The Powers That Be is the transcript of a talkfest. One must imagine the raconteur among friends: The dinner was excellent, the drinks are plentiful, and the audience is sympathetic, eager to enjoy and to believe. Best of all, the storyteller has stories to tell. As he explains, he has spent five years cozing with the great and the near-the-great, mining stories comic and sad, racy and droll, but all touched by certified celebrity and therefore worthy of attention. Covering forty years of the movers and shakers, and the moved and shaken, in the communications media, the transcript is not unlike 770 closeprinted pages of People magazine. Pseudo-sophisticates who think themselves above that sort of thing ignore the fact that Halberstam's gossip is in the service of a very solemn thesis. That thesis, repeated frequently lest the drowsy miss it, is that the media, especially television, have revolutionized American politics and society. Indeed they have taken over.

It is impossible to state with assurance what the policy of the Carter administration is with regard to civil defense. As in so many other fields of policy, the policy of the Carter administration with regard to civil defense is contradictory in different respects. Successive statements of the same officials contradict each other. The statements of different officials contradict each other Official statements are contradicted by the actual policy pursued. The realities of the situation militate against the policy announced.

For the purpose of clarifying the issue let us assume that the administration is committed to a greatly expanded civil defense effort over several years, meaning primarily the evacuation of the bulk of the civilian population from the cities. Such a policy is, according to the New York Times, “farcical” on several grounds.

On my first Rumanian Sunday I sat on the toilet in a third-rate Bucharest hotel peering through the window at an open-air movie featuring John Wayne as cop. On my last Rumanian Sunday I sat in a country inn watching a television western featuring Clint Eastwood as good tough guy.

In between I saw little of such capitalist decadence. While Bucharest is a fashionable metropolis, the northeastern province of Moldavia, just a night train ride away, is another world.

America is a religious nation, but its historians, like most of its intellectuals, tend to be secular. As a result, American religious history has remained until relatively recently an intellectually underdeveloped field. The prevailing liberal and secular biases of most historians produced overviews of church history notable for anachronistic judgments and a general tendency to miss the point of religious experience. The history of American religion was regularly written from a perspective in which the chief ends of faith were liberty of conscience and the transformation of the social order. (These comments apply particularly to what might be termed the textbook consensus on American religion; they are less true of monographic studies or of the myriad—and often filiopietistic—denominational histories. As Herbert Butterfield noted almost fifty years ago in The Whig Interpretation of History, whig biases normally crop up in broad historical overviews rather than in detailed researches.)

There can simply be no doubt that protection of noncombatants is a major priority of the Western tradition on warfare, generally called the “just war” tradition. Its general concerns are two: to define when the violence of war is allowable (the problem of justification) and to set limits to what may be done in even a just war (the problem of limitation). Paul Ramsey, for example, finds both these concerns in the thought of Augustine of Hippo and argues that for him and for Christian just war theory generally they should be regarded as requirements of divine love. A Christian, on this view, has a duty in love to protect innocent persons being unjustly threatened by violence or subjected to it, and he may utilize counterviolence, if necessary, to effect such a defense. At the same time, the use of such counterviolence is limited by a number of restraints also derived from love, foremost of which is a duty also toward the unjust assailant not to harm him any more than necessary to defend his victim.

A similar pattern of reasoning emerges in Jewish tradition. Talmudic ethics allows use of violence against one who pursues with the intent of doing harm; yet the counterviolence that is permitted is limited by two constraints: First, one may do no worse to the pursuer than what he seeks to do, and, second, one may do no more than needed to make the pursuer leave off his evil intention. Secular contributions to Western just war tradition have provided analogous ideas: The medieval code of chivalry, for example, defined the knight as having a duty to protect noncombatants, while the concept of limited war originally defined and put into practice by such military theorists as Frederick the Great sought to ensure absolute protection of noncombatants outside a combat area and relative protection inside such an area.