Talking War to the People : THE ROCKETS’ RED GLARE When America Goes to War: The Presidents and the People <i> by Richard J. Barnet (Simon & Schuster: $24.95; 496 pp.; 0-671-63376-7) </i>

Having never forgotten the “extraordinary” town hall meetings he would attend with his father, John Adams entered public office convinced that “the only moral foundation of government is the consent of the people.” A representative assembly, he wrote, “should think, feel, reason, and act like them.” After years of trying to quiet Americans’ “hysterical” cries to join in the war against the French aristocracy, however, the President left office most proud of ignoring that public will: “I desire no other inscription over my gravestone,” he wrote, “than ‘Here lies John Adams, who took upon himself the responsibility of the peace with France in the year 1800.’ ”

Today, American Presidents and their advisers remain no less torn between the Populist ideals they learned in school and the elitist temptation to “maintain the interest of the American people against their opinions,” as Edmund Burke put it.

Publicly, of course, they are devout Populists, well aware of the longstanding antipathy of Americans toward those who govern them in monarchal isolation. This was reflected most recently in the televised Iran-Contra hearings, where secret government was not so much investigated as ritually denounced. But in private, once the hearings had concluded, the senators went back to practicing a form of government almost as secretive as the one they had been vilifying.

As Richard Barnet illustrates in “The Rockets’ Red Glare,” America’s top leaders have tended to chart foreign policies on their own, presenting them as faits accomplis to the public, as “commodities to be sold rather than a set of facts to be debated.” Agreeing with Alexis de Tocqueville that “democracy tends to obey its feelings rather than its calculations,” America’s foreign-policy elite long has believed that our nation’s security can be assured only when decisions are made independently of imprudent and irrational public pressures.

Consequently, pre-election rhetoric often bears scant resemblance to post-election policy. As Barnet writes, “Wilson, Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson all campaigned on the implied promise to stay out of war; in each case, thousands of Americans were dying in battle within a year of their inauguration. Richard Nixon pleaded for votes by hinting that he had a ‘secret plan’ to end the Vietnam War with honor, a plan that did not exist. At the same time no one who voted for him could know that they were voting for normalization of relations with China.”

But have the policy makers actually been more prudent and rational than the people? Generally not, Barnet convincingly argues in this sophisticated revisionist history. As in his 1973 classic, “The Roots of War,” he draws on his own experiences as an adviser in the Kennedy Administration to illustrate how the State Department’s hermetic way of thinking has left it out of touch with geopolitical realities.

Barnet’s targets range from foreign-policy strategies that underestimate the significance and durability of indigenous cultures to a masculine ethic that makes retreat an unacceptable option. (Against the advice of its own military advisers, for instance, the Reagan Administration insisted on installing missiles in Europe because not doing so would be seen as “backing down” from European protests.)

But unlike Barnet’s previous books--urgent responses to crises of the present or recent past--”The Rockets’ Red Glare” travels back to the founding of the republic to determine how the policy-makers came to be so far removed from the people. This distancing began when George Washington, trying to avoid an economically crippling war with Britain, claimed that the Constitution had given treaty-making powers exclusively to him and the Senate. The public initially rejected the argument, forming democratic “societies” to debate policy, but as the western continent beckoned and the population surged in the 19th Century, vox populi became less dissonant. Turning inward, to the business of nation-building, Americans began to seek freedom on the frontier rather than in the town-hall debate.

In a shift that created the modern campaign, political parties began simplifying issues rather than debating them, and candidates became personalities to be followed rather than ideologues to be challenged. Barnet recounts, for example, how a crowd trailed Andrew Jackson as he rode his horse to the White House after winning the scurrilous 1828 election. The crowd kept following, surging into the East Room, spilling punch, breaking glasses, putting muddy boots on damask chairs. Forced to escape his admirers by a rear window, the President took refuge in a nearby tavern. Lamented Charles Carroll, the last surviving signer of the Declaration of Independence, “The tradition of cultivated manners is lost. Society is less brilliant and more prosperous.”

Jackson’s successors weren’t always blessed with such enthusiastic followers: James Polk had to drum up support for the war with Mexico; William McKinley had to launch foreign adventures to prevent the spread of domestic strikes. But not until the end of World War I, when Woodrow Wilson failed to muster public support for the League of Nations, did domestic opposition truly cripple a President’s foreign policy.

The public’s failure to rise to Wilson’s noble vision of a world peacekeeping force is commonly cited by elite historians to attack precisely the kind of participatory democracy that Barnet is trying to affirm. Barnet’s response is persuasive. The League was a victim not so much of public ignobility, he writes, as of Senate-Executive Branch rivalries and, ironically, of government propaganda: U. S. attempts since the 1890s to discredit “foreign-inspired” labor activists had left Americans suspicious of all dealings with “wily” Europeans.

Barnet is only partially successful at challenging the other principal argument of elite historians: that American pacifism prevented Franklin Roosevelt from standing up to Hitler before the German dictator made his first aggressive moves. He convincingly argues, as Clare Boothe Luce did, that Roosevelt would have been able to win the people’s support had he led them into war through reasoning rather than lied them into it through bobbing, weaving rhetoric. But Roosevelt’s concern over the vein of anti-Semitism in his own country, which discouraged him from bombing the Nazi gas chambers, is one indictment of public opinion’s power that Barnet is unable to explain away. Barnet rightly blames the New York Times for burying on Page 12 the story of 750,000 deaths and Father Coughlin for fanning fears of a “world Jewish conspiracy.” But the Times, Jewish-owned, also was responding to existing prejudices, just as the demagogue from Detroit exploited the public’s need to hear facile explanations for social injustice.

Such irrationalities, together with a rising body of theory propounding a “human need” to barter away freedom for social order, were enough to diminish the faith in human reason which had inspired the Founding Fathers. And so, as illusions of pure democracy faded, postwar intellectuals began to assent and even to collude in the use of propaganda for purposes they deemed beneficent. They enlisted in the fight against isolationism, an American tendency following wars. Political and cultural propaganda eventually displaced anxiety about the Bomb onto the Soviets, and the Cold War was born. As Barnet writes, in the name of battling the Closed Society, the Open Society closed down on dissent.

Barnet hails the reopening of American society in the 1976 elections. They were “a populist counterattack against the imperial presidency,” he writes, giving “a burst of new energy for greater participation in decision making.” But what Barnet sees as a lively period of participatory democracy, conservatives saw as a demoralizing era of “social disorder.” Barnet blithely dismisses this view, deriding the New York Times for warning in its Bicentennial essay of “a wild disorientation about the style of American life, as though the national compass had been lost.”

But the view may well have had some truth to it, for statistics gathered in the ‘80s demonstrate that voter participation began declining precipitously in the post-Watergate, post-Vietnam era. It seems clear that as Americans grew more critical of their government, they also grew less enthusiastic about its policies and plans. It is ironic that Barnet does not recognize this relationship, for his book so eloquently illustrates its converse: When war propaganda has led Americans to uncritically accept their leaders’ myths--e.g., Stalin was bent on world conquest; it was the American Indian’s “destiny” to be conquered--the national sense of mission has become more energized and directed.

Accurately observing that for the first time in our history we have no clear manifest destiny, Barnet suggests that we might well succeed in adopting a new mission: “mobilizing the energetic power of America to help save the planet.” But Barnet’s optimism is based on the unsupported assertion that Americans “are less dependent on stereotypes for simplifying reality” and more aware of foreign cultures than they were in the ‘50s and ‘60s. More problematically, it assumes that the challenge of global intercooperation will be enough to renew American nationalism, when his book has shown that nationalism grows primarily as Americans unite against others.

Barnet’s call for global unity might meet the same fate as the controversial 1970s public-school textbooks that depicted American culture as but one of many, neither better nor worse than other ways of life. Eighties conservatives such as Allan Bloom saw these texts as undermining national morale. American students “must be taught that American culture is better than others,” as former Secretary of Education William Bennett put it.

All of this suggests some important questions we have yet to grapple with seriously: Can our nation remain stable and energized when its citizens question it from differing perspectives, or must it use propaganda to encourage a common perspective? Can a patriotic society be brightened by a thousand points of critical light, or must it inspire a more emotional devotion to a common set of colors, such as the red, white and blue, or the rockets’ red glare?