UNPROGRESSIVE PILGRIM

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP73-00475R000401030001-9
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 23, 2016
• Document Release Date: December 16, 2013
• Sequence Number: 1
• Publication Date: December 24, 1965
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release @ 50-Yr 2013/12/16: CIA-RDP73-00475R000401030001-9
21+ December 1965
?
etrnprogressive Pilgrim
IN MY TIME by S?eobert Strausz-Hup4.
284 pages. Norton. ?
Good autobiographers should have
happy childhoods, when the nightingales
were singing in the orchards of their
mothers. Robert Strausz-Hup6 is such
a one. His childhood was a hazy idyl of
life in old Vienna, of goose-liver break-
fasts on the paternal estate in Hungary.
This Eden soon closed its gates, but at
62 he still has a vivid memory of what
life was like on the sunny side of the
great watershed of World War I.
Strausz-Hupe is now director of the
University of Pennsylvania's Foreign
Policy Research Institute. More scholar
than ideologue, he utters no manifestos
? but offers in comment and anecdote
a system of conservative attitudes to
shore against the century's ruins.
These attitudes can be disconcerting.
For example, he sees the success of the
Western parliamentary system as de-
pendent upon the existence of a respon-
sible elite rather like a composite Eng-
lish gentleman?to whom he addresses
a prose poem of admiration. He de-
plores oral contraceptives as "stealthy
pills which encroach on human dignity
and destroy the few good and beautiful
things that have not yet vanished in the
rummage sale of ancient cultures." He
classifies the "passion for ugliness and
disfigurement" in modern art as a "dan-
ger far greater than depopulation by
war." Liberals would call him a reac-
tionary. Yet his views might more accu-
rately be called the politics of nostalgia.
Undarned Suits. His memoir suggests
that he came by his. views the hard way
?by a tough and unsentimental study
of himself. Here is his account of him-
self at 20: "I moved from one fitful job
to another, improvisations without is-
sue; dreamed my sumptuous dreams of
canopied barges on the Nile and throb-
bing Bentleys in Biarritz; woke with
strangers in dank attics; nursed the one
undarned, too tightly fitting suit?and
plotted my escape. Try as I may, I can-
not bring into focus the young man of
20. If we were to meet today. we would
have little to say to each other. (There
would be] his ruthless naivete, his
clammy embarrassments, his lyrical
sensitivity in the throes of his own endo-
tions, his stoic indifference toward the
feelings of others."
Strausz-Hupe came to the U.S. as a
tutor-guardian to a no-good Salzburg
aristocrat who was older than himself,
worked in the art department of Mar-
shall Field's in Chicago (landscapes and
jolly monks), as a runner in Wall Street
(with social weekends on Long Island),
finally as a customer's man and?after
a return to Europe?as an investment
hanker. This could have been a simple
immigrant's success story. But Strausz-
, Hupe, however frivolous his youth, had
retained the gravitas of a European
education. He met Historian Oswald
Spengler only once, while dressed as
Marc Antony at a Munich carnival, but
' he had read that master pessimist well.
Weighty Man. He thus became, in
the '30s, a war hawk against the rising
threat of Hitlerism, as later he was to
be unpopular as a premature anti-Com-
munist?he is still firmly opposed to
FREDERICK A. MEYER
STRAUSZ-HUPe
The secret lies in the ruins.
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release @ 50-Yr 2013/12/16: CIAIRDP73-00475R000401030001-9