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Mr. and Mrs.President

See How They Ran

Robert Kennedy embodied the moral superiority that weakened liberalism and the moral conviction that fueled its greatest triumphs. CHARLES TASNADI

Once upon a time, true public intellectuals roamed the land. Committed to ideas and idealism rather than research grants and careerism, these academic polymaths ranged widely, conversed freely, argued passionately and wrote prodigiously. Alas, in these days of CNN and Oprah, talking heads now pass for intellectuals; disputation masquerades as discourse; the sound bite and the image rule. To the general public, the academic world consists of a few high-voltage, best-selling, television-friendly celebrities, while the rest of their colleagues lead seemingly empty and pointless lives, languishing anonymously amid irrelevant, unsexy arcana. Louis Menand, by this analysis, is a throwback. He's a Distinguished Professor of English at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and a staff writer at The New Yorker, a promiscuous and supple thinker who can dissect T.S. Eliot's poetry and Jann Wenner's Rolling Stone magazine. Like his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, "The Metaphysical Club," Menand's essays in "American Studies" reveal a passion for the world of ideas and his talent as a public intellectual.

"American Studies" is an intellectual smorgasbord, spread over the last century and a half. It begins with the 19th-century Harvard psychologist William James contemplating his pragmatist "philosophy of hope" and ends with the Vietnam memorialist Maya Lin contemplating the desolation of ground zero. In between are thoughtful essays about the tattered soul of the African-American writer Richard Wright, and the speculative mind of Al Gore, about mid-20th-century heroes such as the Harvard president James B. Conant and the CBS empire builder William S. Paley, and about late-20th-century rogues such as Norman Mailer, the novelist, and Larry Flynt, the pornographer.

The essays are entertaining and enlightening. Menand has a fine eye for detail and a great gift for metaphor. He deftly elevates discussion of one individual's work into an analysis of a broader phenomenon. In his essay about CBS, Menand views Paley as "a man ideally suited to an industry whose prosperity depended on slavish adherence to a standard of utterly respectable mindlessness." It was not easy to create "something that millions of people would watch but that not a single person would be offended by," Menand writes. "No wonder that almost half of all new shows were off the air within a year; few things that are bland enough to pass the test of everyone's sensibility have much flavor left. It was like trying to reinvent milk."

Menand is a master ironist, linking the puritanical Jerry Falwell and the vulgar Larry Flynt as two men "working opposite sides of the street. ... fighting over the same [mid-'80s, blue-collar] socioeconomic constituency." He appreciates the centrality of William James' melancholy to his optimistic and pragmatist philosophy, "What lends authenticity to his philosophy is not its triumph over the unhappiness in his own life, but its failure."

These insights clarify Menand's negative argument. Menand disdains fundamentalists who view culture as set in stone. Without degenerating into deconstructionism, Menand sees culture as dynamic and idiosyncratic. Refuting James Baldwin's charge that Richard Wright, the author of "Native Son," betrayed black culture, Menand argues that "culture is not something that comes with one's race or one's gender. Culture comes only through experience, there isn't any other way to acquire it. And in the end everyone's culture is different because everyone's experience is different."

Menand reinforces his anthropology with sociology. This cultural malleability is particularly characteristic of middle-class America. Our modernist culture is addicted to changing fads, ideals and mores. "The American middle-class is never the same for very long of course; it's much too insecure to resist a new self-conception when one is offered."

A quick reading of these essays would end with that -- Menand's warning to be more open to cultural and historical fluidity. Yet, subtly but inexorably, a more powerful argument accumulates. Menand tips his hand most dramatically in his attack on Christopher Lasch, the author of the late 1970s classic "The Culture of Narcissism." Menand acknowledges Lasch's frustration with, as Menand terms it, "the moral superiority some liberals assume toward the less educated people who oppose them." However, "to take note of the ugliness does not dispose of the matter." Recalling the early 1960s' clash between Alabama's racist governor George Wallace and the Kennedy Justice Department's civil rights crusaders, Menand acknowledges that Attorney General Robert Kennedy and his deputy Nicholas deB. Katzenbach were indeed "Ivy League liberals, supremely assured of their virtue." Yet, "Kennedy and Katzenbach were right, and Wallace was wrong."

Here then, is the heart of the book, confirmed by a certain clumping of the subjects. All but four of the 15 essays address the challenges of the 1960s in some way, and over half address them directly. Menand still believes in many of the ideals and goals of the 1960s. He applauds the political commitment to change and the assumption that politics can improve society. He appreciates the "liberal" social movements that repudiated the "mumbo-jumbo about race and sex." He champions the best of the '60s as the climax of a century's worth of countercultural creativity.

And yet, Menand is not a starry-eyed McGovernite turned Clintonite blind to the era's absurdities. Seeking to understand that culture in its context, he notes that the baby boomers were too young to create or inspire the '60s culture; instead, "They consumed it." With the healthy skepticism that informs his entire volume, Menand recognizes the role of the media and the crass commercialism of modern American capitalist society in hijacking the "movement," or more accurately the movements. "Once the media discovered it, the counterculture ceased being a youth culture and became a commercial culture for which youth was a principal market," he writes. Moreover, like most media-generated commercial fads, "it was a lifestyle that could be practiced on weekends."

Seeking a critical balance, as always, Menand insists that neither the political nor cultural excesses of the 1960s should be allowed to eclipse the positive political or cultural effects. All of us, he shows, remain the children of the 1960s. His book, then, is best understood if read out of chronological order, from the middle to the end and then onto the beginning, with the first essays then functioning as harbingers to the defining cultural and political revolution of our times. The great American historian David Donald said that all 19th-century historians need to "get right with Lincoln" as a way of orienting their studies of the 1800s. In this aptly titled and consistently stimulating volume, Louis Menand makes it clear that all of us, to understand our country, still need to "get right" with the '60s.

Gil Troy, professor of history at McGill University, is author of "Mr. and Mrs. President from the Trumans to the Clintons."