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32 he gets really angry is when he objects to “the self-righteousness of American support for a cause for which America ‘was not prepared to assume responsi- bility.” Although our propensity to give pious ‘advice without doing anything to back ° it up irritates him, he understands why Americans are less impressed than are the British by the Arab claim to the country. It is, he believes, because, as a pioneer people who won our country from the Indians, we look upon the Jew- ish settler in Palestine as a pioneer and the Arab “‘as the aboriginal who must go down before the march of progress.” The English, on the contrary, are “the offspring of the families which did not emigrate, inheritors of unbroken tradi- tions going back for hundreds of years” and thus tend to appreciate the Arab position. He is certainly no defender of British colonial policy or of the pro- Nazi wartime activities of the Grand Mufti, but he doesn’t believe that Arab nationalism is a British invention, either, or that it is without its progressive ele- ments. ‘ B ECAUSE he has a way of seeing both sides and sympathizing with Arab as well as Jew, it‘is all the more im-_ pressive to find in the end that he is just as convinced of the necessity for a Jew- ish state as is his more volatile Ameri- can colleague. Appreciating all the points the Arabs make and admitting that a choice must be made between “two in- justices,” he -advocates the immediate admission of 100,000 immigrants, a par- tition of Palestine to form a Jewish and an Arab state, and Anglo-American as- sistance to both the Jewish common- wealth and the Arab state in the con- struction of a Jordan Valley Authority and an irrigation scheme for the Eu- phrates. He believes that this Jewish nation will eventually become part’ of a Middle Eastern confederation, chiefly Arab in culture and numbers. “Because it is a socialist community,’ he adds, “this small nation will have an influence on its backward neighbors disproportion- ate to its size, bringing to them the ideas and ‘techniques of Western civilization and accelerating the downfall of the present medieval social order. But in doing so it will grow into the life of the Middle East and grow away from its present dependence on the West.” The future this suggests is highly provoca- tive. RICHARD WATTS JR. II: From Vichy to Athens ILLIAM L. LANGER’S Oar Vicsy Gamble (Knopf, $3.75) is a book which tries to do two quite dif- ferent, often conflicting, things at the same time. It sets out to give the full “inside” story of ,America’s official policy toward France from the collapse - in June, 1940, to the death of Darian in’ December, 1942, based in large measure on hitherto unavailable official material furnished by the men responsi- ble for the policy. At the same time it seeks to provide an impartial, dispas- sionate ‘outside’ evaluation of that policy. Langer has two different, often conflicting, viewpoints. As’ Coolidge Professor of History at Harvard, he is an authentic professional of scholarly interpretation. As a wartime member of the high command of the Office of Strategic Services, an intimate of the top-flight statesmen and soldiers who made the Vichy policy, he is an ama- teur of practical policy-making with a personal and partisan attitude. Thus, Cordell Hull wasn’t gambling when he picked Langer as the right man “'to make a detailed and altogether inde- pendent study” and broke precedent to make available to him rele- vant material of the kind the public normally wouldn't have been given for many years. For though Langer con- sented to do the job on con- dition that he “could serve oniy as a dispassionate scholar, not as an apologist,” it was inevitable that his atti- tude as a partisan amateur. would play a part in his judg- ments as an aloof profes- sional. As an inside story, the book is extra- erdinarily timely, since it reveals that ~ “our Vichy gamble’ was the first of a series in which the present Athens gamble seems -likély to take an even more important place. It gives a factual account, readable, entertaining, excit- ing, frequently depressing, of how and why Washington chose and clung PETAIN “.NEW REPUBLIC obstinately to Pétain, Darlan and the Vichy fascists instead of to de Gaulle and those Frenchmen for whom free- dom meant emancipation from fascism as well as from the Germans. As narra- tive, the book has the virtues of excel- Jent polemical journalism and the defects of partisan propaganda, since the author, while using much new ‘material, omits or subordinates much old material. Our Vichy. Gamble takes the, reader behind the scenes as has no other book thus far published about a crucial period in the history of American policy-making. The first poz- tion, describing the collapse of France, the armistice and the first few months of the Vichy regime, is particularly fascinating. The reader is given a day- by-day, sometimes an hour-by-hour, account of what each of the major pat- ticipants’ was doing, saying, thinking, “even feeling in those confused and dreadful days. ORE than any other individual, Langer reveals, Ambassador William C. Bullitt was responsible for the Vichy policy. In retrospect, his deci- sion to remain in Paris instead-of going té Bordeaux—a decision which Roose- velt approved despite the objection of. Hull—seems to have been the first step on the road which led to an American connection with Pétain instead of de Gaulle. Langer arranges and interprets the facts to make Laval the villain of the piece and Pétain the hero. Thanks to Pétain, he says, ‘France was actually able to play both ends against the middle.” And in his evaluation both of Vichy’s policies and cur policy toward Vichy, Langer pulls no punches in an ag- gressive justification of the utmost opportunism and ex- pediency. He goes so far in his defense of Pétain as to say that the Marshal’s conviction by 4 French court of law was a political act and not an act of justice. There is no effort to deny that Pétain was a reac- tionary, a fascist, a man who feared communism and hated democracy SO much that he was willing to connive & with the Germans. Still, in Langer s Vik w) ha