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34 the basis for foreign policy” and that they “have validity ‘only if they can be made to coincide with real national in- terests.” Since he breaks his narrative in December, 1942, he elects to define these interests exclusively in the shoit- term sense of winning the war with practically no attention to the long-term sense of paving the way for a just and durable peace. Thus he falsifies the historical perspective. He ad- “mits that with the death of Darlan “the French problem merely entered upon @ new and if anything more bitter phase, which even at the time of the invasion of Nor- mandy, eighteen months jater, was far from resolution.” Yet he says of the Vichy gamble that ‘“‘we followed a sensible, purely opportunistic policy [which} always was 4 substantially sound one even though it may have been an unattractive one,” and that it was “completely justified . . . an unquali- - fed « success.” His conception of the policy as a “gamble” implies that he chooses as his criteria exclusively the calculated risks of military strategy. His understanding of the stake wholly ignores the humane and moral prin- ciples involved in the permanent prob- Jems of a world order. “At no time,” - says Langer, “were we willing to stake much on de Gaulle.. We were not pat- tial to the fascism of Vichy and we were not unsympathetic ‘to French as- pirations. Our objective was to safe- - guard our own interests, among which twere the liberation and reéstablishment of France. No doubt there were differ- ent conceptions of how this might be done. But we could choose only one.” We chose the Leahy-Bullitt-Murphy policy of expediency, or “We'd better go easy with the Fascists.” Again, in April, 1947, we can choose only one conception of safeguarding our “real national interests.” And again we are choosing a gamble. It is the policy of “necessity” or “We'd better get tough with the Communists.” The greatest value of Professor Langer’s book is that it provides “unofficial official” con- firmation that the ‘new’ Leahy-Dulles- Murphy policy is a continuation of the LEAHY _ assummption—that ests” entail winning economic and mili- . -toad we took in June, 1940, when Bullitt convinced the President that Pétain was the arch enemy of “chaos” and in January, 1941, when Leahy transformed a prejudice into a policy. Murphy's role is more important than ever; he is the man in the shadows be- hind Marshall. Leahy more than ever is the power behind the presidential throne. In- deed, there is evidence that a five-star admiral was £¢- sponsible for the selection: of a five-star general as Secre- taty of State because James F. Byrnes, though a propo nent of a “tough” policy, ““qaritéd toughness to. stop short of a new and more dangerous form of saber- rattling. To those who welcome out “Athens gamble,” Langer’s book will seem proof of the sage, far-sightedness of Leahy and those men in and close to the State Department who plumped for Pétain and “order” against the French “lower classes” and chaos. To those who have doubts, the book will ‘reveal that both gambles rest on the same dangerous “real national inter- tary wars rather than finding the means of achieving progress and security by the methods of peace. PERCY WINNER Percy Winner spent fourteen years in Western Europe as a foreign correspond- ent and was for three years an Ow! Deputy Divector for Field Operations, serving in North Africa: His novel Dario was recently published by Harcourt, Brace. Fiction Parade ENRY Morton Robinson's Te Great Snow (Simon and Schuster, $2.75) is'a twenty-day blizzard that cov- ers the northeastern United States and threatens to destroy all life in the area. The publishers announce that the story “can be read on several levels of mean- ing,” but on the usual level it is the account of one household during the storm: Ruston Cobb, a successful patent lawyer, his family and several guests, matooned in a New York country house. The cast is the conventional expensive variety, smoking and drinking the ad- vertised brands. Under the strain of the NEW REPUBLIC blizzard .and its pressure on “those loftier structures . . . definitions of mor- ality and convention,” they set about be- having in a way we are to suppose is not habitual to them in normal circum- stances. But since they foregathered in the first place for intoxication and adul- tery, it is not clear how the great snow modified their intentions. Anyway, Rus- ton Cobb proves himself the Whole Man, archtype of the energy and re- sourcefulness that builds and maintains civilizations. His ingenuity is described in detail. oo The author includes directions to © “fact-bound readers” who “in... their literal-minded way” may fail to regard “parts of my story as symbols” which have been “previously used with some success by the authors of Genesis, ‘Oedi- pus Rex’ and Finnegans Wake.” At least it can be granted that Robinson's good intentions have paved the road to a Hades frequented by distinguished shades. ' HE STATE OF MIND (Houghton | Mifflin, $3) is a collection of thirty-two short stories Mark Schoret has written over.a period of ten years. There is considerable variety among the tales, but all deal, more ot less directly, with that state of mind which the author feels is peculiar to modern life: anxiety. It is the state of the badgered, the be- wildered and the exhausted. Add its companion state, boredom. In this book these conditions express themselves mainly through callousness of loneli- ness, and Schorer is adept at tricky dis- closures of trivial mentalities and un- motivated meanness. The characters in the stories resemble the readers for whom they were written, the prosperous public of the slick magazines, and while few of the stories exceed the level of high competence, they are an unpreten- tious and exact report of certain preva- lent symptoms of emotional and moral bankruptcy. OGER Vercel’s Madman’s Memory (Random, $2.50), a translation from the French, includes in its slight 213 pages a prodigious allowance of madness, seduction, suicide, incest and terror. But these attractions are so deftly controlled that the story never escapes TSE ES AS iste gee A a ee oT Ste TS