Sidney Blumenthal, Pledging Allegiance--The Last Campaign of the Cold War (New York: HarperCollins, 1990).  386 pp., $22.95.

In mid-1989 a senior editor at a major New York publishing house was asked about the relative merits of several upcoming volumes on the 1988 U.S. presidential election.  His firm, which had published political chronicles in the past, declined to bid on books about the Bush-Dukakis contest.  "Television coverage has made the Teddy White approach to these campaigns obsolete," he remarked.  "These days, to sell an election book, you really need a gimmick."

It is indeed hard to imagine today's publishing barons, or journalism students, buying into Theodore White's Making of the President series, with its careful reportage, modest prose, and quaint respect for American political institutions.  For some time, would-be campaign historians have sought other pegs--or gimmicks--on which to hang their tales.  To the Nightline generation, even Joe McGinniss' treatment of Republican "handlers" in the 1968 Nixon-Humphrey race or Timothy Crouse's angle on press coverage of the 1972 election may seem archaic.  With Pledging Allegiance, Sidney Blumenthal hopes to revive the genre by wedding electoral politics to another large theme--in this case, no less than the history of the Cold War itself.

Readers interested in the campaign's prosaic details--primary results, campaign strategies, vote counts--will be disappointed.  Such minutiae as the results of the Democratic primary in New York, for example, are not mentioned.  Instead, the dust jacket boasts that, "Blumenthal takes the reader behind the public facade of American politics."  This is achieved, in the author's words, by relating the election to "the largest event in the world"--the end of the Cold War.  Blumenthal is nothing if not a big thinker.

Blumenthal, who covered the 1984 campaign for the New Republic before serving as a Washington Post political reporter, is perhaps best known for his acerbic distaste for the conservative "counter-establishment" that sprouted in Washington during the Reagan years.  But in his new book, the usually acidic Blumenthal reveals a decidedly warmer side with his near adolescent infatuation with Mikhail Gorbachev--a figure variously credited by the author with "saving" Ronald Reagan's presidency, sparing George Bush from exposure in the Iran-contra scandal, and "creating the preconditions for the revival of liberalism" in America (all this, and destroying communism in Russia and liberating Eastern Europe, too).

The thesis of Pledging Allegiance is that while Gorbachev was remaking the world and destroying old "shibboleths and taboos," the political class of the United States was behaving like a dysfunctional family, playing out destructively familiar roles, and unable to deal with new therapies.  Blumenthal believes the Cold War--which he alternately refers to as a "metaphysical system" and an "epistemological system"--has shaped and deformed American political life for the past four decades.  Anyone who challenges the comfortable mantras of "Cold War Conservatism" is "speaking the unspeakable" and banished from the political mainstream.  In an ironic Cold War coda, Blumenthal presents Ronald Reagan, whose "politics involved a massive misapplication of memory," as the one voice of "reality" in the political vacuum of 1988 (though only after Gorbachev helped him shed all the vestiges of Reaganism).

Although Chapter One is entitled "A Long Twilight Struggle" after the JFK speech which marked the "zenith" of the Cold War, Blumenthal shows little interest in examining the U.S.-Soviet rivalry as anything other than an exercise in psychotherapy.  On Washington's reaction to the emerging competition in the 1940s, for example, he is satisfied to recount Walter Lippmann's rationalization of the Red Army's occupation of Eastern Europe.  We read nothing of Stalin's imposition of communist regimes throughout Eastern Europe, his "two camp" thesis, the infiltration of labor movements in the West, or Soviet involvement in the Greek civil war.  The Baltic states may exist in the paranoid celebration of Captive Nations Day, but nowhere else.  The Korean War, it appears, was important only because it created an "overheated political atmosphere" in which liberals "obscured their inherent realism even from themselves."

One does find the occasional hasty critique of Moscow--"the Soviets provoked voyages to the brink over Berlin and Cuba," "there was a Soviet buildup in the 1970s"--but they are few, and always followed by an exculpatory "but."  "Cold War" is used exclusively to identify all manner of American ills and malefactors, with Richard Nixon as the archetypal figure.  "The Cold War," Blumenthal asserts with a confident flourish, "was Nixon's reason for being."

Pledging Allegiance begins with a neatly revised history of the Institute of the United States and Canada, an organization that serves the propaganda interests of the Politburo.  For Blumenthal, however, "The task of the institute's experts was to comprehend America and communicate their views to the Central Committee and the Soviet president."  For such purposes they "had been granted a remarkable freedom," even though "some of them were lying, perhaps without knowing they were doing so."  Under Gorbachev, though, "These Soviets, who formerly thought of themselves only as experts or Communists, have taken on the mentality of citizens." 

As for the leader and his works, Blumenthal is likewise tolerant: "Though Gorbachev did not immediately bring dishwashers into the average Russian's kitchen, his policies did something more important.  The heart of totalitarianism was now stone dead."  In its place there appeared an order we might even learn from.  A Soviet official is quoted approvingly: "We are only just coming to democracy, just discovering its virtues.  But, in some ways, Russia might be more liberal, in terms of discussing alternatives."  And when Ronald Reagan himself was wounded by scandal, his "deliverance came through a deus ex machina, Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev, who was determined to end the Cold War."  Dissenting views--say, from citizens of Lithuania, or any of the republics--are absent from this account.

Indeed, Blumenthal's primary focus is how the U.S. political culture was found wanting when it came to purging itself of Cold War demons.  In the Reagan era, of course, these demons were ascendant, especially as conservatives "raised tens of millions of dollars and achieved control over a host of foundations."  He postulates something called the Movement State, in which conservative zealots "embedded" in Washington prevent us from recognizing our problems.  This Movement State led to the Iran-contra scandal and the establishment's whitewash of it, abetted by the cowed press corps.  The Tower Board was composed of the Washington "establishment.  The powers that were, are and will be....Power, as they understood it, neither began with [Reagan's] election nor would end with it."  Howard Baker, brought in to clean up the mess in the White House, had "been the ranking Republican on the Watergate committee, where his job was to protect the party from scandal."  Nowhere do we learn the identity of his employers.  Nor is the "Iran" end of the scandal considered, since the lesser "contra" end fits far more neatly into Blumenthal's Cold War matrix.

His views on the press during this period may surprise some readers, for he was a member of Washington's elite press at the time.  He paints his colleagues as more compliant than vigilant, more confused than enlightened, ratifiers rather than inquisitors.  During the Iran-contra hearings, our "political press corps were like critics who did not know if they were reviewing Samuel Beckett, David Mamet, or Neil Simon."  Little improvement is detected on the campaign trail; of the candidacy of Richard Gephardt, Blumenthal notes that: "the press, reflecting the Washington opinion making elites, refused to accept his candidacy as genuine."  A campaign book by a team of Newsweek scribes is dismissed as "less a book than a corporate product--Teddy White as an assembly line."  He is especially critical of those "objectivist" reporters who disavowed any conscious biases: "In an election notable for its manipulativeness, the reporters who believed their `straight' craft insulated them were the most manipulated figures in political society.  Thus the press, too, played its role in the Cold War drama of 1988."  Again, the reader is left to wonder about the identity of this drama's producer.

As with so many works of contemporary non-fiction, Pledging Allegiance takes leap after speculative leap into the minds of its principals.  Thus Gorbachev, listening to Ronald Reagan's utopian view of nuclear disarmament, "came to understand this vision....[and] emerged as Reagan's ultimate handler."  After Iran-contra broke, "When Reagan sank to his lowest point, Gorbachev, with an eye cocked to the ticking clock, began furiously rewriting."  Even Reagan's mind is open to Blumenthal's reading, as in this novel interpretation of the 1985 Geneva summit:

He explained that he had glimpsed a new age in which nuclear weapons were banished and the two superpowers truly cooperated.  He had seen, perhaps, the 1951 movie, The Day the Earth Stood Still, in which an alien threatens destruction of the planet if all nuclear weapons are not done away with.  Perhaps Reagan did not have the movie in mind--who knows?

Who, indeed?  One suspects that this reference tells us more about how Blumenthal's mind works than Reagan's.

As for the campaign itself, we learn almost nothing new about Bush or Dukakis.  Bush is portrayed as the dutiful establishmentarian son of a series of demanding Dads: father Prescott Bush, mentor Richard Nixon, and benefactor Ronald Reagan.  Dukakis is sketched predictably as the bloodless technocrat whose refusal to adopt a full-throated liberalism in the campaign made him "Bush's chief co-conspirator in perpetuating the Cold War drama."  The only figures who seem to engage his sympathies are Gary Hart and Mario Cuomo.  Yet here, too, consistency is not one of the author's virtues.  Thus Hart, whose windy perorations comparing himself to Gorbachev are fondly received by Blumenthal, "set up a think tank, The Center for New Democracy," which "became a policy and speechwriting shop, in the service of his immediate political needs."  But woe unto conservative Pierre duPont, whose " `new ideas' had been gleaned by his staffers, who raced through the conservative think tanks in Washington, picking up the most extreme economic proposals."  Governor Cuomo, praised for going mano a mano with Richard Perle and Elliott Abrams, "brought a physical audacity to politics."  Bush adviser Roger Ailes, however, is taken to task for similarly instructing "his candidates to invade the mental and, if possible, the physical space of their opponents."