Loyalties: A Son's Memoir.

• Author: Noah, Timothy

Loyalties: A Son's Memoir Carl Bernstein. Simon & Schuster, $18.95. Carl Bernstein's parents didn't approve when he left The Washington Post 12 years ago to write a book. In addition to garden-variety worries about a son giving up a prestigious and secure job was a more exotic concern: the book's subject was their own membership in the Communist party. AI and Sylvia Bernstein had never been completely forthcoming with Carl (or anyone else) about this aspect of their lives, even though its consequences-summonses before congressional committees, scandalous headlines, ostracism by neighbors-caused the family considerable pain.

Given his parents' continuing reluctance to air their dirty linen, Bernstein had two alternatives once he'd signed his book contract: he could be a good boy or he could write a good book. (A third alternative, not to write the book at all but to undertake a private investigation w satisfy his own legitimate curiosity, seems never to have occurred to him.) Judging from the muddled result, Bernstein, after much agonizing, finally chose to protect his parents and leave his readers out in the cold.

That's not to say that Loyalties lacks revelation. Bernstein writes movingly about growing up subversive: piling into the family car to escape the subpoena-server from the House Committee on Un-American Activities, sobbing hysterically after the Rosenbergs were executed (not so much out of altruism as out of fear that his own parents would meet the same fate). Young children are instinctive reactionaries, and Carl was no exception; he drove his parents crazy by serving as class air-raid warden and brandishing a"I Like Ike" button while his parents wondered whether to compromise and support Adlai Stevenson or back Vincent Hallinan of the Progressive party. AI and Sylvia refused their son's pleadings to join a country club, but after Carl wrote them an ugly note calling them "atheistic Jewish communists" they agreed to throw him a bar mitzvah. While Carl read ftom the Torah, FBI agents stood across the street writing down license numbers.

Bernstein's unresolved feelings about his parents' radicalism probably account for the book's maddening stream-of-consciousness structure, which fuzzes up even the simplest facts. It wasn't untill skimmed the book, after a thorough read, that I understood that Carl had two (I think) younger sisters. Crucial information appears in stray sentences inevitably attached to the wrong paragraphs, while...