“That’s what the facts show,” Mr. Woodward responded. “It took me over two years to find out what happened, and quite frankly, as I say as directly as can be said in English, they have not been telling the truth about what Iraq has become.”

To which the 83 percent of Americans who said in the latest New York Times/CBS poll that Bush is lying or hiding something about Iraq might well have shouted back at their screens: Now you tell us?

The George W. Bush who strides across the pages of Bush at War (2002) was a superhero even in matters of diction. (“Gerson had written that, in responding to terrorism, the United States would make no distinction between those who planned the acts and those who tolerated or encouraged the terrorists. ‘That’s way too vague,’ Bush complained, proposing the word ‘harbor.’”) And while the picture of the commander in chief in Plan of Attack (2004) was rounder, the White House found it flattering enough to put it on the recommended reading list they prepared for the Bush-Cheney re-election campaign.

But now, in response to State of Denial: Bush at War, Part III, they’ve put out a series of separate spin sheets with titles like “Five Key Myths in Bob Woodward’s Book: Setting the Record Straight.” How blindsided those poor President’s men must feel! From the last book to this, some mysterious torque has twisted even the incidentals 30 degrees in a less flattering direction.

Plan of Attack: “‘I want to know what the options are,’ Bush recalled. ‘A president cannot decide and make rational decisions unless I understand the feasibility of that which may have to happen.’” State of Denial: “Why should I care about North Korea?”

Plan of Attack: “As Tommy planned, I wanted him to understand some of the nuances, or understand issues in a nuanced way.” State of Denial: “I wish those assholes would put things just point-blank to me. I get half a book telling me about the history of North Korea.”

Plan of Attack: “Bush, 55, has a quick, joshing manner which at times borders on the impulsive.” State of Denial: “Bush and Rove in particular dwelled on ‘flatulence’—passing gas—and they shared an array of fart jokes.”

As for the non-incidentals—well, there’s this little matter: the Bush administration’s near-criminal brush-off of George Tenet’s shrieking July 10, 2001, warning about Osama bin Laden, and the plain implication—it’s on page 52—that the fact that this shocking incident didn’t find its way into the 9/11 Commission report might have had something to do with Condoleezza Rice’s friendship with the commission’s “aggressive executive director,” Philip Zelikow.

Then there are the remarkable revelations about Saudi Arabia’s longtime ambassador to the U.S.: George Bush the elder sent his son to Prince Bandar bin Sultan in 1997 for elementary tutelage in foreign affairs; Prince Bandar keeps a shrine to Bush 41 in his 32-room Aspen mansion; Prince Bandar uses the word “we” to refer to the United States and Saudi Arabia as a single corporate entity. Exactly the sort of things Craig Unger, late of this newspaper, reported in House of Bush, House of Saud (2004), and which David Gergen called “so far-fetched and so critical of a Bush family that has honorably served and sacrificed for the country over three generations that no one of serious reputation takes them seriously.”

Apparently now it’s kosher. “If you want to hear the truth about the administration, you got to listen to Bob Woodward,” CNN anchor John Roberts recently proposed to Mr. Gergen, who heartily concurred, adding: “For the country, it means we have got a much more serious problem in Iraq.”

Yes, he appeared to be in earnest: We have a more serious problem because Robert Upshur Woodward says so.

All of which raises reasonable questions. Considering that the subject and substance of Mr. Woodward’s three books overlap, doesn’t the revision indict the originals? If Part III is the better book because it’s a more accurate portrayal of the Bush administration’s abject failures and inadequacies, doesn’t that make the author look worse? What was he withholding? (The word “Bandar,” for instance, is absent from Bush at War.) What was the eureka moment? Why couldn’t Mr. Woodward have exploited his unique insider access to alert the Washington establishment sooner about the danger of harboring this feckless man-child in their midst?

Or to put it in a way Bob Woodward would find familiar: What did the reporter know and when did he know it?

Unfortunately for the author, he’s provided us with laboratory-like conditions to compare and contrast. Call it State of Denial’s smoking gun.

The two most recent books end with the same interview: Mr. Woodward’s several hours with the President on Dec. 10 and 11, 2003. Both books contain the same exchange: Mr. Woodward says, “But we have not found any weapons of mass destruction,” and Mr. Bush replies, “We have found weapons programs that could be reconstituted.” In both accounts we learn what happened next: The reporter probes as if embarrassed to be challenging the commander in chief, making the question a passive one, the wording limp: As he “traveled around the country,” Mr. Woodward confesses, people had been telling him they thought the President was “less the voice of realism” for not acknowledging that weapons had not been found.

In both accounts the President, as the President is prone to do, responds in the language of spin: “The realism is to be able to understand the nature of Saddam Hussein, his history, his potential to harm America.” Mr. Woodward then honors his readers with a dutiful follow-up: “But the status report, for the last six or seven months, is we haven’t found weapons. That’s all.”

“‘True, true, true,” the President is quoted as saying in Plan of Attack. Mr. Woodward then sums up with this paraphrase: “He contended that they had found enough.” The President has been given the last word, an administration talking point that turns the reporter into a quisling who would happily leave a dictator in power because he only had a little bit of weapons of mass destruction. Good enough, apparently, for a book that went to press with George Bush up above 50 percent in the approval ratings.

But the new book went to press with the President’s approval rating below 40 percent, and the author rewinds the tape. Now he remembers: He’d been pushy.

“‘But the status report, for the last six or seven months, is we haven’t found weapons. That’s all,’ I pushed one more time.”

The same “True, true, true” is played back at the reader. The fillip, however, has changed. Now it’s the author who speaks:

“It had taken five minutes and 18 seconds for Bush simply to acknowledge the fact that we hadn’t found weapons of mass destruction.”

That it has taken Bob Woodward two years, 10 months and 18 days to recall his inner George Orwell …. No, no, no: mustn’t go there. The million-plus copies of this volume already in print consecrate it far above my poor power to add or detract. Better just to conclude that the Lords of Washington have given the peasants permission to acknowledge that the superhero is just a man-child, and thank goodness for small favors.

Rick Perlstein is the author of Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (Hill & Wang); his new book, Nixonland: The Politics and Culture of the American Berserk, 1965-1972, will be published next year.

“That’s what the facts show,” Mr. Woodward responded. “It took me over two years to find out what happened, and quite frankly, as I say as directly as can be said in English, they have not been telling the truth about what Iraq has become.”

To which the 83 percent of Americans who said in the latest New York Times/CBS poll that Bush is lying or hiding something about Iraq might well have shouted back at their screens: Now you tell us?

The George W. Bush who strides across the pages of Bush at War (2002) was a superhero even in matters of diction. (“Gerson had written that, in responding to terrorism, the United States would make no distinction between those who planned the acts and those who tolerated or encouraged the terrorists. ‘That’s way too vague,’ Bush complained, proposing the word ‘harbor.’”) And while the picture of the commander in chief in Plan of Attack (2004) was rounder, the White House found it flattering enough to put it on the recommended reading list they prepared for the Bush-Cheney re-election campaign.

But now, in response to State of Denial: Bush at War, Part III, they’ve put out a series of separate spin sheets with titles like “Five Key Myths in Bob Woodward’s Book: Setting the Record Straight.” How blindsided those poor President’s men must feel! From the last book to this, some mysterious torque has twisted even the incidentals 30 degrees in a less flattering direction.

Plan of Attack: “‘I want to know what the options are,’ Bush recalled. ‘A president cannot decide and make rational decisions unless I understand the feasibility of that which may have to happen.’” State of Denial: “Why should I care about North Korea?”

Plan of Attack: “As Tommy planned, I wanted him to understand some of the nuances, or understand issues in a nuanced way.” State of Denial: “I wish those assholes would put things just point-blank to me. I get half a book telling me about the history of North Korea.”

Plan of Attack: “Bush, 55, has a quick, joshing manner which at times borders on the impulsive.” State of Denial: “Bush and Rove in particular dwelled on ‘flatulence’—passing gas—and they shared an array of fart jokes.”

As for the non-incidentals—well, there’s this little matter: the Bush administration’s near-criminal brush-off of George Tenet’s shrieking July 10, 2001, warning about Osama bin Laden, and the plain implication—it’s on page 52—that the fact that this shocking incident didn’t find its way into the 9/11 Commission report might have had something to do with Condoleezza Rice’s friendship with the commission’s “aggressive executive director,” Philip Zelikow.

Then there are the remarkable revelations about Saudi Arabia’s longtime ambassador to the U.S.: George Bush the elder sent his son to Prince Bandar bin Sultan in 1997 for elementary tutelage in foreign affairs; Prince Bandar keeps a shrine to Bush 41 in his 32-room Aspen mansion; Prince Bandar uses the word “we” to refer to the United States and Saudi Arabia as a single corporate entity. Exactly the sort of things Craig Unger, late of this newspaper, reported in House of Bush, House of Saud (2004), and which David Gergen called “so far-fetched and so critical of a Bush family that has honorably served and sacrificed for the country over three generations that no one of serious reputation takes them seriously.”

Apparently now it’s kosher. “If you want to hear the truth about the administration, you got to listen to Bob Woodward,” CNN anchor John Roberts recently proposed to Mr. Gergen, who heartily concurred, adding: “For the country, it means we have got a much more serious problem in Iraq.”

Yes, he appeared to be in earnest: We have a more serious problem because Robert Upshur Woodward says so.

All of which raises reasonable questions. Considering that the subject and substance of Mr. Woodward’s three books overlap, doesn’t the revision indict the originals? If Part III is the better book because it’s a more accurate portrayal of the Bush administration’s abject failures and inadequacies, doesn’t that make the author look worse? What was he withholding? (The word “Bandar,” for instance, is absent from Bush at War.) What was the eureka moment? Why couldn’t Mr. Woodward have exploited his unique insider access to alert the Washington establishment sooner about the danger of harboring this feckless man-child in their midst?

Or to put it in a way Bob Woodward would find familiar: What did the reporter know and when did he know it?

Unfortunately for the author, he’s provided us with laboratory-like conditions to compare and contrast. Call it State of Denial’s smoking gun.

The two most recent books end with the same interview: Mr. Woodward’s several hours with the President on Dec. 10 and 11, 2003. Both books contain the same exchange: Mr. Woodward says, “But we have not found any weapons of mass destruction,” and Mr. Bush replies, “We have found weapons programs that could be reconstituted.” In both accounts we learn what happened next: The reporter probes as if embarrassed to be challenging the commander in chief, making the question a passive one, the wording limp: As he “traveled around the country,” Mr. Woodward confesses, people had been telling him they thought the President was “less the voice of realism” for not acknowledging that weapons had not been found.

In both accounts the President, as the President is prone to do, responds in the language of spin: “The realism is to be able to understand the nature of Saddam Hussein, his history, his potential to harm America.” Mr. Woodward then honors his readers with a dutiful follow-up: “But the status report, for the last six or seven months, is we haven’t found weapons. That’s all.”

“‘True, true, true,” the President is quoted as saying in Plan of Attack. Mr. Woodward then sums up with this paraphrase: “He contended that they had found enough.” The President has been given the last word, an administration talking point that turns the reporter into a quisling who would happily leave a dictator in power because he only had a little bit of weapons of mass destruction. Good enough, apparently, for a book that went to press with George Bush up above 50 percent in the approval ratings.

But the new book went to press with the President’s approval rating below 40 percent, and the author rewinds the tape. Now he remembers: He’d been pushy.

“‘But the status report, for the last six or seven months, is we haven’t found weapons. That’s all,’ I pushed one more time.”

The same “True, true, true” is played back at the reader. The fillip, however, has changed. Now it’s the author who speaks:

“It had taken five minutes and 18 seconds for Bush simply to acknowledge the fact that we hadn’t found weapons of mass destruction.”

That it has taken Bob Woodward two years, 10 months and 18 days to recall his inner George Orwell …. No, no, no: mustn’t go there. The million-plus copies of this volume already in print consecrate it far above my poor power to add or detract. Better just to conclude that the Lords of Washington have given the peasants permission to acknowledge that the superhero is just a man-child, and thank goodness for small favors.

Rick Perlstein is the author of Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (Hill & Wang); his new book, Nixonland: The Politics and Culture of the American Berserk, 1965-1972, will be published next year.

Last year. August. The

"family ranch" in rural Crawford, Tex. The Presidential-esque seal behind the

press secretary's platform, "WESTERN WHITE HOUSE" branded across the bottom;

the Rancher in Chief snipping at reporters wondering why the man who promised

to bring a new dignity to Washington was abandoning the capital for a solid

month after hardly half a year in office, saying that "they don't understand

the definition of work … I'm getting a lot of work done." (The more friendly

among the media helped White House Presidential Counsel Karen Hughes revive a

Reagan-era phrase: the "working vacation.")

We wise citizens of the Republic of Media reveled in the sheer

histrionics of it all. The New Republic

reported that George W. bought this "family" homestead way back in 1997-the

property developed alongside the younger Bush's Presidential ambitions,

completed just in time to serve as stage-set for his 2000 campaign video. His

August 2001 command performance there did not disappoint. Ryan Liz of TNR recorded the Great Man's chatter

upon arrival: "It's nice to be home.... This is my home.... It's good to be

home.... This is where you come home... I like my own home"-Texas being a

place, he assured his interlocutors, where "a neighbor means more than just

somebody living next-door to somebody else." Mr. Bush's nearest neighbor in

Crawford, it turned out, was several miles away. New Yorkers made many jokes

about George W. Bush-less a cowboy than the handpicked favorite of Wall Street

Republicans-during his weeks in Texas. As once was their wont.

But if George W. Bush, home on the range, was to many New Yorkers

hilarious, his lingering sojourn in Texas also felt devious: proof positive

that our President would play to the rubes a thousand times before even

deigning to set foot in the nation's largest city. It was a symbolic moment in

the souring of a political relationship that was never too sugary to begin

with. He hated us; everyone knew

that. Even the gnarliest stereotype of the right-wing outer-borough hard-hat

couldn't have been too pleased with the guy.

Then, the apocalypse. Hardly had the first vigil for Sept. 11 hit

the pavement when Mr. Bush showed up at Ground Zero-there had been some

complaining that he hadn't made a first-day Churchillian walk-through-and

mounted those wasted ramparts with that scratchy megaphone in his right hand

and a retired old fireman at his right. "We can't hear you," brayed a bystander

as his speech began; "I can hear you !"

he brayed back. "The rest of the world hears you! And the people who knocked

these buildings down will hear all of us soon!"

"Bush! Bush! Bush!" the New York crowd chanted then; and many are

still prepared to chant it now.

It was as if he had turned his back on his Texas fetish and made

room in his heart for us. George W. Bush had a last laugh of sorts vis-à-vis the snarky Manhattan types,

were anyone inclined to laugh: Not only did this city-perhaps even its

liberals-join the rest of the nation in branding this man a hero; now even his

staged histrionics have been adjudged the mark of a wise and brave statesman.

Since Sept. 11, New York has been loving George W. Bush. But that brings me, in

a roundabout way, to my question: Can this marriage be saved?

Four months and change is a not-untypical length of time for a

passionate romance to burn itself out. We all know how it happens: The besotted

parties wipe the stars out of their eyes, see their partners clear for the

first time-and wonder, "Why did we think we ever had anything in common in the

first place?"

No one doubted that Bush was going to make a Republican speech

last night. The question was whether he would gesture towards anything

resembling a New York Republican kind

of speech last night-a speech a Pataki, or even a Bloomberg, could take home to

mother: one that could help lure, say, the upstate unemployed into the former's

camp in his reelection fight next year with generous doses of truly compassionate

conservatism; or something that could provide some kind of cover for the

latter, the liberal-leaning former Democrat for whom a solid working

relationship with the White House will be so crucial in the year to come to

rebuild downtown. And, in a sense, the speech half-delivered.

Mr. Bush went into the State

of the Union staring down the barrel of some ugly facts. An NBC News/ Wall Street Journal poll reported that

two in five Americans already feel the nation is back to normal or nearly

normal. Six of 10 think President Bush's major domestic initiative-the expedited

$1.35 trillion tax cut-shouldn't be delayed (and even Republicans are evenly

split on the issue), and agree with the President, who has declared that will

happen "over my dead body." Karl Rove has declared that Mr. Bush's success in

fighting the war will be enough to sustain the Republicans in the 2002

elections. But 44 percent of Americans-a reasonable number in any election-say

they will judge the success of the war against terrorism on the increasingly

dicey proposition of whether Osama Bin Laden is captured. Crawford's

pieties-the "red-state" priorities-of God and Country and Patriotism seem to be

giving way to the old Democratic priorities of jobs, jobs, jobs.

The surveys show Americans now slightly more concerned with the

economy than with terrorism; and that, perhaps, is why a Fox News poll reported

that "if the election were held today," only 49 percent of Americans would vote

for Bush-despite his wartime approval ratings upwards of 80 percent.

And so, not surprisingly, beyond the expected clarion wartime

calls to patriotism and service, there was something almost Clintonian about

it, or, if you will, Republican moderate. Much of it was the economy,

stupid-with its fervent appeals to Clinton-style national service, to welfarist

appeals to thin the gap between the haves and the have-nots, to "economic

security" over "economic stimulus."

But I fear it was also Clintonian, in the more unwelcome sense of

the term, then any Republican would want to admit. It was not, in a word, a

trustworthy speech. Where once George Bush played Crawford, Texas to the

hilt-traveling incessantly through the "heartland," not even giving the

Northeast, which gave him nothing on election Tuesday, the time of day-he now

plays down the tropes of folksy Southwestern populism. But where Texas was but

empty window dressing back in August, now he plays down the histrionics. Now

"Texas" is in the background. But the things Texas represents more and more

pulls the strings.

There is Enron, for one thing. The Bush family may be relative

newcomers, as things go, to the mythology of the American Southwest. It's too

early to say just how dearly this White House will pay, politically, for its

associations with the now-defunct Houston energy trading company. But it was

not too hard to discern the vulnerability Bush must feel in that scandal's wake

nonetheless. Kenneth Lay's Enron is a state of mind that feels an awful lot

like Texas-a place where legend has it that you can only judge a real man by

the number of times he falls from grace, only to dust himself off and build

himself another empire. And whatever the actual biographical provenance of our

forty-third president-grandson of an Eastern Establishment senator from

Connecticut, son of an Eastern Establishment president that made of his family

a minor American political dynasty, and now a president who came to power with

the blessings of that Eastern Establishment now that he was the scion of one of

the great political dynasties of American history-has invented himself as the

soul of Texas itself. And a politician who wears Texan pride on his sleeve

cannot but tread carefully when Texan booms, as they so often do, go bust.

It is not a Texas boom if you sedulously insure yourself against

bust. For in the self-identity that Southwesterners have inculcated for

themselves-not for nothing is the historical pattern of the American Southwest

we are familiar with called a "mythology"-greatness must be built from

"nothing." It is hard to imagine a Southwestern conservative sincerely

struggling on behalf of an ideal so banal as "economic security." To be

secure-hemmed in by the bureaucratic niceties that protect you from risk-has

seemed nearly, to the greatest of these figures, to suffer a state of

unmanning: you are thereby rendered liberal.  

Of course these desert myths are built (as it were) on sand.

Nothing comes from nothing. Some of the most famous Southwestern fortunes were

originally made in the exploitation of government largesse; Barry Goldwater's

family began its retailing empire in Arizona profiteering off government

projects such as, first, the Indian Wars, and second, the building of the

state's federally funded waterworks, without which no civilization could exist.

That Southwestern protestations of manly independence take on such a

characteristic of high camp is a direct function of their implausibility: a

reaction formation.

"Out here in the West," Barry

Goldwater used to say, "we're not harassed by the fear of what might happen."

Goldwaters "have always taken risks." Certainly more risks, at least, than the

former proprietor of Arbusto. And for converts like Bush-who seems to have

never dared looked back East between the time he left Yale and his White House

ascendancy-the lionization of those who tempt busts by building booms is all

the more zealous. As is the patronization of liberals-deep in the heart, as

they say.

It's getting a little to late to wonder about whether the guy is

really a cowboy because he's a convert and realize all cowboys are converts.

That's the West for you

George W. Bush's Texas habit pops up in odd places and at strange

times, like a stubborn rash. Last week, in a speech in Maine (roundabout the actual Bush family homestead in

Kennebunkport, which, President Bush sheepishly allowed, was "I guess my second

home"), George W. Bush brought up Crawford again. This time the message was more

awkward-he was giving Sen. Edward M. Kennedy his due for helping him pass a

bipartisan education bill (another of those Clintonian touches). "[T] he folks

back home at the coffee shop in Crawford, Texas will be amazed when they see me

standing up there saying nice things about [Ted Kennedy]." The point seemed to

be little more than to signal that where he comes from-his "home"-they still

appreciate the value of a good Ted Kennedy joke. It's that old, base,

Republican reactionary populism again.

I speak impressionistically, of course. But  where is President Bush heading off to

first, today, to sell his new proposals to the nation? He is heading straight

into the welcoming arms of Dixie, Texas's country cousin in reactionary

Republicanism. First stop is a "town-hall meeting," with handpicked questioners,

in Winston-Salem, NC, then Daytona Beach and Atlanta. The symbolism is key.

Bush is an old-style conservative Republican of the Southern and Southwestern;

it is where his deepest sympathies lay; but which show up only fugitively in

his most carefully scripted public orations.

George W. Bush's Northeastern vacation seems soon to be over if

it isn't already, and he's going back home, far from the place his Presidency

was reborn, here; back to the place where he was reborn-south toward home, to

Crawford.

"The middle part of the country-the great red zone that voted for Bush-is clearly ready for war," Andrew Sullivan apprised readers of the London Times the week of the attack. But "the decadent left in its enclaves on the coasts is not dead-and may well mount a fifth column." They fling around "comments that sound eerily similar to some extreme justifications offered in the Arab world," wrote Edward Rothstein in The New York Times . Michael Kelly declared on MSNBC.com that the "largely reactionary, largely incoherent, j2

ti-corporatist, anti-globalist sentiments that passes for the politics of the left" is "objectively pro-terrorist." Concluded Peter Beinart, editor of The New Republic : "What distinguishes leftists from other Americans … isn't their commitment to civil liberties, but their lack of commitment to the anti-terrorism efforts with which those civil liberties may conflict."

Gentlemen, meet Mark Naison. Mr. Naison, professor of African-American studies and history at Fordham University, is an exemplary man of the left: an organizer of 60's-era East Harlem rent strikes, a Columbia S.D.S. veteran, an appreciative scholar of the history of black Communists in New York, and a man still active in hell-raising, in community organizing in Brooklyn and the Bronx. "I felt very emotional about facile opponents of war," he said of the weeks after Sept. 11. So he sent out an e-mail. He threatened, he said, that "if anyone said anything about America's imperialist activities making it the moral equivalent of the Taliban and Al Qaeda … I would beat them up. I'm six feet tall and 200 pounds." Professor Naison later withdrew the threat-although, he said, "nobody was sure I wouldn't do it."

Mr. Naison's ardor may be unique. His position, however, is common enough to suggest that the chorus of left-baiters in the public prints has gotten a complicated story exactly backwards. Everyone knows the most memorable lines of the latter-day Venceneros; they've been recycled endlessly. Ms. Sontag says it's America's fault; Noam Chomsky says that bombing the Sudanese pharmaceutical factory was worse; Alice Walker pleads that "the only punishment that works is love." It would just be too, too ho-hum to report the fact: A predominance of lefties, both name-brand and rank-and-file, feel not altogether too different about the war against terrorism than-well, Republicans.

"We are in a fight for our principles, and our first responsibility is to live by them," said President Bush. "We cannot permit ourselves to strike out blindly, to hurt people who have nothing to do with this," said Dana Rohrbacher, the Southern California Congressman who was among the lustiest of Newt Gingrich's lieutenants. The "new moral standard has got to be that noncombatants will not be attacked. We will not kill unarmed innocent people in order to achieve a political objective." We have just the magazine for them: The Nation . "I see our job here … as to lay out the parameters of a just war," says its editor, Katrina vanden Heuvel.

Ellen Willis, a feminist rabble-rouser from the old days, now a professor at N.Y.U., still espouses the old Marxist-Freudian doctrine of the revolutionary potential of free love. Here's what she said about the current circumstance: "I've just felt sort of an enormous sense of disconnection to the antiwar movement," she said. "To do nothing is unacceptable."

For Doug Henwood, a WBAI radio host who wrote the scathingly anti-capitalist Wall Street , one of the best-selling leftist books of the decade, and who called the Gulf War and the bombing in Kosovo "American imperial manipulations," the question is a no-brainer. "This is an attack on us," he said. "There is a near-certainty that something will be done again soon. Clearly, considerable use of force will have to be used to capture these motherfuckers."

Finding similar sentiments among local lefties can be accomplished almost at random. One researcher at a feminist think tank said she once thought the allowances for the open-ended detention of immigrants in the anti-terrorism and anti-crime bills signed by Bill Clinton "were the most evil laws in the country." Now, she exclaimed, "if they'd been able to do it with all 19 hijackers-whoopee!"

"International courts" figured prominently in the strategy for responding to the terror outlined in a statement the Green Party released last week. But the party's presiding officer in Queens, David Levner, said about the Pentagon taking over the job, "If this was a short period and they got the terrorist network, I would be able to forgive them."

And the Brooklyn Greens and War Resisters League's peace vigil at the corner of Seventh Avenue and Flatbush on primary day this past Thursday revealed their "fifth column" to resemble a toothpick: Eight adults and three children standing quietly, holding 8-by-11 signs about an "eye for an eye making us all blind" drew less attention than a couple of Fernando Ferrer leafletters a few paces down the street.

To extend the examples doesn't prove much. City University sociology professor Stanley Aronowitz-who recently married Ms. Willis after the couple held out for two decades "as a form of symbolic resistance to all this stuff about family values"-pointed to the 500-name listserv of the 17,000-member CUNY faculty union, the Professional Staff Congress (whose recent teach-in on the attacks, according to the New York Post , "degenerated into an anti-American rally"). Its members include the cream of the system's left-wing activist community, and according to Mr. Aronowitz, "there's hardly anybody who is taking a pacifist position."

Those seeking a scientific sampling of the mood on the West Coast might consider Barbra Streisand's Web site, now scoured of articles critical of the President "in light of recent events." And singer and actress Courtney Love, an exuberant advocate of left-wing solutions on her Web site Hole.com, has made inquiries about joining the Marines.

"For the first time in a very long while," wrote Mr. Sullivan, "many liberals are reassessing-quietly, for the most part-their alliance with the anti-American, anti-capitalist forces they have long appeased, ignored, or supported."

Quietly? For the first time? In this particular coastal enclave, at least, the loudest faction on the left has long been exactly that sort of liberal.

"I don't question people's patriotism unless they give me a reason to," said Eric Alterman, the Nation columnist and MSNBC commentator-but recently, he apparently had felt reason to. In his column last week in The Nation , he wrote about the "'hate America' left."

Jo-Ann Mort, another prominent left-wing writer, said, "Am I part of the same project as Noam Chomsky? No. I probably haven't been for some time. I don't feel like I need to have a debate with Noam Chomsky." Todd Gitlin, a national figure since he led Students for a Democratic Society in 1965, has hung an American flag off his balcony and said, "The automatic left is once more marching off a cliff." And political essayist Paul Berman said, "I had the idea of assembling an anthology of intellectual responses to the event, and of publishing it with no introduction or explanation by myself, and of giving it the title Denial ."

One hallmark of this left tendency, alive and kicking since the 1930's, is an untoward condescension towards comrades with whom they disagree. Phrases like "knee-jerk" are the coin of the realm. "That's precisely what it is: take a little rubber-tip hammer and hit them right below their knee caps, and their knees jerk," said Mr. Berman, speaking of the type Mr. Gitlin referred to in a recent essay as "the soft anti-American." But then, condescension is also a hallmark of those whom they oppose. "Gitlin has only one function at a time like this," said Alexander Cockburn, the fiercely antiwar Nation columnist. "He's wheeled on to hose us down with clichés about the 60's."

As for Christopher Hitchens, Mr. Cockburn's fellow Nation columnist, who has asserted the moral equivalence of the war against Osama bin Laden and the war against Hitler, Mr. Cockburn wrote in 1999: "We have long thought that Christopher Hitchens has been asking himself for years how it would feel to plant the Judas kiss." That was friendly compared to what Mr. Cockburn thinks about him now.

The left is a tender family, its more self-conscious members ever given to nostrums like, as Doug Henwood puts it, "the right seeks converts, the left seeks heretics." And it's never been as tender as it is now, in a month filled with social awkwardness for New York's left-of-centerati.

Mike Hoyt, executive editor of the Columbia Journalism Review , is a "middle-of-the-road liberal" and supporter of war against Osama bin Laden. He was at a dinner party before the bombing in Afghanistan. His companions were friends going all the way back to the Ford administration. "The topic naturally came up," he said, "and to the person to my right, the first order of business seemed to be all of America's wrongheaded policies." Mr. Hoyt demurred, and "it just got heated-more and more heated." Then, he added, "I got into a fight with my own mother! She called last night …. She wanted to tell me all the U.S. had done wrong over the years, from El Salvador on down."

"It got quite heated," said journalist Michael Massing of a similar encounter, this one at a wedding at the Council of Foreign Relations' Pratt Mansion on Fifth Avenue. He then matched it with the tale of "a shouting match in my coffee shop" with a friend who "was just livid about any U.S. military action"-an exchange that had every other patron in the place staring at their table.

A public-interest lawyer was sitting down to dinner at an elegant restaurant with one of her closest friends and the friend's live-in boyfriend. She expressed her reservations about all the knee-jerk patriotism bursting into view. "My friend's friend sort of took that as a sign," she said, "that he should go off on how terrible America was. I said that I didn't think that explained away the awful thing that happened. He got upset," and quoted Noam Chomsky's position that "the Sudan thing was absolutely as morally troubling as the act of the terrorists. He argued the same thing about the Iraqi boycott." That was as far as things got. "I said, 'I'm just going to have to leave if this continues,'" said the lawyer. "Basically, it was not a very fun dinner."

As Professor Naison's own tale suggests, the tension only becomes greater when the affinities are closer. Francine Moccio is the director of Cornell University's Institute for Women and Work and an old 60's hand. She reeled off the conversations she now witnesses among fellow movement veterans who once found little to disagree about: "We have always upheld pacifism and diplomacy, not bombing and violence!" asserted one. Replied another, "Who said we were pacifists in the 60's? We just didn't think Vietnam was a just war!"

Old generational resentments have reasserted themselves. "They look at me askance," Professor Aronowitz says sadly of some of his closest students who "have taken an objectively pacifist line." And new resentments have arisen. Glen Rubenstein, leader of the Brooklyn Green Party chapter, describes himself as an "anti-imperialist" who views the American flag "as a nationalist symbol that portrays, in some sense, America's dominance of the world." Some in his camp have pinned flags to their breasts nonetheless. (Take that, Mike Kelly: In an ironic gaffe, MSNBC.com illustrated its piece referring to "flag-burning" antiwar protesters in Washington, D.C., with a picture of flag- waving antiwar protesters.) When flag meets anti-flag on the street, Mr. Rubenstein has noticed, the result is likely to be "intense avoidance." And it is just these encounters that never happen that have probably taken the hardest toll among friends on the left.

The encounter that may or may not have occurred in Susan Sontag's Soho apartment recently with her son David Rieff is, of course, the one tout New York really wants to know about. Mr. Rieff, described a few years back in Slate as America's foremost "liberal warmonger"-at an editorial-board meeting of Dissent in 1999, he expressed his enthusiasm for putting troops on the ground in Kosovo thus: "I would be in the lead vehicle!"-now says, "I support killing as many of these people as possible."

Mr. Rieff makes the observation that there are really two lefts. "The hard left" views the attack "basically, in some weird way, as positive-as a sort of revolt of the oppressed, an act of resistance." A "more moderate left," he says, "really have persuaded themselves that American power is so inherently, almost genetically illegitimate" that its use, "no matter how restrained, is worse than anything else." Ms. Sontag wrote a short response piece for The New Yorker immediately after Sept. 11 that the events were not an "attack on 'civilization' or 'liberty' or humanity' or 'the free world,' but an attack on the world's self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions."

Mamma mia! Mr. Rieff pre-empted that particular question before his interviewer had time to open his notebook: "I won't answer anything about my mother, of course," he said. Ms. Sontag herself has rung down the curtain on any further comment on the affair. "She thinks she has been," says Nation publisher Victor Navasky, "made some kind of moral leper."

Mr. Rieff-who said of his ideology, "I don't feel any deep political affiliation on either side"-distinguishes himself from everyone else interviewed for this story save one: Only he and Alexander Cockburn express an utter lack of ambivalence about their positions on war and peace. Ambivalence, in fact, is exactly how Ms. Sontag ended up explaining herself, once she had time to do so, during the media storm that followed hard upon her three New Yorker paragraphs. It is, if anything, the keynote of "the left's" response to Sept. 11.

Adolph Reed, a legendarily combative activist and New School professor, is the kind of partisan whom it's hard to find at a loss for words on any day. His first reaction upon hearing about the attack was "I hope they"-meaning we-"don't nuke anybody." Later he allowed for the appropriateness of "maybe even a military response, all things considered." His tone is now one of regret and hesitation. "One thing I find frustrating is that there are no acceptable responses from a left perspective." Even to think about the options, he says, is like juggling, one ball being that "what's made it possible to fund and build an apparatus to carry the attacks out at least partly has to do with the history of Western imperalism in other regions. But the other ball is that this is an attack on innocent people-a lot of them working people."

The former point has been judged unfashionable to the point of being, in non-left circles and in some left circles, unsayable. But it has been harder to gainsay in the wake of the recent resurfacing of a 1998 interview with Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former Carter administration National Security Advisor. In it, Mr. Brzezinski reversed the U.S. government's official claim to have intervened in Afghanistan to aid the Islamic fundamentalist mujahideen guerrilla movement only after the Soviet Union invaded the country; he admitted that the administration had armed the Muslims six months earlier and thus "knowingly increased the probability" that the Soviets would intervene. It would be "their Vietnam," he said proudly in the interview. "What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban, or the collapse of the Soviet empire?"

After Sept. 11, of course, the history of the world looks different. Mr. Cockburn practically spits out the words: "I mean, chickens do come home to roost! You've seen the Brzezinski interview! He was rejoicing!" The C.I.A. spent $3.5 billion in Afghanistan building up the mujahideen , he says, the largest covert operation in history.

But then that other ball: After the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks, who cares?

So overwhelming has been the nation's near-unanimity in the wake of Sept. 11, in fact, that many on the left have beheld it with something like a terrible awe, or as something to be latched onto if there can ever be any hope of reviving the left's shared goal of economic justice. Many, like Mr. Alterman, have urged patriotism on their comrades as a last-ditch strategy: "Given the importance that most Americans place on patriotism as a bedrock personal value, it is folly to try to enjoin them in a battle that fails to embrace their most basic beliefs." Cornell's Francine Moccio concurs: "We need health care, but there's not a 92 percent mandate for that. There's a 92 percent mandate for building up the military and bombing. Instead of the position we took in the Vietnam War, where we clashed with the flag and the ideals of patriotism, we should wrap our ideas in them. We have to acknowledge we're marginalized. "

Marginalized? That, clearly, is in the eye of the beholder. But being left-wing in the Age of Beinart, Kelly, Rothstein and Sullivan is like the old joke about the only Jew in a town where everyone else read the Protocols of the Elders of Zion: "All that power they tell me I have! Why didn't I get the memo ? "

On one thing, David Rieff seems to have it right. A yawning gap has been revealed between the left "and large majorities of the population." His explanation of the situation is a little off, though: He blames the left's penchant for "depraved rationalization," its consensus "that America did not deserve the terrorism but does deserve the hate." In actual fact, the gap is likely to remain no matter what any lefty actually says. Knees are jerking in every political direction. And our centrists-they have become the commissars.

No nation is immune to the snares of mass hysteria. Here in America, consider the 80's wave of accusations of "Satanic ritual abuse" against day-care providers. Outside caregivers were the ones implicated, only rarely biological parents–and once the thing finally began unwinding, you didn't have to be a social psychologist to figure it all out. There was a lot of free-floating and repressed anxiety about the increasing incidence of working women offering up their children to be raised in day-care centers; visions of livestock killings, feces games and underground tunnels where tots were coerced into sex and fealty to Old Scratch were how, as it were, society's repressed returned.

Europe being an entirely more morally serious place, the stage for their recent mass delusion was more world-historic. The dynamics, on the other hand, were strikingly the same. It was in the fall of 1996 when, under the prodding of our own Alfonse D'Amato, a class-action suit was taken out against Switzerland's major banks by Holocaust survivors to hold the banks accountable for trafficking in looted gold, hoarding money left in victims' and survivors' accounts, and laundering Germany's foreign holdings to supply Hitler with enough hard currency to keep up der Krieg .

Large swatches of the Swiss reading public had a favorite book around then. Fragments was a memoir of a Holocaust childhood, by a man called Binjamin Wilkomirski. Its imagery was stunning–for instance the child feeling his way through the new concept of motherhood: "All I understood was that a mother [was] something that was worth fighting for, the way you fought over food." The story behind the story, as it began making its way public, seemed even more so: The memoirist Wilkomirski, who still maniacally wiggled his toes unconsciously in the night for fear of devouring rats, was in the midst of an unceasing struggle to reclaim the truth of his Jewish past from foster parents so determined to deny it they even went to the length of sending away their own small child in order for Binjamin Wilkomirski to take up his identity.

Implausible? Perhaps. But critical acclaim for the book was overwhelming ( Fragments bore "the weight of this century," went a typical Swiss review); translations, and copycat praise, followed in nine languages more ( The Nation 's reviewer: "I wonder if I even have the right to try to offer praise"). Awards followed from upstanding Jewish organizations on two continents, and also psychological organizations, before which the author barnstormed with his Israeli therapist to promote their new method combining the arts of psychoanalysis and historiography to give new life to victims of long-repressed trauma. And survivors of all kinds now spoke of Mr. Wilkomirski as the hero who gave shape and meaning to experiences their minds would not let them recall. He almost, it seemed, gave a nation its conscience back: In August of 1998, Switzerland's major banks agreed to pay $1.25 billion to the Jewish class-action litigants.

Two weeks later came the sucker punch. Swiss novelist Daniel Ganzfried, himself a son of a survivor, released an article in a Swiss journal calling Binjamin Wilkomirski a man who "knows Auschwitz and Majdanek only as a tourist," his book a "coldly planned swindle."

60 Minutes followed up with corroborating evidence a few months later–a particular embarrassment to the American Holocaust Museum, which had given the book and its author an especially warm welcome. Further investigations followed, sullying even the prestigious publisher, Schocken Books, that brought out the English edition: The translator of Fragments , Carol Janeway (who is also director of foreign rights at Knopf–like Schocken, an imprint of Random House), introduced into her version literary corruptions which, if seen in light of Schocken's later publication of the study presently under review, seem a mild form of actual corruption.

The Wilkomirski case is far more interesting than any swindle; it is certain to be enshrined in textbooks on abnormal psychology, and in sociology textbooks as well. Born Bruno Grosjean, the child of a troubled, illegitimate affair, the young boy spent years bouncing from orphanages to cruel and neglectful foster homes before landing with adoptive parents, the wealthy Dössekers, who took the boy in–mostly to have someone to take over the aloof and arrogant father's medical practice. Other similarly traumatized adoptees might have fantasized castles and heroics. Bruno, instead, unconsciously chose to become the Baron Munchausen of the Holocaust memory wars.

It started, apparently, when he first glimpsed magazine pictures of the death camps. His new parents implored him never to bring up the subject. This seems plausible. In Switzerland, as Jane Kramer has elucidated in a brilliant 1997 New Yorker article, "the clean white snow blanket of Swiss rectitude and Swiss safety" had become an excuse for national repression of the fact that Swiss wealth was built from "manna from Hell"–Swiss complicity in Nazi fortunes. But the bruised young boy embraced the verboten subject. And through a remarkable lifelong process of elision and accretion–he would hear a detail from a bona fide survivor, unconsciously map it against his actual childhood memories of arbitrary authority, and then double back to the original survivor's story as evidence of his own experience–Mr. Wilkomirski came to believe himself a Holocaust survivor. And the world eagerly came to believe him so.

Ensconced under the clean white snow blanket of vicariously pure victimhood, readers made him a kind of international messiah. Then he was exposed; and yet for many he remained an international messiah. "Account of a Child Survivor: Fact or Fiction?–Does It Really Make a Difference?" was the title of a 1999 article about the subject in Martyrdom and Resistance , a publication of the International Society for Yad Vashem.

Binjamin Wilkomirski and the modern cult of victimology implicate each other. Binjamin Wilkomirski and Switzerland implicate each other. And Binjamin Wilkomirski and the Holocaust memory industry implicate each other. These are the themes that emerged from two previous investigations of the matter, both very fine, by Philip Gourevitch in The New Yorker and Elena Lappin in Granta . And these themes are only explicated in more detail in Swiss historian Stefan Maechler's The Wilkomirski Affair: A Study in Biographical Truth . It's pretty good, though marred by a pretentious structure (in the opening pages, the main narrative is told in self-contained chapters from different vantage points, which confuses more than it enlightens) and by some exceptionally heavy-handed social-psychological and literary-critical interpretations. It should be said, however, that it's not so good that the ordinary reader wouldn't be just as well off with a trip to the local library to photocopy the articles from The New Yorker and Granta .

And yet, some of the forensic coups Mr. Maechler adds to the story are quite stunning. A typically eye-popping one is his discovery that one of Mr. Wilkomirski's key witnesses in his after-scandal face-saving, a survivor named Laura Grabowski who corroborated Mr. Wilkomirski's memories of Birkenau, was actually a woman named Lauren Stratford–the American author of Satan's Underground , a "memoir" about her awful childhood experience of Satanic ritual abuse! Mr. Maechler also nails his own countrymen with aplomb. My favorite is the Swiss lawyer who sued Mr. Wilkomirski when he learned the book was a fake–not just to recover the cost of the book, but because he had been "maliciously tricked into feeling sympathy for this topic."

That takes care of the review. But there's another matter: the strange provenance of Mr. Maechler's book. A Swiss literary agent, Eva Koralnik, shepherded Mr. Wilkomirski's bogus Fragments into publication with astonishing speed (it came to her as an unsolicited manuscript). In lieu of outright contrition, Ms. Koralnik commissioned Mr. Maechler to write his "Study in Biographical Truth." Whatever you think of the moral bona fides of that move, consider the parallel act of the book's U.S. publisher, Schocken: The American edition of Mr. Maechler's book is an act of contrition avoided.

Mr. Maechler notes that "Many critics have remarked on Fragments ' emotional and brutal aesthetic of violence; some have even spoken of a pornography of violence." European critics, he means. You never learn from The Wilkomirski Affair that the version of Fragments English-language readers have seen–which is reprinted in The Wilkomirski Affair as an appendix–is quite different from the German. Mr. Maechler told The Observer that Mr. Ganzfried believes that Fragments in the original is "pornographic" and that Carol Janeway's English translation is prettified–turned into something more literary. It also introduced distortions that squeeze Mr. Wilkomirski more perfectly into the mold of Perfect Victim. For example, as Ms. Lappin has pointed out, Mr. Wilkomirski's German recalls a schoolyard ditty aimed at him as "Beggar child, the beggar child, he still hasn't got enough"; in Ms. Janeway's English it's "Beggar kid, beggar kid. There's never enough for the yid." It scans better, and it adds a telling anti-Semitic detail in no way present in the original. Ms. Janeway's version of Fragments is both less repellent and more pitiful: No wonder some of Mr. Wilkomirski's most belated defenders are American.

Ms. Janeway saw The Wilkomirski Affair through publication in America, but Schocken's edition never mentions discrepancies in the translation of Fragments . Ms. Janeway's motives for publishing Stefan Maechler's corrective study are likely colored by contrition–and yet this omission, in an otherwise overwhelmingly exhaustive 500-page book, is troubling. The Wilkomirski Affair succeeds in putting away for good any lingering doubts about the character of the man who calls himself Binjamin Wilkomirski. As for the character of those who saw Mr. Wilkomirski into print, doubts are still in order.

Rick Perlstein is the author of Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (Hill & Wang).

There is a character in Primo Levi's Survival in Auschwitz called Henri, one of the few figures in the book whom the master Holocaust memoirist singles out for contempt. Henri is a Jewish inmate from Paris, so young he cannot grow a beard, civilized, intelligent, multilingual, pleasant; but he has mastered a skill so contemptible that Levi compares him to the Serpent in Genesis: He survives by capturing and playing upon the pity of the brutes who are the inmates' keepers and executioners. In a world that produces men who are not human when it does not simply produce corpses, Henri, Levi seems to be implying, is one of the most inhuman of all.

"Henri" is the name Primo Levi gave Paul Steinberg, an Auschwitz survivor who died in 1999. Steinberg only became aware that he himself was "that cold and calculating creature singled out by Primo Levi" late in life, on the cusp of writing Speak You Also: A Survivor's Reckoning , which appeared in France in 1996 and is now out in an English translation by Linda Coverdale with Bill Ford. It is, the entire situation, rather interesting.

We live in a time of memory wars. Director Claude Lanzmann furiously battles Steven Spielberg for Mr. Spielberg's importuning of memory without moral license; historians Daniel Goldhagen and Christopher Browning fight over the meaning of guilt; books by Tom Segev, Norman Finkelstein and Peter Novick each, in various ways, interrogate an aftermath that Mr. Finkelstein calls the "Holocaust Industry" and Art Spiegelman labels, in its worst excrescences, "Holokitsch." There are good memoirs, mediocre memoirs, faked Swiss memoirs, Swiss financial scandals, package tours to the killing grounds; there is Harvard casting about for years to choose someone for a new endowed chair in "Holocaust studies" that proves too controversial to fill. Memory "is sweating, oozing," writes Steinberg in one of his best metaphors.

I say "metaphor," which raises another order of complication: the reviewer's pang of conscience when describing what a Holocaust memoirist does in such ordinary literary terms as "metaphor"–as if Steinberg were writing any old kind of book. Morally, you feel like Wayne and Garth lying prostrate at the feet of Alice Cooper in Wayne's World : "We're not worthy! We're not worthy!" (If I can be allowed a joke–as if I were reviewing any old kind of book.)

In this case, however, the memoirist is even more conscious of these overdeterminations than the reviewer. Paul Steinberg reflects throughout on his working method ("A strange vacation assignment, one I've been planning for fifty years, for the moment in my life when I could freely devote myself to it," writing straight through the story in four months of fever dreams and mood swings). He thinks through the standard bromides about writing as therapy, as exorcism, meditates on the condition of writing a Holocaust memoir itself–wondering whether his traumatized recollections are not "trick[s] of the imagination," reminding himself "I must not let the writings of other witnesses affect me." Because this morbid ground has been gone over so many times, inevitably some of the things he writes about are familiar unto cliché: the gentiles protesting "we didn't know"; the cruel instruction upon deportation to pack a suitcase that the deportee will "get back" later; the liberated inmates who breathe their last while finally enjoying a restorative meal; that certain style of black humor; even the memoirist's heightened literary self-consciousness itself. Steinberg smartly makes sure you know he knows there are clichés here. Recalling from 1944 a "dreamless" night of sleep after a certain harrowing experience, he continues, "I wrote 'dreamless' almost automatically, without thinking." He corrects himself: He never dreamed in the camp.

Speak You Also calls attention to itself as an act of literature. So I feel no compunction about judging it as a piece of literature: It's not so good. Steinberg writes well sometimes, but he's no master. His visceral distinction between the early days in 1941 and 1942–"a time of handmade death"–and the time when gas chambers did the killing anonymously instead of guards doing it face-to-face is, for example, startling; but his decision to write an entire chapter about a friend of whom he remembers nothing is foolish. To get himself started, he seems to require the distancing strategy of writing in a garish and annoying Damon Runyon style: "way out in the sticks," "pop him one or two in the breadbasket," wearing the yellow star as a "trap for suckers." (I doubt it's the translators' fault.) The wiseguy tone drops away, but you're not sure whether this is a decision of craft or a failure of it.

He is all too aware, also, of the self-imposed burden to redeem his comrade Primo Levi's assessment, and he does so by reworking the familiar phenomenon of "survivor's guilt"; he stresses, instead, a kind of survivor's pride. This comes to grate. Then it comes to backfire. Pages are given over to recitations of his remarkable stratagems, special fitness for camp life, keen intellect and luck–his miraculous inducements of pity in the guards ("because in any flock of sheep … the herdsman always has his favorite"); his horrible childhood which gave him an "immersion course" in "continual displacements and readjustments, the absence of ties and enduring friendships"; even the remarkable good fortune of never having been circumcised. "Can one be so guilty for having survived?" he asks.

Other times he displays a kind of victim's guilt, reciting the times he thinks he could have escaped but didn't ("I went meekly to the slaughter like a lousy sheep"), as if somehow he could achieve the impossible, besting the Nazis once and for all. He seems to have become a nice enough old man. Still, it's hard not to recognize the figure Primo Levi described as "hard and distant, enclosed in armor, the enemy of all, inhumanly cunning and incomprehensible."

In the most affecting moments, it is his body, not his pen, which proves the best archaeologist. The body the writer lives in is the same one that was once inhabited by an emaciated, sickly ghost. The body that never lets itself onto a Paris bus because of a repressed memory of the last bus trip he ever took, which led him to his first holding camp; the body whose writing hand bears an oval scar from pustulence brought on by poorly thrown bricks in a camp chain gang; the body that doesn't know how to act like a mourner when mourning is called for because meaningless death was once too familiar for him. The body that watches American action movies and calls up fantasies about "do[ing] a Rambo" on SS soldiers.

As a survivor, of course, he has more than earned the right to think and feel this way. And who is to say these sentiments, which make him unusual among testifiers, can't make for worthy testimony, worthy writing, worthy art? No one. But to whom does it fall finally to judge the art? The critic, and properly so. And as literature, what we have here is a sometimes interesting, pleasant read–though that's not quite right. It's unpleasant, of course. But that's the problem: Considering the subject, Speak You Also is not nearly unpleasant enough.

Rick Perlstein's Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (Hill and Wang) will be published in March.

Six years ago, when I came to New York from the Midwest to seek my fortune as a writer of the intellectual sort, I developed an obsession with an obsession. Colleagues in my adopted city could not stop arguing about the Communist Party of the United States of America. And I wondered: Wherefore this ridiculous pursuit?

After poring over probably 800 book reviews and magazine articles (and occasionally an actual book), the soup began sorting itself out–Radoshes and Meer-opols; Scheers and Klehrs; Navaskys, Weinsteins, Issermans, Schreckers. One day I woke up to discover that their obsession had become mine. This Jewish soap opera was just too damned irresistible. I had become a New York intellectual.

So what does that mean? It means I walk around with my cranium burdened by a bulking cast of heroes and villains (or villains and heroes, depending on my perspective that day), and their queer literary doppelgangers, too: hectoring 50's right-wing scribes and even more hectoring 50's anti-Stalinist left-wing scribes; New Left revisionists and New Right revisers of same; fevered Venona decryptionists–and, creeping forth even today, the ones who are revising them, ghosts of ghosts of ghosts of ghosts. It is not a healthful situation, not just for tender-minded 30-year-olds like myself, but for innocent readers everywhere.

I come to sing the praises, then, of Millicent Dillon, who has conjured up out of this crowded waxworks a man who fits no mold. Around this man, she has created a wondrous and strange work of art. On the surface, her novel is placid, but she's a patient, thoughtful writer whose writing rewards patience and thoughtfulness–and rereading.

The eponymous hero of Harry Gold (I mention this for those of you who do not have the good fortune to be a New York intellectual) was a real historical figure. Both an important courier of contraband information for the Soviet Union and a key witness against the Rosenbergs, Gold inevitably comes down to us as one of the stockest of stock characters in these melodramas: the pink who becomes a fink. In the way these tropes usually unfurl, such figures are supposed to stir in us the cathartic pathos of tragedy–Tru Believers who are either crushed by an impossible moral conundrum, or who switch sides and yet remain trapped in the same dogmatic absolutism.

That ain't Harry Gold, at least as Ms. Dillon depicts him. (Leave aside for today the question of whether she is accurate to the historical record: Her book is a novel.) This is the kind of Marxist Harry Gold is: He's hardly aware of the Spanish Civil War, utterly baffled why anyone would want to go fight in it. Like our 40th president, his answer to every awkward conversation is to tell a baseball story. He doesn't understand what his friends are talking about when they say workers are chained to their machines by an invisible chain because his own boss is really nice. He doesn't read the newspaper.

This is the kind of spy Harry Gold is: He keeps the receipts, stubs from movie tickets and train schedules from his espionage assignations–"things he didn't need now but that he might need someday, you never could tell."

And what kind of person is Harry Gold? That is the mystery. "We are confronted with a question of motive, and of intent," a lawyer says at his trial near the end of the book, at just the time in a mystery when questions like these are supposed to be asked. You are puzzling out the clues not to solve the crime, but to solve the man. The creepy selflessness, the compulsion to work in his lab until 2 a.m., the moral banality, the leveling into equivalence of every emotion, the sweetness, the thoughtfulness, the militant lack of self-knowledge: What does Harry Gold want?

As Ms. Dillon tells it, Harry begins "sharing" industrial formulas (how to extract Vitamin D from fish oils, that sort of thing) with the Soviet Union because a friend who got him a job, a Communist, asks him to. "The very word communist upset him, but how could he be upset with Dave after all he had done for him and his family?" Through inertia–and then after blackmail threats, which Harry may have been dense enough to miss–he keeps passing on more chemical recipes and making failed attempts at recruitment, eventually winning the Order of the Red Star (his contact peels back its newspaper wrapping so he can catch a glimpse; he will only be able to claim his reward after the Revolution).

Then, in a development you might think would change his life, he begins traveling to New Mexico to collect information on the Manhattan Project from an exiled physicist, Klaus Fuchs, and then makes another contact whose identity is confirmed to Harry by the matching half of a Jell-O box top and the ominous greeting, "I come from Julius." (This is no fiction: A cultural-studies maven has written an entire essay on the semiotics of that box top.)

Harry is caught, confesses. After a spell of ignominy and death threats, he goes to prison, where he is able to carry out a fine study of glucose tolerance for the U.S. Public Health Service, is paroled in 1966, and serves as chief biochemist at Philadelphia's John F. Kennedy Memorial Hospital. The medical students raise money to establish a Harry Gold Memorial fund "in appreciation," as Ms. Dillon records in the last line of her novel–it doesn't look like much on its own, but in context it turns out to bear as much existential depth as any last line I have read–"of his selfless and untiring devotion to their needs."

These facts do nothing to illuminate the mystery–which is the point. This is a study of the elusiveness of motive. J. Edgar Hoover called Harry Gold one of the criminals of the century. But it is exactly Ms. Dillon's project to think about this man's smallness. History fits him like a bad suit. He believes in nothing, apologizes about his inability to believe, thinks endlessly about it, agonizes over it. And yet he pursues his treasonous project with fervid devotion. He is a strange man to be setting the world on its ear. Millicent Dillon's Harry Gold isn't Everyman, or Superman. But he is deeper the deeper you delve, even as the surface remains plain. Which makes him more like us than not, because we are all strange men. And given the treatment of the subject elsewhere, giving us a Communist who can make you feel that way is a true literary accomplishment.

Rick Perlstein's Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (Hill & Wang) will be out in January 2001.