Book Review : ‘Political Passages’ Details Two Decades of Radicalism

Political Passages: Journeys of Change Through Two Decades, 1968-1988, edited by John H. Bunzel (The Free Press/Macmillan: $21.95; 354 pages)

“ ‘Personal essays,’ the editor writes--not theory, autobiography. He says he is compiling a book of them, points of view. ‘Describe the odyssey you took through the ‘60s, how your life was changed.’ ”

That’s how Richard Rodriguez describes the invitation to contribute to John H. Bunzel’s “Political Passages,” a book that Rodriguez manages to subvert by adding his own superb work, “Irish Catholic,” to the 11 other essays in the collection. Most of the contributors to “Political Passages” are college professors, journalists and other disaffected former radicals who take the opportunity to rewrite the history of the 1960s and the early 1970s by renouncing their own radicalism, or by condemning the radicalism of their former comrades. Rodriguez, by contrast, confronts his own soul, and the soul of the ‘60s, in a work that is very nearly poetry.

“The ‘60s were gringo time,” he writes. “White-middle-class crisis! The white middle class decided it no longer wanted the diploma, the seals, the ribbons and the stole I had cherished from boyhood. The white middle class pretended to be poor.”

‘Horrendous Dislocation’

Most of the other essayists tend to take the ‘60s (and themselves) much more seriously. They condemn the moral cowardice and the clouded vision of college administrators, professors and miscellaneous other “pied pipers” who should have known better. Above all, they carefully explain why the radicals and their fellow travelers were not merely silly but downright dangerous. Joseph Epstein, now an English professor at Northwestern University, characterizes the ‘60s as nothing less than “a time of horrendous dislocation, a disaster nearly averted, a damn near thing, but a thing nonetheless for which we are still paying and shall continue to pay.”

Indeed, those of us who recall the ‘60s as an era of earnest but misguided idealism are always in danger of taking our adolescent memories too seriously. Here and there in “Political Passages,” we are reminded that the exploits of the ‘60s were exhilarating, sometimes zany, often foolhardy but ultimately futile. “There are many ways to kill,” Ronald Radosh, author of a distinguished (but distinctly revisionist) study of the Rosenberg case, quotes himself in recalling a failed attempt to seize a campus of the City University of New York in the aftermath of the Kent State shootings. “Some do it with the National Guard’s bullets, others with grades.”

Too many of the contributors to “Political Passages” adopt a sanctimonious tone, and too many of them devote their essays to somber and tedious self-criticism. (Indeed, too many of them have written their own annotated resumes.) The doctrinal and ideological skirmishes on the left were less memorable and perhaps less decisive than the sheer energy of young people who took to the streets. “The ‘60s were an era of adolescents--lost boys and girls who for the most part never grew up politically and have thus ignored the promptings of history to take stock of the consequences of their acts,” we are reminded by Peter Collier, well known as the biographer (with fellow contributor David Horowitz) of the Rockefeller, Kennedy and Ford families. “The decade plays less authentically in the chambers of memory as tragedy than as melodrama and farce.”

Honest Foibles, Failings

Occasionally, a contributor to “Political Passages” is brave enough to write with complete honesty about his or her own foibles and failings. Martha Bayles, who is today a television columnist for the Wall Street Journal, tells of her experiences as a volunteer teacher in the Deep South in the ‘60s, including a failed attempt to rescue a drowning black child (“Was my rescue attempt a sham?”) and her “trysts” with a black lover: “No matter how tenderly I reached for him that summer, I always embraced a tangle of barbed emotions instead. Guilt, anxiety, self-hatred, despair--how many of these strands were tied to the racial and class differences which so obsessed me at the time?”

The very best example of confessional prose in “Political Passages”--and, by far, the most impressive and memorable writing in the book--is “Irish Catholic” by Richard Rodriguez. Indeed, the account of his adolescence as a Mexican-American under the tutelage of Irish nuns and priests at a Sacramento parochial school during the ‘60s seems to belong in a different book, and almost deserves a review of its own.

What Rodriguez experienced during the ‘60s is far less typical than, say, the exploits of former radicals like Collier, Novak or Radosh--”I should say that my ‘60s began in the 16th Century with the Protestant Reformation,’ Rodriguez writes--but his vision is so compelling, his words so moving, that I found myself rearranging his paragraphs into poetry, as when Rodriguez describes the peculiar role of Ireland in the cosmology of his tutors:

“Our gallery--our history, our geography, our arithmetic--was Ireland. The story of man was the story of sin which couldn’t be overcome with any such thing as a Declaration of Independence. Earth was clocks and bottles and heavy weights. Earth was wheels and rattles and sighs and death. We all must die. Heaven was bliss eternal, heaven was a reign of grace bursting over the high city and over the mansions of that city. Earth was Ireland and heaven was Ireland.”