We Expected Better From You, Sam

The New York Times Book Review finally got around to noting the existence of Unfit for Command by John E. O'Neill and Jerome R. Corsi after ignoring it for the past eight weeks, during which time it held the top spot on their much-vaunted best sellers' list for four weeks.

Yet the cursory review, by Susannah Meadows of Newsweek, is disappointing on two fronts. First and most obviously, the quality of the review is not merely poor; it's embarrassing. Meadows knew ahead of time she wouldn't care for the book, and the review simply doesn't reveal a serious attempt to engage it, evaluate it professionally, and report her findings.

Beldar Blog has thoughts on the review, and Power Line prints a response mailed to the Times by Steve Sherman and Bud Barnes (with their permission). Choice lines from these gentlemen:

"'Her sole venture into the facts is to say that "Navy records have discredited the book's claim that Kerry lied to get his Bronze Star and third Purple Heart . . . . Judicial Watch stands ready to challenge the Navy's avoidance. She ignores the fact that more than sixty men who witnessed Kerry's actual actions have signed sworn affidavits citing false claims in the reports authored by Kerry."

The men are identified at PL as:

"Steve Sherman
Houston, TX
5th Special Forces Group 1967-68, presently Archivist/Historian for Special Forces in SE Asia.

"Bud Barnes
Little Rock, AR
Lieutenant Commander, US Navy Retired, a former Navy Seawolf helicopter gunship pilot providing close air support to the Swift Boats in the lower Ca Mau Peninsula, 1969.

"Messrs. Barnes and Sherman have been identifying and locating personnel involved in these operations and not heretofore mentioned in the media."

It'll be interesting to see if the Times deigns to print their letter, especially since it's found a significant readership in the blogosphere. Which leads me to the second (and more profound) disappointment in the Times's cheap-shot at O'Neill and Corsi: the poor showing of the Book Review's new editor, Sam Tanenhaus.

After his superb biography of Whittaker Chambers, which came down solidly on the side of Chambers and against Alger Hiss, Tanenhaus told a conservative gathering in Washington that his defenders were almost all from the right. Liberals attacked him for painting an unflattering picture of Hiss -- as if simply being a Soviet spy was insufficient reason for condemning him -- yet conservatives embraced his thorough scholarship and fluid style.

It's not that Tanenhaus had gone right, per se, but that he insisted on treating Chambers, and the Hiss trial, fairly as the historical sources demanded. I also heard him deliver a moving tribute to Chambers in Washington on the fortieth anniversary of Chambers's death -- an event skewered in the Times because their reporter, Elaine Sciolino, wasn't allowed inside. (One would have thought we were dining on spotted owls behind those locked doors.)

All of this gave some hope when word came of Tanenhaus's appointment to the editorship of the Book Review. Even if he bowed to liberal pieties at times, many of us hoped he would at least treat the right fairly, an act that would have helped all of us, left and right. I mentioned this hope to a friend with years of experience in NY and DC only to be rebuffed, as he knew that Tanenhaus, somewhat alienated from the left by his treatment of Hiss and warm depiction of Chambers, was moving left once again, the better to regain his foothold among the New York literati.

Unfortunately, that friend seems to have nailed it. This morning's review of the Swift Boaters, coupled with his decision (unsuccessfully executed, in my opinion) to undermine Michiko Kakutani's honest review of Bill Clinton's Life by running a PR ad under the guise of a review by Larry McMurtry, are but two examples of many that show that the Review hasn't turned a corner after all. A further question: Will the biography of Bill Buckley Tanenhaus has been working on for years display the same equanimity and attention to detail that made the Chambers book such a stand-out?

So, as a friend says of the charge that Sam has missed a golden opportunity to turn around an important institution: "The evidence is now beyond refutation." The bright side, according to this friend: knowing in advance that so little in the Times is worth reading creates "a time-saving opportunity."