You’re the President of the United States, it’s September, and over in Iraq, various gangs of thugs are driving around murdering and terrorizing a certain community, which has, naturally, created some militia outfits to defend itself. Bear in mind that after your martial victory several years before, the new government legislated that all Iraqis, whatever their ethnic background, enjoy equal voting rights, and there’s an election looming in November.

That election is a crucial stage in your planned reconstruction of Iraqi civil society, but owing to the intractable blood feuds, there’s a systematic terrorist campaign to keep the voters away from the polls. Your people out there have urgently requested that you deploy the Army right now to restore order so the election can take place. Now here’s where it gets tricky: In October, there’s an important election in Ohio, and your Republican candidate will lose if the Army gets involved in this increasingly unpopular foreign conflict. So, what do you do?

If, because you believe that this is no time to play dice with people’s lives, you gave the morally obvious answer—order out the troops, crack some skulls and hang the consequences in Ohio—then you’re hereby disqualified from high political office and should stick to reading book reviews at your local Starbucks.

But if your reasoning went something like this: Well, I feel badly for the Iraqis, but these Johnny Foreigners will always find a way to kill each other anyway, and if we lose Ohio my party will collapse, so I’m going to ignore the trouble and hope no one gets too worked up over it, then you should consider a career in Washington, D.C.

Ignore the trouble is precisely what President Ulysses S. Grant chose to do in September 1875 when the beleaguered governor of Mississippi pleaded with him to dispatch federal troops to ensure peaceful state elections. At the time, well-organized hordes of Democratic “White Liners,” mostly recalcitrant Confederates implacably opposed to the extension of the franchise to blacks, were terrorizing the black community to suppress the vote.

The governor, Adelbert Ames, had organized a few companies of black militia to counterbalance the White Liners in an act of brave defiance that raised the horrific (or enticing) possibility of reigniting the Civil War and overthrowing Reconstruction using the specter of an “armed Negro uprising” as a dubious pretext. And what happened? In the election, the Republicans were demolished, and Mississippi returned to white control, soon followed by several other states where the same tactics were employed. Up north, Grant’s man, Rutherford B. Hayes, won re-election as the governor of Ohio. (He succeeded Grant as President and ended Reconstruction, thereby helping to hand the South over to segregationist Democrats.)

Nicholas Lemann, the dean of Columbia’s School of Journalism and a staff writer at The New Yorker, tells the story of what soon became known as “the Mississippi Plan,” its background and its baleful aftermath in Redemption. The undoubted hero of the piece is the remarkable Adelbert Ames, a former Union general from Maine who first traveled to Mississippi under the assumption that he was a savior of the defeated South, only to find himself crucified by an unforgiving enemy. Along the way, this flawed messiah was himself redeemed: From being a political hack hoping to launch a Presidential career and larded down with the usual well-meaning but hopelessly patronizing attitude toward the “simple Negroes,” Ames transformed into a fiery crusader determined to see justice done toward the huddled black masses now set free but still suborned by their appalling former owners.

Mr. Lemann performs a sterling service in excavating these hidden ruins, and Redemption is a superb, supple work of popular narrative history backed up by sound archival evidence. Still, there’s one aspect that troubles me, though maybe I’m just being oversensitive: Mr. Lemann very properly gives both sides of any given clash, yet almost invariably exculpates blacks from any hint of impropriety. By portraying Mississippi’s blacks as universally forbearing and heroic innocents, he inadvertently turns them into caricatures.

Mr. Lemann spends a great deal of time carefully delineating the complex facets and motivations of the whites, but relatively little on their black allies. Were none of them corrupt, did none commit murder, had none ever helped to incite a riot? What about the internal politics of the black community and the inevitable class tensions between newly freed landless and land-owning blacks, or the literate and the illiterate?

In his reluctance to portray blacks as subject to the same vices and temptations as anybody, Mr. Lemann may have feared somehow giving succor to the self-pitying Southern historiography of Reconstruction as a “crime” perpetrated by corrupt blacks and their carpet-bagging pals. By this logic, a hint of anything less than untainted grace and innocence would presumably strengthen the cracker view that these uppity blacks had it coming and that whites were merely protecting themselves.

This is an understandable worry on Mr. Lemann’s part, though I think he should be less fearful. There’s no danger of moral equivalence here: Notwithstanding a few individual acts of violence, Republicans of all races were enforcing the law, a moral law that was the product of a war in which about 600,000 men had recently died. One side was right, the other wrong.

Nevertheless, much to his credit, Mr. Lemann never bashes you over the head with an obvious modern analogy—that was me, I’m afraid—but leaves the reader to read between his lines. Every writer is shaped by the present and thus brings biases to his text, and while the old Southern magnolia-and-moonlight historians who reigned until the 1940’s certainly had theirs, it would be surprising if Mr. Lemann—who’s written several perceptive pieces for The New Yorker about Iraq—had not had the failing reconstruction effort and the all-too-successful terrorist activity there lurking in the back of his mind.

The lesson here is that civil wars are messy affairs that rarely end when the official hostilities do; they linger instead for decades as the aggrieved losers settle old scores. The American Civil War is still, to an extent, being fought. When will the Iraqi one end?

Alexander Rose’s Washington’s Spies: The Story of America’s First Spy Ring (Bantam) was published in April.

You’re the President of the United States, it’s September, and over in Iraq, various gangs of thugs are driving around murdering and terrorizing a certain community, which has, naturally, created some militia outfits to defend itself. Bear in mind that after your martial victory several years before, the new government legislated that all Iraqis, whatever their ethnic background, enjoy equal voting rights, and there’s an election looming in November.

That election is a crucial stage in your planned reconstruction of Iraqi civil society, but owing to the intractable blood feuds, there’s a systematic terrorist campaign to keep the voters away from the polls. Your people out there have urgently requested that you deploy the Army right now to restore order so the election can take place. Now here’s where it gets tricky: In October, there’s an important election in Ohio, and your Republican candidate will lose if the Army gets involved in this increasingly unpopular foreign conflict. So, what do you do?

If, because you believe that this is no time to play dice with people’s lives, you gave the morally obvious answer—order out the troops, crack some skulls and hang the consequences in Ohio—then you’re hereby disqualified from high political office and should stick to reading book reviews at your local Starbucks.

But if your reasoning went something like this: Well, I feel badly for the Iraqis, but these Johnny Foreigners will always find a way to kill each other anyway, and if we lose Ohio my party will collapse, so I’m going to ignore the trouble and hope no one gets too worked up over it, then you should consider a career in Washington, D.C.

Ignore the trouble is precisely what President Ulysses S. Grant chose to do in September 1875 when the beleaguered governor of Mississippi pleaded with him to dispatch federal troops to ensure peaceful state elections. At the time, well-organized hordes of Democratic “White Liners,” mostly recalcitrant Confederates implacably opposed to the extension of the franchise to blacks, were terrorizing the black community to suppress the vote.

The governor, Adelbert Ames, had organized a few companies of black militia to counterbalance the White Liners in an act of brave defiance that raised the horrific (or enticing) possibility of reigniting the Civil War and overthrowing Reconstruction using the specter of an “armed Negro uprising” as a dubious pretext. And what happened? In the election, the Republicans were demolished, and Mississippi returned to white control, soon followed by several other states where the same tactics were employed. Up north, Grant’s man, Rutherford B. Hayes, won re-election as the governor of Ohio. (He succeeded Grant as President and ended Reconstruction, thereby helping to hand the South over to segregationist Democrats.)

Nicholas Lemann, the dean of Columbia’s School of Journalism and a staff writer at The New Yorker, tells the story of what soon became known as “the Mississippi Plan,” its background and its baleful aftermath in Redemption. The undoubted hero of the piece is the remarkable Adelbert Ames, a former Union general from Maine who first traveled to Mississippi under the assumption that he was a savior of the defeated South, only to find himself crucified by an unforgiving enemy. Along the way, this flawed messiah was himself redeemed: From being a political hack hoping to launch a Presidential career and larded down with the usual well-meaning but hopelessly patronizing attitude toward the “simple Negroes,” Ames transformed into a fiery crusader determined to see justice done toward the huddled black masses now set free but still suborned by their appalling former owners.

Mr. Lemann performs a sterling service in excavating these hidden ruins, and Redemption is a superb, supple work of popular narrative history backed up by sound archival evidence. Still, there’s one aspect that troubles me, though maybe I’m just being oversensitive: Mr. Lemann very properly gives both sides of any given clash, yet almost invariably exculpates blacks from any hint of impropriety. By portraying Mississippi’s blacks as universally forbearing and heroic innocents, he inadvertently turns them into caricatures.

Mr. Lemann spends a great deal of time carefully delineating the complex facets and motivations of the whites, but relatively little on their black allies. Were none of them corrupt, did none commit murder, had none ever helped to incite a riot? What about the internal politics of the black community and the inevitable class tensions between newly freed landless and land-owning blacks, or the literate and the illiterate?

In his reluctance to portray blacks as subject to the same vices and temptations as anybody, Mr. Lemann may have feared somehow giving succor to the self-pitying Southern historiography of Reconstruction as a “crime” perpetrated by corrupt blacks and their carpet-bagging pals. By this logic, a hint of anything less than untainted grace and innocence would presumably strengthen the cracker view that these uppity blacks had it coming and that whites were merely protecting themselves.

This is an understandable worry on Mr. Lemann’s part, though I think he should be less fearful. There’s no danger of moral equivalence here: Notwithstanding a few individual acts of violence, Republicans of all races were enforcing the law, a moral law that was the product of a war in which about 600,000 men had recently died. One side was right, the other wrong.

Nevertheless, much to his credit, Mr. Lemann never bashes you over the head with an obvious modern analogy—that was me, I’m afraid—but leaves the reader to read between his lines. Every writer is shaped by the present and thus brings biases to his text, and while the old Southern magnolia-and-moonlight historians who reigned until the 1940’s certainly had theirs, it would be surprising if Mr. Lemann—who’s written several perceptive pieces for The New Yorker about Iraq—had not had the failing reconstruction effort and the all-too-successful terrorist activity there lurking in the back of his mind.

The lesson here is that civil wars are messy affairs that rarely end when the official hostilities do; they linger instead for decades as the aggrieved losers settle old scores. The American Civil War is still, to an extent, being fought. When will the Iraqi one end?

Alexander Rose’s Washington’s Spies: The Story of America’s First Spy Ring (Bantam) was published in April.

It takes a man with a certain singular talent to write a history of America empty of originality and devoid of insight. William J. Bennett is that man, and America: The Last Best Hope should be enough to end his reputation as a historian—if he had one.

Mr. Bennett was once Ronald Reagan’s chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Secretary of Education and “drug czar.” He subsequently wrote several uplifting volumes, including The Book of Virtues, The Moral Compass and The Death of Outrage, in between gambling binges in Atlantic City and Vegas. Nothing legally dubious about that, of course, and he’s got a talk-radio show now, where he prognosticates on virtue, moral compasses and outrage—and why he’s for them.

I’m reminding you of these biographical facts only to demonstrate that America is not the work of some beetle-browed antiquary beavering away in the archives for the greater glory of scholarship, but that of a politico adept at writing middlebrow best-sellers that teach us valuable lessons. In other words, his America is a political and moral tract masquerading as history.

Mr. Bennett resents how the “sense of American greatness, of American purpose, of American exceptionalism” has been eroded by “[n]ewspaper columns and television reports” that are “full of cynicism.” That means we need “to tell the truth, get the facts out, [and] correct the record” in order to encourage a “positive” attitude to “Lincoln and the Founders”—who are apparently suffering from “[o]bscurity and oblivion.” Ultimately, Mr. Bennett wants to inspire “a new patriotism,” of the sort promoted by (please!) “the Old Man who dreamed dreams”—Reagan—so that Americans can “fall in love with this country.” This is history, not as enlightenment or as scholarship, but as inspiration.

Mr. Bennett is right in one regard: Even with lots of trendy graphics, history textbooks are deathly boring, a result of their authors’ sensitivity to identity politics combined with a keen eye for sales. So, to aid his retelling of a coherent, stirring national story of American genius and exceptionalism, Mr. Bennett accordingly emphasizes traditional drum-and-trumpet history with all its lashings of patriotic gore, good and bad Presidents, noble sacrifices, immortal speeches, hazardous wagon trails, etc.

The downside is that the inspirational interpretation of American History is so alien to any reasonably tutored adult’s sensibilities that one wonders whether a single sun hangs in the heavens of Mr. Bennett’s home world. He subscribes to a school of history so old that it was the one they demolished to make way for the old school. Here’s an example: In Chapter 1, which covers 1492 to 1607, Mr. Bennett has 67 endnotes; of these, fully 50 cite a few works by such paleolithic pop historians as Samuel Eliot Morison, Henry Steele Commager and Daniel Boorstin. The sole coelacanth he left out, unsurprisingly, was Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who still thinks F.D.R.’s election in 1933 meant History came to a . Of the 17 left, eight refer to a book by Robert Royal, of the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center, called 1492 and All That: Political Manipulations of History.

The ironic result of Mr. Bennett’s thudding unawareness of modern research is that his supposedly entertaining, engaging and educational narrative of, say, the background and course of the Revolution is desperately dull: It’s been said a million times before, all that stuff about star-spangled, lantern-jawed Yankees pulling together for the cause of—wait for it—Liberty!, to oust those tyrannical, effete Brits.

Wouldn’t it have been more interesting to have learnt about the strength and diversity of loyalty to the Crown, the illegal trading with the enemy in which thousands of Americans participated (with Washington’s tacit support), the widespread unenthusiasm for independence among Whigs, the Continental Army’s remarkable incidence of disease picked up from nymphs du pavé, the purging of politically neutral farmers and shopkeepers by patriot fanatics, the denunciations by neighbors and the hanging of those deemed too ambivalent about eventual American victory? Surely one can challenge the consensus view of the Revolution and its comfortable certainties without necessarily being an America-hating, ivory-tower tenured radical.

And on that note, it takes a man with a different but equally peculiar talent to write a history of America that omits the War of Independence. And that man is Thomas Bender, a professor at New York University. Well, he doesn’t exactly omit it, since he manages to devote two paragraphs in a book of 368 pages to the fighting—but he thinks that whole Revolution thing didn’t really happen, at least as we commonly perceive it.

In short, Mr. Bender takes exception to exceptionalism. It’s time “to mark the end of American history as we have known it,” he believes. The Bennettian form of nation-state history, taught in schools “to forge and sustain national identities,” is flawed owing to its assumption that the nation is “the natural container and carrier of history,” which he calls a “nineteenth-century ideological framing of history.” That is, national history is merely a product of the iron-and-blood nationalist era, and in our cosmopolitan, increasingly borderless world, we deserve something less parochial, less arrogant. Which is why Mr. Bender’s book sets American history in a global context: what was happening everywhere else, and how it influenced events here. To that end, the Revolution, he writes, is part of a “large historical narrative” encompassing other contemporaneous conflicts and rebellions that also made “claims of universal human rights.” (Bill Bennett, in the opposite corner, calls it the “Greatest Revolution.”)

I admire Mr. Bender’s spunk, and it’s refreshing to see such an inventive, jarring perspective. Even so, his thesis is not critic-proof. First, there’s always the danger of contextualizing historical events so much that one loses any appreciation of their distinctiveness, and second, he’s fatally wrong in assuming that national history is some brittle new innovation, one easily shattered and replaced by his cosmopolitan model.

As early as the mid-12th century, Europeans were identifying their nations with defined borders. Whereas in 1066 William the Conqueror—who saw himself as vanquisher of the tribe inhabiting his new Norman satrapy—crowned himself Rex Anglorum (“King of the English”), within a century Henry II had pointedly adapted his title to Rex Angliae (“King of England”), thereby linking geography to a national consciousness. And then what about Shakespeare’s (national) history plays, with John of Gaunt’s evocation of “this England,” populated by a “happy breed of men”? No, nation-states have existed for a very long time, which makes me think that Mr. Bennett’s nationalist historiography, despite its limitations and vulgarity, has a more natural basis than Mr. Bender assumes.

In any case, Mr. Bender needs to be careful that his own perspective isn’t brittler than the one he’s proposing to replace. A Nation Among Nations, after all, is a product of the modern transnationalist impulse. Today, we have N.G.O.’s, multilateral institutions and corporations answerable to no domestic, democratic government and committed to “global solutions” and self-defined “international standards.” The problem with transnationalism—exemplified by the European Union, human-rights watchdogs and fickle businesses—is that its unelected, unaccountable adherents neither represent the people nor dwell among them, and thus lack credibility and popularity.

Thomas Bender’s interpretation, in short, isn’t likely to make much headway against the mighty nationalist wind, and Bill Bennett is already threatening us innocents with a sequel taking events to the glorious present. God save us—and the Republic.

Alexander Rose is the author of Washington’s Spies: The Story of America’s First Spy Ring, published in April by Bantam Dell.

It takes a man with a certain singular talent to write a history of America empty of originality and devoid of insight. William J. Bennett is that man, and America: The Last Best Hope should be enough to end his reputation as a historian—if he had one.

Mr. Bennett was once Ronald Reagan’s chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Secretary of Education and “drug czar.” He subsequently wrote several uplifting volumes, including The Book of Virtues, The Moral Compass and The Death of Outrage, in between gambling binges in Atlantic City and Vegas. Nothing legally dubious about that, of course, and he’s got a talk-radio show now, where he prognosticates on virtue, moral compasses and outrage—and why he’s for them.

I’m reminding you of these biographical facts only to demonstrate that America is not the work of some beetle-browed antiquary beavering away in the archives for the greater glory of scholarship, but that of a politico adept at writing middlebrow best-sellers that teach us valuable lessons. In other words, his America is a political and moral tract masquerading as history.

Mr. Bennett resents how the “sense of American greatness, of American purpose, of American exceptionalism” has been eroded by “[n]ewspaper columns and television reports” that are “full of cynicism.” That means we need “to tell the truth, get the facts out, [and] correct the record” in order to encourage a “positive” attitude to “Lincoln and the Founders”—who are apparently suffering from “[o]bscurity and oblivion.” Ultimately, Mr. Bennett wants to inspire “a new patriotism,” of the sort promoted by (please!) “the Old Man who dreamed dreams”—Reagan—so that Americans can “fall in love with this country.” This is history, not as enlightenment or as scholarship, but as inspiration.

Mr. Bennett is right in one regard: Even with lots of trendy graphics, history textbooks are deathly boring, a result of their authors’ sensitivity to identity politics combined with a keen eye for sales. So, to aid his retelling of a coherent, stirring national story of American genius and exceptionalism, Mr. Bennett accordingly emphasizes traditional drum-and-trumpet history with all its lashings of patriotic gore, good and bad Presidents, noble sacrifices, immortal speeches, hazardous wagon trails, etc.

The downside is that the inspirational interpretation of American History is so alien to any reasonably tutored adult’s sensibilities that one wonders whether a single sun hangs in the heavens of Mr. Bennett’s home world. He subscribes to a school of history so old that it was the one they demolished to make way for the old school. Here’s an example: In Chapter 1, which covers 1492 to 1607, Mr. Bennett has 67 endnotes; of these, fully 50 cite a few works by such paleolithic pop historians as Samuel Eliot Morison, Henry Steele Commager and Daniel Boorstin. The sole coelacanth he left out, unsurprisingly, was Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who still thinks F.D.R.’s election in 1933 meant History came to a . Of the 17 left, eight refer to a book by Robert Royal, of the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center, called 1492 and All That: Political Manipulations of History.

The ironic result of Mr. Bennett’s thudding unawareness of modern research is that his supposedly entertaining, engaging and educational narrative of, say, the background and course of the Revolution is desperately dull: It’s been said a million times before, all that stuff about star-spangled, lantern-jawed Yankees pulling together for the cause of—wait for it—Liberty!, to oust those tyrannical, effete Brits.

Wouldn’t it have been more interesting to have learnt about the strength and diversity of loyalty to the Crown, the illegal trading with the enemy in which thousands of Americans participated (with Washington’s tacit support), the widespread unenthusiasm for independence among Whigs, the Continental Army’s remarkable incidence of disease picked up from nymphs du pavé, the purging of politically neutral farmers and shopkeepers by patriot fanatics, the denunciations by neighbors and the hanging of those deemed too ambivalent about eventual American victory? Surely one can challenge the consensus view of the Revolution and its comfortable certainties without necessarily being an America-hating, ivory-tower tenured radical.

And on that note, it takes a man with a different but equally peculiar talent to write a history of America that omits the War of Independence. And that man is Thomas Bender, a professor at New York University. Well, he doesn’t exactly omit it, since he manages to devote two paragraphs in a book of 368 pages to the fighting—but he thinks that whole Revolution thing didn’t really happen, at least as we commonly perceive it.

In short, Mr. Bender takes exception to exceptionalism. It’s time “to mark the end of American history as we have known it,” he believes. The Bennettian form of nation-state history, taught in schools “to forge and sustain national identities,” is flawed owing to its assumption that the nation is “the natural container and carrier of history,” which he calls a “nineteenth-century ideological framing of history.” That is, national history is merely a product of the iron-and-blood nationalist era, and in our cosmopolitan, increasingly borderless world, we deserve something less parochial, less arrogant. Which is why Mr. Bender’s book sets American history in a global context: what was happening everywhere else, and how it influenced events here. To that end, the Revolution, he writes, is part of a “large historical narrative” encompassing other contemporaneous conflicts and rebellions that also made “claims of universal human rights.” (Bill Bennett, in the opposite corner, calls it the “Greatest Revolution.”)

I admire Mr. Bender’s spunk, and it’s refreshing to see such an inventive, jarring perspective. Even so, his thesis is not critic-proof. First, there’s always the danger of contextualizing historical events so much that one loses any appreciation of their distinctiveness, and second, he’s fatally wrong in assuming that national history is some brittle new innovation, one easily shattered and replaced by his cosmopolitan model.

As early as the mid-12th century, Europeans were identifying their nations with defined borders. Whereas in 1066 William the Conqueror—who saw himself as vanquisher of the tribe inhabiting his new Norman satrapy—crowned himself Rex Anglorum (“King of the English”), within a century Henry II had pointedly adapted his title to Rex Angliae (“King of England”), thereby linking geography to a national consciousness. And then what about Shakespeare’s (national) history plays, with John of Gaunt’s evocation of “this England,” populated by a “happy breed of men”? No, nation-states have existed for a very long time, which makes me think that Mr. Bennett’s nationalist historiography, despite its limitations and vulgarity, has a more natural basis than Mr. Bender assumes.

In any case, Mr. Bender needs to be careful that his own perspective isn’t brittler than the one he’s proposing to replace. A Nation Among Nations, after all, is a product of the modern transnationalist impulse. Today, we have N.G.O.’s, multilateral institutions and corporations answerable to no domestic, democratic government and committed to “global solutions” and self-defined “international standards.” The problem with transnationalism—exemplified by the European Union, human-rights watchdogs and fickle businesses—is that its unelected, unaccountable adherents neither represent the people nor dwell among them, and thus lack credibility and popularity.

Thomas Bender’s interpretation, in short, isn’t likely to make much headway against the mighty nationalist wind, and Bill Bennett is already threatening us innocents with a sequel taking events to the glorious present. God save us—and the Republic.

Alexander Rose is the author of Washington’s Spies: The Story of America’s First Spy Ring, published in April by Bantam Dell.

It ain’t the same these days. I mean, O.K., there’s Benedict XVI making sure things don’t go to hell, but Tony Blair’s a Labour man, and look at the guy occupying 1600 Pennsylvania. To self-proclaimed real conservatives—defined by Bruce Bartlett as the upholders of small government, free trade, federalism and the original intent of the Constitution—George W. Bush is not one of the faithful. He had ’em fooled for a couple of years, but it’s becoming ever clearer that he’s a fraud or, still worse, a liberal, as Mr. Bartlett tries to show in Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy.

Basically, Mr. Bartlett’s theory is that George W. Bush is spending like a drunken Midwestern businessman trying to impress the strippers at Scores. He’s the first President since John Quincy Adams to serve a full term without vetoing a single budgetary item; the deficit is ballooning; and his fellow Republicans are guzzling pork faster than they can slaughter hogs.

To tax-cutting, Cato Institute–loving supply-sider conservatives like Mr. Bartlett, the Bush administration is threatening to bankrupt the country once the first boomers start drawing their Social Security benefits in a couple of years. The only way out of the mess will be to raise taxes, big time. And you know what that means: socialism. Things are getting so bad, even Bill Clinton is looking good. (Better impeached than impostor, it seems.) After all, Mr. Clinton ran surpluses and kept the budget more or less in check. Mr. Bartlett thinks, economically speaking, Mr. Clinton was first-rate, and believes Mr. Bush is the 21st century’s new Nixon (another President liberals assumed was a crazy-ass right-winger but who was, in fact, regarded by Republicans as a candy-ass lefty).

The most interesting thing about Impostor is what’s left unsaid. Republicanism is convulsing. The movement has long been schizophrenically torn between a populist, extrovert impulse to irradiate the masses with the happy glow of conservatism and a self-marginalizing instinct to amputate itself from the slights of a corrupt, fallen, secularized world.

The home-schooling phenomenon and the invention of exclusively conservative film festivals (see the American Film Renaissance at www.afrfilmfestival.com) are symptoms of the introvert tendency, as is the new The Politically Incorrect Guide series published by Regnery. There are three entries so far: American History, Islam and Science. (A new one’s coming out in April: Women, Sex, and Feminism.) Each of these assumes there’s a sinister conspiracy by the politically correct, all-powerful liberal elite to cover up the real “facts,” which our brave authors reveal to their followers. They are out to get us, we’re told; retreat to the hills, hole up there and stick to what you know.

The appearance of Mr. Bartlett’s Impostor shows that the populists are hitting back. Its most striking aspect is the beatification of Reagan—and there’s more to come, to judge by publishing trends: There are already 960 books about him, and the pace is picking up.

Reagan is being turned into the President against whom all future Republican Presidents (and politicians) will be measured. He’s safely dead, so it’s not as if he can complain, and he reigned sufficiently long ago that few can remember exactly where he stood on various issues (let alone on those that didn’t exist at the time, such as stem-cell research and the reconstruction efforts in Iraq).

Reagan was perfect in every way (especially if you discreetly forget weird stuff like Nancy and her psychic-friend network, or the most needlessly complex conspiracy in history, Iran-contra). Hey, he was the Great Communicator and the Gipper and a Christian—the Sun King of American politics. He was entertaining, he was rosy-cheeked, he was smart, he looked good on a horse—but, most importantly, he was loved by the people. Not only of them but for them, Reagan was the evangelist of popular conservatism and succeeded in converting an entire class of blue-collar Democrats to the side of righteousness. No wonder Republicans miss the old boy: He won 49— 49—states in 1984. Imagine pulling that trick off today.

After Sept. 11, Mr. Bush was solemnly crowned and hailed as “The Right Man” by the high priests and prophets of conservatism. Turns out His Majesty was just a fraudulent pretender to the throne. Hence Mr. Bartlett’s 310-page howl of despair at Mr. Bush’s betrayal of “the Reagan legacy.”

Putting on my Stephen Colbert hat—his shoes are too large to fill—it seems to me that a lot of this agitated Bush-baiting is the result of the President’s dreadful poll numbers. They rose like a rocket and have fallen like a stick. When he was striding, haughty as a warlord, across the deck of the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln a couple of years ago, conservatives somehow found it compatible with their consciences to keep mum about Mr. Bush’s spending habits, but they’re getting rather disheartened these days, and those Rove-imposed rictus grins are wearing off. In the upcoming Congressional elections, it’s looking increasingly likely there will be mild Senate losses and more substantial ones in the House, which may well leave the G.O.P. majority pretty slim.

Mr. Bartlett goes so far as to wonder whether an outright Republican electoral loss would be so bad: It would allow the new opposition party to reform itself without all the pressure that holding office brings. Well, perhaps. British Conservatives consoled themselves with the same advice just before John Major’s Tories were bludgeoned at the polls by Mr. Blair’s once-unelectable Labour Party—and look what happened: The Tories are still divided and still out of power nearly a decade later. Hard-core ideologues who pang for purity—like Bruce Bartlett—forget that the primary point of politics is not “vision,” or “morality,” or “principle,” but winning elections and holding power. All opposition parties can do is oppose; ruling parties govern.

Politicos, in other words, have to be realistic, which is where Mr. Bartlett trips up. The choice he presents—Mr. Bush’s big-government conservatism or Reagan’s budget-slashing small(er) government—is a misleading one. The latter is not on offer, one reason being that the day of the old-time supply-siders is waning. Resurrecting the Reagan 80’s is just not feasible in our age, and the more moderate conservatives have instead been more interested in Mr. Bush’s successful purge of the party’s quasi-Clintonite wing and his expansion of Republican power in the Supreme Court and Congress.

Granted, a Democrat would have to have a heart of stone not to laugh at the Republicans’ travails. How delicious is it that even the staunchest of Republicans are deserting the President? Yet Dems ought to be wary of Mr. Bartlett’s siren song. Yes, he fiercely attacks George Bush, the man they love to hate, but no, that doesn’t mean he’s on your side. Hankering after a Democratic victory is, to Mr. Bartlett, merely a tactical maneuver to force the G.O.P. to change. What he really wants is for the next Republican administration to be more right-wing than this one. So, if Democrats line up behind Bruce Bartlett and opportunistically quote him chapter and verse, perhaps they will succeed in undermining their current bête noire—but they may very well end up burying themselves.

Alexander Rose’s Washington’s Spies: The Story of America’s First Spy Ring will be published by Bantam Dell in April.

It ain’t the same these days. I mean, O.K., there’s Benedict XVI making sure things don’t go to hell, but Tony Blair’s a Labour man, and look at the guy occupying 1600 Pennsylvania. To self-proclaimed real conservatives—defined by Bruce Bartlett as the upholders of small government, free trade, federalism and the original intent of the Constitution—George W. Bush is not one of the faithful. He had ’em fooled for a couple of years, but it’s becoming ever clearer that he’s a fraud or, still worse, a liberal, as Mr. Bartlett tries to show in Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy.

Basically, Mr. Bartlett’s theory is that George W. Bush is spending like a drunken Midwestern businessman trying to impress the strippers at Scores. He’s the first President since John Quincy Adams to serve a full term without vetoing a single budgetary item; the deficit is ballooning; and his fellow Republicans are guzzling pork faster than they can slaughter hogs.

To tax-cutting, Cato Institute–loving supply-sider conservatives like Mr. Bartlett, the Bush administration is threatening to bankrupt the country once the first boomers start drawing their Social Security benefits in a couple of years. The only way out of the mess will be to raise taxes, big time. And you know what that means: socialism. Things are getting so bad, even Bill Clinton is looking good. (Better impeached than impostor, it seems.) After all, Mr. Clinton ran surpluses and kept the budget more or less in check. Mr. Bartlett thinks, economically speaking, Mr. Clinton was first-rate, and believes Mr. Bush is the 21st century’s new Nixon (another President liberals assumed was a crazy-ass right-winger but who was, in fact, regarded by Republicans as a candy-ass lefty).

The most interesting thing about Impostor is what’s left unsaid. Republicanism is convulsing. The movement has long been schizophrenically torn between a populist, extrovert impulse to irradiate the masses with the happy glow of conservatism and a self-marginalizing instinct to amputate itself from the slights of a corrupt, fallen, secularized world.

The home-schooling phenomenon and the invention of exclusively conservative film festivals (see the American Film Renaissance at www.afrfilmfestival.com) are symptoms of the introvert tendency, as is the new The Politically Incorrect Guide series published by Regnery. There are three entries so far: American History, Islam and Science. (A new one’s coming out in April: Women, Sex, and Feminism.) Each of these assumes there’s a sinister conspiracy by the politically correct, all-powerful liberal elite to cover up the real “facts,” which our brave authors reveal to their followers. They are out to get us, we’re told; retreat to the hills, hole up there and stick to what you know.

The appearance of Mr. Bartlett’s Impostor shows that the populists are hitting back. Its most striking aspect is the beatification of Reagan—and there’s more to come, to judge by publishing trends: There are already 960 books about him, and the pace is picking up.

Reagan is being turned into the President against whom all future Republican Presidents (and politicians) will be measured. He’s safely dead, so it’s not as if he can complain, and he reigned sufficiently long ago that few can remember exactly where he stood on various issues (let alone on those that didn’t exist at the time, such as stem-cell research and the reconstruction efforts in Iraq).

Reagan was perfect in every way (especially if you discreetly forget weird stuff like Nancy and her psychic-friend network, or the most needlessly complex conspiracy in history, Iran-contra). Hey, he was the Great Communicator and the Gipper and a Christian—the Sun King of American politics. He was entertaining, he was rosy-cheeked, he was smart, he looked good on a horse—but, most importantly, he was loved by the people. Not only of them but for them, Reagan was the evangelist of popular conservatism and succeeded in converting an entire class of blue-collar Democrats to the side of righteousness. No wonder Republicans miss the old boy: He won 49—49—states in 1984. Imagine pulling that trick off today.

After Sept. 11, Mr. Bush was solemnly crowned and hailed as “The Right Man” by the high priests and prophets of conservatism. Turns out His Majesty was just a fraudulent pretender to the throne. Hence Mr. Bartlett’s 310-page howl of despair at Mr. Bush’s betrayal of “the Reagan legacy.”

Putting on my Stephen Colbert hat—his shoes are too large to fill—it seems to me that a lot of this agitated Bush-baiting is the result of the President’s dreadful poll numbers. They rose like a rocket and have fallen like a stick. When he was striding, haughty as a warlord, across the deck of the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln a couple of years ago, conservatives somehow found it compatible with their consciences to keep mum about Mr. Bush’s spending habits, but they’re getting rather disheartened these days, and those Rove-imposed rictus grins are wearing off. In the upcoming Congressional elections, it’s looking increasingly likely there will be mild Senate losses and more substantial ones in the House, which may well leave the G.O.P. majority pretty slim.

Mr. Bartlett goes so far as to wonder whether an outright Republican electoral loss would be so bad: It would allow the new opposition party to reform itself without all the pressure that holding office brings. Well, perhaps. British Conservatives consoled themselves with the same advice just before John Major’s Tories were bludgeoned at the polls by Mr. Blair’s once-unelectable Labour Party—and look what happened: The Tories are still divided and still out of power nearly a decade later. Hard-core ideologues who pang for purity—like Bruce Bartlett—forget that the primary point of politics is not “vision,” or “morality,” or “principle,” but winning elections and holding power. All opposition parties can do is oppose; ruling parties govern.

Politicos, in other words, have to be realistic, which is where Mr. Bartlett trips up. The choice he presents—Mr. Bush’s big-government conservatism or Reagan’s budget-slashing small(er) government—is a misleading one. The latter is not on offer, one reason being that the day of the old-time supply-siders is waning. Resurrecting the Reagan 80’s is just not feasible in our age, and the more moderate conservatives have instead been more interested in Mr. Bush’s successful purge of the party’s quasi-Clintonite wing and his expansion of Republican power in the Supreme Court and Congress.

Granted, a Democrat would have to have a heart of stone not to laugh at the Republicans’ travails. How delicious is it that even the staunchest of Republicans are deserting the President? Yet Dems ought to be wary of Mr. Bartlett’s siren song. Yes, he fiercely attacks George Bush, the man they love to hate, but no, that doesn’t mean he’s on your side. Hankering after a Democratic victory is, to Mr. Bartlett, merely a tactical maneuver to force the G.O.P. to change. What he really wants is for the next Republican administration to be more right-wing than this one. So, if Democrats line up behind Bruce Bartlett and opportunistically quote him chapter and verse, perhaps they will succeed in undermining their current bête noire—but they may very well end up burying themselves.

Alexander Rose’s Washington’s Spies: The Story of America’s First Spy Ring will be published by Bantam Dell in April.

Nice theory, but it sounds too pat to me, a tad too diabolically clever for our friends at Langley. Like any argument, Mr. McCoy’s rests on the validity of the assumptions, not the vigor of the assertions; if the former prove flawed, the entire thesis collapses. And Mr. McCoy’s assumptions are very questionable indeed.

A Question of Torture is the newest addition to Metropolitan Books’ American Empire Project, a left-wing series of “short, argument-driven books” that “explore[s] every facet of the developing American imperium.” Just as Regnery authors adhere to a, ahem, robustly conservative worldview, Mr. McCoy’s book comes freighted with certain preconceptions. For those who believe in the gospel according to Noam Chomsky—whose contribution, Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance (2003), was the first of the A.E.P. books—the C.I.A. is assumed to be a fearsome, super-efficient outfit filled with sinister assassins, right-wing interrogators and malevolent white guys itching to take over the country (or, alternatively, other people’s countries).

Hence, in Mr. McCoy’s reading, everything this omnipresent, omniscient intel shop does must be part of a long-term plan, cunningly conceived and flawlessly executed. To that end, Mr. McCoy gamely strives to connect the C.I.A.’s “mind-control” experiments of the 1950’s with its enquiries into self-inflicted pain and sensory deprivation capsulated in the 1963 Kubark Counterintelligence Interrogation manual, the Vietnam-era Phoenix program, the 1983 Honduras handbook Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual, the Army’s FM 34-52: Intelligence Interrogation field guide of 1992, the post–Sept. 11 Bush administration’s legally and morally dubious memos on interrogation methods, and—capping it all as the preordained blowback from half a century’s lies—the photos snapped of Lynndie England and her debonair lover, Charles Graner, by their camera-happy pals at Abu Ghraib.

And that’s by no means all. Half-nelsoned by the A.E.P.’s ideological demands, Mr. McCoy must relate C.I.A. procedures to the growth of this “imperium” of ours—the agency needs to be representative of American power, you see, for the sake of high drama. Mr. McCoy’s a dab old hand at this sort of thing: A previous book was called The Politics of Heroin: C.I.A. Complicity in the Global Drug Trade—the subtitle tells you all you need to know. In his latest volume, because Washington apparently provided the training and equipment, as well as “moral legitimacy,” to various regimes to torture their citizens, there is, Mr. McCoy says, “a clear correspondence between U.S. Cold War policy and the extreme state violence of the authoritarian age.” (Strangely, he doesn’t cite the role of the USSR.)

Mr. McCoy’s essential problem is that he’s trying to conjure up a Grand Unified Theory out of a myriad of disparate factors. His effort to meld this hodgepodge of reports and manuals from different eras and theaters into a single, coherent narrative sometimes leads him astray. His claim that watching The Passion of the Christ—released several weeks before the Abu Ghraib story broke—“prepared the American public for quiet acceptance of the prison photos” is silly, and he mistakes the low-budget, typically 50’s C.I.A. forays into LSD kookiness and electro-shock faddery for a systematic campaign to instill mass mind control over “whole societies.”

These errors are more amusing than alarming. More serious are the shortcuts taken to make connections that don’t actually exist. Thus, he quotes from the Honduran handbook (“successful ‘questioning’ is based upon … psychological techniques”) to prove that a 2003 memorandum by Gen. Ricardo Sanchez authorizing certain interrogation methods used “similar language.” And what was this “similar language”? “Interrogation approaches,” General Sanchez wrote, “are designed to manipulate the detainee’s emotions and weaknesses to gain his willing cooperation.” One bears no resemblance to the other—though both state the thuddingly obvious—but Mr. McCoy nevertheless states that “clearly, in both its design and detail, Gen. Sanchez’s memo was influenced by past C.I.A. interrogation research.”

Perhaps it was, but not necessarily. Despite Mr. McCoy’s insistence that the C.I.A. pioneered psychological “no-touch” measures of extracting information, General Sanchez could easily have picked up pointers from The Gulag Archipelago, 1984 or Darkness at Noon, all of which detail the same kinds of psyche-out games these interrogators do play. Mr. McCoy also claims the C.I.A.’s methods of “self-inflicted” pain were revolutionary, but were they really? Any Japanese P.O.W. guard or tsarist secret policeman or medieval inquisitor could have told you that making someone stand up for several hours hurts, or that depriving prisoners of sleep makes them more pliable. (The genius of torture, it seems, lies in the dull unoriginality of its practitioners down the ages.) And finally, General Sanchez is a soldier, not a spook, but if the C.I.A.’s techniques are so if-I-tell-you-I-have-to-kill-you, then how did General Sanchez hear about them? Mr. McCoy never satisfactorily explains the mode of transmission between the C.I.A. and the military. Indeed, he sometimes elides the two.

But the main failure of Mr. McCoy’s thesis lies in his habit of arguing backwards from the present. He knows how this story ends—with an Iraqi prisoner posed in a martyr’s tableau, wired-up arms outstretched and outfitted with a black Klan-like hood. Accordingly, he excavates for evidence in the past to support his presuppositions about C.I.A. omniscience and the concordant inevitability of Abu Ghraib. But the real question is, did C.I.A. officials and operatives consciously plan 50 years ahead? I suspect not.

Put another way, in the film The Luzhin Defence, we see the grandmaster staring at a chessboard as pawns advance, gambits are declined, piece takes piece, and checks are countered in super-fast-forward. From this we infer that chess whizzes like Fischer, Capablanca and Botvinnik plot out their games from the start (“mate in 17” sort of thing), whereas real chessies see two, perhaps three, moves ahead and rapidly adapt to their opponent’s tactics. Same goes with the C.I.A.: Despite Mr. McCoy’s assumptions, the agency, like any corporation or bureaucracy, operates on an ad hoc basis and reacts to external events as best it can.

Spies and their masters are not all-knowing manipulators like M and Karla and Control—though they love it when you think them so. If you do, however, then you’ve succumbed to the romanticism propagated by hack novelists and the pseudo-sophistication of A.E.P. authors. In fact, in the office they’re ordinary men in Men’s Wearhouse suits—plodders, turf-warriors and careerists, along with the usual complement of the disgruntled, the overlooked, the inept and the over-promoted—while in the field, agents and assets are too often fantasists, fabricators and nutters. Dumb mistakes and shortsighted decisions are made all the time. The C.I.A., in short, couldn’t pull off a conspiracy this complex, this long-term, this sinister if it tried.

I’ve been harsh on poor old Alfred McCoy. This is a worthwhile book, one well worth reading to balance the repulsive agit-prop of the right (“water-boarding is not torture”). And, for once, a reviewer can’t complain about a lack of sources and sloppy research. There’s a ton of interesting stuff here, and Mr. McCoy does weave a fascinating narrative, but his thesis is inherently flawed, and A Question of Torture ultimately fails to prove the case.

Alexander Rose is the author of Washington’s Spies: The Story of America’s First Spy Ring, which Bantam Dell will publish in April.

Nice theory, but it sounds too pat to me, a tad too diabolically clever for our friends at Langley. Like any argument, Mr. McCoy’s rests on the validity of the assumptions, not the vigor of the assertions; if the former prove flawed, the entire thesis collapses. And Mr. McCoy’s assumptions are very questionable indeed.

A Question of Torture is the newest addition to Metropolitan Books’ American Empire Project, a left-wing series of “short, argument-driven books” that “explore[s] every facet of the developing American imperium.” Just as Regnery authors adhere to a, ahem, robustly conservative worldview, Mr. McCoy’s book comes freighted with certain preconceptions. For those who believe in the gospel according to Noam Chomsky—whose contribution, Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance (2003), was the first of the A.E.P. books—the C.I.A. is assumed to be a fearsome, super-efficient outfit filled with sinister assassins, right-wing interrogators and malevolent white guys itching to take over the country (or, alternatively, other people’s countries).

Hence, in Mr. McCoy’s reading, everything this omnipresent, omniscient intel shop does must be part of a long-term plan, cunningly conceived and flawlessly executed. To that end, Mr. McCoy gamely strives to connect the C.I.A.’s “mind-control” experiments of the 1950’s with its enquiries into self-inflicted pain and sensory deprivation capsulated in the 1963 Kubark Counterintelligence Interrogation manual, the Vietnam-era Phoenix program, the 1983 Honduras handbook Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual, the Army’s FM 34-52: Intelligence Interrogation field guide of 1992, the post–Sept. 11 Bush administration’s legally and morally dubious memos on interrogation methods, and—capping it all as the preordained blowback from half a century’s lies—the photos snapped of Lynndie England and her debonair lover, Charles Graner, by their camera-happy pals at Abu Ghraib.

And that’s by no means all. Half-nelsoned by the A.E.P.’s ideological demands, Mr. McCoy must relate C.I.A. procedures to the growth of this “imperium” of ours—the agency needs to be representative of American power, you see, for the sake of high drama. Mr. McCoy’s a dab old hand at this sort of thing: A previous book was called The Politics of Heroin: C.I.A. Complicity in the Global Drug Trade—the subtitle tells you all you need to know. In his latest volume, because Washington apparently provided the training and equipment, as well as “moral legitimacy,” to various regimes to torture their citizens, there is, Mr. McCoy says, “a clear correspondence between U.S. Cold War policy and the extreme state violence of the authoritarian age.” (Strangely, he doesn’t cite the role of the USSR.)

Mr. McCoy’s essential problem is that he’s trying to conjure up a Grand Unified Theory out of a myriad of disparate factors. His effort to meld this hodgepodge of reports and manuals from different eras and theaters into a single, coherent narrative sometimes leads him astray. His claim that watching The Passion of the Christ—released several weeks before the Abu Ghraib story broke—“prepared the American public for quiet acceptance of the prison photos” is silly, and he mistakes the low-budget, typically 50’s C.I.A. forays into LSD kookiness and electro-shock faddery for a systematic campaign to instill mass mind control over “whole societies.”

These errors are more amusing than alarming. More serious are the shortcuts taken to make connections that don’t actually exist. Thus, he quotes from the Honduran handbook (“successful ‘questioning’ is based upon … psychological techniques”) to prove that a 2003 memorandum by Gen. Ricardo Sanchez authorizing certain interrogation methods used “similar language.” And what was this “similar language”? “Interrogation approaches,” General Sanchez wrote, “are designed to manipulate the detainee’s emotions and weaknesses to gain his willing cooperation.” One bears no resemblance to the other—though both state the thuddingly obvious—but Mr. McCoy nevertheless states that “clearly, in both its design and detail, Gen. Sanchez’s memo was influenced by past C.I.A. interrogation research.”

Perhaps it was, but not necessarily. Despite Mr. McCoy’s insistence that the C.I.A. pioneered psychological “no-touch” measures of extracting information, General Sanchez could easily have picked up pointers from The Gulag Archipelago, 1984 or Darkness at Noon, all of which detail the same kinds of psyche-out games these interrogators do play. Mr. McCoy also claims the C.I.A.’s methods of “self-inflicted” pain were revolutionary, but were they really? Any Japanese P.O.W. guard or tsarist secret policeman or medieval inquisitor could have told you that making someone stand up for several hours hurts, or that depriving prisoners of sleep makes them more pliable. (The genius of torture, it seems, lies in the dull unoriginality of its practitioners down the ages.) And finally, General Sanchez is a soldier, not a spook, but if the C.I.A.’s techniques are so if-I-tell-you-I-have-to-kill-you, then how did General Sanchez hear about them? Mr. McCoy never satisfactorily explains the mode of transmission between the C.I.A. and the military. Indeed, he sometimes elides the two.

But the main failure of Mr. McCoy’s thesis lies in his habit of arguing backwards from the present. He knows how this story ends—with an Iraqi prisoner posed in a martyr’s tableau, wired-up arms outstretched and outfitted with a black Klan-like hood. Accordingly, he excavates for evidence in the past to support his presuppositions about C.I.A. omniscience and the concordant inevitability of Abu Ghraib. But the real question is, did C.I.A. officials and operatives consciously plan 50 years ahead? I suspect not.

Put another way, in the film The Luzhin Defence, we see the grandmaster staring at a chessboard as pawns advance, gambits are declined, piece takes piece, and checks are countered in super-fast-forward. From this we infer that chess whizzes like Fischer, Capablanca and Botvinnik plot out their games from the start (“mate in 17” sort of thing), whereas real chessies see two, perhaps three, moves ahead and rapidly adapt to their opponent’s tactics. Same goes with the C.I.A.: Despite Mr. McCoy’s assumptions, the agency, like any corporation or bureaucracy, operates on an ad hoc basis and reacts to external events as best it can.

Spies and their masters are not all-knowing manipulators like M and Karla and Control—though they love it when you think them so. If you do, however, then you’ve succumbed to the romanticism propagated by hack novelists and the pseudo-sophistication of A.E.P. authors. In fact, in the office they’re ordinary men in Men’s Wearhouse suits—plodders, turf-warriors and careerists, along with the usual complement of the disgruntled, the overlooked, the inept and the over-promoted—while in the field, agents and assets are too often fantasists, fabricators and nutters. Dumb mistakes and shortsighted decisions are made all the time. The C.I.A., in short, couldn’t pull off a conspiracy this complex, this long-term, this sinister if it tried.

I’ve been harsh on poor old Alfred McCoy. This is a worthwhile book, one well worth reading to balance the repulsive agit-prop of the right (“water-boarding is not torture”). And, for once, a reviewer can’t complain about a lack of sources and sloppy research. There’s a ton of interesting stuff here, and Mr. McCoy does weave a fascinating narrative, but his thesis is inherently flawed, and A Question of Torture ultimately fails to prove the case.

Alexander Rose is the author of Washington’s Spies: The Story of America’s First Spy Ring, which Bantam Dell will publish in April.

I've had articles killed by editors-every working hack has-and, as an editor myself, I've killed articles by other working hacks, as well as by policy wonks, nutters who temporarily masqueraded as sensible, hopeful freelancers and senior government officials (who invariably use their assistants as ghosts, by the way). I've even killed a piece because, in one memorable case, the author demanded $10,000 for his 750 words; assuming it was a typo, I offered $100 for it, but no, it wasn't.

Sometimes, spiking a truly terrible article is the charitable thing to do, but most often it happens because the submission, no matter how wonderful, has lost its immediacy-the very essence of journalism, the thing that makes it journalism , not scholarship-and doesn't have the "legs" to withstand a few weeks' delay. These things happen. It's (usually) nothing personal.

Having been spiked, I'm a blood-brother of sorts to Killed 's contributors, who provide illuminating prefaces to their killed articles explaining why they didn't run. Illuminating, that is, in the sense that these mini-essays unwittingly reveal the paranoia, bitterness and narcissism raging furiously within your average penny-a-worder's breast.

They might, in a few cases, have a point, though it's but a small one, for, despite what you may have heard about the sacred duty of the press to expose corruption and uphold the public interest, journalism can be a despicable racket-and one, moreover, that employs quite the stupidest and most vile people I have ever known. There is a jarring disconnect between the news business' image (the charming idea that the "Fourth Estate" is about setting the world to rights and putting the system on trial) and reality (prizes and postings that reward the clubbable over the deserving, cute columnists who just happen to be related to someone important, and news-desk fart-catchers toadying the boss).

That's the problem with Killed 's raison d'être, which is to create a "literary orphanage" that "rescues remarkable stories that editors commissioned, then abandoned," in the words of David Wallis, himself an editor-of this volume, among other things. Enjoyable though most of their individual pieces are, too many of the book's contributors seem unable to grasp that journalism is temporal, and that much of it deserves to be abandoned once the moment has been and gone. They labor under the misapprehension that they possess a divine right to publish worthy articles in their organ of choice, and that if said journal "abandons" their efforts to the "literary orphanage" of the rejections pile, then something murky must be afoot.

The bean-counters were afraid of losing Big Tobacco advertising if a story on smoking ran; the editors just couldn't handle The Truth and prostrated themselves before the proprietor's interests; political influence was brought to bear on the desk chiefs, who knuckled under-it all sounds a bit conspiratorial, if you ask me, which is not to say that such conspiracies do not exist (oh, they do, they do), but then, so what?

A free press is supposed to be, after all, a profit-making, point-scoring enterprise that diverts readers by entertaining, delighting, informing, titillating and surprising them enough to persuade them to send in those annoying subscription cards (circulation attracts the advertisers who pay the hacks' salaries). Therefore, a degree of editorial discretion (i.e., benign censorship) and authorial sensitivity (i.e., writing to your audience) is needed to avoid frightening the horses. Put it this way: Ted Rall's daddy-hating screed (included in Killed ) could never run in The New York Times Magazine on Father's Day, and Mr. Rall should not only have appreciated that, but his editors should never have commissioned someone as coarse as Ted Rall in the first place. (Next time try Garrison Keillor.)

We've lost sight of those happy days of the 18th century when Tories and Whigs libeled each other in the robustly partisan press. Compare the vim, humor and spunk of, say, James Rivington's Royal Gazette -a Loyalist rag published in New York during the Revolution that mocked the Founding Fathers-with the po-faced, unctuous reportage of the upcoming Presidential election in the better papers. Today, daily quality journalism is in a terrible state: It's tedious, portentous and pompous, a product of the dire American fetish for "objectivity," which really is the impossible dream.

The trouble is that while journalism is a trade in which people write words in exchange for shekels or glory, its practitioners now regard it as a professional craft to be handed down by a guild of "media professors" at expensive journalism schools. The inmates of these institutions would be better served by a diet of history or classics, subjects that impart the rudiments of stylistic felicity, cultivate the habit of weighing evidence and, perhaps most importantly, oblige pupils to think critically. Then, when an editor hurls them into the tumult of the night crime beat, they'll hammer out lively copy rather than the funeral procession of monotonous declarative sentences that today passes for "proper" reporting. And so we find Howell Raines inflicting on an unsuspecting public a 20,000-word mea culpist snooze-athon in The Atlantic about "My" Times . Only a proper journalist like Howie would actually take hackdom so seriously.

Since similar displays of self-pity and self-righteousness are the verities of today's journalism, what we hear less about in Killed is that editors are sometimes right. A case in point: Harper's commissioned Robert Fisk to expose the "breakdown of serious journalism during the 2001 Afghanistan bombardment" (Mr. Fisk's words). Good idea-except that after submission, an editor called and said it wasn't "exactly the article we had spoken about over the phone" (Mr. Fisk, quoting the editor). When she suggested that he might wish to rewrite the piece "along different lines," our stiff-necked Samson heroically refused to change a word of his copy and announced, out of nowhere, that he would not truckle to "pro-Israeli lobbyists." Reading the article in Killed , I can quite see the editor's point. Mr. Fisk drones on about the Palestinian tragedy, how he's always being crucified by the Jews, the Turkish mass murder of the Armenians in 1915, Christian Phalangist militias in Lebanon … in fact, everything but the Afghan war. The piece is a rambling, self-absorbed mess, and it would have taken that poor editor a week to bash it into shape. Abandoned, and deservedly so, methinks.

Is Killed crammed, as the subtitle advertises, with "Great Journalism Too Hot to Print"? In a word, no. There's some pretty good and even damn fine journalism among the 24 contributions, ranging from Betty Friedan to Jamie Malanowski (on a pervert who makes Dr. Mengele dolls "for the serious collector") to Carlo Wolff's ravaging of Mitch Albom's dreadful efforts at writing, but it's rarely hot , and in any case, a significant proportion of the pieces were later shopped around and published in rival outlets, so they really weren't too hot to print after all. In the case of P.J. O'Rourke, the humorist (though I sometimes have my doubts), he filed a story for Vanity Fair describing his adventures in Lebanon-dismissed by the incomparable Tina Brown with one sentence, "You can't make fun of people dying"-that later became part of his best-selling book, Holidays in Hell . I wish we all did so well out of being killed.

There is a lot of worthwhile stuff in here, but much of it is now dated. At the time, though, Todd Gitlin's take on "The Clinton Legacy and America" should have been printed by the London Review of Books ; Vanity Fair should have run Jon Entine's dissection of Anita Roddick and the Body Shop; and GQ should have gone with T.D. Allman's look at China a decade after Tiananmen Square instead of bumping it for a profile of Steve Forbes.

Shoulda, shoulda, shoulda. But they didn't. That's journalism. You gotta roll with it.

Alexander Rose, deputy managing editor of National Review, is writing a book on espionage during the American Revolution for Bantam Dell.