July 17, 2003

July 17, 2003

HORSEFEATHERS’ FOOL OF THE MONTH: AND THE WINNER IS…THOMAS POWERS

Yale Kramer

Once a fool, always a fool, I suppose. Thomas Powers won the Pulitzer Prize a few years back. As everyone knows who reads Horsefeathers regularly its Fool of the Month Award is highly coveted because most of its recipients sooner or later go on to receive the Pulitzer Prize for their foolishness. In Powers’ case it was for his book called “Heisenberg’s War: The Secret History of the German Bomb,” which is about the relationship between Niels Bohr, the Danish Nobel prize winning atomic physicist and his brilliant student and colleague Werner Heisenberg. Bohr was an anti-Nazi and trapped in Denmark when it was suddenly invaded by the Nazis in 1940. He and his wife were harassed and threatened with arrest by the Germans until they were able to make their escape to Sweden and then England in 1942.

In the meantime Werner Heisenberg remained in Germany and although he did not become a member of the Nazi party, he led the German team chosen to build an atomic bomb. The Nazis never succeeded in building one although they persisted in trying throughout the war.

Thomas Powers examined the events of the time and concluded in his Pulitzer Prize winning book that Heisenberg—contrary to what his scientific colleagues believed after the war—was really a hero who consciously prevented the Nazis from building the atomic bomb because he was an anti-Nazi at heart, and only stayed behind in Nazi Germany long after his colleagues had escaped to keep the Nazis from getting the secret of the bomb.

Powers bases this notion on, among other ambiguous facts, a puzzling visit which Heisenberg paid to Bohr in Denmark in 1941. The reason for this visit, Powers suggests, was that Heisenberg wished to reassure Bohr that he, Heisenberg, was not going to help the Nazis build a bomb.

Powers was so convincing that his book inspired Michel Frayn, an otherwise sensible and entertaining British playwright, to write “Copenhagen,” a play about this mysterious 1941 visit between Heisenberg and Bohr. The play had a mild success among New York and London intellectuals, but among ordinaries, like myself, it induced such a profound state of torpidity that one had to be rushed to a nearby watering-hole for an emergency Martini—Bombay Gin, straight-up, with an onion.

But the play did stir up some controversy between those who felt that Heisenberg was a Nazi who tried to transform himself after the war into a “pure scientist” who had nothing to do with any bomb-making schemes during the war, and those who felt that he had worked for the Nazis tirelessly and had just simply never gotten the physics right.

The matter was settled about a year ago when the Bohr family decided to release family documents. According to Bohr’s wishes they were not to be released until 2012, but because of the controversy it was decided to make certain relevant documents public. And these settled the matter once and for all. Much to the chagrin of Thomas Powers and the Pulitzer Prize committee.

What follows is an excerpt from a letter by Bohr in 1957 on the occasion of the publication of “Brighter than a Thousand Suns” by Robert Jungk. In that book Heisenberg is quoted and Bohr’s letter (never sent) takes issue with Heisenberg’s statement:

“Dear Heisenberg,

“I have seen a book, “Stærkere end tusind sole” [“Brighter than a thousand suns”] by Robert Jungk, recently published in Danish, and I think that I owe it to you to tell you that I am greatly amazed to see how much your memory has deceived you in your letter to the author of the book, excerpts of which are printed in the Danish edition.

“Personally, I remember every word of our conversations, which took place on a background of extreme sorrow and tension for us here in Denmark. In particular, it made a strong impression both on Margrethe and me, and on everyone at the Institute that the two of you spoke to, that you and Weizsäcker [Heisenberg’s student] expressed your definite conviction that Germany would win and that it was therefore quite foolish for us to maintain the hope of a different outcome of the war and to be reticent as regards all German offers of cooperation. I also remember quite clearly our conversation in my room at the Institute, where in vague terms you spoke in a manner that could only give me the firm impression that, under your leadership, everything was being done in Germany to develop atomic weapons and that you said that there was no need to talk about details since you were completely familiar with them and had spent the past two years working more or less exclusively on such preparations. I listened to this without speaking since [a] great matter for mankind was at issue in which, despite our personal friendship, we had to be regarded as representatives of two 2 sides engaged in mortal combat.

“That my silence and gravity, as you write in the letter, could be taken as an expression of shock at your reports that it was possible to make an atomic bomb is a quite peculiar misunderstanding ….If anything in my behaviour could be interpreted as shock, it did not derive from such reports but rather from the news, as I had to understand it, that Germany was participating vigorously in a race to be the first with atomic weapons.

“….All this is of course just a rendition of what I remember clearly from our conversations, which subsequently were naturally the subject of thorough discussions at the Institute and with other trusted friends in Denmark.

“It is quite another matter that, at that time and ever since, I have always had the definite impression that you and Weizsäcker had arranged …. the visit to us in order to assure yourselves that we suffered no harm and to try in every way to help us in our dangerous situation.

“This letter is essentially just between the two of us, but because of the stir the book has already caused in Danish newspapers, I have thought it appropriate to relate the contents of the letter in confidence to the head of the Danish Foreign Office and to Ambassador Duckwitz.”

Unchastened by the exposure of his daffy theory about Heisenberg as patent nonsense, Powers has this week published what the New York Times has called a “news analysis” entitled “When Frontier Justice Becomes Foreign Policy.” In it Powers gives us his hand-wringing ruminations on the subject of assassinations. It seems he doesn’t like the idea that our government has more or less made it public policy to kill Saddam Hussein if we can find him.

He calls assassination “personalized killing” and says “…much of the public continues to oppose it as both dangerous and wrong - dangerous because it commits the United States to a campaign of murder and countermurder, and wrong because hunting people down, however it plays in the movies, excuses murder by calling it something else….the administration has quit arguing the rights and wrongs of killing enemies, and makes plain its determination to kill Mr. Hussein if he can be found.”

Not even the fact that Saddam Hussein has refused to acknowledge that he has been removed from office and a new interim government has taken over and that he and his supporters continue to wage war in Iraq makes any difference to Mr. Powers’ analysis of the situation. In fact he seems to suggest that Mr. Hussein cannot be considered a wartime enemy because in Powers’ view we are not at war. “Can it still be called assassination if it is carried out in wartime? Does a White House decision to attack Iraq make it ‘a war,’ and thereby turn Mr. Hussein into a legitimate target?”

Mr. Powers’ analysis labors under several handicaps: his denial of reality—the way things work in the real world of international politics—his ignorance of history, and, worst of all, his moral idiocy.

Political Murder—assassination—is and has been an instrument of politics for as long as war has been. And just as there have been good wars and bad wars and indeterminate wars, the same can be said of assassinations. And of course, what determines whether a war or an assassination is good or bad depends on what side you are on and at what point in history the assessment takes place. Today there is no doubt that Lincoln’s assassination was an unmitigated evil, but at the time of the event the North and South felt differently about it.

The assassination of Hitler, though all attempts failed, would, we would all acknowledge, have been desirable. In 1944, the German General Staff would have welcomed his murder, though most of the German Volk would have been devastated.

The assassination of Admiral Francois Darlan in Algers in December of 1942 is an example of the complexities of international affairs and the way in which responsible men of power do things that have to be done in the service of national interests.

In order to achieve a bloodless invasion of North Africa, Eisenhower and the Americans were forced to make a deal with Admiral Darlan, who was defense minister of the pro-Nazi Vichy government and High Commissioner of French North Africa. Although the deal was strategically advantageous to the Allied military aims, it left Darlan in charge of the French North African forces. Not only was this arrangement politically awkward, but it left a military force in the hands of an unreliable pro-Nazi French leader.

Darlan, a man with an odious record, was universally detested as a symbol of collaboration by the free French and the French resistence, and Churchill was roundly criticized in Parliament for allowing Darlan to remain in authority. Churchill wrote in his wartime memoirs that Darlan’s murder “…however criminal, relieved the Allies of their embarrassment at working with him.” Churchill’s problem was that he had to choose between supporting Roosevelt and the American deal, or supporting De Gaulle in post-war France. At stake was the political future of France. It was a crisis, according to British historian David Stafford, “that cried out for special action. The assassination solved the problem.” (“Churchill and Secret Service” link)

On the afternoon of Christmas Eve, 1942, a 20-year-old Frenchman waited patiently for Darlan to return to his official residence in Algiers after a long lunch. When he arrived, he coolly shot him twice in the belly with a pistol.

When British Secret Service was accused of the assassination, Churchill ordered an “inquiry,” and the next day Admiral Cunningham, according to Stafford, “was instructed to deny the charges. Whatever might be claimed, he was told, nothing could incriminate any branch of the British Secret Service, ‘who do not indulge in such activities.’

“Perhaps so,” Stafford goes on, “but extensive evidence exists of an active behind-the-scenes effort to rid the Allies of Darlan. Churchill no more needed to order the killing of Darlan than did Henry II that of Thomas a Becket.”

In a strange coincidence, Stewart Menzies, head of MI 6, unbeknownst to even his closest associates, “was enjoying a Christmas Eve lunch on a sunny Algiers rooftop when Darlan was shot only a few hundred yards away.

The assassin, Fernand Bonnier de la Chappelle, belonged to a paramilitary group that wore the Gaullist Cross of Lorraine as a shoulder patch. He had been given pistols by both the OSS and its British equivalent SOE.

“Naively, Bonnier believed he would be hailed as a hero,” Stafford says. Instead, he was hauled before a court martial and shot by a firing squad forty-eight hours later. He was “buried at an unmarked site in a coffin thoughtfully ordered before his trial.”

You can imagine how Mr. Powers would be clucking his tongue at the ruthless machinations of this deceitful and unpretty picture. The choice was between the cost of two lives and the cost of thousands of military casualties and a politically free post-war France. I will let the reader decide which of the two evils was the better choice.

The problem with journalists like Powers who want guru status on the cheap is that they mix up reportage and political philosophy—the descriptive and the normative. Instead of describing or informing they feel compelled to moralize—at the most primitive level. Powers doesn’t seem to understand that nations are not individual people and that moral concepts can only appeal to individual consciences. They cannot apply to nations because there is no universally accepted code of morality that applies to all nations and cultures. In the West “Thou shalt not kill” is an imperative that is accepted universally. In Wahabbi Saudi Arabia jihad is the imperative—as a Muslim you are required to kill an infidel. Different strokes for different folks.

Thus morality has a meaning only within a socio-political context, and has no meaning or use between societies and nations. Foreign policy is an amoral universe and national leaders are only obliged to define their nation’s aims and interests and find ways to achieve them using various combinations and permutations of force and persuasion—war and diplomacy—and their respective instruments: treaties, intimidation, and, yes, even assassination if that becomes necessary.