The man who stayed behind

Brief Reviews The Man Who Stayed Behind By Sidney Rittenberg and Amanda Bennett. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993. 512 pp. $25.00. The most humdrum existence can provide the ingredients for a great literary creation, and a dazzling life can give rise to a dull book. After thirty-five years spent in the drama of post-war China, Sidney Rittenberg had become a figure surrounded by a potent aura of mystery; sadly, he and his collaborator have provided an autobiography of disappointing mediocrity. The book follows a simple chronological form, recounting Sidney Rittenberg’s time in China with brief references to its preamble and aftermath. Born to a prominent American Jewish family, he became a communist, went with the U.S. Army to China in 1945, and then stayed behind. Rittenberg joined the Chinese revolutionaries, and after helping their foreign propaganda work was imprisoned in Beijing by them as a “spy” for six years in the 1950s. He was rehabilitated, married a Chinese and raised a family . . . and then came the Cultural Revolution. Rittenberg shot to prominence in the factional infighting, and even briefly controlled Peking Radio, before the pendulum swung the other way. He spent the next decade in solitary confinement to emerge into the very different China of Deng Xiaoping. In 1980, this Rip Van Winkle returned to the United States, where he and his family are now contentedly resettled. The book attempts to knit this odyssey together with the common thread of Rittenberg’s developing political thinking. Rittenberg claims at the start that concern for his fellow beings and opposition to poverty and exploitation drove him, and that by the end of his journey, he had learned the lesson that he and the Communist Party had failed to appreciate-the importance of political rights. Unfortunately, this theme is treated perfunctorily and reads unconvincingly. The author makes noises about concern for the human condition, but ‘the man who stayed behind’ lacked either real interest in his fellow humans-and indeed the capacity for profound introspection--or else he has failed, even with the help of the journalist Bennett, to demonstrate these qualities in the book. Pity. John Honeyman Twin Pillars to Desert Storfm America’s Flawed Vision in the Middle East fhm Nixon to Bush. By Howard Teicher and Gayle Radley Teicher. New

York: William Morrow, 1993. 418 pp. $23.00. I first met Howard Teicher in April 1983-or, on about page 225 of his memoir, Twin. Pillars to Dew-t Storm. He dazzled me both because of his meteoric ascent to the National Security Council staff and his grasp of the political process. Knowing Teicher, I read his awkward but informative autobiography differently in two ways from the way a stranger might. First, I believed his claims to having affected the course of American foreign policy during his decade in government. Secondly, I read Twin Pillars to Desert Storm wondering how this political impresario could have gotten so badly ensnarled in the Iran/contra affair that he found himself in February 1987 with only four hours’ notice to clear out his desk and turn in his White House pass. The answer: Iran/contra was so big and so unexpected, even a champion swimmer found himself unable to keep from drowning. Winter

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