Books: Potshots at the Pentagon

FAIL-SAFE (286 pp.)—Eugene Bardick & Harvey Wheeler—McGraw-Hill ($4.95).

SEVEN DAYS IN MAY (341 pp.)—Fletcher Knebel & Charles W. Bailey II—Harper & Row ($4.95).

There is a rush on inside novels about big-time politics in Washington, and each author tries to outdo the last in dreaming up fantastic political skulduggery that has never occurred and never will. The latest to climb on the badwagon are the writing teams of Burdick-Wheeler and Knebel-Bailey. Their target is the Pentagon. According to their spicy exposés, it is a den of some of the most hideous monsters this side of Cyclops’ cave.

Emotional Neuters. Burdick, who swung wildly, and sometimes below the belt, at American diplomats in his book The Ugly American, swings just as hard at scientists advising the Pentagon. Walter Groteschele, Fail-Safe’s villain, is a caricature of a scientist, who advocates preventive war in scholarly treatises and exults in private: “Knowing you have to die, imagine how fantastic it would be to have the power to take everyone else with you. The untold billions of them. They are murderees: born to be murdered and don’t know it. And the person with his finger on the button is the one who knows and who can do it.”

Pentagon scientists, write Burdick-Wheeler, have reduced men to automatons. An underground missile base in Colorado gives the “sensation of entering an ingenious collective coffin,” populated by swarms of ”emotional neuters, technicians of a greater terror taught to ignore the unalterable end of their work.”

The scientists get their comeuppance when a computer misfires. Planes are accidentally signaled to bomb Moscow, and before they can be stopped, they have done just that. President Kennedy frantically calls Premier Khrushchev. Says Kennedy: “All day you and I have sat here fighting, not each other, but rather this big rebellious, computerized system, struggling to keep it from blowing up the world.” Replies a chastened Khrushchev: “Yes, we both trusted these systems too much. You can never trust any system, Mr. President, whether it is made of computers, or of people.”

Plotting Ward Heelers. There is scarcely a patriotic military man to be found in Seven Days in May. They are all engaged in a plot to overthrow the President because he has negotiated a disarmament treaty with Russia. Chief conspirator is the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General James Scott, who combines Eisenhower’s charm with MacArthur’s hauteur. Knebel-Bailey save the country from the conspirators, but they might as well have let the military take over, considering that the political savvy of their top politicos is somewhere below the ward heeler level. The Vice President, for instance, talks like a Greenwich Village grocer. “You want Ivy League manners,” he tells the President, who rebukes him for his table manners; “you should have picked someone from Princeton to run with you—and lost, maybe.”

Though Fail-Safe is a far more competent gee-whiz job than Seven Days, neither author team can create believable characters. The reason is built into the nature of the genre. For if these characters were convincing human beings of the sort who actually run things—and whose very character and competence prevent the calamities involved—there would be no books.