1. The Arab Question. "By 1944.. she had come to see it as the 'most important' challenge. Without 'Arab-Jewish co-operation,' she wrote in 1948, 'the whole Jewish venture in Palestine is doomed.'"

2. Israel's dependence on super-powers would allow it to show contempt for its neighbors. "Only folly could dictate a policy that trusts distant imperial power for protection, while alienating the goodwill of neighbours,' she wrote. In a 1950 essay, she declared that Zionists simply ignored or failed to understand 'the awakening of colonial peoples and the new nationalist solidarity in the Arab world from Iraq to French Morocco'."

3. Some Zionists' definition of Jewishness, as a people or nationality, was a "volk" concept that recalled the racist German definition of Jewishness. Writes Robin: "In 1948, the leader of Herut, Israel's Revisionist party, travelled to America. Arendt drafted a letter of protest to the New York Times, which was signed by Einstein, Sidney Hook and others. Herut was 'no ordinary political party', she wrote. It was 'closely akin in its organisation, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties'. It used 'terrorism', and its goal was a 'Fuhrer state' based on 'ultra-nationalism, religious mysticism and racial superiority'. The letter also decried those 'Americans of national repute' who 'have lent their names to welcome' the Herut leader, giving 'the impression that a large segment of America supports Fascist elements in Israel'. The leader of Herut was Menachem Begin."

In the 21st century, according to George Kateb, an eminent emeritus professor of political philosophy at Princeton, the United States has slid far down the slippery slope. With sophisticated technologies of surveillance, an entrenched welfare bureaucracy and a national-security state, Mr. Kateb argues, “the powers for total domination are insidiously being heaped up.” Since history reveals that “every power or capacity is eventually abused,” Americans may be only one trauma away from “general and unmistakable oppression.”

Pessimism permeates Patriotism and Other Mistakes, a collection of essays on the expansion of government power, President Bush’s war in Iraq, the relationship between aesthetics and morality, and political philosophy from Aristotle to Hannah Arendt. A libertarian, Mr. Kateb offers paeans to individual audacity and a Thoreauvian insistence that no one need be an instrument of injustice, but emphasizes that collective human behavior exhibits “political ruthlessness tending toward brutal excess and extremism and accompanied by intoxicated or thoughtless moral indifference.” Intended to challenge common sense and conventional wisdom, to bear witness and speak the truth, even if no one will listen, Patriotism and Other Mistakes is, in turn, erudite and angry, ingenious and outrageous, sophisticated and shrill.

Defenders of patriotism and group identity, Mr. Kateb contends, commit grave mental and moral errors. Patriotism engenders a jealous and exclusive loyalty to the nation-state, which “has a few actual and many imaginary ingredients.” Patriotism has been enlisted for moral ends, like the abolition of slavery, but far more often it bolsters unjust causes. Moral principles, moreover, should be defended directly: not because they are ours, but because they are right. For most citizens, Mr. Kateb observes, patriotism induces vicarious love and a deadly sort of rooting—making it easy to forsake principles with a clear conscience.

Like patriotism, Mr. Kateb asserts, other intense forms of group identity may be inevitable but are nonetheless lamentable. Ethnic, racial and religious identity diminishes individuality by encouraging pride in achievements not of one’s own and subsuming the self into an abstraction. By reducing sympathy for outsiders, group identity destroys the chance of developing a “democratic aestheticism” that embraces a common humanity, finding even the ugly, the impure and the ill-defined worthy of appreciation.

Mr. Kateb acknowledges, though only in passing, that group identity can counter some of the vices of individualism—selfishness, solipsism and materialism. He’s more interested in the use of patriotism to concentrate power in the executive branch of the American government. The Bush administration, he charges, spreads fear by portraying terrorism as “motiveless malignity”; went to war with Iraq for “partisan politics, unreserved concern for Israel, and oil”; and used pain, coercion and violence as instruments of state policy. Retaliation and retribution, Mr. Kateb proclaims, are always immoral: It doesn’t matter morally if people are killed deliberately or accidentally, as “collateral damage.” Even in an unequivocally good war, “the very use of violent means disallows invoking the name of justice.” Like Thoreau, Mr. Kateb doesn’t deem it his duty to eradicate wrong, but instead endorses “a morally driven disaffiliation.”

Mr. Kateb’s ferocious critique of contemporary American politics will resonate only with the left side of the choir. It’s redeemed, however, by a penetrating analysis (based on the work of Arendt) of the non-rational ideals that bind citizens to their government. In judging individual works of art, Mr. Kateb notes, critics divorce moral from aesthetic criteria. Thus, they deem D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation a “great” film, despite its racism. Less well known, and far more dangerous, Mr. Kateb indicates, is the application of these “aesthetic cravings”—a love of beauty, coherence and order—to politics. Far more than self-interest or even necessity, they trump considerations of justice and truth and help swell “the unconscious or rationalized immorality in the world.” Mr. Kateb speculates that Eve ate that apple for aesthetic reasons: It was beautiful to behold and pleasing to the palate. People praise courage on the battlefield, he notes, even when it serves wrongdoing. Fascists and totalitarians, as well as some “democrats,” have understood the appeal of what Arendt called “a lying world of consistency” to people eager to substitute “a design for a new reality” for the less satisfactory one they inhabit.

Mr. Kateb has gauged the power of these aesthetic cravings. Even though they tend to make us “monstrous,” without them “we are not human.” How, then, might they be checked and balanced? He finds some small consolation in the fact that many people who embrace “stories that make reality more meaningful, tend to like even more some immediate answers to the daily problems of staying afloat.” These people need to be reminded of the role of due process in “recognizing human dignity as a reality that emanates from a unique and immeasurable potentiality of human beings”; they need to be reminded, also, that although the United States still surpasses the world in freedom of speech and religion and the extension of equal protection of the laws to immigrants, the rights to privacy and habeas corpus are now in danger.

Such rational appeals may not be enough. To make aesthetic cravings only “a momentary stay against confusion,” Mr. Kateb looks, without much confidence, to existentialism. Our greatest teachers, he suggests, should “encourage us to endure meaninglessness.” By abjuring the search for a transcendent meaning and allowing local meanings to suffice, we can recognize “ordinary” things as beautiful and distinctive—and “intensify wonder that there is a world at all.” The prospect of nothingness, then, may be the last, best hope to force us, one by one, to look at ourselves and acknowledge others as worthy of respect.

Glenn C. Altschuler is the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Professor of American Studies at Cornell University.

In the 21st century, according to George Kateb, an eminent emeritus professor of political philosophy at Princeton, the United States has slid far down the slippery slope. With sophisticated technologies of surveillance, an entrenched welfare bureaucracy and a national-security state, Mr. Kateb argues, “the powers for total domination are insidiously being heaped up.” Since history reveals that “every power or capacity is eventually abused,” Americans may be only one trauma away from “general and unmistakable oppression.”

Pessimism permeates Patriotism and Other Mistakes, a collection of essays on the expansion of government power, President Bush’s war in Iraq, the relationship between aesthetics and morality, and political philosophy from Aristotle to Hannah Arendt. A libertarian, Mr. Kateb offers paeans to individual audacity and a Thoreauvian insistence that no one need be an instrument of injustice, but emphasizes that collective human behavior exhibits “political ruthlessness tending toward brutal excess and extremism and accompanied by intoxicated or thoughtless moral indifference.” Intended to challenge common sense and conventional wisdom, to bear witness and speak the truth, even if no one will listen, Patriotism and Other Mistakes is, in turn, erudite and angry, ingenious and outrageous, sophisticated and shrill.

Defenders of patriotism and group identity, Mr. Kateb contends, commit grave mental and moral errors. Patriotism engenders a jealous and exclusive loyalty to the nation-state, which “has a few actual and many imaginary ingredients.” Patriotism has been enlisted for moral ends, like the abolition of slavery, but far more often it bolsters unjust causes. Moral principles, moreover, should be defended directly: not because they are ours, but because they are right. For most citizens, Mr. Kateb observes, patriotism induces vicarious love and a deadly sort of rooting—making it easy to forsake principles with a clear conscience.

Like patriotism, Mr. Kateb asserts, other intense forms of group identity may be inevitable but are nonetheless lamentable. Ethnic, racial and religious identity diminishes individuality by encouraging pride in achievements not of one’s own and subsuming the self into an abstraction. By reducing sympathy for outsiders, group identity destroys the chance of developing a “democratic aestheticism” that embraces a common humanity, finding even the ugly, the impure and the ill-defined worthy of appreciation.

Mr. Kateb acknowledges, though only in passing, that group identity can counter some of the vices of individualism—selfishness, solipsism and materialism. He’s more interested in the use of patriotism to concentrate power in the executive branch of the American government. The Bush administration, he charges, spreads fear by portraying terrorism as “motiveless malignity”; went to war with Iraq for “partisan politics, unreserved concern for Israel, and oil”; and used pain, coercion and violence as instruments of state policy. Retaliation and retribution, Mr. Kateb proclaims, are always immoral: It doesn’t matter morally if people are killed deliberately or accidentally, as “collateral damage.” Even in an unequivocally good war, “the very use of violent means disallows invoking the name of justice.” Like Thoreau, Mr. Kateb doesn’t deem it his duty to eradicate wrong, but instead endorses “a morally driven disaffiliation.”

Mr. Kateb’s ferocious critique of contemporary American politics will resonate only with the left side of the choir. It’s redeemed, however, by a penetrating analysis (based on the work of Arendt) of the non-rational ideals that bind citizens to their government. In judging individual works of art, Mr. Kateb notes, critics divorce moral from aesthetic criteria. Thus, they deem D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation a “great” film, despite its racism. Less well known, and far more dangerous, Mr. Kateb indicates, is the application of these “aesthetic cravings”—a love of beauty, coherence and order—to politics. Far more than self-interest or even necessity, they trump considerations of justice and truth and help swell “the unconscious or rationalized immorality in the world.” Mr. Kateb speculates that Eve ate that apple for aesthetic reasons: It was beautiful to behold and pleasing to the palate. People praise courage on the battlefield, he notes, even when it serves wrongdoing. Fascists and totalitarians, as well as some “democrats,” have understood the appeal of what Arendt called “a lying world of consistency” to people eager to substitute “a design for a new reality” for the less satisfactory one they inhabit.

Mr. Kateb has gauged the power of these aesthetic cravings. Even though they tend to make us “monstrous,” without them “we are not human.” How, then, might they be checked and balanced? He finds some small consolation in the fact that many people who embrace “stories that make reality more meaningful, tend to like even more some immediate answers to the daily problems of staying afloat.” These people need to be reminded of the role of due process in “recognizing human dignity as a reality that emanates from a unique and immeasurable potentiality of human beings”; they need to be reminded, also, that although the United States still surpasses the world in freedom of speech and religion and the extension of equal protection of the laws to immigrants, the rights to privacy and habeas corpus are now in danger.

Such rational appeals may not be enough. To make aesthetic cravings only “a momentary stay against confusion,” Mr. Kateb looks, without much confidence, to existentialism. Our greatest teachers, he suggests, should “encourage us to endure meaninglessness.” By abjuring the search for a transcendent meaning and allowing local meanings to suffice, we can recognize “ordinary” things as beautiful and distinctive—and “intensify wonder that there is a world at all.” The prospect of nothingness, then, may be the last, best hope to force us, one by one, to look at ourselves and acknowledge others as worthy of respect.

Glenn C. Altschuler is the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Professor of American Studies at Cornell University.

The station and the street outside were filled with kids with automatic weapons dangling off their hips. Most had on uniforms. One reservist ran past me in pajama pants and a tie-dyed shirt, with an M-16 smacking against one shoulder and his boots bouncing at the end of their laces off the other. Another guy was saying goodbye to his girlfriend with a pistol shoved down into the waistband of his gym shorts. Nothing in life prepares you for a city teeming with Jews with guns. Well, actually one thing does: the Holocaust. It is invoked frequently: the idea that Jews went passively to their deaths, abandoned by gentiles, is offered as a justification for the militarization of Israeli society.

On my bus, gun barrels poked into the aisle or up in the air. The more careful soldiers removed their magazine clips and wedged them into the metal handhold on the back of the seat in front of them. A girl in uniform sat down beside me. She had tattoos on her arm, and nails with gold crescents at the tips. She plugged in an MP3 player the size of a lighter and kept tugging her M-16 back to her side of the seat, like a stray umbrella.

No one was reading. Cell phones went off, soldiers murmured. We made our way north past slow-moving trucks with the soldiers sprawled out in the back. At every station, reservists ran up carrying worn backpacks made for treks in India, not bunkers. After their service in the army, almost all Israeli kids go traveling, to decompress, to escape this world of guns. Now and then, as if to keep the picture real, a fatty in uniform would run up to the bus with his shirttails out and jump on too.

We stopped for a while in Afula. I talked to a guy who looked like a professor, in fatigues and purple Crocs, his gun worn shiny.

“All Israel is together now; there is no right or left,” he said. “The feeling is beyond patriotism. It is not nationalism, or something taken from the inventory of ideas in Europe—this is essential. There are a very few on the left who have a different idea, but no one pays attention to them. The Palestinians do not want us to be here.”

I quoted a former minister in The Jerusalem Post saying that the war had begun not because of the attacks on civilians but because of the capture of three soldiers, damage to “the Army’s ego.”

The man nodded. “An ego is important …. The army is our echo of reality. Not to be poetic.”

After the Sea of Galilee, we lost our soldiers one by one. Then the bus pulled into Kiryat Shmona and a couple of civilians got out and I found myself alone. The town was empty. The Golan Heights loomed in the east, and smoke rose from what I would learn was a Katyusha landing. You could hear the ordinance now. I walked one way, then another on the big avenue, wondering what to do. A group of soldiers who had taken over an apartment building looked at me as though I were an idiot.

Thankfully, there soon appeared in the frame that genie for all foreign correspondents, that provider of Middle Eastern quotations: a taxi driver in a Mercedes. The guy shot his window down. “Journalist?”

After a while—I have to be vague about this under the constraints of my newfound calling—we were in a pretty town by the Lebanese border. The driver took me on a tour of the high fence separating countries, then back up the hill about a hundred yards—or, as Christiane Amanpour would say, meters—and dropped me at a hotel I must also be vague about.

One thing about war—in my experience—is that it rapidly sorts people out. The only people in the town older than 50 looked to be this group of slovens running a hotel, sitting around in various lumpish poses on the patio showing utter indifference to anything except when a credit card was needing to be swiped. They were catering to CNN. Its cables snaked through their lobby and dining room. One of the slovens, a fat gray unshaven man wearing threadbare white linen pajama pants with blue bikini underpants under them—take my word—gave me the key to Room 436 across the way.

A TV crew was sitting outside in the sun, as though by the swimming pool, though there wasn’t a pool. Before them was an Israeli army spokesman, feet apart, explaining very directly in a perfect American accent what Phase 3 of the war would involve. I noticed signs for the bomb shelter and went upstairs.

My first flutter. My room was the most exposed in the hotel, the most northerly on the top floor. The window looked out on two Lebanese villages on a ridge. I had a mind to ask for another room, but the last thing I wanted was to seem chicken in front of the CNN guys, so I lay down and read Hannah Arendt. I tuned out the crump of shelling, took a nap.

At 6, I went down for a beer and hung out some with the Israeli spokesman. He is a type you see a lot of over here, more American-seeming than Israeli. Their families made aliyot when they were in their early teens, so their accent was fixed in the States. This fellow had the aggressive quality that I recognized in Israeli spokesmen on the PBS NewsHour. He was not without charm, even twinkle-eyed, but he was utterly focused as he spoke in incisive and logical terms. We had been talking for only a minute or two when, without any prompting on my part, he explained why more Arabs died in their houses than Jews (apparently referring to both Lebanese Arabs and Israeli Arabs). The Arabs had the same understanding about war that Israelis did; still they chose to defy the building codes and did not put in bomb shelters, which were expensive, while the Israelis did put in bomb shelters, and arranged for an orderly evacuation of the war zone, too.

I have to say that contempt for Arabs is a theme in Israeli conversation, though it does not seem that the Israelis have spent any real time with Arabs. Of course, there is plenty of contempt toward Jews when you talk to Arabs. That is the most obvious problem in the Israel/Palestine situation: The two sides don’t talk. And within five minutes of meeting you, a middle-class Israeli is saying that Arabs are animals and you Americans are lucky you don’t have to deal with them. And meantime, the Israelis are putting up a giant concrete wall so they don’t ever have to talk to one another again. There is a reason for the wall, as there is a reason for everything people do to one another here, but some part of it seems a vanity. Israelis are convinced that they are a Western country. They say this all the time: We are Westerners. But they live 500 miles east of Istanbul. I wonder if they aren’t embarrassed by the neighborhood.

There was a restaurant up the hill. I walked up the road, and Israeli boys came down wearing helmets and camouflage and moving at a military trot. The ground invasion. And what a pretty little town we were in. There were flagstone sidewalks and rock-walled gardens and a plaque outside a writer’s house. When I had confessed to the spokesman that I was new to wartime correspondence, he told me that he’d been a paratrooper in the first Lebanon war and this is how things went, sitting around a remote town, half in civilian life and half in military engagement, waiting. It was nice of him to say, and in the pretty hill town, I began to feel a little like Hemingway in Spain. Where was Martha Gellhorn?

At the top of the hill. Here was the real reporters’ hotel. My cabdriver had boned me. This place was crawling with people I recognized, daring and a little meshuggeneh, near the beginnings of their careers, working for several outlets at once, trying to catch a break. I followed a group of them down the road. We passed their cars and vans, all with duct tape plastered to roofs and windows, shouting out: TV.

I wish I could tell you the name of the steakhouse. It was good. They served stuffed grape leaves and kohlrabi spears as antipasto, then a rib steak and local beer. Israeli officers were at half the tables, foreign correspondents at the others. The press were in helpless little packs of people who would not get along under other circumstances, leather-tongued old misfits, young whip-smart Englishwomen, a tall nonverbal guy or two, a dyke, a womanizer and the counterpart of a womanizer, a ball-buster.

At this time, I began to feel alone. It was night; I had no pack. The rockets went off, boom, boom, every minute or so, and the restaurant dog, a big old yellow Lab, pushed under my table, afraid. I tried to make out the incoming from the outgoing, using the lesson the spokesman had given to me, about waiting for the reverb on the incoming. One of the correspondents said into her phone, “We haven’t had so many as this before,” and I had my second flutter.

I stuck at my table, reading Hannah Arendt, and grew irritated by her manner. She used irony once or twice a page. She began sentences with “Well,” signaling her judgments.

At last I made myself go back to Room 436.

For a while, I couldn’t get to sleep. I told myself they had to take a break now that it was dark, but of course they didn’t. A few minutes would pass and there would be another explosion. I went to the window. There was only the silhouette of a little windmill on a well pump across the alley and, in a yard on the border, a group of soldiers monitoring the ridge. I went back to bed and didn’t sleep. I calculated how many people were left in the north, say 200,000, and how few had died. Then I turned on the light and read some more Hannah Arendt and began underlining the parts where she was ironic. I wrote in the margin, “Stop, Hannah.” Or “Bloody Irony.” Notwithstanding her manner, Eichmann in Jerusalem is a great, rich book; and then I wondered if I was getting more out of her book than from the war, if I wasn’t more of an intellectual than a man of action; and I was angry at myself for not having resolved this conflict and maybe dying for my neurosis, before I turned off the light and still couldn’t sleep. I thought about girls. That helped. I fell asleep, I think.

The next thing I knew, I was out of the bed. There had been a huge crack against the hotel building, under the window, it seemed. My first thought was: We’ve been hit. I ran to the door, then it came again—the crack sound came right through the room and the suspended ceiling tiles jumped up and down. The door of the room next to me slammed. No, we hadn’t been hit; it just felt that way. I wasn’t sure what to do. The loud cracks came a third time, then a fourth. It was like being inside a toaster that someone was hitting with a baseball bat.

Out on the balcony, I saw a red explosion on the ridge, and then it came to me that it was outgoing, not incoming: The Israelis had moved to a bigger gun, or they had changed the angle of fire. It was going right past the fourth floor. It was only then that I realized how deadly and serious this really was. Movies hadn’t prepared me for this, and not Tolstoy or Vonnegut, either. A friend who came close to a shooting war once in South America told me he was so scared that his only thought was the desperate feeling, “There has got to be a better way to deal with whatever you are quarreling about than doing this to one another.” I was right there.

I dressed and went down to the bomb shelter. There was a stack of mattresses in a polar-white cube the size of the bedroom in which you were conceived (indeed, in which I imagine some of you were conceived), but there was no one there. Chicken.

Up the road, a couple of the slovens were at a table in the piazza, but up the hill the other hotel was dark. A kid came walking down the road nonchalantly. Soldiers went by in a Hummer.

I went back to my room, and the sharp cracks continued. You can get used to anything. I fell asleep.

In the morning, one of the CNN guys told me he had been terrified too. Their crew was getting ready for the day’s action. They looked wildly excited, loose, wide-eyed, with the sort of joyful anticipation that exceeds even the anticipation of fucking. One of the slovens was having an argument with a European journalist. It was the moral-equivalency argument, the idea that our violence is different from theirs, the argument that goes round and round like a pepper grinder. The European journalist said, “They are both forms of terrorism. Hezbollah practices terror against civilians. Israel’s is state-sponsored terrorism.” The sloven said something dismissive of the world’s opinion, and I bent into the conversation. “Of course I agree with you,” I said, “but I am curious. Does it ever upset you that world opinion is so often against you?” The sloven shrugged. “It used to bother me, not any more,” he said, then offered the obvious unfolding of the thought: “The United States is on our side.”

I forget what reason I had to get out of there. The spokesman said I needed to get credentials in Jerusalem. Or I needed to see the Hagana Museum in Tel Aviv, or the Begin Museum in Jerusalem, or another of the many museums to the military ego. By 12:30, I was back in the bus station in Kiryat Shmona. It was now full of soldiers, one in a SpongeBob SquarePants T-shirt, another lean, handsome one changing out of his fatigues into shorts and hiking boots right there on the platform, and a girl draped like a Versace waif against a railing, in flip-flops, her T-shirt cut off, an M-16 strap not covering a violet bra strap. A couple of hours later, we were in Afula, where Katyushas killed that day, and where you saw soldiers running up to one another and kissing each other—boys who hadn’t seen each other in years, I guess—and then after that we were out of Nasrallah’s range. Though it was not till that night, in Jerusalem, that a shop owner supplied that staple of war correspondence, the sober conclusion:

“The Palestinians live in misery. We do—we live in misery. And so do the Israelis.”

Mary McCarthy was a tactician of scandal; she had a sure sense of just how much would be good for her. She learned this early on. In her freshman English class at Vassar, students' papers were kept in a folder in the library for classmates to read; one of them, Lucille Fletcher Wallop, remembers the effect of McCarthy's compositions: "I learned from her short stories that deviled ham was fatal to a proper orgasm and that lettuce was a powerful aphrodisiac. I had never heard of orgasms or aphrodisiacs, but I lapped up her descriptions, as did the rest of the class, who often lined up in a long queue waiting for the folder."

Fifty years later, when she told Dick Cavett in a television interview that every word Lillian Hellman wrote was a lie, including "and" and "the," she didn't expect to be sued for libel; but when Herbert Mitgang first told her about the suit, the idea of the scandal didn't displease her: "I laughed," she remembered. "He said, 'You won't laugh when I tell you it's for two and a quarter million dollars.' I think I did laugh again."

Seeing Mary Plain , Frances Kiernan's semi-oral biography, is punctuated by such affairs; they are, with her books, McCarthy's gift to posterity. More: Her writing and her life converged, and were often interesting for the same reason and in the same way. The best-known facts of her biography are her lovers and her husbands; her best-known fictions are "The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt" and the "pessary" episode from The Group , both programmatically, scandalously honest about sex. And, of course, her novels are buckets drawn from the well of personal anecdote: The scheming professors of The Groves of Academe , the confused alumnae of The Group , all have identifiable "originals." She wrote and rewrote her memoirs several times.

All this makes McCarthy an ideal subject for an oral biography. As time passes, it becomes clearer that she was a fine writer but not a literary artist; she did not achieve (or necessarily attempt) the promotion from talk to writing, from life to work, that artists aim for, and so it is fitting that talk should memorialize her. Unfortunately, Seeing Mary Plain is not quite that memorial. It is injured, above all, by the absence of the most important voices in McCarthy's life. Ms. Kiernan writes that she began the book in the early 90's, and by that time the key witnesses were dead: Harold Johnsrud, whom McCarthy married at 21 and divorced at 23; Philip Rahv, her lover; Edmund Wilson, whom she married and suffered with to her friends' bewilderment; Hannah Arendt, her unlikely best friend; and, of course, almost everyone who knew her as a child. Others, who are still living–most notably Reuel Wilson, her son, and Bowden Broadwater, her third husband–barely participated.

Ms. Kiernan fills these gaps with dozens of more tangential observers, and with her own narrative, neither of which quite compensates. Isaiah Berlin, Saul Bellow and Alfred Kazin, none of them intimates of McCarthy, provide some of the most astute observations, especially of the scandal surrounding Eichmann in Jerusalem , which McCarthy defended out of loyalty to Arendt and, one suspects, out of a sense of where the action was. From time to time, one catches the tone of the Partisan Review crowd of which McCarthy was a founding member, the merciless, intimate, ingenious arguments. (McCarthy was especially close to the Italian intellectual Nicola Chiaromonte, of whom William Phillips recalls, "People thought he was a genius because he was silent. Because he didn't talk much. He felt a lot.")

Inevitably, most of the people who are still around to be interviewed are much younger than McCarthy, and knew her in her more placid last decades; they are not peers but students, admirers, secretaries, even a maid. As a result, the second half of the book feels much too long, with details of McCarthy's houses and travels and finances and health squeezing out matters literary and genuinely personal. There are suggestions, for instance, that her relationship with her son was strained (he failed to attend her funeral), but the cause of the breach is not made clear.

Given the shortage of "raw material," the other possible approach for Ms. Kiernan would have been a close psychological analysis, an attempt to find out what made McCarthy so attractive and difficult. The theme that runs through her life and work is total certainty; she looked on tempests domestic and political and was never shaken. This made her formidable in conversation, where she delighted in holding people's characters up for evaluation, and extremely seductive to the people–usually men–on whom she focused her attention. It was also her major flaw as a writer, of both fiction and nonfiction. In The Group , for instance, one always feels sorry for McCarthy's characters, summoned out of the ether to be ridiculed and condescended to by their superior author.

In her two books of Vietnam reportage, the same certainty, transposed to the political realm, makes her come off as shamefully, irresponsibly naïve: She is led around by the nose by the North Vietnamese, whom she trusts implicitly, while she mocks an American prisoner of war. Ms. Kiernan's account of her meeting with that P.O.W., and its aftermath–after his release, he wrote about how McCarthy had "knocked on wood" during their meeting, leading him to be interrogated for hours about the code she must be using–is a locus classicus of the irresponsibility of the intellectual.

The fruitful question is what experiences and drives led McCarthy to place such value on being always and in advance correct, and superior to everyone around her. Ms. Kiernan goes some way toward an answer in her sketch of McCarthy's childhood, which is like something out of a fairy tale, minus the happy ending: After an idyllic early childhood with her charming, young parents, she was orphaned by the flu epidemic of 1918 and sent to live with old, humorless, abusive relatives. (When McCarthy came home one day with a school prize, her uncle beat her with a razor strop–"to teach me a lesson, he said, lest I become stuck-up"). The shock of that change would have been enough to make her realize that she had to be always self-sufficient, always able to master the people and circumstances around her. Her strangely cold obsession with sex–as Susan Sontag observes, her attitude seems to be that "when [men] do it with you, you have something on them"–is another form of this wary mastery. One does not have to be a Freudian (and McCarthy had no use for Freud) to guess at some sort of early sexual trauma. In The Group , the character whose life most resembles McCarthy's ends as a suicide; the most idealized character, the dream-Mary, turns out to be a lesbian.

An intrepid biographer could make much of this. But Ms. Kiernan, ensnared by her method, is confined to recounting events and bridging quotes. The result is that much of McCarthy's brilliance, charm and force are leached out. Ms. Kiernan's book gives us Mary plainer than she was.

Perhaps now is the time. Perhaps the imminent publication of the diaries alleged to be Adolf Eichmann's makes this the moment to put to rest one of the most pernicious and persistent misconceptions about Eichmann and the Nazi perpetrators of the Holocaust: the fashionable but vacuous cliché about "the banality of evil." It's remarkable how many people mouth this phrase as if it were somehow a sophisticated response to the death camps, when in fact it is rather a sophisticated form of denial, one that can come very close to being the (pseudo-) intellectual version of Holocaust denial. Not denying the crime but denying the full criminality of the perpetrators.

You're probably familiar with the origin of "the banality of evil": It was the subtitle of Hannah Arendt's 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil . (She didn't use it in the New Yorker pieces that were the basis of the book.) The phrase "banality of evil" was born out of Arendt's remarkable naïveté as a journalist. Few would dispute her eminence as a philosopher, the importance of her attempt to define, in The Origins of Totalitarianism , just what makes totalitarianism so insidious and destructive.

But she was the world's worst court reporter, someone who could be put to shame by any veteran courthouse scribe from a New York tabloid. It somehow didn't occur to her that a defendant like Eichmann, facing execution if convicted, might actually lie on the stand about his crimes and his motives. She actually took Eichmann at his word. What did she expect him to say to the Israeli court that had life and death power over him: "Yes, I really hated Jews and loved killing them"?

But when Eichmann took the stand and testified that he really didn't harbor any special animosity toward Jews, that when it came to this little business of exterminating the Jews, he was just a harried bureaucrat, a paper shuffler "just following orders" from above, Arendt took him at his word. She treated Eichmann's lies as if they were a kind of philosophical position paper, a text to analyze rather than a cowardly alibi by a genocidal murderer.

She was completely conned by Eichmann, by his mild-mannered demeanor on the stand during his trial; she bought his act of being a nebbishy schnook. Arendt then proceeded to make Eichmann's disingenuous self-portrait the basis for a sweeping generalization about the nature of evil whose unfounded assumptions one still finds tossed off as sophisticated aperçus today.

A generalization which suggests that conscious, willful, knowing evil is irrelevant or virtually nonexistent: that the form evil most often assumes, the form evil took in Hitler's Germany, is that of faceless little men following evil orders, that this is a more intellectual, more interesting evil, anyway-old-fashioned evil being the stuff of childish fairy tales, something intellectual sophisticates feel too refined to acknowledge. Either that or too sheltered to have glimpsed.

Of course, there are a few problems with this analysis, a few holes in her theory. Even if it were true about Eichmann, for instance, that he was a schnook with no strong feelings just following orders, someone had to be giving the orders. Orders have to come from somewhere rather than nowhere before they can be followed, more importantly from someone, from a person. If that person's orders are the extermination of a people, that is not an instance of banality. Eichmann's orders came from Reinhard Heydrich, for instance, who was relaying with enormous (non-banal) enthusiasm the exterminationist orders of Adolf Hitler. It hardly needs to be said that Hitler and Heydrich's hatred was not in any way banal. It is closer to what Arendt herself once called "radical evil." In her classic work The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), she wrote of the existence of an "absolute evil" that could no longer be understood and explained by the evil motives of self-interest, greed, covetousness, resentment, lust for power and cowardice, a "radical evil … difficult to conceive of even in the face of its factual evidence ." (italics mine)

There was, in Arendt's initial response to the death camps, a kind of philosophic humility: Nazi evil was so radical, it could not be understood or explained, certainly not easily; it was difficult even "to conceive of." But as Richard J. Bernstein, professor of philosophy at the New School for Social Research, points out in Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question (M.I.T. Press), one of the best accounts of this issue, by 1963, Arendt thought she had the answer, a complete reversal: "Evil is never radical," she wrote to Karl Jaspers, it's not inexplicable, it can be understood, defined by the phrase "the banality of evil." It's interesting that those intellectuals who profess to revere Arendt for The Origins of Totalitarianism still uncomprehendingly drop the phrase "banality of evil" with reverence, not realizing that the latter cliché is a repudiation of the former work-a complete contradiction!

But why has the phrase "banality of evil" had such an appeal over the years, and not just for intellectuals? One of the things that I found fascinating about doing a lot of radio talk shows, from NPR stations to morning drive-time on my book tour for Explaining Hitler, was the way it was almost guaranteed that one caller on every show would cite "the banality of evil" as if it were a wise and dispositive pronouncement on the subject of Hitler and the Holocaust. That settles that. We've got that all figured out. No need to trouble ourselves further. It's all about "the banality of evil." The banality of evil has itself become one of the most egregious instances of genuine banality in our culture.

One response I'd give to callers who cited it was that although I have some problems with the single-pointedness of Daniel Goldhagen's thesis in Hitler's Willing Executioners , one valuable service Mr. Goldhagen's book performs is to put to rest for all time the notion that the Holocaust was in any significant way the product of passive banality. Hitler's willing executioners, hundreds of thousands of them, from Eichmann on down to the men who stoked the ovens, exhibited eagerness and enthusiasm, love for the job of genocide rather than just-following-orders sullenness. (The latter sort undoubtedly could be found , the former were more characteristic.)

But, to return to the question of why : Why is it that the banality of evil has become such an unquestioned unthinking response-aside from the superficial appeal to pseuds of its aura of philosophic sophistication? I think an answer might be suggested by an observation about the origins of Arendt's own rejection of "radical evil" and her subsequent embrace of "banality," literally and figuratively.

Arendt's biographer, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, offers a telling remark, cited by Mr. Bernstein: "Arendt rejected the concepts

she had used in The Origins of Totalitarianism to point at the incomprehensible nature of the Nazis-'radical evil'. As she did this she freed herself of a long nightmare ; she no longer had to live with the idea that monsters and demons had engineered the murders

of millions." I think Ms. Young-Bruehl is right on the mark in pointing up the consolatory, the comfort value of abandoning the "nightmare" of radical evil for the notion of banality, although I'd take exception a bit to the way Ms. Young-Bruehl characterized Arendt's "nightmare." The nightmare was not that monsters and demons in any supernatural sense had perpetrated the crimes of the Nazis, but that human beings were capable of acting like monsters and demons. (Ms. Young-Bruehl may have meant this and was merely using shorthand to convey it.) It was a crime committed by fully responsible, fully engaged human

beings, not unthinking bureaucratic automatons shuffling paper, unaware of the horror they were perpetrating, merely carrying out orders to maintain regularity and discipline, as "the banality of evil" school has it. Human beings capable of making monstrous choices and consciously choosing radical evil.

To deny this, as Arendt does in Eichmann's own case, is to deny "the face of [the] factual evidence," as she herself once characterized it. Even Mr. Bernstein, who attempts a scrupulous, skeptical defense of Arendt's reversal and rejection of radical evil for "banality," concedes that "the evidence suggests Eichmann was far more fanatical in carrying out his duties." He reminds us in an important footnote that Eichmann made repeated trips to Hungary to speed up the last-minute murder of nearly a million Jews, until then spared from shipment to the death camps. Not the act of the colorless paper shuffler, but of a fanatically eager exterminationist.

This is the nightmare Arendt fled from, the factual face of the perpetrators of the final solution, one that gives the lie to their self-serving statements on the witness stand facing execution.

And that is why so many are unthinkingly attracted to "the banality of evil" formula. Not because they want to let the perpetrators off the hook (although it certainly does that) but because Arendt's nightmare suggests far more terrifying depths to which "normal" human nature can fall. Fall without a net. "It breaks the reinsurance on human hope," George Steiner characterized it when I interviewed him for my book. Meaning it removes the safety net, the limit to the depths to which we can imagine human nature can plunge. It is this terrifying vision, this reality Arendt fled from facing. Fled into banality.

Let's hope that the occasion of the surfacing of the new self-exculpatory "diaries" of Eichmann (actually the same old fraudulent alibi that Arendt's bad reporting gave a fig leaf of legitimacy to) can be the occasion to bury, or at least dispense with forever, the false consolation of that foolish cliché about the banality of evil.

In all the trips I've made to the Strand bookstore, I don't think I've ever failed to find at least one copy of Norman Podhoretz's 1967 memoir, Making It , somewhere on a dusty shelf. I've considered several theories to explain its cut-rate ubiquity. Perhaps Random House, anticipating a best seller, printed an enormous number of copies, a reasonable proportion of which were subsequently discarded. Or maybe thousands of readers threw their copy across the room in disgust and packed it off to the used book store. I like to imagine that Making It was snapped up by hordes of enthusiastic readers who at first appreciated Mr. Podhoretz's audacious chest-thumping and then, as his politics grew more reactionary and his prose more leaden, came to so loathe him that they simply had to banish his book from their homes.

Aside from being the most emotionally satisfying, this last theory has the advantage of mimicking the pattern-infatuation, gradual disappointment and, finally, outright contempt-by which Mr. Podhoretz says he lost most of his friends over the past 40 years. And quite a group of friends they were, as we learn even before we open the third volume of his memoirs, Ex-Friends -the subtitle lists the companions with whom he has "fallen out": Allen Ginsberg, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Lillian Hellman, Hannah Arendt and Norman Mailer. The notion of a memoir organized around the principle of mutual antipathy has its own peculiar charm, and since Mr. Podhoretz has never been a particularly subtle hater, one opens Ex-Friends confident it will be free of the winsome nostalgia that usually plagues the genre.

Moreover, Mr. Podhoretz has lived through genuinely interesting times-about which a more candid, forthcoming book should one day be written. A student of Mark Van Doren's and Lionel Trilling's in the 1950's, he attended Columbia University along with the editor Jason Epstein and the poets Allen Ginsberg and John Hollander. After studying English literature with F.R. Leavis at Cambridge University, he returned to America to write literary criticism for The New Yorker , Partisan Review and Commentary , of which he eventually became the editor.

Taking over Commentary in 1960, Mr. Podhoretz transformed a cautious, parochially Jewish magazine with a dogmatic pro-America, anticommunist agenda, into a provocative, liberal literary monthly that published some of the most controversial political and social criticism of its time. He serialized Paul Goodman's Growing Up Absurd in the first three issues of the "new" Commentary ; he ran essays by Norman O. Brown, as well as by the group Mr. Podhoretz calls "The Family," established New York intellectuals like Alfred Kazin, Hannah Arendt, Dwight Macdonald and Irving Howe. Although I've always been skeptical of Mr. Podhoretz's insistence that he was a "radical" during this period (a claim that conveniently lends authenticity and drama to his "conversion" from left to right), it's certainly true that he edited a scintillating magazine.

In fact, I'd argue that one can't really understand the state of so-called highbrow culture today without first coming to terms with the career of Norman Podhoretz. Along with Jason and Barbara Epstein, Robert Silvers, Susan Sontag, Norman Mailer and a few others (the "children" of Edmund Wilson, Lionel Trilling and Philip Rahv), Mr. Podhoretz reconceived the very idea of what it means to be an intellectual. The sense of urgency and expectation that swirled around this third generation of New York intellectuals is often overlooked by historians who view the late 60's as the end, not beginning, of a grand New York tradition. Victor Navasky, in a 1966 New York Times Magazine article, "Notes on Cult: How to Join the Literary Establishment," quoted one critic's bold prediction: "There's an intellectual revolution going on and we're about to see the emergence of a new intelligentsia … Guys like Epstein and Podhoretz are riding herd on the hurricane. They are giving direction and shape to this revolution."

For their elders, an intellectual was first and foremost a thinker who lacked power; for Mr. Podhoretz's generation, the duty of the intellectual was to come to terms with cultural and even economic power itself-whether by starting a magazine like The New York Review of Books , establishing ideologically oriented think tanks, advising businessmen or protesting U.S. Government policy. This generation realized that power, unless it was embodied in institutions, would simply fade away. (The intellectual's lust for success-the "dirty little secret" Mr. Podhoretz trumpeted in Making It -was taken more or less for granted by his peers; what dismayed them was the unironic, artless way he announced it.) The period during which Mr. Podhoretz ran Commentary (1960 to 1995) might be thought of as a cultural test tube in which two elements-power and ideas-were combined and shaken up. The experiment may be too recent for us to judge the results with any accuracy; but it's clear at least that the revolution in the culture industry which took place during this time was as momentous as the battle for modernism and against communism that had preoccupied the previous generation. For better or for worse, this is Norman's and Jason's world; we just live in it.

Alas, this is not the tale Mr. Podhoretz chooses to tell in Ex-Friends .

Instead of a genuinely searching exploration of a few unlikely, intense friendships, Mr. Podhoretz has chosen to write a memoir whose covert function is to assure himself that he's better off as he is: "I was who I was in some part because of my friendship with them, and I am who I am in larger part because we ceased being friends."

One often wonders how much self-deception was involved in these friendships. Mr. Podhoretz writes that he was dazzled by Lillian Hellman's "easy references to legendary literary characters" until he wearied of her intellectual hypocrisy. There is no one for whom he has higher regard than Hannah Arendt-until she writes about Adolf Eichmann and he realizes "there was nothing admirable about brilliance in itself." For Mr. Podhoretz, Lionel Trilling was "the most important literary figure on the Columbia faculty." Trilling tells him he was "the best student he ever had"-then loses his nerve when faced with the naked honesty of Mr. Podhoretz's first memoir.

Making It is a tremendously vital book that burns with the yearnings of a brash 35-year-old. Breaking Ranks is the wistful political memoir he wrote a decade later. Ex-Friends is a new departure: By now, Mr. Podhoretz fancies himself a neoconservative éminence grise ; his high-minded tone is designed to convince the reader that he has written a more important, more sophisticated book than he actually has. The deadly sobriety makes one long for the jaw-dropping egotism and forthrightness of his earlier work.

The new book rehashes-and often outright cannibalizes-his previous memoirs, with certain episodes tweaked or, "filled out," with details Mr. Podhoretz may have hesitated to include while his "ex-friends" were still alive. But a hint of déjà vu is not necessarily fatal when your stories are as good as some of these are: the disastrous, and ultimately humiliating, orgy Mr. Podhoretz joins in his Maileresque quest for sexual liberation (Mr. Mailer later tells him it was "a concentration-camp orgy" and that he was lucky to have gotten out alive); Ginsberg's parting threat to Mr. Podhoretz that the Beats would "get you through your children!" (judging by the hard-right politics of Norman's son John Podhoretz, the Beats failed miserably); Lionel Trilling's advice to conclude Making It with a mealy-mouthed final chapter, a play-it-safe retraction; Mr. Mailer privately telling Mr. Podhoretz he admired Making It , and then denouncing it in the pages of Partisan Review as "a blunder of self-assertion, self-exposure, and self-denigration."

The only ex-friend about whom Mr. Podhoretz seems to have genuinely unresolved feelings is Norman Mailer; at one point, he even compares their friendship to the one between Edmund Wilson and F. Scott Fitzgerald. "I felt a certain proprietary interest in Mailer-he was my tiger," Mr. Podhoretz writes. Fellow son of Brooklyn, fellow "nice Jewish boy," Mr. Mailer still casts a spell over Mr. Podhoretz-never mind the nasty comments about recent Mailer novels. One wonders how different literary history might be had Mr. Mailer given Making It a good review. Would Mr. Podhoretz still have taken his right turn? Might "The Family" have held together?

The two Normans once had an extremely intimate bond, traces of which sneak into the book. In the wake of the "concentration-camp orgy," Mr. Mailer attempts to soothe Mr. Podhoretz's disappointment. After a dinner with one of Mr. Mailer's girlfriends, the three return to her hotel room for a nightcap. The atmosphere is charged and Mr. Mailer gets up and goes into the bathroom. "A few minutes later he returned stark naked and directed a very serious look straight into the eyes of his girlfriend. It was as if he had decided to make up for having inadvertently misled me by demonstrating what a proper orgy was like." Unfortunately, the girlfriend simply laughs Mr. Mailer off and apologizes to Mr. Podhoretz for the misunderstanding, leaving the reader to ponder another great "What if?"

"I must admit that I was more disappointed than relieved," Mr. Podhoretz writes.

Me, too.