Parts of it are excellent

Spectator, The, Dec 20-27, 1997 by Stone, Norman

A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE by Paul Johnson Weidenfeld, L25, pp. 925

An interesting review of this book came from Ray Seitz, a recent American ambassador in London, in the Sunday Telegraph. Yes, he said, judiciously, it was a success, in many ways a brilliant one. The first three-quarters or thereabouts had the best qualities of the best history books: curious, hitherto-unknown detail, some fun, solid work based on solid sources, balance, etc. Then it went haywire. When it reached the ultra-modern era, it became propaganda.

The discerning reader of Ambassador Seitz's review will therefore turn to that bit first. The Sixties, and especially the Seventies, saw the American Dream fall apart. The Eighties, under Reagan, were quite different. The Nineties seems to have consisted of missed opportunities and dithering. Paul Johnson does indeed say very good things about Reagan, whose presidency, to the astonishment of the American Establishment, was not only a great success, but was also fun (encouraged by Ronald Reagan's Bob Hope sense of humour). There is now a serious proposal to rename the Washington National Airport after him, as Paris employed de Gaulle's name (who knows, one day we might ourselves be landing, not at Heathrow, but at Princess Diana).

This does not seem to have suited Ambassador Seitz at all, nor did it suit Harvard which, for its tercentenary, invited all surviving former Presidents, including poor little Carter, but issued a very guarded invitation to Reagan. The American Establishment - State Department, media etc really do not like him. Some hysteria built up. I have kept, on and off, unsystematically, various articles, and they include some lengthy remarks made by the learned and imposing Felix Rohatyn on the terrible debt that the United States were building up in the middle of the Eighties. Doom and gloom were forecast. In fact, notoriously, the United States in these years created 18 million new jobs. The Bush administration suited them much better; but we can see at this moment the consequences of one of its major decisions, to halt before Baghdad at the time of the Gulf war. Saddam is still there, able to cause great trouble. Reagan, of whom they said that he owned more horses than books, had a sure instinct for something. He knew at least which books he ought to be seen to be reading, and had a copy by the side of his bed of an earlier book of Paul Johnson's, although the bookmark had not changed position, apparently, from one year to the next. Johnson, who tells this story, does not mind.

The ultra-modern part of Paul Johnson's book does in fact something rather valuable, whatever your political perspective: it tells the story, gives you a side to argue for or against, and presents evidence which, though it may be wrong, can be tested.

The narrative is not one-dimensionally political, either: one of the book's great strengths is that it can (sometimes at a tangent) wander into architecture, or film, or the decline of the main American Protestant churches, before getting back to its main themes. His Modern Times had the same quality, and it attracted the same hostile reviews in some quarters. There are, no doubt, errors of fact: they are inevitable in a book of this size, but there is no point in harping on about these things unless you truly wish to convict an author of not really knowing what he is talking about, which, in the case of Johnson's book, no one could ever claim. He has done a huge amount of work, and if you try to write this sort of book with too many qualifications, you become, sadly, unreadable.

More and more - I have an interest to plead - I test books in terms of their usefulness for an intelligent British 15-year-old and intelligent Turkish university students, who are desperately anxious to know what on earth makes the West, and especially America, tick. This book is of airport bestseller size, but it also takes up the time of an aircraft journey (a long return one), and an empty night in a foreign hotel splendidly. Paul Johnson is very, very rude about American universities, quoting at length the inanities of censorship and witch-hunting that they practise, and I doubt if his book will figure on their booklists. But it will have a powerful effect on influential thinking about the United States while all the politically correct tomeproducers lie howling.

A great gulf opened between the presidency and the intelligentsia under Reagan, but in fact it had been developing ever since the later Fifties, with Eisenhower (Norman Mailer called these years `the worst decade in history'). In the Sixties, there was Vietnam, one well-meant blunder after another; in the Seventies, as Nixon was trying to sort out the consequences, and opening up to China, he was undermined by the business of Watergate; there followed a dismal era in which the President simply drifted, without prestige. In the Eighties came the Reagan recovery, and the intelligentsia were baffled, resentful, and, when it all resulted in the collapse of the Soviet Union, almost bereft of speech. Why this gulf between government and intelligentsia, which was not characteristic of the United States before? Johnson takes it back to the Thirties, and money: books did not sell in the Depression, he claims (actually they did, provided that enlightened publishers such as Penguin took the right openings). But the problem of the intelligentsia is not just one of money. There is, partly, the shift in communication technology towards the visual: television (or even book-reviewing in a newspaper) can pay sometimes extremely well - certainly much better than poor old academe - and there seems to be something about such media that shifts people to the left-liberal side, sometimes naively so. I wonder what the answer is. It is an observable phenomenon in all countries that I know. They used to say that you could tell a communist by his or her face, regardless of national or racial origin. I reckon I can now tell a media person in much the same way.