Remembering and Forgetting

The Public Square

When the much-celebrated architect Philip Johnson died this year at age ninety-eight the obituaries made little or no mention of his politics. In the days following, some commentators took note of this glaring omission. To be more precise, the omission was glaring only to those who remembered his politics. The worlds pertinent to supporting his celebrity status had long since decided to forget. Johnson was an enthusiastic backer of Hitler. In the 1930s he tried to organize a pro-Hitler fascist party in this country. He published a rave review of Mein Kampf, and he was part of the cheering crowds at the 1938 and 1939 Nuremberg rallies. He followed German troops invading Poland and watched the burning of Warsaw. “It was a stirring spectacle,” he wrote. Being rich and famous, some might infer, means never having to say you’re sorry. When on rare occasions his sordid past was mentioned, Johnson observed that he was also criticized for some of his artistic flirtations and would say with an impish smile that he had always been a “whore.” I am told his admirers found this charming. He was a whore, but he was their whore.

Others have been treated very differently. In 1986, Kurt Waldheim, former UN general secretary, was treated as a nonperson when it was discovered he had served in the Nazi SS. Charles Lindbergh, at one time perhaps the most admired man in America, was destroyed by his “America First” effort to keep the country out of World War II. After the war, Martin Heidegger was permanently denied an academic post for his collaboration with the Nazis. Ezra Pound was locked up for years in St. Elizabeths mental hospital in Washington for his wartime broadcasts on behalf of Mussolini. And of course the witless young Prince Harry was excoriated in headlines around the world a while back when he thought it clever to show up at a party dressed as a soldier of the Afrika Korps, complete with swastika. There is also the case of Herbert von Karajan who never apologized for his Nazi past yet continued, until his death in 1989, to be the honored conductor of orchestras in all the great halls of the world. And Leni Riefenstahl, the gifted filmmaker and Hitler propagandist, was honored at the 2004 Academy Awards for her lifetime achievements.

How does one explain the dramatically different treatment of people guilty of similar offenses? Columnist Ann Applebaum, who is also author of a remarkable book on Soviet oppression, Gulag (see FT, November 2003), writes: “In the end, I suspect the explanation is simple: People whose gifts lie in esoteric fields get a pass that others don’t. Or, to put it differently, if you use crude language and wear a swastika, you’re a pariah. But if you make up a complex, witty persona, use irony and jokes to brush off hard questions, and construct an elaborate philosophy to obfuscate your past, then you’re an elder statesman, a trendsetter, a provocateur and—most tantalizingly—an enigma.” That is no doubt a large part of it, although Pound was punished, as was Heidegger, albeit more mildly, and their gifts were undoubtedly “in esoteric fields.” But their punishment was in the immediate aftermath of “the last good war,” when the line between good and evil seemed less ambiguous.

The erratic course of forgetting and remembering, of absolving and punishing, can also be explained by reference to another tyranny and those who supported it. In our culture-commanding institutions today, including the leadership of the once influential old-line churches, there are thousands upon thousands who enthusiastically backed Stalin, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Castro, and others whose victims number in the many millions. After the fall of Saigon in April, 1975, hundreds of thousands of “boat people” fled to their death at sea, while hundreds of thousands of others were driven into reeducation camps, in many cases never to be heard from again. I had been a leader in the “peace movement”—the quotes are now necessary and maybe were then—and helped organize a protest against the brutality of the Hanoi regime. We asked 104 movement leaders to sign the protest and the split was almost exactly even. Those refusing to sign subscribed to the doctrine of “no criticism to the left.” No matter what they did, leftist regimes represented the historical dynamic of progress; they were the wave of the future and therefore above any criticism that might slow their course. It was a pity about the victims, but most of them probably deserved it, and, anyway, “you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.”

There are things not to be forgotten. At the height of Mao’s cultural revolution in which as many as thirty million died, the National Council of Churches published a booklet hailing China as an admirably “Christian” society. In 1981, 60 Minutes did an hour-long program on the National Council of Churches’ support for Marxist causes, and I spoke with Morley Safer about religious leaders who had become “apologists for oppression.” That was the end of some important friendships, or at least I thought they were friends. I was then a much younger man, learning slowly and painfully what many had learned before. Allegiance to the left, however variously defined, was a religion, and dissent was punished by excommunication. There was for a long time no romance so blinding as that with the Soviet Union. Malcolm Muggeridge wrote witheringly about Lenin’s “useful idiots”—Western progressives on pilgrimage to the Soviet Union, from which they returned with glowing accounts of “the future that works.” There was also Whittaker Chambers’ Witness, Robert Conquest’s The Great Terror, Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago—all of them dismissed as right-wing propaganda. To be sure, there were those who had a change of mind, and even instances of something like public penance. In a famously lucid moment, the late Susan Sontag shocked a Town Hall audience by saying that the readers of Reader’s Digest had a better understanding of Communism than did readers of the New York Review of Books. Much earlier, William F. Buckley had launched National Review with the help of apostates from “the god that failed.” Yet up to the present the hard left, not so reduced in numbers and influence as some claim, is enraptured; not usually by Communism but by a Marxian analysis of oppression and imperialism joined to a more or less consistent anti-Americanism.

Yes, Philip Johnson should have apologized for his repugnant politics, and because he didn’t he should have paid the price of being denied the fame and wealth so uncritically bestowed. But it is almost too easy to excoriate, hunt down, and punish the remaining collaborators with Hitler. That was a long time ago, and they are very old now. Not so with the unrepentant apologists for oppression from the Old Left, the New Left, the Maoists, the cheerleaders for the Sandinistas, and those who make slight effort to disguise their hope for America’s defeat in the war on terror. In many instances they hold positions of influence on the commanding heights of culture. There may not be much that can be done about our circumstance. Nobody should want to revisit the experience of the House committee on un-American activities. And it is impossible to imagine something like South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission that was set up after the end of apartheid, since with the great divide in our society and its politics there is no end in sight. We have to try to get along with one another as best we can, keeping our disagreements within the bounds of civility. But, as was not done in the case of Philip Johnson, we should remember.