New & Noteworthy

JULY/AUGUST 2009 reviews New & Noteworthy dictatoRSHIP, DEMOCRACY, AND ARGENTINA: STORIES FOR A DIRTY SECRETS, DIRTY waR: THE GLOBALIZation: Nation by EXILE OF EDITOR ARGENTINA AND Amy K. Kaminsky, ROBERT J. COX THE COST OF University of (BUENOS AIRES, paRALYSIS, Minnesota Press, ARGENTINA, 1973–2001 by Klaus 2008, 280 pp., 1976–1983) by F. Veigel, Penn State $22.50 (paperback) David Cox, Evening University Press, Post Publishing, 2009, 248 pp., $65 2008, 232 pp., (hardcover) $26.95 (hardcover) IN THIS REVISION OF HIS PRINCETON HIS - BY CLOSELY READING LITERARY TEXTS THE PROBLEMATICS OF JOURNALISTIC tory dissertation, Klaus Veigel traces from the North, supplemented by detachment thread through David what he calls Argentina’s “epic struggle film, newspaper stories, and adver- Cox’s memoir of his father’s life as the over the very model of economic and tisements, Amy Kaminsky attempts editor of the Buenos Aires Herald, an political order” in the last three decades in this book to create a new theory of English-language daily, during Argen- of the 20th century. The story is book- national identity by uncovering the tina’s military dictatorship. Cox brings ended with the departure by helicop- dialectic that emerges between the his father’s voice to a story that his fa- ter of Isabel Perón from the roof of the Argentine self image and European ther, having lived through the terror Casa Rosada in 1976, at the dawn of and U.S. visions of the Argentine na- of the times, is unable and unwilling the military dictatorship, and the strik- tion. The long history of northern to write. Interspersed with journal ingly similar departure of Fernando De engagement with Argentina began in excerpts and re-created dialogue, the La Rúa, 25 years later, as Argentina’s the 19th century with the official en- book chronicles the story of Cox’s un- economy and government collapsed couragement of European immigra- likely heroism, told with the obvious around him. tion for the task of physical nation- adulation of a son for his father. Veigel argues that in the 1960s and building, including the construction Living an aristocratic life in an up- early 70s, the social consensus within of railroads, schools, and plantation scale neighborhood with his wealthy Argentina on how to best manage the agriculture, and persists in both the Argentine wife, Robert Cox had close economy began to unravel, and that built environment and the popula- contacts in the military and was the lack of such a consensus, even dur- tion today. “Argentina,” Kaminsky firmly situated within the country’s ing the military dictatorship, exacer- says, “lives at the tip of the collective bourgeoisie. He initially supported bated the many economic and political unconscious of the North.” It is “a the junta and its campaign against crises that have wracked Argentina in familiar other, a foggy mirror to Eu- “subversives.” But when the disap- the last 30 years. Both civilian and mili- ropeans concerned about their own pearances began, Cox’s “English- tary governments, he argues, vacillated identity.” man’s conscience,” as his son calls it, between inward-looking, protectionist By attempting to move beyond compelled him to publish the names policies and outward-looking liberal- formulations of national identity that and the stories of the disappeared in ization, reacting to each new crisis by rely exclusively on colonial relation- the Herald—which he continued to reversing whichever policy was cur- ships and perpetuate the subordi- do until 1979, when threats against rently in place to provide a short-term nation of the formerly colonized, his family forced him into exile in solution at the expense of long-term Kaminsky shows how the cultural the United States. The Herald under stability and growth. A growing lack of elite of Argentina shape, and are Cox’s leadership was one of the few confidence in the government’s ability shaped by, Northern representations sources reporting the truth about to solve any crisis fostered what Vei- of their nation. In this way, the book state terror during the dictatorship, gel calls “strategic indecision,” which provides a useful case for thinking and this emotional memoir offers a brought down one government after about what she calls “globalization in window into the toll that it took on another in the last three decades. relation to nation.” the Cox family. 45.

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