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Theodore Pappas talks to an ex-US intelligence and defence chief who now spies out illiberalism in books
ONLY IN America could the butchering of a black celebrity's ex-wife cause a book editor to rethink the standards of his craft. In a land obsessed with race and racial politics, it is not at all surprising that the interminable sideshow known as the O.J. Simpson murder trial, which has just entered its second phase in civil court, has even affected the editing and publishing of books in America.
I learned about this little-known effect of the `trial of the century' from James Schlesinger, former CIA director and US Secretary of Defense -- economist, lawyer and Harvard University overseer who writes and edits as well, and who commands attention because of the governmental posts he has held. I had called Mr Schlesinger to discuss the latest book in his care, a new edition of the 1902 bestseller Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son, by the Saturday Evening Post editor George Horace Lorimer. Lorimer's forgotten screed on bourgeois morality (by a `Lord Chesterfield of the sticks', as one critic put it) was an international sensation in its day, selling hundreds of thousands of copies in America, England and Germany. Translated into more than a dozen languages, it was the most read American book since Uncle Tom's Cabin.
But what is most striking about this new edition published by Regnery (for decades the pre-eminent conservative publisher in America) is not what it reprints but what it leaves out. Scores of references and sentences have either been elided or rewritten by Mr Schlesinger, and no indication is given - no footnotes, no endnotes, no explanation anywhere - as to what exactly has been spiked, bowdlerised or rephrased. All the reader is told, in a brief `prefatory note' (which many readers never read), is that the editor has 'eliminated a few references, such as to songs or individuals of the era, that would now be obscure at best', `substituted a few words for others that are now archaic' and `altered phraseology that might be offensive to modern taste'.
Now, before explaining what Mr Schlesinger considers to be beyond the pale, it should be conceded that editing with an eye...