Hitting the Books

Question: What do the following have in common? The Sears, Roebuck Mail Order Catalog. Collected Poems 1947-1980 of Allen Ginsberg. Elvis, by Albert Goldman. Jane Fonda's Workout Book. Iacocca. The Butter Battle Book, by Dr. Seuss. The Rand McNally Road Atlas. The Union of Concerned Scientists' The Fallacy of Star Wars. An eclectic selection of summer reading? Not quite. They are among the 313 books chosen by a committee of ten literary figures for an exhibition at the Moscow International Book Fair called "America Through American Eyes."

Innocuous enough, at first glance anyway. But last week a quiet imbroglio between the National Endowment for Democracy, a bipartisan organization funded by Congress, which helped pay for the bookselection process, and the International Freedom to Publish Committee, a unit of the Association of American Publishers, which appointed the selectors, developed into a nasty politico-literary dustup as the NED charged that the list was philosophically "one-sided." The IFP accused the NED of would-be censorship and then announced that it would return the $12,000 it had already received from the group and refuse the remainder of the promised $50,000 unless there was a public apology.

Carl Gershman, 41, president of the NED and a former counselor to Jeane Kirkpatrick when she was U.N. Ambassador, seemed to have no mea culpas in mind. Citing the agreement that allowed the NED to "consult" with the IFP, Gershman expressed concern about a number of the selections -- Seymour Hersh's The Price of Power, Jonathan Kwitny's Endless Enemies and Jonathan Schell's The Fate of the Earth -- saying that they reflected the views "of only one segment of the American political spectrum." He asked not that they be withdrawn but that others from a conservative perspective be included.

"It is nobody's business but mine and the committee's what books we select," said a testy Kurt Vonnegut Jr., who headed the selection committee. John Macrae III, chairman of the IFP, noted that "the important thing here is the principle of the government trying to have a hand in the choosing of books for exhibition, not what books are selected." The books were supposed to reflect the diversity of opinion in America. That goal has been duly accomplished -- if not by the list, at least by the debate about it.