BREWSTER'S MINIONS:

The Fall of the Liberal Establishment: a review of The Guardians: Kingman Brewster, His Circle, and the Rise of the Liberal Establishment, by Geoffrey Kabaservice (Jim Sleeper, 4/12/04, LA Times)

Two people probably not to have mentioned to the Brewster portrayed in Geoffrey Kabaservice's The Guardians, though, would have been George W. Bush ('68) and Dick Cheney (Yale dropout '61), who have all but buried the "liberal establishment" that Brewster ('41) and his circle piloted through the turbulent 1960s after inheriting it partly from an older Yale crew (W. Averell Harriman, Dean Acheson, Robert Abercrombie Lovett and others) who framed the Atlantic Alliance and Cold War containment. Brewster's problem with today's team wouldn't have been partisan; he and many in his circle were Republicans, albeit of a genus now extinct. Nor would it have been narrowly ideological: Even the most liberal of Brewster's cohorts were often denounced by the new left as moderates co-opting social change. What Brewster was seeking was a leadership whose authority rested in a small "r" republican civic virtue that is seldom evident now and even less understood.

Brewster's shipmates included fellow Yale undergrads McGeorge Bundy, the Vietnam War-era national security advisor and later Ford Foundation president; Cyrus Vance, the roving ambassador, domestic civic mediator extraordinaire and Jimmy Carter's secretary of state; New York Mayor John Lindsay; and New York's Episcopal Bishop Paul Moore Jr. Kabaservice weaves their portraits and others' into a tapestry depicting the group's star-crossed voyage through critical national decision-making, political exile and death; his subtitle might better read, "The Fall of the Liberal Establishment," but this is really the story of a quest for great American leadership that hasn't been told so fairly and richly before. [...]

Small wonder that in the populist understanding of Yale's more recent history -- reinforced gently by Calvin Trillin's and Nicholas Lemann's The Big Test -- a gothically imposing, slightly dunderheaded, white-shoe male club is wrenched open at last to a vibrant pluralism of color, culture and class. This story is true enough to make us heedless of something lost in the translation: Plato's Guardians -- cited in Kabaservice's epigraph -- for whom the Republic is "so closely bound up with oneself that its interests and fortunes, for good or ill, are held to be identical with one's own." Where is such leadership nourished now? "Mother of Men, grown strong in giving," runs a song to old Yale, "Rich in the toil of thousands living, proud of the deeds of thousands dead!" A bit musty, but what now matches the depth of such constraints on self-interest?

Brewster once teased a cousin who'd sent him an encomium to Elder William Brewster, his direct lineal antecedent and minister on the Mayflower, that he was "grateful that you and I had the wisdom to select such a magnificent ancestor." His bemusedly secure yet egalitarian sense of the absurdities of caste belongs in leaders of a republic who know that self-restraint by the powerful is critical to others' freedom. Even as a Yale senior, Brewster had refused induction into his mentors' and friends' secret society, Skull & Bones. Vance and Richardson too would fall on their swords, resigning high office rather than compromise republican principles.

Kabaservice's account leaves one wondering why men whose forebears had governed so much of America for so long passed the torch of leadership without securing the rites of passage, disciplines and standards that nourish not only "merit" but dedication, not self-promotion but self-denial and, in a crisis, self-immolation: "They were the 'guardian critics,' as the columnist Tom Wicker called them, who tried to break down the power of the smaller establishments by speaking from the heart of the American tradition in the name of the national interest." [...]

Yale's own Guardians have changed now, and three months before Sept. 11 Bush was awarded an honorary doctorate at the behest of the university's current president. Kabaservice reminds us that one of Brewster's first such awards, in 1964, had gone to Martin Luther King Jr., then newly out of jail. The challenge remains what King always said it was -- not just to open the doors of leadership but to deepen its republican commitments.

Mr. Sleeper, normally more perceptive, seems to have completely missed the point that Mr. Bush is the main proponent today of the republican civic virtues--even extending them to the Middle East--while the Reverend Dr. King by his later years was utterly opposed to them.

Posted by Orrin Judd at April 14, 2004 1:50 PM