War is Peace.(The Last Word)(Book Review)

Author Philip Roth's latest offering, The Plot Against America, is a labor of hate. Presented as an alternate history of World War II-era America in which Charles Lindbergh won the 1940 presidential election, Roth's novel depicts the general U.S. population of the time as a teeming mass of incipient Nazis eager to build an American Reich. Without a war to sublimate their murderous impulses, Americans turn their wrath against our nation's Jewish citizens.

In the book--written in the style of a childhood memoir--Jewish youths are conscripted in a forcible assimilation program called "Just Folks," in which they are sent to live and work with rural farm families. Amid eruptions of anti-Semitic violence nationwide, President Lindbergh makes the U.S. a satellite of Nazi Germany, before disappearing under mysterious circumstances. The president's disappearance triggers a reign of terror, with prominent Jewish Americans--including several members of FDR's "Brain Trust"--being rounded up and detained as suspects in a coup. Hundreds more are murdered by Klansmen and assorted violent bigots.

The coup, in fact, was apparently staged by Lindbergh's vice president, former Montana Democratic Senator Burton K. Wheeler. Roth depicts Wheeler --who, like Lindbergh, was a leader of the nonpartisan America First movement--as a pillar of malice and corrupt ambition. Wheeler's conniving is rewarded when he becomes president.

His success is short-lived, however, because Lindbergh's wife becomes disgusted with Wheeler and throws her support behind a special presidential election in 1942, returning FDR and his cabinet to power. Immediately after the election, the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor, leading to American entry in the war and an Allied victory over the Axis.

It is eventually revealed that the Lindbergh baby, rather than being murdered in 1932, had been taken to Germany, where he was used as blackmail leverage against his father. Lindbergh, at the time the most popular man in America, was forced to use his celebrity to serve Nazi interests, first as a leader of the America First movement and then as a quisling president, leading a puppet government.

The moral of Roth's exercise in "alternate history" seems to be that unless Americans are forced to go abroad in search of monsters to destroy, they will become monstrous themselves. This is difficult to reconcile with the fact that foreign wars abet both the growth of the hatred that fuels persecution of minorities and the government power necessary to turn persecution into genocide.

The ...