Sullivan has been dedicated on this issue, but I've always found his tone here to be overwrought and legalistic. A big supporter of the invasion of Iraq, as essential to our national security, Sullivan seems to be saying, If only this war could have been fought more cleanly, on moral and military grounds. Once he wrote that he wanted to cry over the abuses. He doth protest too much.

War is horrifying, and torture/abuse is inevitable, to one degree or another. Some of that torture is surely practical and tacitly approved, the movie version: You have caught an insurgent who you believe knows where a live IED is set to go off; what do you do? But that is a small part of it. If you are brutalized, as so many of our troops are, and always will be by war on this scale, there is going to be torture. Sullivan writes fatuously of "long-standing American honor and decency." Read Charles Lindbergh's memoirs on the Pacific war in '43 (The Wartimes Journals). Such a just war, yes—but Lindbergh was angered by what other pilots and soldiers (under General MacArthur, a rectitudinous commander if ever there was one) were doing to Japanese captives, and implored them not to abuse or kill these men. He didn't have much effect. Those pilots were inflamed by reports of what the Japanese had done to American pilots they had captured. Starvation, medical experiments. And water tortures of the sort we now see in Iraq. Round and round the circle of violence we go. War selects for Lynndie England types. If intellectuals have a role to play in war, so do the desperate people who so often distinguish themselves at the front. Again to refer to New Guinea (the only war I've closely studied), when the Japanese poured down through the Pacific after Pearl Harbor, the first thing the Aussies did was empty the New Guinea prisons—and arm the felons.

I am not trying to justify this; these are observations. But it seems to me naive not to recognize that this is an inevitable aspect of the larger violence, of which Sullivan approved. As for that larger violence, I suppose he looks on the collateral damage to innocents of an airstrike or a not-so-smartbomb as somehow necessary. And so he cries for the Iraqi general suffocated by an abusive interrogator, but not for the innocent family incinerated mistakenly/rashly by our forces at a roadblock. I'm not so sure that the Iraqi families who are crying in a different way over these deaths would see the distinction in our actions. This war has been a brutal thing, as we on the left said it would be. It has churned innocents like ants, and not-so-innocent prisoners too. Look at the horrifying photographs on Juan Cole's website. Cole says 200,000 civilians have died. Lately in Syria, I met two of the tens of thousands of Iraqi refugees who had fled to Syria, at a bar. "Iraq is a coffin," one said to me. Then he added, with rage, that American soldiers fire indiscriminately into homes after insurgent attacks. (Collective punishment. Ala Israel's occupiers). There are many things going on in Iraq that would make a person cry.

I'm no pacifist. I supported the war in Afghanistan. But war is an extreme measure, something the utopian planners and cheerleaders for this war deluded themseves about. (And still do; it would have gone perfectly if we'd only had half a million troops...) None of them had to go there. Few of them seem to know war. The older ones had declined an education in the matter during the Vietnam War, for instance by getting a political appointment to the Texas Air National Guard.

Sullivan is right when he assails the Administration's policy of countenancing torture. But he is off when he wrings his hands and imagines a clean war, edges trimmed legally. I imagine that he feels guilty about that larger horror, and has displaced it on to this issue, and so has come to fetishize a tidy legal cutout to put his guilt down on, amid the nightmare. If you need a code, why not try the one that those other savior/interveners have—doctors: First, do no harm.

A little more than 15 years ago, Philip Roth published a slim, peculiar book called The Facts: A Novelist’s Autobiography, which consisted of a brief letter from "Roth" to his fictional alter ego, Zuckerman; an airbrushed memoir of the author’s first 55 years; and, finally, a long letter to "Roth" from Zuckerman picking apart the airbrushed memoir. Zuckerman is especially dismissive of the sweet chapter (called "Safe at Home") about young Philip’s boyhood in the "peaceful ... haven" of the Weequahic section of Newark. Quoth Zuckerman: "[Y]ou are evidently in a mood to idealize the confining society that long ago ceased impinging on your spirit and to sentimentalize people who now inhabit either New Jersey cemeteries or Florida retirement communities."

Mr. Roth’s new novel could be called The Counterfacts: It begins in November 1940 with the landslide election of Charles A. Lindbergh as President of the United States, and builds quietly, ominously, until the fall of 1942, when the assassination of Walter Winchell unleashes a national cataclysm.

Lindbergh President? Winchell assassinated? Yes, we’re in the what-if world of counterfactual history, neatly engineered by Mr. Roth to transform the peaceful haven of Weequahic into a site of "perpetual fear" and the safe, charmed boyhood of young Philip Roth into a nightmarish, blood-splattered ordeal complete with blighted lives, simmering fury, murder and looming madness. (Well, that would explain Sabbath’s Theater and The Dying Animal.)

Two years of the nation’s history are boldly reimagined in The Plot Against America, and so is the daily life of the Roth family on Summit Avenue in Weequahic. The "facts," rendered with loving precision, remain the same: 7-year-old Philip lives in a rented second-floor flat in a small house on a tree-lined street; his father sells insurance for Metropolitan Life; his mother is involved in the P.T.A.; his 12-year-old brother, Sandy, nurtures a precocious artistic talent—"We were a happy family in 1940." But the change in national government (especially the cozy entente between Hitler and Lindbergh, who campaigned on the promise to keep America out of the European war) has ugly local consequences. The political poisons the personal.

And what is the poison that turns the neighborhood septic? American anti-Semitism—imported from Germany by President Lindbergh. Or, more specifically, the fear of American anti-Semitism. Young Philip’s own encounters with prejudice are very few and relatively anodyne (two incidents in which the epithet "loudmouth Jew" is uttered in his presence, and an odd exchange with an otherwise friendly Italian-American boy who insists, without a trace of rancor, that "Jews drink blood"). Until the spring of 1942, however, the Weequahic Jews don’t experience anything even remotely like persecution. They can’t "justify either their alarm or their composure with hard fact."

Instead of persecution, they get "Just Folks," a pushy program of cultural indoctrination administered by the newly created "Office of American Absorption"—the purpose of which is to encourage minorities "to become further incorporated into the larger society." Just Folks is aimed squarely at neighborhoods like Weequahic: The intent is to send Jewish boys between 12 and 18 to work on farms in the American heartland for eight weeks.

Depending on how you look at it, Just Folks is either a benign voluntary summer program for kids or the first step towards eradicating the kind of ethnic difference that gives Jews their identity. Sandy, the admired big brother, ignoring his parents’ worried protest, ships happily off to Kentucky to work on a tobacco farm. "This doesn’t have anything to do with anti-Semitism," Sandy tells his father, who strenuously objects to what the mere existence of the Office of American Absorption implies about the status of Jewish citizens, and who fears that the hidden agenda of Just Folks is to "erode the solidarity of the Jewish family." (That’s precisely what happens: A year later, Sandy is calling the rest of his family "ghetto Jews.")

The next phase—the Office of American Absorption’s "Homestead 42" program—is unequivocally sinister. At the prompting of the government, Met Life orders the transfer of Philip’s father (and his family) to a new district office in Danville, Ky. A sugar-coated letter from corporate headquarters congratulates him on being "among the company’s first pioneering ‘homesteaders’ of 1942." Altogether, 225 Jewish families are accorded this honor, including several of the Roths’ Weequahic friends.

Here’s Walter Winchell’s take: "Item: Whether the Homestead 42 Jews end up in concentration camps à la Hitler’s Buchenwald has yet to be decided by Lindbergh’s two top swastinkers, Vice President Wheeler and Secretary of the Interior Henry Ford. Did I say ‘whether’? Pardon my German. I meant when." (A fine bit of channeling on Mr. Roth’s part.)

The backlash against Homestead 42 triggers a backlash against Winchell (in September of 1942, "America history ... recorded its first large-scale pogrom"), and from there events spiral out of control—along with the plot of The Plot Against America —until the country plunges into chaos.

What’s the point of this counterfactual fantasy? A daring imaginative exercise, it’s a way to see both the country and the Roth family more clearly by making everything thrillingly strange. It’s an explicit rebuke, as well, to those who still insist, despite Sinclair Lewis’ 1935 warning, that It Can’t Happen Here. (Is it also a parable about the dangers of the Bush administration’s flag-waiving assault on civil liberties? Though Mr. Roth, in an essay in The New York Times Book Review, says not, I think I hear faint echoes.)

There’s something delightfully creepy about picturing Nazi Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop at a White House state dinner, and the Office of American Absorption is a brilliant device for exposing the coercive, implicitly bigoted side of self-righteous American patriotism, but it’s on the domestic front—back home in meticulously mapped Weequahic—that Mr. Roth’s book succeeds best. ("History is everything that happens everywhere," Philip’s father tells him. "Even what happens in his house to an ordinary man—that’ll be history too someday.")

"I wonder," Mr. Roth writes in the second sentence of the novel, "if I would have been a less frightened boy if Lindbergh hadn’t been president or if I hadn’t been the offspring of Jews." Most of The Plot Against America is about the dire consequences of Lindbergh’s Presidency, but there’s also a tantalizing undercurrent, a hidden personal history, again counterfactual: What if young Philip could have sloughed off his Jewishness?

Twice in the course of the novel, Philip resolves to run away from home, and in each instance he plans to assume a wholly new identity: First he decides to become an orphan ("I wanted to be a boy on the smallest scale") and tries to gain admittance to a Catholic orphanage; then he hatches a scheme to go work at a pretzel factory that employs deaf-mutes and earn the money for a one-way ticket to Omaha, Neb., "where Father Flanagan ran Boys Town"—his aim, again, is to be "just a boy and nothing more." Fear has caused him to internalize the Just Folks agenda: He wants to efface all signs of ethnic difference.

As a writer, of course, Philip Roth has devoted a good deal of his genius to the task of recording for posterity the particularities that make the Weequahic section of Newark in the middle of the 20th century indelibly different (and at the same time representative). In this novel, his 21st, he adds some brilliant touches to that life-long project. My favorite begins with the smell of Christmas trees on a downtown street. He breathes in the "rustic tang" and then he’s off: "There were no trees for sale in our neighborhood—because there was no one to buy them—and so the month of December, if it smelled at all, smelled of something a hissing alley cat had tugged from an overturned garbage can in somebody’s yard, and of supper heating on the stove of a flat whose steamy kitchen window was open a crack to let in air from the alleyway, and of the bursts of noxious coal gas spewed from the furnace chimneys, and of the pail of ashes dragged up from the cellar to be emptied outdoors over slippery patches of sidewalk." For emphasis, he turns once more to difference: "I traveled downtown … and saw the trees and took a whiff and discovered that, as with many things, for Christians, December was otherwise."

In this novel about history "turned wrong way round," it’s always the "otherwise" that counts.

Adam Begley is the books editor of The Observer.

When I got the news that a galley of the new Philip Roth novel was available, I raced down to the Union Square offices of Houghton Mifflin. It was late in the day, so by the time I got there, the offices were closed, but they'd been kind enough to leave an envelope for me leaning against the locked glass doors.

It's been a long time since I felt this kind of urgency about getting hold of a novel. Maybe not since Pynchon's Mason & Dixon or Robert Stone's Damascus Gate . Philip Roth's astonishing streak of late-life literary sensations is a phenomenon of sorts, and he's one of the novelists who still have the power to make you feel you need to know what they're up to as soon as possible . But to me, the subject matter made getting my hands on it more imperative, more personal.

You may have read some of the advance reports on the Roth book, his alternative-future novel in which Charles Lindbergh, in real life the figurehead for the isolationist and (in part) pro-fascist America First movement, runs for President in 1940, beats F.D.R. and-soon after his inauguration-makes a pact with Hitler.

It was the night of that Lakers-Pistons overtime game. I mention this because as soon as I got home with the Roth galley, I proceeded to read all 390 pages straight through the night, with only one interruption: watching that amazing last-quarter Lakers comeback, capped by Kobe Bryant's stunning game-tying, buzzer-beating three-point shot. It's not like Roth has to make a comeback or Kobe has something to prove (wait, that's not completely true), but there's at least a surface analogy there: Both the game and the reading experience were, in some primal way, unbearably suspenseful.

The novel's distinctiveness derives not just from suspense-although I have to say, Roth proves himself capable of weaving ominous intimations into the texture of his narrative, creating compelling suspense with the best of them.

I feel constrained about what I can say about a pre-publication galley (the book won't be out till early October), but before I get to my High Concept here, which links Lindbergh, Spielberg, A. Scott Berg and Philip Roth, let me talk about Roth's title a little bit-that's not forbidden. Some Pynchon scholars have told me they still recall the essay I wrote in these pages on the title of Pynchon's closely held new novel ( Mason & Dixon ) before I-or anyone-had read the book. An essay in which I predicted that, knowing Pynchon's thematic concerns, one focus of Mason & Dixon would surely be the "Transit of Venus" and its metaphorical resonances-as indeed was the case. (But not enough Pynchon scholars have taken notice of the delicious hoax on postmodern Pynchon scholarship I uncovered, the one David Bromwich and Edward Mendelson authored under a pseudonym in Raritan .)

But I turned out to be wrong, at least in part, in the extrapolation I'd made from the Roth title. The book is called The Plot Against America . When I first heard it, I took it as another instance of Roth's deliberate doubleness. Doing pastiche and sending it up, as he did in his 1998 title I Married a Communist , a send-up of deadly earnest 50's F.B.I. Story – I Led Three Lives pop lit and an Amazing Tales comic-book adventure mindset. But this new novel wasn't just doing pastiche and sending it up. This was transcending it, all the while enjoying the genre-pleasure of manipulating narrative seductiveness (as in the espionage plot of Mr. Roth's Operation Shylock , for instance).

What is the "Plot Against America"? I ain't tellin', but it gets freaky toward the end and scary throughout: There was just no way I was going to get to sleep without finishing the book. I hope the serious-minded literati among you will forgive me for dwelling on the confluence of the Kobe Bryant shot and the Roth novel, but the Kobe shot had something of a similar quality, a jaw-dropping last-quarter gamble that pays off and leaves you astonished. A long rainbow arc. Nothing but net.

This is not a review; as I said, I'm not going to spoil the plot, or share my many complex feelings about the choices Roth makes, until a later column. But I do want to share an idea that came to me at the groggy end of the night, see if it survives the light of day. It was then I saw a connection to something I'd been thinking of writing about Steven Spielberg and Mel Gibson. About Mr. Spielberg's silence on the question of The Passion of the Christ , a silence pointedly remarked on by Frank Rich at a panel I'd moderated the week before.

It was then that I remembered Steven Spielberg and his ill-advised Lindbergh project. And then I had an idea about Spielberg and Roth and Lindbergh.

But first, to put my idea in context, a little more about the Lindbergh of history and the Lindbergh of the Roth novel. Did you notice Mr. Roth actually felt compelled to write a letter to The Times (which ran on March 5, 2004) trying to clarify the distinction-or, in this instance, lack of one-between the Lindbergh of history and the Lindbergh of his novel? The Times ' initial report on his novel had read, in part, "His [Roth's] Lindbergh blames Jews in a radio address for selfishly pushing America toward a pointless war with Nazi Germany."

No, Roth wrote to The Times , it isn't just "my" (fictional) Lindbergh who attacked an alleged Jewish cabal, it's the Lindbergh of history. Mr. Roth quoted from the actual speech attacking Jews (and British agents and F.D.R., all part of the sinister cabal), a speech Lindbergh made at an America First rally in Des Moines, Iowa, on Sept. 11, 1941, in which he said, "No person of honesty and vision can look on [the Jews'] pro-war policy here today without seeing the dangers involved in such a policy both for us and for them …. We cannot allow the natural passions and prejudices of other peoples to lead our country to destruction."

This may explain Mr. Roth's decision to include, as an appendix to his novel (at least in the galleys), the full damning text of Lindbergh's Des Moines speech-more about that speech later-as well as a passage from A. Scott Berg's biography of Lindbergh, in which the aviator's fear of "inferior blood" and other Master Race idiocies are described.

It's fascinating the way that Lindbergh-who could well have won the war for Hitler, even without running for President, if his isolationist campaign had succeeded-nonetheless still occupies a niche as that great American archetype, the "deeply flawed hero." (As does Henry Ford, peddler of The International Jew , a four-volume Americanized riff on The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion that became a key inspiration for Adolf Hitler.) This is essentially how A. Scott Berg's biography-a book written with some cooperation from the Lindbergh family-portrays Lindbergh, and most of the media have been inclined to follow.

Roth's novel is likely to open, or re-open, a salutary historical debate over the degree of Lindbergh's culpability, and the role that anti-Semitism played in his willingness to be, in effect, Hitler's stooge in America. (Yes, I know that he flew some combat missions for the U.S. after Pearl Harbor-it doesn't excuse the time he spent as a fascist dupe.) Perhaps it will raise the question: At what point in one's support for a genocidal tyrant does one stop being a "flawed hero" and become, say, a "sinister creep exploiting his celebrity on behalf of a mass murderer"? Just asking.

Anyway, to return to Roth's Lindbergh. What Roth knows is rage, what Roth writes about in many of his peak moments is rage-often rage against those who have false reputations for probity-and I wouldn't be surprised if it turns out that rage at the continued lionization of race-haters like Ford and Lindbergh (Ford serves in President Lindbergh's cabinet in the novel) might have impelled Roth to embark upon this risk of a novel.

I've said enough, but I just can't resist mentioning one touch of genius in Roth's Lindbergh novel: After the hero aviator wins the 1940 election, he makes his pact with Hitler to keep us out of the war (and a similar one with the Japanese, in effect making America a silent partner in the Axis takeover of the rest of the world).

It's got frisson of Sinclair Lewis' forgotten pre-war classic It Can't Happen Here. But Roth's focus is on the Roth family in Newark and how the Lindbergh Presidency affects them, as seen through the eyes of 9-year-old "Philip Roth." One particularly divisive issue in the family is the Lindbergh administration's program to have Jews in American cities first visit, then get transferred to isolated rural areas, ostensibly to help their "American Absorption." The ultimate goals of the program are troublingly unspoken. The subtly sinister touch of Rothian black-humor genius is in the name he gives the program: "Just Folks."

Of course, I had a special interest in reading Roth on this subject. I'd excerpted a chapter from Roth's equally astonishing Operation Shylock in my new anthology on contemporary anti-Semitism. The chapter in which Roth's tricky doppelgänger, "the Diasporist," speaks of his apprehension of a "second Holocaust" in the Middle East. Back in April of 2002, when I'd come upon that passage, I wrote a column speculating about whether the Diasporist's dire conjecture could come true. Uttering the words "Second Holocaust"-even quoting a Roth character-touched off an interesting debate about whether one was permitted to examine "worst-case scenarios," or whether doing so was forbidden because it was "alarmist." Among other things, the new Roth novel is a meditation on some of the same questions raised by Operation Shylock : How should we know whether or not to be alarmed, or whether one is being "alarmist." Over the "Just Folks" plan, for instance.

2) Mr. Spielberg Meets Mr. Lindbergh

I have to admit the Spielberg side of this notion was set off by an Internet rumor. After I heard Frank Rich's impassioned comments on Spielberg's silence on the Passion issue, I Googled Spielberg and Mel Gibson and came upon this strange Internet rumor. Did you catch this? It was fake, but it had a certain appeal.

Spielberg was going to "fight fire with fire" when it came to Mel's Passion , as one version of the widely circulated e-mail had it. The director was going to respond to the anti-Semitic animus of Mr. Gibson's Passion in the way he knew best: by making a counterfilm, a counterhistory.

If Mr. Gibson insisted on defining his film as "history," well then, Steven Spielberg, Jewish auteur warrior, would take on Mel the Crusader by making a film about the Crusades, followed by one about the Inquisition. If Mel wanted history, Spielberg would give him history-the history of the slaughter of the Jews, perpetrated by Crusader bands often inflamed by the same anti-Semitic notions embedded in The Passion . This is the "history" Mel ignored in blithely making a film that will for centuries ever after shape the vision of Jews with its vile stereotypes for untold millions. Mel's Passion -already popular in the Middle East and Asia-will be poisoning the already poisoned history of relations between Jews and non-Jews on film, DVD and whatever technology succeeds it, nurturing hatred ever after.

So Spielberg was going to strike back, "fight fire with fire," as the Internet rumor had it. A showdown over the crucifix at the cineplex. The W.W.E. doesn't offer that kind of titanic drama. It's reminiscent of the "disputations" of the medieval era, when Jews were forced to "debate" Christian theologians over which religion was "right" about God. This time, the fight wouldn't be fixed. It would be the rumble in the Hollywood jungle.

Not exactly.

The Internet rumor that Mr. Spielberg would make a movie about the Crusaders' casual slaughter of Jews (followed up by one about the Inquisition's persecution and torture) turned out to have no foundation. A fantasy.

But I have a better fantasy: Steven Spielberg drops the Lindbergh biopic he'd planned, and instead makes a film out of Philip Roth's sensational (but more truthful) portrait of Lindbergh in The Plot Against America . The Roth novel won't come out until October, but that shouldn't be any bar to Mr. Spielberg, who bought A. Scott Berg's Lindbergh biography without reading it.

It's going to make a great movie by someone, and it would be perfect karma, a bold act, if that movie were made by Steven Spielberg.

I'm not saying Mr. Spielberg hasn't paid his dues. He's already done something of far more lasting importance than any single movie in creating the Shoah Foundation, which documents on videotape the personal stories of the last surviving victims of the Holocaust. All the more important when a Holocaust denier like Mel Gibson's father Hutton is given a nationwide platform because of his son's movie. (And I've read he is making a movie about the 1972 Munich Olympics attack on Israeli athletes.) But the Internet rumor suggested that, in some subrealm of the collective unconscious, people wanted a response of some kind from Steven Spielberg to The Passion .

As I said, the Google search that disclosed the Internet rumor was inspired by some impassioned and acerbic comments The Times ' Frank Rich had made during a panel discussion at Barnes & Noble on the Upper West side on May 24. The panel was composed of writers-Mr. Rich, Jonathan Rosen, Marie Brenner, Harold Evans-whose essays appeared in the anthology I just published, whose title (if you must know) is Those Who Forget the Past: The Question of Anti-Semitism . (Full disclosure: In addition to excerpting Operation Shylock , Mr. Roth's 1993 novel, in the anthology, it's also the case that my agent once submitted a project to a DreamWorks executive. Further disclosure: I'm not looking for a Graydon Carter–type "finder's fee" in bringing these two together.)

Anyway, at the Barnes & Noble panel, Mr. Rich spoke of the way virtually the whole of Hollywood had been silent about The Passion . (Almost as if there had been a "gentleman's agreement"-my phrase, not Mr. Rich's.) He spoke about the way virtually the entire media had given Mel a pass, despite the film's unmistakable deviations from the Gospels that further demonized Jews.

And then Mr. Rich brought up Steven Spielberg. Mr. Spielberg's silence was particularly regrettable, he said, at a time when the director was out there making a big to-do over the release of the Schindler's List DVD.

Has Mr. Spielberg been silent? The only response to The Passion I've seen from him was a brush-off he gave an interviewer earlier this spring, just after The Passion came out. "I think it's much too important," he told a questioner, to speak of the film before seeing it. "I'm too smart to answer a question like that," he said. And when he did see it, he added, he'd reserve his comments for Mel Gibson himself.

We have no indication that this heart-to-heart with Mel has occurred, but it would be good, after he shared his thoughts with Mr. Gibson, to share them with us as well.

As for Mr. Spielberg's Lindbergh project, he himself has conceded that he's had second thoughts about it. Here's what Mr. Spielberg told a reporter from The Observer (London's, that is), on March 21, 1999:

"Later," the Observer reporter wrote, "I ask Spielberg what happened to the film about Charles Lindbergh that he had planned to direct. He replies by explaining how Schindler's List and the Shoah Foundation have reshaped his thinking. 'They've given me more of a moral responsibility to make sure I'm not putting someone else's agenda in front of the most important agenda, which is trying to create tolerance,' he says. 'We'll probably make Lindbergh , but one of the reasons I've considered not being the director is that I didn't know very much about him until I read Scott Berg's book and I read it only after I purchased it. I think it's one of the greatest biographies I've ever read but his 'America First' and his anti-Semitism bothers me to my core, and I don't want to celebrate an anti-Semite unless I can create an understanding of why he felt that way. Because sometimes the best way to prevent discrimination is to understand the discriminator.'"

This is somewhat puzzling: He doesn't "want to celebrate an anti-Semite"-well, not unless he can find some other director who can do it and/or he can make Lindbergh's anti-Semitism "understandable," so to speak. Call me crazy, but I don't see that a movie whose purpose is to help us understand how little Charlie learned to dislike Jews is likely to get off the ground.

Which is why I suggest that he abandon the project altogether (Mr. Berg has already been paid a reported $2 million fee for his book, so it's not taking money out of his pocket) and instead make Philip Roth's Lindbergh novel.

Clearly one can feel the discomfort in Mr. Spielberg's remarks to the Observer reporter about the Berg book (some call it a masterpiece; some call it a whitewash), but making movies with the solemn burden of "creating tolerance" is not always the best way of evoking an artist's best work. A dip into Mr. Roth's rage might be just the thing for Mr. Spielberg, fire him up again. While there are other directors who could make this a great film, Mr. Spielberg's feel for the Amazing Stories pastiche mystique of the period, his intuitive feel for communicating the emotion beneath the surface of pop-culture obsessions, make one hope he could bring some of the sizzle to Mr. Roth's steak that would make it a powerful film, an event. No rides, no toys, but an event.

3) Mr. Lindbergh Makes a Speech

Why is all this important? Because Lindbergh was a kind of "Manchurian candidate" in "real" history: a figurehead for pro-fascists. It's important for that reason, yes, but its also important because the record isn't clear on who Lindbergh really was; one can imagine something worse: that he wasn't entirely a puppet. That he was a knowing smooth operator and agitator playing on popular prejudice to advance himself. He could indeed have become President.

Lindbergh's famous "Who Are the War Agitators?" speech, the one Mr. Roth added to his galleys, was one that Lindbergh delivered at a pivotal moment in history: Sept. 11, 1941, when the U.K. alone was still holding off Hitler, in what increasingly looked like Churchill's futile fantasy of resistance now that Nazi armies were sweeping towards Moscow. If Lindbergh had succeeded in his aim, Hitler may have had a solid foundation for his Thousand Year Reich, rather than the 12 years he got.

By that time, in real (as opposed to alternate) history, Lindbergh had been the figurehead for the Hitler-friendly America First movement, which was doing everything to prevent not just the U.S. entering the war, but providing any life support to the U.K., the only regime in the West that was fighting the genocidal Third Reich. The fighting in the East, just begun, made it seem like the Soviet Union was about to collapse. The Holocaust had begun, but while giving lip service to his opposition to the "persecution" of Europe's Jews, Lindbergh warned against American Jews, whom he depicted-along with F.D.R. and British agents-as a sinister cabal trying to manipulate America into opposing Hitler. Perish the thought, Lindbergh told his audience in this speech, given in Des Moines. It's a speech that demonstrates just how canny and effective a politician he might have been, the deceptively "just folks" smooth operator that Roth depicts his President Lindbergh as.

Here's the great hero Charles Lindbergh warning what he saw as a sinister cabal of American Jews: "Instead of agitating for war, the Jewish groups in this country should be opposing it in every possible way, for they will be among the first to feel its consequences."

The veiled threat here-we know what kind of "consequences" the Jews in Europe were already feeling-is, "Shut up or you'll be blamed for the war and given a taste of Hitler's medicine." It is utterly repulsive in a slimy insinuating way. It is also remarkably similar to some rhetoric you hear in certain quarters today.

Lindbergh goes on to speak, in that subtly sinister way, of "tolerance": "Tolerance is a virtue that depends upon peace and strength. History shows that it cannot survive war and devastations." So the lesson from Lindbergh is that it's better to be silent about Jews being slaughtered elsewhere than speak up for them, because if they speak up, they'll be slaughtered here too. Cut the Jews of Europe loose if you want to feel safe in America.

Recently, I was privileged to attend a dinner honoring the distinguished historian David S. Wyman, who now has an important Holocaust education institute named after him (wymaninstitute.org). Professor Wyman was the author of the ground-breaking investigative history, The Abandonment of the Jews , about the indifference and hostility of the U.S government (or most parts of it) to those attempting to escape Hitler's slaughter. Wyman was also the author, with Rafael Medoff, of another important subsequent book, A Race Against Death , the utterly heartbreaking story of the valiant efforts by legendary U.S. writer Ben Hecht and messenger-from-Europe Peter Bergson to attempt to awake America to the Holocaust as it happened. Both books cumulatively demonstrate that although Lindbergh's America First, objectively pro-fascist politicking did not propel him to the Presidency as in Roth's alternate history, those Lindberghian attitudes prevailed in the bowels of the U.S. government and served to cost the lives of hundreds of thousands who could have been saved. In a way, Lindbergh-like Hitler-won.

Lindbergh's speech goes on to tell us that the Jews' "greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government …. "

Again, I don't think I need to tell anyone that we're seeing the same kind of rhetoric in certain quarters these days. If anything goes wrong with a policy that is unpopular in some quarters, it's "the Jews" collectively who are at fault if there's any Jew involved.

All the more reason I can't wait until this fall, when I'll no longer be bound by pre-pub discretion from further discussing the choices Philip Roth makes in his portrait of America under a Lindbergh Presidency, the reign of the Hitler-Lindbergh pact.

In a way, the novel is as much a novel about Jews and the choices they make as it is about Lindbergh and Hitler. There are those who say, "Don't panic; don't speak up against the mistreatment of fellow Jews-it will only make things worse." And there are those in the novel, like Philip Roth's father and Walter Winchell(!), who do speak up. The fate of those who make such choices isn't something I think I can reveal, but Mr. Roth's novel has the makings of a thrilling, suspenseful and profound movie. Steven Spielberg, have your heart-to-heart chat with Mel Gibson after you see his sickening movie.

Then switch Lindbergh projects. The Plot Against America could be your finest hour.

William Aloysius Conway, which was my great-grandfather's name and was the name of his business, bought the place from a retiring smith around 1914. Automobiles were swiftly outpacing horses; fashioning horseshoes was about to become a money loser. So he concentrated on getting work with newspaper delivery horses, and he scored lucrative contracts with the police and fire departments for troublesome horses that were hard to shoe. His business card hangs in a little frame on a wall at my mother's house. Beneath his name is a line that reads "LAME AND INTERFERING HORSES A SPECIALTY."

He made headlines one day, when Charles Lindbergh took off on his famous transatlantic flight. For good luck, the aviator was given a giant horseshoe my great-grandfather forged for the occasion. When he was interviewed, my great-grandfather waved the reporter off, offering dryly that if Lindbergh got to the other side it would have nothing to do with the horseshoe.

In the 1930's he retired, partly: He spent winters in the workshop making decorative wrought-iron objects, and summers upstate in Warwick, N.Y., where relatives had a farm.

When Conway finally closed up shop, the family rented the downstairs to some Italians, who turned it into a restaurant called, provocatively, "17." It was already a sign of change. In the 1920's and 1930's, I've been told, Cornelia Street was the line that divided Little Italy from the Irish neighborhood. My mother was not allowed to walk the dicey block east toward Sixth Avenue alone. "17" remained open through the 1960's, when my great-uncle and -aunt sold the building and retired to Florida.

My mother often told us about the Barrow Street place: a light-red-brick, two-story, colonial-era building that had once served as the carriage house for Aaron Burr's estate, which occupied much of the present Greenwich Village.

"That's where they brought the horses in," my mother would say, attempting in her often less-than-completely-useful way to describe the large workshop with its great doors opening onto Barrow Street. Upstairs were all the living rooms, she said.

In its present incarnation as a high-end restaurant, large oak doors open up to the street, punched through in the center to accommodate antique-looking, ripply glass windowpanes. As a teenager, when many of my nights were spent trying to convince bartenders in Greenwich Village that I was 21, I happened upon the place almost accidentally one evening. Since then, I've often peered in and been able to just see the large room through the elaborate fronds that sit on top of the grand piano at the front of the dining area.

Looking at the building from the street, it's difficult to imagine my grandfather's large family quartered in the tiny upstairs portion of the shop. The house was always described to me as a magnificent place, and it certainly is a beautiful building, reclaimed and cleaned up like most of the neighborhood. But as a family home and working blacksmith's shop, it looked to me like it must have been a bit on the Dickensian side-hardly the idyllic setting my mother remembers from the Sundays of her youth.

It's just as hard to reconcile my mother's stories with the now-trendy neighborhood, stripped of its utilitarian qualities and reclaimed as one Block Beautiful after another. In fact, it's hard for me to imagine Irish-Americans in Manhattan at all. I have no memory of when Chelsea was an Irish neighborhood, let alone when Greenwich Village was. The Village, to me, was a place I'd go to escape my home on Roosevelt Island and the structure of family life, or to find some feeling of youthful urbanity to replace the ethnicity I felt all around me otherwise.

One If By Land, with its cathedral-height ceilings in the front room, fresh flowers, plaid carpeting and that large piano, consistently gets good reviews, but it's not my kind of place. For one thing, it's one of the most popular spots for marriage proposals. To me, it looks very peaceful and nice-like a funeral home or rectory.

But I prefer the caterwaul of Clinton Street or East Second Street, and the loud and indelicate clatter of silverware on china to the white noise of soft piano and the sound of careful, mannered eating.

A few years ago my aunt, who was visiting from Pennsylvania, decided to pay a visit to the old family place on Barrow Street. There was some conversation with the restaurant staff about the building and its history. According to my mother's report, the drinks were not free.

I don't think that can be the only reason that the visit felt a bit like a rejection to us. Really, it was only a slightly embarrassing reminder that this is a transient city. Even deep roots in the city are pulled out and scattered, eventually; old places give way to the new, and our ancestors die. Yet like a microcosm of the much more mobile United States, there is a sort of New York family that moves from Manhattan to the boroughs and back again in the course of generations, but never leaves.

I am the first and only person in my extended family to live in Manhattan since the house on Barrow Street was sold. Recently, I went to the opening of an art gallery around the corner from my apartment on the Lower East Side, which had an adjoining apartment.

There, I met a couple who were having an uncanny experience. The woman was pointing toward a platform that had been built above the bathroom.

"That's where we used to sleep!" she said. It turned out that she and her husband lived for many years in the ground-floor apartment of the building. The neighborhood had changed entirely; the woman told me that she remembered when the streets were flooded with drug dealers. It looked as though it was difficult for her to stand in this place and not feel the past catching up, fast as wild horses, to the present-an exhilarating and vaguely frightening approach.

Now she lived in Soho and ran a restaurant.

"What restaurant?" I asked the woman.

She described it in vague terms that nevertheless made it clear which restaurant it was.

"Is it at 17 Barrow Street?" I asked. It was. I told her all about William Conway and Cornelia Street and the lame and interfering horses, and we both marveled at the chance meeting. She told me the place was haunted by Aaron Burr's ghost-a tale that must have developed after my great-uncle sold the building in 1969.

With an earnest graciousness, she and her husband invited me to a complimentary dinner at One If By Land. I assured her that I would take her up on it.

Now all I have to do is call.

Pat has become a kind of white man's Jesse Jackson. You never know whether either of these two mucklemouths mean it, or if they do it because afterwards it kicks up their lecture fees. They probably do it for both reasons, although neither of them would be around in such a largely visible form were it not for CNN-Time Warner, which keeps them afloat by paying them to wave their mouths around in front of the cameras during the down years between election forays.

This year Pat may have an additional motive for taking to the stump. He has a book out, and the campaign ought to hype sales. Whatever his reasons, the book, A Republic, Not an Empire , isn't your ordinary blatherskiting pile of commonplace nostrums candidates are given to publishing around campaign time. This volume, although mainly historical, has got burrs and stickles in it aplenty.

Seldom will you see a book so made to order for being taken out of context and used against its author. These excerpts read as though they had been lifted from Mein Kampf , Adolf Hitler's political testament: "During [World War I] not one Allied soldier had set foot on German soil. As late as April 1918 the Allies were on the defensive, and a German army was on the Marne within 40 miles of Paris. But after agreeing to an armistice on [Woodrow] Wilson's terms, Germany was treated as a war criminal whose atrocities justified stripping it of all property and rights … Self-determination was granted former subjects of Germany and Austria-Hungary, but denied millions of Germans and Austrians who were marched under French, Italian, Czech and Polish rule. Divided and dismembered, Germany was put on the rack and ordered to pay … and to accept moral responsibility for having started the war."

In dilating on the thesis that President Franklin Roosevelt baited the Japanese into attacking the United States as part of a larger stratagem to get the country into the Second World War, Mr. Buchanan writes: "F.D.R. and those who felt they knew better made only feeble attempts to lead Americans to embrace their view and accept the sacrifices of war. Instead, they smeared, persecuted and blacklisted antiwar leaders and maneuvered us into one collision after another with Germany and Japan so that war would be 'thrust upon us.'" Mr. Buchanan is at particular pains to mention Charles A. Lindbergh as one of the martyrs to the war hawks' dirty-politics campaign. To this day, in some circles, the Lone Eagle has not lived down his reputation as an anti-Semitic Nazi sympathizer who accepted a medal from German Field Marshal Hermann Goering.

If you read the book and therefore absorb the context in which these and other Buchananian sentences appear, his opinions are not as savagely revanchist and proto-fascist as they seem when plucked off the page and left to stand on their own. Indeed, much that he says is taken from the work of historians who, I suspect, wouldn't sit down and have a cup of coffee with Mr. Buchanan. It doesn't matter how well some of his opinions would be received at the high table over in the history department, so let's skip over how right or wrong Mr. Buchanan may be and ask the important question, which is, "Why now?"

For years Mr. Buchanan has had an odor of anti-Semitism about his public self. I don't know that he has ever been nailed on it, I don't know that he is an anti-Semite, but the smell is on him, so you might think that the last thing he would do going into a drive to cop a Presidential nomination from some party or other would be to publish a book extolling Lindbergh and the America First Committee, which struggled to keep the United States out of World War II. Certainly, for people over a certain age, doing so can only galvanize them into apoplexy.

Why might he do such a thing? Well, in a political moment when all barks are becalmed, one means of getting under way may be to break wind. Let go with a sockdolager of such force that the emitter is propelled forward à la an air-filled balloon with a puncture in it. In this autumn of national political somnambulism, Mr. Buchanan's followers, if he has many, are sawing wood and staring at the stock market numbers along with everybody else. There is always a sufficiency of special-purpose political groups-in this case liberal ones-who are delighted to call a press conference and fulminate, if that's what it takes to goose contributions. For fund-raising purposes, thesis and antithesis need each other. Where would all those handgun-control organizations be without the National Rifle Association? A perfect set of upper teeth is useless without a matching set of lowers.

Mr. Buchanan cultivates a picture of himself as a barroom brawler, the kind of guy who waits for the chance to smash the neck off of his beer bottle and assume a crouch while he uses his free hand to beckon his would-be opponent to come get disfigured. Although from a decidedly middle-class background, Mr. Buchanan likes to drop the G's of his participles and hint that he is up from the docks and loading platforms, and not too long ago at that. He's one of those middle-class types who aspires to be a thug.

Yet at the core Mr. Buchanan is an angry guy looking for other angry guys, and he evidently believes the way to find his kind is to look and act like an industrial Cro-Magnon man, an avatar of the time of the coal-and-iron brotherhoods. To see him is to picture men with long-necked oil cans and hear the singing, pinging noise of steam pent up in iron boilers, waiting for release. Hence his harping on jobs lost to low-wage factories overseas and the lament over how Pittsburgh vanished and the smoke is gone.

The people he wants to lead are a fraction of the labor force; there aren't enough of them to catapult him very far. To get past where he is, he will have to learn how to talk to the newer, white-collar techno-proletariat. He's smart, and he'll learn, and then he will have to wait for his chance. It hasn't come this year, but if the stock market tanks, next year may be better for him.

As things stand now, if he snags a third-party nomination, he won't have the impact Aitch Ross Pee-rot had when he first came among us. Aitch Ross was saucy, original and quick, with sometimes funny, sometimes stinging wisecracks. He entertained us and fit into our daguerreotype notions of how genuine Americans should act and talk. Then his brain got fussed up with nightmares of conspiracies, and he lost his charm.

Mr. Buchanan doesn't have any charm to lose. Charm is not a Cro-Magnon trait, but he is around and apparently intends to stay around, so dismiss him at your peril. Ours is a period when political parties have scant control over whom they nominate. When things go awry, you could wake up and find that the damnedest people have taken over.