The New Republic Reader: Eighty Years of Opinion and Debate.

George Orwell made no secret of his frequent irritation with the New Statesman--which in fact didn't keep him from declaring his even greater irritation over the occasional Saturday when it failed to arrive in his mailbox. Not a few of us feel the same way about The New Republic. It is maddening, wayward, obstreperous...and more or less indispensable. With its commitment to the world of ideas as well as the realm of public policy, TNR holds a unique place in our national discourse. For all that readers may lament the magazine's often snarky tone and two-decade-long creep rightward, they have no other recourse if they want a generally liberal weekly journal of opinion. (The Nation? Like National Review, it is ultimately about ideology, not politics. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, or, for that matter, a good thing. But it is a different thing.)

This is the fourth anthology of selections from the magazine, the others having appeared on the 20th, 50th, and 60th anniversaries of its founding 80 years ago this November. The magazine began in 1914 as a beacon of Progressivism, a last monument of the Age of Reform. The twenties and thirties saw its growing radicalization--or quasi-radicalization. With the coming of the Depression, TNR seemed to falter. It was at once too conservative for those increasingly Marxist times yet too fellow-traveling to serve as a true liberal alternative. Even more problematic was the magazine's opposition to U.S. involvement in World War II--surely a consequence, at least in part, of its ardent support of entry into World War I. Having Henry Wallace as editor for a brief period after the war only made things worse. More significant, the emergence of Partisan Review during the forties, the newfound seriousness of The New Yorker under William Shawn during the fifties, and the arrival of The New York Review of Books in the sixties meant the back of the book came to suffer eclipse as the front had.

There were two key dates in shaping TNR as we today know it: 1950, when it moved from New York to Washington; and 1974, when Martin Peretz bought the magazine. The move emphasized the magazine's orientation toward politics and its sense of newsiness, attributes that would distinguish TNR as other "serious" publications found themselves increasingly subject to the academicization of intellectual life in postwar America. Yet at the same time, the arrival of Peretz--besides bringing in fresh blood and new money--helped bolster the magazine's always-strong connections to academe. Himself a member of the Harvard faculty, Peretz opened a pipeline to Cambridge that both enhanced relations with the professoriat and--more significant--brought a steady stream of bright young editors and reporters who have helped the magazine maintain a sharp (sometimes too sharp) rhetorical edge over the past two decades. Of course, one might argue that in doing so Peretz was simply following tradition. As Dorothy Wickenden notes in her introduction to the Reader, TNR editors have tended to be "primarily young men from Harvard unhindered by self-doubt."

In theory, a TNR anthology could double as a shadow history of 20th-century liberalism--or, more to the point, TNR's idea of what such a shadow history might be. Certainly, the Reader boasts a glittering compendium of names--Rebecca West, Randolph Bourne, John Maynard Keynes, Bertrand Russell, Winston Churchill (with a cable marking the first anniversary of FDR's death), W. H. Auden, John Dewey, John Dos Passos (famously proclaiming, "Hoover or Roosevelt, it'll be the same cops"), Margaret Sanger, Gunnar Myrdal, Lewis Mumford--but it's the names themselves that do most of the glittering, rather than what they've written. For that matter, the most famous item in the Reader, Orwell's "Politics and the English Language" appears under questionable pretenses. It ran in Cyril Connolly's Horizon two months before its TNR publication. Compounding the offense, the Reader reprints only half the essay (when it ran in TNR, it did so in two parts).

The most memorable pieces tend to come from lesser lights. Jean Daniel's interview with Castro includes his receiving the news of John F. Kennedy's assassination. "This is bad news," he says three times, and one almost expects to hear a cock crowing. Leon Wieseltier on the Holocaust Museum is at once magnificent and maddening (oh, what a high horse that man can ride, especially when, as is often the case, he's right). Alexander Bickel's tough-minded, and darkly prescient, uncredited editorial on Roe v. Wade remains as pertinent today as when written 21 years ago. And Charles Merz's account of Warren G. Harding running for president, "The Front Porch in Marion," remains as deadpan devastating as it must have been at the time. Taylor Branch is eloquent on the observance of the first Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday, and Michael Kinsley's 1984 anatomization of the role of "the gaffe" in presidential campaigns (a gaffe being something that "occurs not when a politician lies, but when he tells the truth") is as amusing as it is insightful.

The anthology does not shrink from showing the magazine in a bad light. Bruce Bliven's "Letter to Stalin" might qualify for a thirties version of TNR's current feature, "Suck-Up Watch" ("It is in one sense a real tragedy for the world that you, with your remarkable abilities and intelligence, should never have traveled outside the borders of the USSR"). At the other end of the political spectrum, the 1986 editorial, "The Case for the Contras," argues for military aid to the Nicaraguan opposition with a Blivenesque obliviousness, most egregiously so when it declares that "The future of Central America hinges on [the contra aid vote's] outcome." A 1960 editorial hailing JFK's nomination asks with brushcut earnestness, "And why not a Taste Cultivation Program?" (One is hard pressed to decide whether those capital letters are more terrifying or hilarious).

As thankless tasks go, anthologizing is the literary equivalent of balancing the federal budget: For every item included, scores more--or, in this case, hundreds--get left out. And that leaving-out means an all-the-harsher scrutiny for whatever makes the cut. It is only proper, then, to salute Wickenden, a former TNR managing editor and now Newsweek's national affairs editor, for fighting the good editorial fight.

Yet even granting that she could provide, in her words, only "a tiny and skewed sampling" here, the anomalies are striking. She has arranged the book by category rather than chronology. The first section, "The New World Order: 'After the Revolution,'" includes everything from Virginia Woolf on the movies to Ronald Steel on Kissinger's memoirs; as two such disparate items suggest, this section is grab-baggy, at best. The next section focuses on America, which is followed by a grouping on that most vexing of American dilemmas: race. The anthology concludes, suitably enough, with a category bearing the none-too-edifying title, "Fights." (The subtitle "What Do the Liberals Hope For?" does try to cast things in a rosier light.)

In her lengthy introduction, Wickenden never addresses her criteria for inclusion. Intrinsic excellence? Importance to the magazine's history? Representativeness of the debates or issues? What's good here can be very good, and what's bad is rare. Still, there's an awful lot of material that would appear to have been included simply for the sake of name-dropping. Worse, though, are the exclusions. There's nothing here from America's greatest living journalist, Murray Kempton, a TNR editor in the mid-sixties; or from Sidney Blumenthal, whose reporting of the '84 presidential race revitalized campaign coverage. And only two pieces come from Richard Strout, who so gracefully manned the TRB column from 1943 to 1983, and just one from John Osborne, whose "Nixon Watch" columns put him in the very front rank of commentators on that most commentatedupon of men. We get Tom Geoghagen on the relationship between the 1972 Democratic platform and the Port Huron Statement rather than far more notable efforts by him on labor or the culture of American Catholicism. Otis Ferguson, who was enlivening the magazine with pop-culture criticism two decades before anyone realized such a thing even existed, does not appear. Perhaps most perplexing of all, Edmund Wilson gets the same number of bylines (two) as Wieseltier. This for the man who, during the twenties and thirties, lent more distinction to TNR than any writer in its history.

Of course, Wilson soon enough found himself chafing against the magazine's restrictions of space, of reach, and of ideology. Something similar is going on in the Reader. Amid all the variousness is a consistent, wearying tidiness. It's not, to be sure, a tidiness of belief (no collection that contains both Andrew Kopkind and Charles Krauthammer can be accused of that), but instead a tidiness of aim--that aim being the attempt to capture in one not-so-small book the nobly lurching march of 20th-century liberalism. Or as the Basic Books catalogue rather grandly puts it, "a composite portrait of the development of twentieth-century liberal ideology." Well, part of what makes the magazine so refreshing is its obvious inability to contain within its covers the loose baggy monster that is liberalism.

It's not that Wickenden has done her job badly. But this is a curiously leaden birthday present to a confoundingly lively magazine. The best monument to The New Republic is still the rather flimsy one that comes in the mail every Saturday--or, if you live where I do, every Monday or Tuesday. It's all very irritating: both the publication and its postal delivery. Orwell would have understood. Mark Feeney is editor of The Boston Globe's Focus section.