and the family has settled in to a comfortable, academic life, with two active children. Peter Cutler decides to take the job, rent a small apartment in Washington and visit his family on weekends.

There’s an old joke that goes If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog. Cutler finds out how true this is when an expeditionary force to stop the transfer of nuclear technology from Pakistan to Iran goes horribly wrong and he gets blamed. The backstabbing and infighting Nye portrays bears the ring of truth.

There’s a lot of character development and ripped from the headlines action in “The Power Game.” It’s an impressive debut novel by a political insider who has written a number of excellent nonfiction books.
 
More Book Reviews by David M. Kinchen
— 10/28/04 BOOK REVIEWS: Bill Kurtis on the Death Penalty; Ms. Moffett Becomes a Teacher
— 11/15/04 BOOK REVIEW: Roth Envisions a Frightening 'What If?' in 'The Plot Against America'
— 12/15/04 BOOK REVIEWS: 'Past Imperfect' Covers Complexities of History, Plagiarism Issues; 'His Excellency' Reveals George Washington's Accomplishments
— 12/29/04 BOOK REVIEWS: ‘de Kooning’ Chronicles Rise of American Art Supremacy; ‘Adams vs. Jefferson’ Shows That Controversial Presidential Elections are Nothing New
— 01/17/05 BOOK REVIEW: Max Hastings on Germany's 'Armageddon' as Allies from West, East Conquer Third Reich
— 01/24/05 BOOK REVIEW: ‘Images of America: Huntington’ Displays Glorious Architecture of West Virginia’s First Planned City
— 01/27/05 BOOK REVIEW: ‘Auschwitz’ Personalizes Horror That Should Never Be Forgotten

David M. Kinchen is the Editor of HuntingtonNews.Net, repsponses and article submissions can be made to .
 
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