New York Times Review/Television; The Twilight of 'America's Century’ By WALTER GOODMAN NOV. 27, 1989

''America's Century,'' Lewis H. Lapham's dour and dire view of the decline of American power and confidence over the last 100 years, comes to its gloomy conclusion with a litany of events that have shaken the nation's sense of itself.
With the support of a few like-minded journalists and think-tankists, Mr. Lapham probes traumas like the loss of the war in Vietnam, the economic competition from Japan and West Germany, the Iranian hostage crisis, the killing of United States marines by terrorists in Lebanon and the Iran-contra revelations. He arrives at a diagnosis of terminal malaise.
The six-part series, is as close to a personal essay as television has given. Mr. Lapham, the editor of Harper's Magazine, sees American history in this century as a compound of pretensions to power, affectations of ideology, and a naive idealism about the workings of the world and the motives and interests of the United States itself. And so the nation has plunged from triumph to disarray.
The last hour is given to the Presidencies of Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, and Mr. Lapham and his cohort really give it to them. Mr. Carter is presented, not without sympathy, as a feckless leader, altogether out of his depth in Washington. Even as he was trying to incorporate ideals of human rights into foreign policy, he is shown toasting the Shah of Iran: ''We don't fear the future when we have friends like this great country.'' The Administration, by this account, was totally unprepared for the advent of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Mr. Carter's response to the taking of American hostages in 1979 is written off as ''weak, indecisive, sentimental.''
The treatment of Mr. Carter is kindness itself compared with the treatment of Mr. Reagan, who is credited here with having accomplished the ''Hollywoodization of politics.'' Mr. Lapham, who can seem supercilious even when he means to be pleasant, lets loose his scorn for the former President for upholding ''the sanctity of myth against the heresy of fact.'' He is blunter about Lieut. Col. Oliver L. North, whom he calls ''a treacherous and lying agent of the national security state.''

It is that state, represented most formidably by the Pentagon, that Mr. Lapham and most of his guests, who are not very helpfully identified but speak mainly from the left, see as the Great Satan. President Eisenhower's warning against the power of the military-industrial complex is hauled out as a prophecy come true. The Pentagon and the defense industry are pictured as clinging to past threats and future profits, while present threats and opportunities go unmet. Instead of working with other nations to safeguard the environment and help the impoverished, Washington, in the Laphamian view, is frozen in its obsession with military power.
At the very end, Mr. Lapham, who delivers his messages while strolling among international sites and sights like a figure out of Henry James, turns slightly upbeat, offering the possibility that the hopes of the American people will prevail over the ambitions of the American state. Given all that has gone before, this seems like pro forma condescension toward the People. It runs smack against the strong current of the series.

But you don't have to buy Mr. Lapham's entire stock of goods to be stimulated by this effort to provoke thought, concern, debate. And whatever one's reservations about the quality of the history offered by ''America's Century'' and the opinions advanced with such assurance, at the very least - and it is not so little - they are phrased with an elegance not common to television.