All pieces in this collection were originally published by The New Yorker. The publication dates are given at the beginning or end of each piece.
First published in Great Britain by William Heinemann in 2016 (First published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, in 2016)
www.penguin.co.uk
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 9780434022434
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PART TWO · CONFRONTATION
Youth in Revolt
and
PART THREE · AMERICAN SCENES
A Note by Jill Lepore 197
Pressure and Possibility
(The Cuba Crisis)
Shots Were Fired
(The Assassination of John F. Kennedy)
of a Death (J.F.K.’s Televised Funeral) ·
and
(The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.)
PART FOUR · FARTHER SHORES
PART
PART SIX · ARTISTS & ATHLETES
A Note by Larissa MacFarquhar 397 A Tilted Insight (Mike Nichols & Elaine May) ·
The Crackin’, Shakin’, Breakin’ Sounds (Bob Dylan)
the Unbored (World Series
PART SEVEN · CRITICS
A Note by Adam Gopnik 489
PART EIGHT · POETRY
PART NINE · FICTION
Acknowledgments 691 Contributors 693
Int duction
THE NEW YORKER IN THE SIXTIES
David Remnick
It’s difficult to think of William Shawn, the reserved and courteous man who edited The New Yorker from 1952 to 1987, as a figure of the sixties. If he wore a tie-dyed T-shirt, he kept it well hidden. Most days, he wore a dark wool suit, a necktie of subdued color, and a starched white shirt, sometimes adding one or two sweater vests to the ensemble when it was chilly. He was soft-spoken and addressed his colleagues with the formality of an earlier time. Nearly everyone in the office referred to him, even when he was out of earshot, as “Mr. Shawn.” He was already well into middle age when that decisive decade came roiling in, and although there is no defi nitive way to fact-check this, I would bet the house that he did not partake of the hallucinogens that helped defi ne the era.
Yet this volume represents a magazine that, under his guidance, became more politically engaged, more formally daring, more vivid, and more intellectually exciting than it had ever been or wished to be. The world was changing, and Shawn was determined to change The New Yorker. In the early days of the magazine, Shawn’s predecessor, Harold Ross, had preferred to minimize politics in what he referred to as a “comic weekly.” When Dorothy Parker wanted to write a piece about the civil war in Spain that was sympathetic to the Loyalists, Ross told her wryly that he would print it, but only if she would come out in favor of Generalissimo Franco. “God damn it,” he told her, “why can’t you be funny again?”
Shawn, who had been Ross’s longtime deputy, helped deepen the magazine with its coverage of the Second World War, but The New
Yorker tended to steer clear of the most vexed of many political questions, including that of race. There were exceptions, including “Opera in Greenville,” Rebecca West’s 1947 account of a lynching in South Carolina; Richard H. Rovere’s occasional coverage of the movement to desegregate American schools; and Joseph Mitchell’s “Mr. Hunter’s Grave,” which portrayed an elderly man living in Sandy Ground, one of the oldest communities founded by free African Americans. But such instances were infrequent.
In 1959, Shawn gave James Baldwin an advance to make a trip to Africa and write about it for the magazine. Baldwin was then thirty-five, and celebrated for his novels Go Tell It on the Mountain and Giovanni’s Room, and for the essays that formed the collections Notes of a Native Son and Nobody Knows My Name. He was a consistent presence at civil-rights rallies, and he spoke with eloquence and penetration from stages and on television about the realities of white supremacy. Baldwin, accompanied by his sister Gloria, fi nally made the trip in the summer of 1962. He made stops over a period of a few months in Guinea, Senegal, Ghana, Liberia, Ivory Coast, and Sierra Leone. But, when he returned, he failed to concentrate for long on the writing he was meant to do about his journey. He was too absorbed by what was going on at home.
A few years earlier, Baldwin had agreed to write an article on Elijah Muhammad’s separatist movement, the Nation of Islam, for Norman Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary. Baldwin set to work on “Down at the Cross,” a discursive and powerful twenty-thousand-word essay on race, the church of his Harlem childhood, and the Black Muslims. He gave it to The New Yorker. Podhoretz never forgave Baldwin or Shawn.
Baldwin’s essay confronted the “cowardly obtuseness of white liberals”—that is, much of the magazine’s readership— and acted as a kind of spur to the next phase of the civil-rights movement, black power. Shawn was well aware that such an intensely personal and polemical essay, which did not permit an easy complacency, was a mold breaker for a magazine that had thrived for so long on reportage, humor, fiction, and, for the most part, a generalized equanimity. As if to domesticate the essay, to keep it within the bounds of his readers’ expectations, Shawn retitled it “Letter from a Region in My Mind.” (It appeared the following year in the book The Fire Next Time.)
Baldwin’s masterpiece was one of a number of ambitious works in the sixties that reshaped the tenor of the magazine, expanding its sense of the possible. Rachel Carson’s environmental manifesto, “Silent Spring”;
Hannah Arendt’s coverage of the trial of one of the engineers of the Holocaust, “Eichmann in Jerusalem”; Dwight Macdonald’s assessment of American poverty; Jonathan Schell’s dispatches from Vietnam; Calvin Trillin’s and Renata Adler’s coverage of the student movements; and Ellen Willis’s essays on feminism and rock music were among the pieces that provoked the kind of rancorous debates that were part of the sixties soundtrack. For a magazine that had long had a distinct antipathy toward intellectual seriousness, Arendt, a German émigré philosopher with a Germanically heavy prose style, was an especially unlikely addition to the table of contents. Arendt’s assessment of the trial, her phrase “the banality of evil,” and her interpretation of Holocaust history, particularly her seeming disdain for the behavior of the victims, would be debated for years afterward.
Perhaps the most sensational publication of the decade for the magazine was one that Shawn quietly came to regret. In 1959 , Truman Capote, who had failed as a young assistant in The New Yorker ’s art department before becoming famous for his short fiction, came across a brief clipping about the murder of the Clutter family in Holcomb, a small town in Kansas. Shawn was under the impression that Capote was going to write a “Letter from . . .” describing how the people of Holcomb reacted to the grisly murders. Capote, occasionally joined by his friend Harper Lee, spent years interviewing countless sources, particularly the two suspects, and the manuscript he turned in, which was several times longer than John Hersey’s Hiroshima, was far more lurid than Shawn, who was averse to violence, could ordinarily stomach. Still, despite his misgivings, he published the series, and In Cold Blood was a newsstand phenomenon and remains a model of the “nonfiction novel.”
Shawn came to adore the Beatles, though the astute archivist will note scant coverage of the band in the magazine. Such are the curiosities— the misses among the hits—in any publication. But what was more remarkable was how many of the cultural touchstones of the time the magazine, which was not exactly Rolling Stone or Creem, did cover well. Nat Hentoff’s 1964 Profi le of Bob Dylan, Jane Kramer’s Profi le of Allen Ginsberg, Pauline Kael’s essays on the fi lms of that time, and Michael Arlen’s Vietnam-focused television criticism all hold up for their vitality. In poems like W. S. Merwin’s “The Asians Dying,” the politics, the catastrophe, of the sixties was never far away. As a vehicle for fiction, The New Yorker widened its scope, including not only the suburban-based classicists Updike and Cheever, mainstays of the magazine, but also the
Yiddish-language tales of Isaac Bashevis Singer, the Paris-based stories of Mavis Gallant, and the formal experiments of Donald Barthelme. William Shawn did not look the part, and his voice was barely a whisper in a raucous time, but this book demonstrates that he, too, was a man of the turbulent sixties and that his New Yorker was equal to the moment.
Part One RECKONINGS
A NOTE BY GEORGE PACKER
These days, the quarter century between the Second World War and the 1970s seems like at least an American silver age. The middle class was big and prosperous. Leaders in government, business, and labor worked out compromises that kept the deal table level and the payout fair. National institutions worked pretty well, and under stress they didn’t collapse. Congress responded to civil-rights protests with sweeping, bipartisan legislation; environmental awareness produced the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts. As Richard H. Rovere wrote in “Half Out of Our Tree,” even the protests over the war in Vietnam showed that American democracy still had a pulse— a strong one by today’s standards.
Read the journalism of the 1960s and you might not think so. If the country now seems to be painfully breaking down, in the sixties it was quite dramatically exploding. The sense of continuous crisis forced a change in the journalism that appeared in The New Yorker. The magazine lost its habitual cool, its restraint. It began to publish big, ambitious reports and essays that attempted to meet the apocalyptic occasion. These pieces were intended to make noise, even to shock the national mind, and they dominated conversation for weeks or months. In the sixties, The New Yorker acquired a social consciousness. It went into opposition, challenging the complacent postwar consensus that had prevailed across American culture, including in its pages. The result was some of the most famous and influential journalism ever to appear in the magazine.
This work occupied so much territory—paid for by the voluminous and high-end advertising that used to fi ll The New Yorker ’s pages—that some of the pieces took up an entire issue, or else spread themselves out over two, three, or even five in succession. Ambitious work had often appeared in the magazine, but the pieces from the sixties were some-
thing more than stories enjoying the luxury of a lot of space to be well and fully told. This was journalism as event. Sometimes the events arrived so fast and thick that readers could barely catch their breath. Rachel Carson’s warning of the effects of chemical spraying on birds, trees, and other living things—published in the late spring of 1962 —is now credited with starting the environmental movement. Five months later, James Baldwin’s autobiographical essay on the black church, the Nation of Islam, and the racial crisis detonated, making him a prophet of the civil-rights era, Jeremiah to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Moses, and that rare thing in American letters—the writer as national oracle. No less a personage than Bobby Kennedy felt prompted to answer “Letter from a Region of My Mind,” privately, leading to an angry exchange between the two in Kennedy’s midtown Manhattan apartment.
Just a few months later, in early 1963, The New Yorker published a report on the trial in Jerusalem of the Nazi criminal Adolf Eichmann, by the German-Jewish writer Hannah Arendt: a piece of political philosophy that simultaneously raised the repressed horror of the Holocaust and interrogated its perpetrators and victims alike—the former for their supposed banality, the latter for failing to put up a fight. Nor did Arendt try to conceal her contempt for the new state of Israel. From an Olympian perch, she flung down complex, razor-edged sentences that couldn’t fail to hurt. The writers known as the New York intellectuals were thrown into an uproar, published replies, replied to the replies, broke into proand anti-Arendt camps, and debated the piece at a legendary town-hall meeting that Arendt herself disdained to attend.
In the middle of the decade came Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, about the killing of a family of four in Kansas. The murders had taken place in 1959, and the story of lonely, doomed small-town Americans feels as if it’s in black and white, not Technicolor. But Capote’s literary method helped defi ne the experimental journalism of the sixties. In Cold Blood was shocking above all for its style, which dared to enter the dream life of a killer, to fl irt dangerously along the borderline between fact and fiction. Jonathan Schell’s “The Village of Ben Suc” was more conventional in its reportorial approach— dispassionate and meticulous—but devastating in its description of the American war machine turned loose on one corner of South Vietnam. The piece conveys the madness of overpowering technology and geopolitical dogma wreaking havoc, with no ability to see or understand the targets of destruction.
The sixties introduced the idea, reluctantly acknowledged in Rovere’s
essay “Half Out of Our Tree,” that something had gone wrong with America—that we could no longer assume ourselves to be good. The New Yorker registered this change in many departments, but nowhere more memorably than in its journalism. These heavyweight pieces did not just record the decade’s drama—they became part of it.
SILENT SPRING—1
Rachel Carson
JUNE
16, 1962
There was once a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to be in harmony with its surroundings. The town lay in the midst of a checkerboard of prosperous farms, with fields of grain and hillsides of orchards, where white clouds of bloom drifted above the green land. In autumn, oak and maple and birch set up a blaze of color that fl amed and fl ickered across a backdrop of pines. Then foxes barked in the hills and deer crossed the fields, half hidden in the mists of the mornings. Along the roads, laurel, viburnum, and alder, great ferns and wild flowers delighted the traveller’s eye through much of the year. Even in winter, the roadsides were places of beauty, where countless birds came to feed on the berries and on the seed heads of the dried weeds rising above the snow. The countryside was, in fact, famous for the abundance and variety of its bird life, and when the flood of migrants was pouring through in spring and fall, people came from great distances to observe them. Other people came to fish streams, which flowed clear and cold out of the hills and contained shady pools where trout lay. So it had been from the days, many years ago, when the fi rst settlers raised their houses, sank their wells, and built their barns.
Then, one spring, a strange blight crept over the area, and everything began to change. Some evil spell had settled on the community; mysterious maladies swept the flocks of chickens, and the cattle and sheep sickened and died. Everywhere was the shadow of death. The farmers told of much illness among their families. In the town, the doctors were becoming more and more puzzled by new kinds of sickness that had ap-
peared among their patients. There had been several sudden and unexplained deaths, not only among the adults but also among the children, who would be stricken while they were at play, and would die within a few hours. And there was a strange stillness. The birds, for example—where had they gone? Many people, baffled and disturbed, spoke of them. The feeding stations in the back yards were deserted. The few birds to be seen anywhere were moribund; they trembled violently and could not fly. It was a spring without voices. In the mornings, which had once throbbed with the dawn chorus of robins, catbirds, doves, jays, and wrens, and scores of other bird voices, there was now no sound; only silence lay over the fields and woods and marshes. On the farms, the hens brooded but no chicks hatched. The farmers complained that they were unable to raise any pigs; the litters were small, and the young survived only a few days. The apple trees were coming into bloom, but no bees droned among the blossoms, so there was no pollination and there would be no fruit. The roadsides were lined with brown and withered vegetation, and were silent, too, deserted by all living things. Even the streams were lifeless. Anglers no longer visited them, for all the fish had died. In the gutters under the eaves, and between the shingles of the roofs, a few patches of white granular powder could be seen; some weeks earlier this powder had been dropped, like snow, upon the roofs and the lawns, the fields and the streams. No witchcraft, no enemy action had snuffed out life in this stricken world. The people had done it themselves.
This town does not actually exist; I know of no community that has experienced all the misfortunes I describe. Yet every one of them has actually happened somewhere in the world, and many communities have already suffered a substantial number of them. A grim spectre has crept upon us almost unnoticed, and soon my imaginary town may have thousands of real counterparts. What is silencing the voices of spring in countless towns in America? I shall make an attempt to explain.
The history of life on earth is a history of the interaction of living things and their surroundings. To an overwhelming extent, the physical form and the habits of the earth’s vegetation and its animal life have been molded and directed by the environment. Over the whole span of earthly time, the opposite effect, in which life modifies its surroundings, has been relatively slight. It is only within the moment of time represented
by the twentieth century that one species—man—has acquired significant power to alter the nature of his world, and it is only within the past twenty-five years that this power has achieved such magnitude that it endangers the whole earth and its life. The most alarming of all man’s assaults upon the environment is the contamination of the air, earth, rivers, and seas with dangerous, and even lethal, materials. This pollution has rapidly become almost universal, and it is for the most part irrecoverable; the chain of evil it initiates, not only in the world that must support life but in living tissues, is for the most part irreversible. It is widely known that radiation has done much to change the very nature of the world, the very nature of its life; strontium 90, released into the air through nuclear explosions, comes to earth in rain or drifts down as fallout, lodges in soil, enters into the grass or corn or wheat grown there, and, in time, takes up its abode in the bones of a human being, there to remain until his death. It is less well known that many man-made chemicals act in much the same way as radiation; they lie long in the soil, and enter into living organisms, passing from one to another. Or they may travel mysteriously by underground streams, emerging to combine, through the alchemy of air and sunlight, into new forms, which kill vegetation, sicken cattle, and work unknown harm on those who drink from once pure wells. As Albert Schweitzer has said, “Man can hardly even recognize the devils of his own creation.” It took hundreds of millions of years to produce the life that now inhabits the earth— aeons of time, in which that developing and evolving and diversifying life reached a state of adjustment to its surroundings. To be sure, the environment, rigorously shaping and directing the life it supported, contained hostile elements. Certain rocks gave out dangerous radiation; even within the light of the sun, from which all life draws its energy, there were short-wave radiations with power to injure. But given time—time not in years but in millennia—life adjusted, and a balance was reached. Time was the essential ingredient. Now, in the modern world, there is no time. The speed with which new hazards are created reflects the impetuous and heedless pace of man, rather than the deliberate pace of nature. Radiation is no longer merely the background radiation of rocks, the bombardment of cosmic rays, the ultraviolet of the sun, which existed before there was any life on earth; radiation is now also the unnatural creation of man’s tampering with the atom. The chemicals to which life is asked to make its adjustment are no longer merely the calcium and silica and copper and the rest of the minerals washed out of the rocks and carried in
rivers to the sea; they are also the synthetic creations of man’s inventive mind, brewed in his laboratories and having no counterparts in nature. To adjust to these chemicals would require time on the scale that is nature’s; it would require not merely the years of a man’s life but the life of generations. And even this would be futile, for the new chemicals come in an endless stream; almost five hundred annually fi nd their way into actual use in the United States alone. The figure is staggering and its implications are not easily grasped: five hundred new chemicals to which the bodies of men and all other living things are required somehow to adapt each year— chemicals totally outside the limits of biological experience.
Among the new chemicals are many that are used in man’s war against nature. In the past decade and a half, some six hundred basic chemicals have been created for the purpose of killing insects, weeds, rodents, and other organisms described in the modern vernacular as “pests.” In the form of sprays, dusts, and aerosols, these basic chemicals are offered for sale under several thousand different brand names— a highly bewildering array of poisons, confusing even to the chemist, which have the power to kill every insect, the “good” as well as the “bad,” to still the song of birds and to stop the leaping of fish in the streams, to coat the leaves with poison and to linger on in soil. It may prove to be impossible to lay down such a barrage of dangerous poisons on the surface of the earth without making it unfit for all life. Indeed, the term “biocide” would be more appropriate than “insecticide”— all the more appropriate because the whole process of spraying poisons on the earth seems to have been caught up in an endless spiral. Since the late 1940s, when DDT began to be used widely, a process of escalation has been going on in which ever more toxic chemicals must be found. This has happened because insects, in a triumphant vindication of Darwin’s principle of the survival of the fittest, have consistently evolved super-races immune to the particular insecticide used, and hence a deadlier one has always had to be developed— and then a deadlier one than that. It has happened also that destructive insects often undergo a “flareback,” or resurgence, after spraying, in numbers greater than before. The chemical war is never won, and all life is caught in its cross fi re.
Along with the possibility of the extinction of mankind by nuclear war, a central problem of our age is the contamination of man’s total environment with substances of incredible potential for harm— substances that accumulate in the tissues of plants and animals, and even
penetrate the germ cells, to shatter or alter the very material of heredity, upon which the shape of the future depends. Some would-be architects of our future look toward a time when we will be able to alter the human germ plasm by design. But we may easily be altering it now by inadvertence, for many chemicals, like radiation, bring about gene mutations. It is ironic to think that man may determine his own future by something so seemingly trivial as the choice of his insect spray. The results, of course, will not be apparent for decades or centuries. All this has been risked—for what? Future historians may well be amazed by our distorted sense of proportion. How could intelligent beings seek to control a few unwanted species of weeds and insects by a method that brought the threat of disease and death even to their own kind?
The problem whose attempted solution has touched off such a train of disaster is an accompaniment of our modern way of life. Long before the age of man, insects inhabited the earth— a group of extraordinarily varied and adaptable beings. Since man’s advent, a small percentage of the more than half a million species of insects have come into confl ict with human welfare, principally in two ways— as competitors for the food supply and as carriers of human disease. Disease-carrying insects become important where human beings are crowded together, especially when sanitation is poor, as in times of natural disaster or war, or in situations of extreme poverty and deprivation. As for insects that compete with man for food, they become important with the intensification of agriculture—the devotion of immense acreages to the production of a single crop. Such a system sets the stage for explosive increases in specific insect populations. Single-crop farming does not take advantage of the principles by which nature works; it is agriculture as an engineer might conceive it to be. Nature has introduced great variety into the landscape, but man has displayed a passion for simplifying it. Thus he undoes the built-in checks and balances by which nature holds the various species within bounds. One important natural check is a limit on the amount of suitable habitat for each species. Obviously, an insect that lives on wheat can build up its population to much higher levels on a farm devoted solely to wheat than on a farm where wheat is intermingled with crops to which the insect is not adapted. In all such circumstances, insect control of some sort is necessary and proper. But in the case of both types of insect—the disease-carrying and the crop-consuming—it is a sobering fact that massive chemical control has had only limited success, and even threatens to worsen the very conditions it is intended to curb.
Another aspect of the insect problem is one that must be viewed against a background of geological and human history—the spreading of thousands of different kinds of organisms from their native homes into new territories. This worldwide migration has been studied and graphically described by the British ecologist Charles Elton in his recent book The Ecology of Invasions by Animals and Plants. During the Cretaceous period, some hundred million years ago, flooding seas created many islands within continents, and living things found themselves confi ned in what Elton calls “colossal separate nature reserves.” There, isolated from others of their kind, they developed large numbers of new species. When some of the land masses were joined again, about fi fteen million years ago, these species began to move out into new territories— a movement that not only is still in progress but is now receiving considerable assistance from man. The importation of plants is the primary agent in the modern spread of species, for animals have almost invariably gone along with the plants— quarantine being a comparatively recent and never completely effective innovation. The United States government itself has imported approximately two hundred thousand species or varieties of plants from all over the world. Nearly half of the hundred and eighty–odd major insect enemies of plants in the United States are accidental imports from abroad, and most of them have come as hitchhikers on plants. In new territory, out of reach of the natural enemies that kept down its numbers in its native land, an invading plant or animal is able to increase its numbers enormously. Realistically speaking, it would seem that insect invasions, both those occurring naturally and those dependent on human assistance, are likely to continue indefi nitely. We are faced, according to Dr. Elton, “with a life-and-death need not just to fi nd new technological means of suppressing this plant or that animal” but to acquire the basic knowledge of animal populations and their relations to their surroundings that will “promote an even balance and damp down the explosive power of outbreaks and new invasions.” Much of the necessary knowledge is now available, but we do not use it. Have we fallen into a mesmerized state that makes us accept as inevitable that which is inferior or detrimental, as though we had lost the will or the vision to demand that which is good? Such thinking, in the words of the American ecologist Paul Shepard, “idealizes life with only its head out of water, inches above the limits of toleration of the corruption of its own environment,” and he goes on to ask, “Why should we tolerate a diet of weak poisons, a home in insipid surroundings, a circle of acquaintances
who are not quite our enemies, the noise of motors with just enough relief to prevent insanity? Who would want to live in a world which is just not quite fatal?”
Yet such a world is pressed upon us. For the fi rst time in history, virtually every human being is subjected to contact with dangerous chemicals from birth to death. In the less than two decades of their use, DDT and other synthetic pesticides have been thoroughly distributed over all but a few corners of the world. They have been recovered from many of the major river systems, and even from the streams of ground water flowing unseen through the earth. They have been found in soil to which they were applied a dozen years before. They have lodged in the bodies of fish, birds, reptiles, and domestic and wild animals to the point where it is now almost impossible for scientists carrying on animal experiments to obtain subjects free from such contamination. They have been found in fish in remote mountain lakes, in earthworms burrowing in soil, in the eggs of birds, and in man himself. These chemicals are now stored in the bodies of the vast majority of human beings, regardless of their age. They occur in mother’s milk, and probably in the tissues of the unborn child.
All this has come about because of the prodigious growth of an industry for the production of synthetic chemicals with insecticidal properties. This industry is a child of the Second World War. In the course of developing agents of chemical warfare, some of the chemicals created in the laboratory were found to be lethal to insects. The discovery did not come by chance; insects were widely used to test chemicals as agents of death for man. In being man-made—by the ingenious laboratory manipulation of molecules, involving the substitution of atoms or the alteration of their arrangement—the new insecticides differ sharply from the simpler ones of prewar days. These were derived from naturally occurring minerals and plant products: compounds of arsenic, copper, lead, manganese, zinc, and other minerals; pyrethrum, from the dried flowers of chrysanthemums; nicotine sulphate, from some of the relatives of tobacco; and rotenone, from leguminous plants of the East Indies. What sets the new synthetic insecticides apart is their enormous biological potency. They can enter into the most vital processes of the body and change them in sinister and often deadly ways. Yet new chemicals are added to the list each year, and new uses are devised for them. Production of synthetic pesticides in the United States soared from 124 ,259,000 pounds in 1947 to 637,666,000 pounds in 1960 —more than a fivefold
increase. In 1960, the wholesale value of these products was well over a quarter of a billion dollars. But in the plans and hopes of the industry this enormous production is only a beginning. . . .
Over increasingly large areas of the United States, spring now comes unheralded by the return of the birds, and the early mornings, once fi lled with the beauty of bird song, are strangely silent. This sudden silencing of the song of the birds, this obliteration of the color and beauty and interest they lend to our world, has come about swiftly and insidiously, and has gone unnoticed by those whose communities are as yet unaffected. From the town of Hinsdale, in northeastern Illinois, in 1958, a housewife wrote in despair to one of the world’s leading ornithologists, Robert Cushman Murphy, Lamont Curator Emeritus of Birds at the American Museum of Natural History: “Here in our village the elm trees have been sprayed for several years. When we moved here six years ago, there was a wealth of bird life; I put up a feeder and had a steady stream of cardinals, chickadees, downies, and nuthatches all winter, and the cardinals and chickadees brought their young ones in the summer. After several years of DDT spray, the town is almost devoid of robins and starlings; chickadees have not been on my shelf for two years, and this year the cardinals are gone, too; the nesting population in the neighborhood seems to consist of one dove pair and perhaps one catbird family. It is hard to explain to the children that the birds have been killed off, when they have learned in school that a federal law protects the birds from killing or capture. ‘Will they ever come back?’ they ask, and I do not have the answer.”
One story might serve as a tragic symbol of the fate of the birds— a fate that has already overtaken some species and threatens all. It is the story of the robin, the bird known to everyone. To millions of Americans, the season’s fi rst robin means that the grip of winter is broken. Its coming is an event reported in newspapers and described eagerly at the breakfast table. And as the number of arrivals grows and the fi rst mists of green appear in the woodlands, thousands of people listen for the dawn chorus of the robins, throbbing in the early-morning light. But now all is changed, and not even the return of the birds may be taken for granted.
The fate of the robin, and indeed of many other species as well, seems linked with that of the American elm, a tree that is part of the history of
thousands of towns within its native range, from the Atlantic to the Rockies, gracing their streets, their village squares, and their college campuses with majestic archways of green. Today, the elms are subject to a disease that affl icts them throughout their range— a disease so serious that many experts believe all efforts to save the elms will in the end be futile. The so-called Dutch elm disease entered the United States from Europe in 1930, in elm-burl logs imported for the veneer industry. It is a fungus disease; the organism invades the water-conducting vessels of the tree, spreads by spores carried in the flow of sap, and, by mechanical clogging and also by poisons it secretes, causes the branches to wilt and the tree to die. The disease is spread from diseased trees to healthy ones by elm-bark beetles. The insects tunnel out galleries under the bark, and these become a favorable habitat for the invading fungus. As the insects move through the galleries, they pick up the spores, and later carry them wherever they fly. Efforts to control the disease have concentrated on achieving control of the carrier insect, and in community after community, especially throughout the strongholds of the American elm, the Middle West and New England, intensive spraying with DDT has become a routine procedure.
What this spraying could mean to bird life, and especially to the robin, was fi rst made clear by the work of two ornithologists at Michigan State University, Professor George Wallace and one of his graduate students, John Mehner. In 1954 , when Mr. Mehner began work toward his doctorate, he chose a research project that had to do with robin populations. This came about entirely by chance, for at that time no one suspected that the robins were in danger. But even as he undertook the work, events occurred that were to change its character— and, indeed, to deprive him of his material. Spraying for Dutch elm disease began in a small way on the university campus that very year. In 1955 , the city of East Lansing, where the university is situated, joined in; spraying on the campus was expanded; and, with local programs for control of the gypsy moth and the mosquito also under way, the chemical rain increased to a downpour. In 1954 , the year of the fi rst, light spraying, all seemed to be well. The following spring, the migrating robins returned to the campus as usual. Like the bluebells in H. M. Tomlinson’s haunting essay “The Lost Wood,” they were “expecting no evil” as they reoccupied their familiar territory. But soon it became evident that something was wrong. Dead and dying robins began to appear on the campus. Few birds were seen engaging in their normal foraging activities or assembling in their
customary roosts. Few nests were built; few young appeared. The pattern was repeated with monotonous regularity in succeeding springs. In the sprayed area, each wave of migrating robins would be eliminated in about a week. Then new arrivals would come in, only to add to the numbers of birds seen on the campus in the agonized tremors that precede death. “The campus is serving as a graveyard for most of the robins that attempt to take up residence in the spring,” Dr. Wallace noted. But why? At fi rst, he suspected some disease of the nervous system, but soon it became evident that “in spite of the assurances of the insecticide people that their sprays were ‘harmless to birds,’ the robins were really dying of insecticidal poisoning; they invariably exhibited the well-known symptoms of loss of balance, followed by tremors, convulsions, and death.” Several circumstances suggested that the robins were being poisoned not so much by direct contact with the insecticides as indirectly, by eating poisoned earthworms. Campus earthworms had been fed to crayfish in a research project, and all the crayfish had quickly died. A snake kept in a laboratory cage had gone into violent tremors after being fed such worms. And earthworms are the principal food of robins in the spring.
A key piece in the jigsaw puzzle of the doomed robins was presently supplied by Dr. Roy Barker, of the Illinois Natural History Survey. Dr. Barker’s work, published in 1958, traced the intricate cycle of events by which the robins’ fate is linked to the elm trees by way of the earthworms. The trees are sprayed in the spring or early summer and often again a few months later. Powerful sprayers direct a stream of poison toward all parts of the tallest trees, killing directly not only the target organism—the bark beetle—but other insects, including pollinating species and predatory spiders and beetles. The poison forms a tenacious fi lm on the leaves and bark. Rains do not wash it away. In the autumn, the leaves fall to the ground, accumulate in sodden layers, and begin the slow process of becoming one with the soil. In this they are aided by the toil of the earthworms, which feed in the leaf litter, for elm leaves are among their favorite foods. In feeding on the leaves, the worms, of course, also swallow the insecticide. Dr. Barker found deposits of DDT throughout the digestive tracts of the worms, and in their blood vessels, nerves, and body wall. Undoubtedly some of the earthworms themselves succumb, but those that survive become “biological magnifiers” of the poison—that is, the concentration of insecticide builds up in their bodies. Then, in the spring, the robins return. As few as eleven large earthworms can transfer a lethal dose of DDT to a robin. And eleven worms
form a small part of a robin’s daily ration; in fact, a robin may easily eat eleven earthworms in as many minutes.
Not all robins receive a lethal dose, but another consequence of poisoning may lead as surely to the extinction of their kind. The shadow of sterility lies over all the bird studies— and, indeed, lengthens to include all living things. There are now only two or three dozen robins to be found each spring on the entire hundred-and-eighty-five-acre campus of Michigan State University, compared with a conservatively estimated three hundred and seventy adults before spraying. In 1954 , every robin nest under observation by Mehner produced young. In 1957, Mehner could fi nd only one young robin. Part of this failure to produce young is due, of course, to the death of one or both of a pair of robins before the nesting cycle is completed. But Dr. Wallace has significant records that point toward something more sinister—the actual destruction of the birds’ ability to reproduce. He has, for example, “records of robins and other birds building nests but laying no eggs, and others laying eggs and incubating them but not hatching them.” In 1960, he told a congressional committee that was holding hearings on a bill for better coordination of spraying programs, “We have one record of a robin that sat on its eggs faithfully for twenty-one days and they did not hatch. The normal incubation period is thirteen days. . . . Our analyses are showing high concentrations of DDT in the testes and ovaries of breeding birds.”
The robins are only one element in the complex pattern of devastation arising from the spraying of the elms, even as the elm program is only one of the multitudinous spray programs that spread poison over our land. Heavy mortality has occurred among about ninety species of birds, including those most familiar to amateur naturalists, and in some of the sprayed towns the populations of nesting birds in general have declined as much as 90 percent. All the various types of birds are affected— ground feeders, treetop feeders, bark feeders, predators. Among them is the woodcock, which includes earthworms in its diet and which winters in southern areas that have recently been heavily sprayed with chemicals. Two significant discoveries have now been made about the woodcock. The numbers of young birds in New Brunswick, where many woodcocks breed, have defi nitely been reduced, and adult birds that have been analyzed contain heavy residues of both DDT and a chlorinated hydrocarbon called heptachlor. Already there are disturbing records of mortality among more than twenty other species of ground-feeding birds, including three of the thrushes whose songs are among the most exquisite of
bird voices, the olive-backed, the wood, and the hermit. And the sparrows that fl it through the shrubby understory of the woodlands and forage with rustling sounds amid the fallen leaves—the song sparrow and the whitethroat—have also been found among the victims of the sprays.
All the treetop feeders—the birds that glean their insect food from the leaves—have disappeared from heavily sprayed areas, including those woodland sprites the kinglets, both ruby-crowned and golden-crowned; the tiny gnat-catchers; and many of the warblers, whose migrating hordes flow through the trees in spring in a multicolored tide of life. In Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin, in the years before 1958, at least a thousand myrtle warblers could be seen in migration; after the spraying of the elms in that year, observers could fi nd only two. So, with additions from other communities, the list grows, and the warblers killed by the spray include those that most charm and fascinate all who are aware of them: the black-and-white, the yellow, the magnolia, and the Cape May; the ovenbird, whose call throbs in the Maytime woods; the Blackburnian, whose wings are touched with fl ame; the chestnut-sided, the Canada, and the black-throated green. These treetop feeders are affected either directly, by the eating of poisoned insects, or indirectly, by a shortage of food.
The loss of food has also struck hard at the swallows, which cruise the skies straining out the aerial insects as herring strain out the plankton of the sea. A Wisconsin naturalist has reported, “Swallows have been hard hit. Everyone complains of how few they have compared to four or five years ago. Our sky overhead was full of them only four years ago. Now we seldom see any. . . . This could be both lack of insects because of spray, or poisoned insects.” Of other birds this observer wrote, “Another striking loss is the phoebe. Flycatchers are scarce everywhere, but the early common phoebe is no more. I’ve seen one this spring and only one last spring. Other birders in Wisconsin make the same complaint. I have had five or six pair of cardinals in the past, none now. Wrens, robins, catbirds, and screech owls have nested each year in our garden. There are none now. Summer mornings are without bird song. Only pest birds, pigeons, starlings, and English sparrows remain.”
The sprays applied to the elms in the fall, sending the poison into every little crevice in the bark, are probably responsible for severe reductions observed in the numbers of bark feeders— chickadees, nuthatches, titmice, woodpeckers, and brown creepers. During the winter of 1957 – 58, Dr. Wallace for the fi rst time in many years saw no chickadees or nut-
hatches at his home feeding station. Three nuthatches that he came upon later provided a sorry little step-by-step lesson in cause and effect: one was feeding on an elm, another was found dying, and the third was dead. The loss of all these birds is deplorable for economic reasons as well as for less tangible ones. The summer food of the white-breasted nuthatch and the brown creeper, for example, includes the eggs, larvae, and adults of a very large number of insect species injurious to trees. About threequarters of the food of the chickadee is animal, including all stages of the life cycle of many insects. The chickadee’s method of feeding is described in Arthur Cleveland Bent’s Life Histories of North American Jays, Crows, and Titmice : “As the flock moves along, each bird examines minutely bark, twigs, and branches, searching for tiny bits of food (spiders’ eggs, cocoons, or other dormant insect life).” Various scientific studies have established the critical role of birds in insect control in a variety of situations. Thus, woodpeckers are the primary factor in the control of the Engelmann spruce beetle, reducing its populations by a minimum of 45 percent and a maximum of 98 percent, and are also important in the control of the codling moth in apple orchards. Chickadees and other winter-resident birds can protect orchards against the cankerworm. But what happens in nature is not allowed to happen in the modern, chemicaldrenched world, where spraying destroys not only the insects but their principal enemy, the birds. When, as almost always happens, there is a resurgence of the insect population, the birds are not there to keep their numbers in check.
To the public, the choice may easily appear to be one of stark simplicity: Shall we have birds or shall we have elms? But it is not as simple as that, and, by one of the ironies that abound throughout the field of chemical control, we may very well end by having neither. Spraying is killing the birds but is not saving the elms. The theory that the survival of the elms lies in spraying is a dangerous illusion, leading one community after another into a morass of heavy expenditures without producing lasting results. Greenwich, Connecticut, sprayed regularly for ten years. Then a drought year brought conditions especially favorable to the beetle, and the mortality of elms went up a thousand percent. In Toledo, Ohio, a similar experience caused the city’s Superintendent of Forestry, Joseph A. Sweeney, to take a realistic look at the results of spraying. Spraying of elms was begun there in 1953 and continued through 1959. Meanwhile, however, Mr. Sweeney had noticed that a citywide infestation of the cottony maple scale was worse after the spraying recom-
mended by “the books and the authorities” than it had been before. He decided to review for himself the results of spraying for Dutch elm disease. His fi ndings shocked him. In the city of Toledo, he found, “the only areas under any control were the areas where we used some promptness in removing the diseased or brood trees. Where we depended on spraying, the disease was out of control. In the county, where nothing has been done, the disease has not spread as fast as it has in the city. This indicates that spraying destroys any natural enemies. We are abandoning spraying for the Dutch elm disease. This has brought me into confl ict with the people who back any recommendations by the United States Department of Agriculture, but I have the facts and will stick with them.”
In the spraying of the elms, the birds are the incidental victims of an attack directed at an insect, but in other situations they are now becoming a direct target of poisons. There is a growing trend toward aerial applications of deadly poisons, like parathion, a member of the family of organic-phosphate insecticides, for the purpose of “controlling” concentrations of birds distasteful to farmers. The Fish and Wildlife Service has expressed serious concern over this trend, pointing out that “parathion-treated areas constitute a potential hazard to humans, domestic animals, and wildlife.” In southern Indiana, for example, a group of farmers joined forces in the summer of 1959 to engage a spray plane to treat an area of river-bottom land with parathion. The area was a favored roosting site of thousands of blackbirds, which were feeding in nearby cornfields. The problem could have been solved easily by a slight change in agricultural practice— a shift to a variety of corn with deep-set ears, inaccessible to the birds—but the farmers had been persuaded of the merits of killing by poison, and so they sent in the plane. The results probably gratified them, for the casualty list included some sixty-five thousand red-winged blackbirds and starlings. The question of other wildlife deaths that may have occurred was not considered. Parathion is not a specific for blackbirds; it is a universal killer. But such rabbits or raccoons or opossums as roamed those bottom lands, and perhaps never visited the farmers’ cornfields, were doomed by a judge and jury who neither knew nor cared about their existence. And what of human beings? In orchards sprayed with this same parathion, workers handling foliage that had been treated a month earlier have collapsed and gone into shock, escaping severe injury only by a small margin, thanks to skilled medical attention. Does Indiana still raise boys who roam the
woods and fields, and might even explore the margins of a river? If so, who guarded the poisoned area to keep out any boys who might wander in? Who kept watch to tell the innocent stroller that the fields he was about to enter were deadly, their vegetation coated with a lethal fi lm? No one. Yet it was at so fearful a risk that the farmers waged their war on blackbirds.
LETTER FROM A REGION IN MY MIND
James Baldwin
NOVEMBER 17, 1962
Take up the White Man’s burden— Ye dare not stoop to less— Nor call too loud on Freedom To cloak your weariness; By all ye cry or whisper, By all ye leave or do, The silent, sullen peoples Shall weigh your Gods and you.
—Kipling
Down at the cross where my Saviour died, Down where for cleansing from sin I cried, There to my heart was the blood applied, Singing glory to His name!
—Hymn
I underwent, during the summer that I became fourteen, a prolonged religious crisis. I use “religious” in the common, and arbitrary, sense, meaning that I then discovered God, His saints and angels, and His blazing Hell. And since I had been born in a Christian nation, I accepted this Deity as the only one. I supposed Him to exist only within the walls
of a church—in fact, of our church— and I also supposed that God and safety were synonymous. The word “safety” brings us to the real meaning of the word “religious” as we use it. Therefore, to state it in another, more accurate way, I became, during my fourteenth year, for the fi rst time in my life, afraid— afraid of the evil within me and afraid of the evil without. What I saw around me that summer in Harlem was what I had always seen; nothing had changed. But now, without any warning, the whores and pimps and racketeers on the Avenue had become a personal menace. It had not before occurred to me that I could become one of them, but now I realized that we had been produced by the same circumstances. Many of my comrades were clearly headed for the Avenue, and my father said that I was headed that way, too. My friends began to drink and smoke, and embarked— at fi rst avid, then groaning— on their sexual careers. Girls, only slightly older than I was, who sang in the choir or taught Sunday school, the children of holy parents, underwent, before my eyes, their incredible metamorphosis, of which the most bewildering aspect was not their budding breasts or their rounding behinds but something deeper and more subtle, in their eyes, their heat, their odor, and the inflection of their voices. Like the strangers on the Avenue, they became, in the twinkling of an eye, unutterably different and fantastically present. Owing to the way I had been raised, the abrupt discomfort that all this aroused in me and the fact that I had no idea what my voice or my mind or my body was likely to do next caused me to consider myself one of the most depraved people on earth. Matters were not helped by the fact that these holy girls seemed rather to enjoy my terrified lapses, our grim, guilty, tormented experiments, which were at once as chill and joyless as the Russian steppes and hotter, by far, than all the fi res of Hell.
Yet there was something deeper than these changes, and less defi nable, that frightened me. It was real in both the boys and the girls, but it was, somehow, more vivid in the boys. In the case of the girls, one watched them turning into matrons before they had become women. They began to manifest a curious and really rather terrifying singlemindedness. It is hard to say exactly how this was conveyed: something implacable in the set of the lips, something farseeing (seeing what?) in the eyes, some new and crushing determination in the walk, something peremptory in the voice. . . .
And I began to feel in the boys a curious, wary, bewildered despair, as though they were now settling in for the long, hard winter of life. I did not know then what it was that I was reacting to; I put it to myself that
they were letting themselves go. In the same way that the girls were destined to gain as much weight as their mothers, the boys, it was clear, would rise no higher than their fathers. School began to reveal itself, therefore, as a child’s game that one could not win, and boys dropped out of school and went to work. My father wanted me to do the same. I refused, even though I no longer had any illusions about what an education could do for me; I had already encountered too many college-graduate handymen. My friends were now “downtown,” busy, as they put it, “fighting the man.” They began to care less about the way they looked, the way they dressed, the things they did; presently, one found them in twos and threes and fours, in a hallway, sharing a jug of wine or a bottle of whiskey, talking, cursing, fighting, sometimes weeping: lost, and unable to say what it was that oppressed them, except that they knew it was “the man”—the white man. And there seemed to be no way whatever to remove this cloud that stood between them and the sun, between them and love and life and power, between them and whatever it was that they wanted. One did not have to be very bright to realize how little one could do to change one’s situation; one did not have to be abnormally sensitive to be worn down to a cutting edge by the incessant and gratuitous humiliation and danger one encountered every working day, all day long. The humiliation did not apply merely to working days, or workers; I was thirteen and was crossing Fifth Avenue on my way to the Forty-second Street library, and the cop in the middle of the street muttered as I passed him, “Why don’t you niggers stay uptown where you belong?” When I was ten, and didn’t look, certainly, any older, two policemen amused themselves with me by frisking me, making comic (and terrifying) speculations concerning my ancestry and probable sexual prowess, and, for good measure, leaving me fl at on my back in one of Harlem’s empty lots. Just before and then during the Second World War, many of my friends fled into the service, all to be changed there, and rarely for the better, many to be ruined, and many to die. Others fled to other states and cities—that is, to other ghettos. Some went on wine or whiskey or the needle, and are still on it. And others, like me, fled into the church.
For the wages of sin were visible everywhere, in every wine-stained and urine-splashed hallway, in every clanging ambulance bell, in every scar on the faces of the pimps and their whores, in every helpless, newborn baby being brought into this danger, in every knife and pistol fight on the Avenue, and in every disastrous bulletin: a cousin, mother of six, suddenly gone mad, the children parcelled out here and there; an inde-
structible aunt rewarded for years of hard labor by a slow, agonizing death in a terrible small room; someone’s bright son blown into eternity by his own hand; another turned robber and carried off to jail. It was a summer of dreadful speculations and discoveries, of which these were not the worst. Crime became real, for example—for the fi rst time—not as a possibility but as the possibility. One would never defeat one’s circumstances by working and saving one’s pennies; one would never, by working, acquire that many pennies, and, besides, the social treatment accorded even the most successful Negroes proved that one needed, in order to be free, something more than a bank account. One needed a handle, a lever, a means of inspiring fear. It was absolutely clear that the police would whip you and take you in as long as they could get away with it, and that everyone else—housewives, taxi-drivers, elevator boys, dishwashers, bartenders, lawyers, judges, doctors, and grocers—would never, by the operation of any generous human feeling, cease to use you as an outlet for his frustrations and hostilities. Neither civilized reason nor Christian love would cause any of those people to treat you as they presumably wanted to be treated; only the fear of your power to retaliate would cause them to do that, or to seem to do it, which was (and is) good enough. There appears to be a vast amount of confusion on this point, but I do not know many Negroes who are eager to be “accepted” by white people, still less to be loved by them; they, the blacks, simply don’t wish to be beaten over the head by the whites every instant of our brief passage on this planet. White people in this country will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this—which will not be tomorrow and may very well be never—the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed. . . .
Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, fl ags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death— ought to decide, indeed, to earn one’s death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible to life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return. One must negotiate this passage as nobly as possible, for the sake of those who are coming after us. But white Americans do not believe in death, and this is why the darkness of my skin so intimidates them. And
this is also why the presence of the Negro in this country can bring about its destruction. It is the responsibility of free men to trust and to celebrate what is constant—birth, struggle, and death are constant, and so is love, though we may not always think so— and to apprehend the nature of change, to be able and willing to change. I speak of change not on the surface but in the depth— change in the sense of renewal. But renewal becomes impossible if one supposes things to be constant that are not— safety, for example, or money, or power. One clings then to chimeras, by which one can only be betrayed, and the entire hope—the entire possibility— of freedom disappears. And by destruction I mean precisely the abdication by Americans of any effort really to be free. The Negro can precipitate this abdication because white Americans have never, in all their long history, been able to look on him as a man like themselves. This point need not be labored; it is proved over and over again by the Negro’s continuing position here, and his indescribable struggle to defeat the stratagems that white Americans have used, and use, to deny him his humanity. America could have used in other ways the energy that both groups have expended in this confl ict. America, of all the Western nations, has been best placed to prove the uselessness and the obsolescence of the concept of color. But it has not dared to accept this opportunity, or even to conceive of it as an opportunity. White Americans have thought of it as their shame, and have envied those more civilized and elegant European nations that were untroubled by the presence of black men on their shores. This is because white Americans have supposed “Europe” and “civilization” to be synonyms—which they are not— and have been distrustful of other standards and other sources of vitality, especially those produced in America itself, and have attempted to behave in all matters as though what was east for Europe was also east for them. What it comes to is that if we, who can scarcely be considered a white nation, persist in thinking of ourselves as one, we condemn ourselves, with the truly white nations, to sterility and decay, whereas if we could accept ourselves as we are, we might bring new life to the Western achievements, and transform them. The price of this transformation is the unconditional freedom of the Negro; it is not too much to say that he, who has been so long rejected, must now be embraced, and at no matter what psychic or social risk. He is the key figure in his country, and the American future is precisely as bright or as dark as his. And the Negro recognizes this, in a negative way. Hence the question: Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?
White Americans fi nd it as difficult as white people elsewhere do to divest themselves of the notion that they are in possession of some intrinsic value that black people need, or want. And this assumption— which, for example, makes the solution to the Negro problem depend on the speed with which Negroes accept and adopt white standards—is revealed in all kinds of striking ways, from Bobby Kennedy’s assurance that a Negro can become President in forty years to the unfortunate tone of warm congratulation with which so many liberals address their Negro equals. It is the Negro, of course, who is presumed to have become equal— an achievement that not only proves the comforting fact that perseverance has no color but also overwhelmingly corroborates the white man’s sense of his own value. Alas, this value can scarcely be corroborated in any other way; there is certainly little enough in the white man’s public or private life that one should desire to imitate. White men, at the bottom of their hearts, know this. Therefore, a vast amount of the energy that goes into what we call the Negro problem is produced by the white man’s profound desire not to be judged by those who are not white, not to be seen as he is, and at the same time a vast amount of the white anguish is rooted in the white man’s equally profound need to be seen as he is, to be released from the tyranny of his mirror. All of us know, whether or not we are able to admit it, that mirrors can only lie, that death by drowning is all that awaits one there. It is for this reason that love is so desperately sought and so cunningly avoided. Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word “love” here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace—not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth. And I submit, then, that the racial tensions that menace Americans today have little to do with real antipathy— on the contrary, indeed— and are involved only symbolically with color. These tensions are rooted in the very same depths as those from which love springs, or murder. The white man’s unadmitted— and apparently, to him, unspeakable—private fears and longings are projected onto the Negro. The only way he can be released from the Negro’s tyrannical power over him is to consent, in effect, to become black himself, to become a part of that suffering and dancing country that he now watches wistfully from the heights of his lonely power and, armed with spiritual traveller’s checks, visits surreptitiously after dark. How can one respect, let alone adopt, the values of a people who do not, on any level whatever,
live the way they say they do, or the way they say they should? I cannot accept the proposition that the four-hundred-year travail of the American Negro should result merely in his attainment of the present level of the American civilization. I am far from convinced that being released from the African witch doctor was worthwhile if I am now—in order to support the moral contradictions and the spiritual aridity of my life— expected to become dependent on the American psychiatrist. It is a bargain I refuse. The only thing white people have that black people need, or should want, is power— and no one holds power forever. White people cannot, in the generality, be taken as models of how to live. Rather, the white man is himself in sore need of new standards, which will release him from his confusion and place him once again in fruitful communion with the depths of his own being. And I repeat: The price of the liberation of the white people is the liberation of the blacks—the total liberation, in the cities, in the towns, before the law, and in the mind. Why, for example— especially knowing the family as I do—I should want to marry your sister is a great mystery to me. But your sister and I have every right to marry if we wish to, and no one has the right to stop us. If she cannot raise me to her level, perhaps I can raise her to mine.
In short, we, the black and the white, deeply need each other here if we are really to become a nation—if we are really, that is, to achieve our identity, our maturity, as men and women. To create one nation has proved to be a hideously difficult task; there is certainly no need now to create two, one black and one white. But white men with far more political power than that possessed by the Nation of Islam movement have been advocating exactly this, in effect, for generations. If this sentiment is honored when it falls from the lips of Senator Byrd, then there is no reason it should not be honored when it falls from the lips of Malcolm X. And any Congressional committee wishing to investigate the latter must also be willing to investigate the former. They are expressing exactly the same sentiments and represent exactly the same danger. There is absolutely no reason to suppose that white people are better equipped to frame the laws by which I am to be governed than I am. It is entirely unacceptable that I should have no voice in the political affairs of my own country, for I am not a ward of America; I am one of the fi rst Americans to arrive on these shores.
This past, the Negro’s past, of rope, fi re, torture, castration, infanticide, rape; death and humiliation; fear by day and night, fear as deep as the marrow of the bone; doubt that he was worthy of life, since everyone
around him denied it; sorrow for his women, for his kinfolk, for his children, who needed his protection, and whom he could not protect; rage, hatred, and murder, hatred for white men so deep that it often turned against him and his own, and made all love, and trust, all joy impossible— this past, this endless struggle to achieve and reveal and confi rm a human identity, human authority, yet contains, for all its horror, something very beautiful. I do not mean to be sentimental about suffering— enough is certainly as good as a feast—but people who cannot suffer can never grow up, can never discover who they are. That man who is forced each day to snatch his manhood, his identity, out of the fi re of human cruelty that rages to destroy it knows, if he survives his effort, and even if he does not survive it, something about himself and human life that no school on earth— and, indeed, no church— can teach. He achieves his own authority, and that is unshakable. This is because, in order to save his life, he is forced to look beneath appearances, to take nothing for granted, to hear the meaning behind the words. If one is continually surviving the worst that life can bring, one eventually ceases to be controlled by a fear of what life can bring; whatever it brings must be borne. And at this level of experience one’s bitterness begins to be palatable, and hatred becomes too heavy a sack to carry. The apprehension of life here so briefly and inadequately sketched has been the experience of generations of Negroes, and it helps to explain how they have endured and how they have been able to produce children of kindergarten age who can walk through mobs to get to school. It demands great force and great cunning continually to assault the mighty and indifferent fortress of white supremacy, as Negroes in this country have done so long. It demands great spiritual resilience not to hate the hater whose foot is on your neck, and an even greater miracle of perception and charity not to teach your child to hate. The Negro boys and girls who are facing mobs today come out of a long line of improbable aristocrats—the only genuine aristocrats this country has produced. I say “this country” because their frame of reference was totally American. They were hewing out of the mountain of white supremacy the stone of their individuality. I have great respect for that unsung army of black men and women who trudged down back lanes and entered back doors, saying “Yes, sir” and “No, Ma’am” in order to acquire a new roof for the schoolhouse, new books, a new chemistry lab, more beds for the dormitories, more dormitories. They did not like saying “Yes, sir” and “No, Ma’am,” but the country was in no hurry to educate Negroes, these black men and women knew that
the job had to be done, and they put their pride in their pockets in order to do it. It is very hard to believe that they were in any way inferior to the white men and women who opened those back doors. It is very hard to believe that those men and women, raising their children, eating their greens, crying their curses, weeping their tears, singing their songs, making their love, as the sun rose, as the sun set, were in any way inferior to the white men and women who crept over to share these splendors after the sun went down. But we must avoid the European error; we must not suppose that, because the situation, the ways, the perceptions of black people so radically differed from those of whites, they were racially superior. I am proud of these people not because of their color but because of their intelligence and their spiritual force and their beauty. The country should be proud of them, too, but, alas, not many people in this country even know of their existence. And the reason for this ignorance is that a knowledge of the role these people played— and play—in American life would reveal more about America to Americans than Americans wish to know.
The American Negro has the great advantage of having never believed that collection of myths to which white Americans cling: that their ancestors were all freedom-loving heroes, that they were born in the greatest country the world has ever seen, or that Americans are invincible in battle and wise in peace, that Americans have always dealt honorably with Mexicans and Indians and all other neighbors or inferiors, that American men are the world’s most direct and virile, that American women are pure. Negroes know far more about white Americans than that; it can almost be said, in fact, that they know about white Americans what parents— or, anyway, mothers—know about their children, and that they very often regard white Americans that way. And perhaps this attitude, held in spite of what they know and have endured, helps to explain why Negroes, on the whole, and until lately, have allowed themselves to feel so little hatred. The tendency has really been, insofar as this was possible, to dismiss white people as the slightly mad victims of their own brainwashing. One watched the lives they led. One could not be fooled about that; one watched the things they did and the excuses that they gave themselves, and if a white man was really in trouble, deep trouble, it was to the Negro’s door that he came. And one felt that if one had had that white man’s worldly advantages, one would never have become as bewildered and as joyless and as thoughtlessly cruel as he. The Negro came to the white man for a roof or for five dollars or for
a letter to the judge; the white man came to the Negro for love. But he was not often able to give what he came seeking. The price was too high; he had too much to lose. And the Negro knew this, too. When one knows this about a man, it is impossible for one to hate him, but unless he becomes a man—becomes equal—it is also impossible for one to love him. Ultimately, one tends to avoid him, for the universal characteristic of children is to assume that they have a monopoly on trouble, and therefore a monopoly on you. (Ask any Negro what he knows about the white people with whom he works. And then ask the white people with whom he works what they know about him.)
How can the American Negro past be used? It is entirely possible that this dishonored past will rise up soon to smite all of us. There are some wars, for example (if anyone on the globe is still mad enough to go to war) that the American Negro will not support, however many of his people may be coerced— and there is a limit to the number of people any government can put in prison, and a rigid limit indeed to the practicality of such a course. A bill is coming in that I fear America is not prepared to pay. “The problem of the twentieth century,” wrote W. E. B. Du Bois around sixty years ago, “is the problem of the color line.” A fearful and delicate problem, which compromises, when it does not corrupt, all the American efforts to build a better world—here, there, or anywhere. It is for this reason that everything white Americans think they believe in must now be reexamined. What one would not like to see again is the consolidation of peoples on the basis of their color. But as long as we in the West place on color the value that we do, we make it impossible for the great unwashed to consolidate themselves according to any other principle. Color is not a human or a personal reality; it is a political reality. But this is a distinction so extremely hard to make that the West has not been able to make it yet. And at the center of this dreadful storm, this vast confusion, stand the black people of this nation, who must now share the fate of a nation that has never accepted them, to which they were brought in chains. Well, if this is so, one has no choice but to do all in one’s power to change that fate, and at no matter what risk— eviction, imprisonment, torture, death. For the sake of one’s children, in order to minimize the bill that they must pay, one must be careful not to take refuge in any delusion— and the value placed on the color of the skin is always and everywhere and forever a delusion. I know that what I am asking is impossible. But in our time, as in every time, the impossible is the least that one can demand— and one is, after all, emboldened by the
spectacle of human history in general, and American Negro history in particular, for it testifies to nothing less than the perpetual achievement of the impossible.
When I was very young, and was dealing with my buddies in those wine- and urine-stained hallways, something in me wondered, What will happen to all that beauty? For black people, though I am aware that some of us, black and white, do not know it yet, are very beautiful. And when I sat at Elijah’s table and watched the baby, the women, and the men, and we talked about God’s— or Allah’s—vengeance, I wondered, when that vengeance was achieved, What will happen to all that beauty then? I could also see that the intransigence and ignorance of the white world might make that vengeance inevitable— a vengeance that does not really depend on, and cannot really be executed by, any person or organization, and that cannot be prevented by any police force or army: historical vengeance, a cosmic vengeance, based on the law that we recognize when we say, “Whatever goes up must come down.” And here we are, at the center of the arc, trapped in the gaudiest, most valuable, and most improbable water wheel the world has ever seen. Everything now, we must assume, is in our hands; we have no right to assume otherwise. If we— and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others— do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world. If we do not now dare everything, the fulfi llment of that prophecy, re-created from the Bible in song by a slave, is upon us: God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fi re next time!
EICHMANN IN JERUSALEM
Hannah Arendt
FEBRUARY 16, 1963
Every morning, the words “Beth Hamishpath” (“The House of Justice”), shouted by the court usher at the top of his voice, make us jump to our feet as they announce the arrival of the three judges, who, bare-headed and in black robes, walk into the courtroom from a side entrance to take their seats on the highest tier of the raised platform at the front of the long hall. They sit at a long table, which is eventually to be covered with innumerable books and more than fi fteen hundred documents. Immediately below the judges are the translators, whose services are needed for direct exchanges between the defendant or his counsel and the court; otherwise, Adolf Eichmann, the German-speaking accused party, like all the other foreigners in the courtroom, follows the Hebrew proceedings through the simultaneous radio transmission, which is excellent in French, bearable in English, and sheer comedy— frequently incomprehensible—in German. (In view of the scrupulous fairness of all the technical arrangements for the trial, it is among the minor mysteries of the new State of Israel that, with its high percentage of German-born people, it was unable to fi nd an adequate translator into the only language the accused and his counsel could understand. The old prejudice against German Jews, once very pronounced in Israel, is no longer strong enough to account for it.) One tier below the translators are the glass booth of the accused and the witness box, facing each other. Finally, on the bottom tier, with their backs to the spectators, are the prosecutor, Attorney General Gideon Hausner, with his staff of four assistant attorneys, and Dr. Robert Servatius, counsel for the defense—
a lawyer from Cologne, chosen by Eichmann and paid by the Israeli government (just as at the Nuremberg Trials all attorneys for the accused were paid by the tribunal of the victorious powers), who during the fi rst weeks is accompanied by an assistant. Whoever planned this auditorium in the newly built House of the People, Beth Ha’am —now guarded from roof to cellar by heavily armed police, and surrounded by high fences, as well as by a wooden row of barracks in the front courtyard, in which all comers are expertly frisked— obviously had a theatre in mind, complete with orchestra and balcony, with proscenium and stage, and with side doors for the actors’ entrances.
At no time, however, is there anything theatrical in the conduct of the judges—Moshe Landau, the presiding judge, Judge Benjamin Halevi, and Judge Yitzhak Raveh. Their walk is unstudied; their sober and intense attention, visibly stiffening under the impact of grief as they listen to the tales of suffering, is natural; their impatience with the prosecutor’s attempt to drag out the hearings is spontaneous and refreshing; their attitude toward the defense is perhaps a shade over-polite, as though they had it always in mind that, to quote the judgment they handed down, “Dr. Servatius stood almost alone in this strenuous legal battle, in an unfamiliar environment”; their manner toward the accused is always beyond reproach. They are so evidently three good and honest men that one is not surprised to see that none of them yields to the greatest of all the temptations to play-act in this setting—that of pretending that they, all three born and educated in Germany, must wait for the Hebrew translation of anything said in German. Judge Landau hardly ever waits to give his answer until the translator has done his work, and he frequently interrupts the translation to correct and improve it, appearing grateful for this bit of distraction from the grim business at hand. In time, during the cross-examination of the accused, he even leads his colleagues to use their German mother tongue in the dialogue with Eichmann— a proof, if proof were still needed, of his remarkable independence of current public opinion in Israel.
There is no doubt from the very beginning that it is Judge Landau who sets the tone, and that he is doing his best—his very best—to prevent this trial from becoming a “show” trial under the direction of the prosecutor, whose love of showmanship is unmistakable. Among the reasons he cannot always succeed is the simple fact that the proceedings happen on a stage before an audience, with the usher’s marvellous shout at the beginning of each session producing the effect of a rising curtain. Clearly, this
courtroom is well suited to the show trial that David Ben-Gurion, Prime Minister of Israel, had in mind when he decided to have Eichmann kidnapped in Argentina and brought to the District Court of Jerusalem to answer the charge that he had played a principal role in “the Final Solution of the Jewish question,” as the Nazis called their plan to exterminate the Jews. And Ben-Gurion, who has rightly been given the title of “architect of the state,” is the invisible stage manager of the proceedings. He does not attend a single one of the sessions; in the courtroom, he speaks with the voice of his Attorney General, who, representing the government, does his best—his very best—to obey his master. And if his best often turns out not to be good enough, the reason is that the trial is presided over by someone who serves Justice as faithfully as Mr. Hausner serves the State of Israel. Justice demands that the accused be prosecuted, defended, and judged, and that all the other questions, though they may seem to be of greater import— of “How could it happen?” and “Why did it happen?,” of “Why the Jews?” and “Why the Germans?,” of “What was the role of other nations?” and “What was the extent to which the Allies shared the responsibility?,” of “How could the Jews, through their own leaders, cooperate in their own destruction?” and “Why did they go to their death like lambs to the slaughter?”—be left in abeyance. Justice insists on the importance of Adolf Eichmann, the man in the glass booth built for his protection: medium-sized, slender, middle-aged, with receding hair, ill-fitting teeth, and nearsighted eyes, who throughout the trial keeps craning his scraggy neck toward the bench (not once does he turn to face the audience), and who desperately tries to maintain his selfcontrol— and mostly succeeds, despite a nervous tic, to which his mouth must have become subject long before this trial started. On trial are his deeds, not the sufferings of the Jews, not the German people or mankind, not even anti-Semitism and racism.
And Justice turns out to be a much sterner master than the Prime Minister. The latter’s rule, as Mr. Hausner is not slow in demonstrating, is permissive; it permits the prosecutor to give press conferences and interviews for television during the trial (the American program, sponsored by the Glickman Corporation, is constantly interrupted—business as usual—by real-estate advertising), and even “spontaneous” outbursts to reporters in the court building (he is sick of cross-examining Eichmann, who answers all questions with lies); it permits frequent side glances into the audience, and the theatrics characteristic of a conspicuous vanity, which fi nally achieves its triumph in the White House with
a compliment on “a job well done” by the President of the United States. Justice does not permit anything of the sort; it demands seclusion, it requires sorrow rather than anger, and it prescribes the most careful abstention from all the nice pleasures of putting oneself in the limelight. Yet no matter how consistently the judges shun the limelight, there they are, seated at the top of the platform, facing the audience as from a stage. The audience is supposed to represent the whole world, and in the fi rst few weeks it indeed consisted chiefly of newspapermen and magazine writers who had flocked to Jerusalem from the four corners of the earth. They were to watch a spectacle as sensational as the Nuremberg Trials; only this time, Mr. Hausner noted, “the tragedy of Jewry as a whole was the central concern.” In fact, said Hausner, “if we charge him [Eichmann] also with crimes against non-Jews . . . this is” not because he committed them but, surprisingly, “because we make no ethnic distinctions. ” That was certainly a remarkable sentence for a prosecutor to utter in his opening speech; it proved to be the key sentence in the case for the prosecution. For this case was built on what the Jews had suffered, not on what Eichmann had done. And, according to Mr. Hausner, that amounted to the same thing, because “there was only one man who had been concerned almost entirely with the Jews, whose business had been their destruction, whose role in the establishment of the iniquitous regime had been limited to them. That was Adolf Eichmann.” Was it not logical to bring before the court all the facts of Jewish suffering (which, of course, were never in dispute) and then look for evidence that, in one way or another, would connect Eichmann with what had happened? The Nuremberg Trials, where the defendants had been “indicted for crimes against members of many and various nations,” had left the Jewish tragedy out of account, Hausner said, for the simple reason that Eichmann had not been there. Did Hausner really believe the Nuremberg Trials would have paid greater attention to the fate of the Jews if Eichmann had been in the dock? Hardly. Like almost everybody else in Israel, he believed that only a Jewish court could render justice to Jews, and that it was the business of Jews to sit in judgment on their enemies.
If the audience was to be the world and the play was to be the huge panorama of Jewish suffering, the reality was falling short of expectations and failing to accomplish its purpose. The journalists remained faithful for no more than two weeks, and then the audience changed drastically. It was now supposed to consist of Israelis, and, specifically, of those who were too young to know the story or, as in the case of Oriental
Jews, had never been told it. The trial was supposed to show them what it meant to live among non-Jews, to convince them that only in Israel could a Jew be safe and live an honorable life. (For correspondents, the lesson was spelled out in a little booklet on Israel’s legal system, which was handed to the press. Its author, Doris Lankin, cites a decision of Israel’s Supreme Court whereby two fathers who had “abducted their children and brought them to Israel” were directed to send them back to their mothers, living abroad, who had a legal right to their custody. This, says the author—no less proud of such strict legality than Hausner of his willingness to prosecute a murder charge even when the victims of the murder were non-Jews—“despite the fact that to send the children back to maternal custody and care would be committing them to waging an unequal struggle against the hostile elements in the Diaspora.”) But in actuality there were hardly any young people in the audience, and it did not consist of Israelis, as distinguished from Jews. It was fi lled with “survivors”—middle-aged and elderly people, immigrants from Europe, like myself—who knew by heart all that there was to know, and who were in no mood to learn any lessons and certainly did not need this trial to draw their own conclusions. As witness followed witness and horror was piled upon horror, they sat there and listened in public to stories they would hardly have been able to endure in private, when they would have had to face the storyteller. And the more “the calamity [in Hausner’s words] of the Jewish people in this generation” unfolded, and the more grandiose Hausner’s rhetoric became, the paler and more ghostlike became the figure in the glass booth, and no fi nger-wagging (“And there sits the monster responsible for all this”) could summon him back to life. It was precisely the play aspect of the trial that collapsed under the weight of the hair-raising atrocities. A trial resembles a play in that both focus on the doer, not on the victim. A show trial, to be effective, needs even more urgently than an ordinary trial a limited and well-defi ned outline of what the doer did, and how. In the center of a trial can only be the one who did—in this respect, he is like the hero in the play— and if he suffers, he must suffer for what he has done, not for what he has caused others to suffer. No one knew this better than the presiding judge, before whose eyes the trial began to deteriorate into a bloody spectacle, or, as the judgment called it, “a rudderless ship tossed about by the waves.” But if his efforts to prevent this were often defeated, the defeat was, strangely, in part the fault of the defense, which hardly ever rose to challenge any testimony, no matter how irrelevant or immaterial it might
be. Dr. Servatius (as everybody invariably addressed him) was a bit bolder when it came to the submission of documents, and the most impressive of his rare interventions occurred when the prosecution introduced as evidence the diaries of Hans Frank, wartime Governor General of Poland and one of the major war criminals hanged at Nuremberg. “I have only one question,” Dr. Servatius said. “Is the name Adolf Eichmann, the name of the accused, mentioned in those twenty-nine volumes [in fact, it was thirty-eight]? . . . The name Adolf Eichmann is not mentioned in all those twenty-nine volumes. . . . Thank you, no more questions.”
Thus, the trial never became a play, but the show that Ben-Gurion had had in mind did take place— or, rather, the “lessons” he thought should be offered to Israelis and Arabs, to Jews and Gentiles; that is, to the whole world. These lessons to be drawn from an identical show were meant to be different for the different recipients. Ben-Gurion had outlined them before the trial started, in a number of articles that were designed to explain why Israel had kidnapped the accused. There was the lesson to the non-Jewish world: “I want to establish before the nations of the world how millions of people, because they happened to be Jews, and one million babies, because they happened to be Jewish babies, were murdered by the Nazis.” Or, in the words of Davar, the organ of BenGurion’s Mapai party: “Let world opinion know this, that not Nazi Germany alone was responsible for the destruction of six million Jews of Europe.” Hence, again in Ben-Gurion’s own words, “We want the nations of the world to know . . . and they should be ashamed.” The Jews in the Diaspora were to remember how “four-thousand-year-old Judaism, with its spiritual creations, its ethical strivings, its Messianic aspirations, had always faced a hostile world,” how the Jews had degenerated until they went to their death like sheep, and how only the establishment of a Jewish state had enabled Jews to hit back, as Israelis had done in the War of Independence, in the Suez adventure, and in the almost daily incidents on Israel’s unhappy borders. And if the Jews outside Israel had to be shown the difference between Israeli heroism and Jewish submissive meekness, there was a complementary lesson for the Israelis; for “the generation of Israelis who have grown up since the holocaust” were in danger of losing their ties with the Jewish people and, by implication, with their own history. “It is necessary that our youth remember what happened to the Jewish people. We want them to know the most tragic facts in our history.” Finally, one of the motives in bringing Eichmann to
trial was “to ferret out other Nazis—for example, the connection between the Nazis and some Arab rulers.”
If these had been the only justifications for bringing Adolf Eichmann to the District Court of Jerusalem, the trial would have been a failure on most counts. In some respects, the lessons were superfluous, and in others they were positively misleading. Thanks to Hitler, anti-Semitism has been discredited, perhaps not forever but certainly for the time being, and this is not because the Jews have become more popular all of a sudden but because not only Ben-Gurion but most people have “realized that in our day the gas chamber and the soap factory are what antiSemitism may lead to.” Equally superfluous was the lesson to the Jews in the Diaspora, who hardly needed a great catastrophe in which a third of their people perished to be convinced of the world’s hostility. Not only has their conviction of the eternal and ubiquitous nature of anti-Semitism been the most potent ideological factor in the Zionist involvement since the Dreyfus Affair; it must also have been the cause of the otherwise inexplicable readiness of the German-Jewish community to negotiate with the Nazi authorities during the early stages of the regime. This conviction produced a fatal inability to distinguish between friend and foe; the German Jews underestimated their enemies because they somehow thought that all Gentiles were alike.
The contrast between Israeli heroism and the submissive meekness with which Jews went to their death— arriving on time at the transportation points, walking under their own power to the places of execution, digging their own graves, undressing and making neat piles of their clothing, and lying down side by side to be shot— seemed a telling point, and the prosecutor, asking witness after witness, “Why did you not protest?,” “Why did you board the train?,” “Fifteen thousand people were standing there and hundreds of guards facing you—why didn’t you revolt and charge and attack these guards?,” harped on it for all it was worth. But the sad truth of the matter is that the point was ill taken, for no nonJewish group or non-Jewish people had behaved differently. Sixteen years ago, while still under the direct impact of the events, a former French inmate of Buchenwald, David Rousset, described, in Les Jours de Notre Mort, the logic that obtained in all concentration camps: “The triumph of the S.S. demands that the tortured victim allow himself to be led to the noose without protesting, that he renounce and abandon himself to the point of ceasing to affi rm his identity. And it is not for nothing. It is not gratuitously, out of sheer sadism, that the S.S. men desire
his defeat. They know that the system which succeeds in destroying its victim before he mounts the scaffold . . . is incomparably the best for keeping a whole people in slavery. In submission. Nothing is more terrible than these processions of human beings going like dummies to their death.” The court received no answer to this cruel and silly question, but one could easily have found an answer had he permitted his imagination to dwell for a few minutes on the fate of those Dutch Jews who in 1941, in the old Jewish quarter of Amsterdam, dared to attack a German security police detachment. Four hundred and thirty Jews were arrested in reprisal, and they were literally tortured to death, being sent fi rst to Buchenwald and then to the Austrian camp of Mauthausen. Month after month, they died a thousand deaths, and every single one of them would have envied his brethren in Auschwitz had he known about them. There exist many things considerably worse than death, and the S.S. saw to it that none of them was ever very far from the mind and imagination of their victims. In this respect, perhaps even more significantly than in others, the deliberate attempt in Jerusalem to tell only the Jewish side of the story distorted the truth, even the Jewish truth. The glory of the uprising in the Warsaw ghetto and the heroism of the few others who fought back lay precisely in their having refused the comparatively easy death that the Nazis offered them—before the fi ring squad or in the gas chamber. And the witnesses in Jerusalem who testified to resistance and rebellion, to “the small place the uprising had in this history of the holocaust,” confi rmed the known fact that only the very young had been capable of taking the “decision that we cannot go and be slaughtered like sheep.”
In one respect, Ben-Gurion’s expectations for the trial were not altogether disappointed, for it did indeed become an important instrument for ferreting out other Nazis and criminals—but not in the Arab countries, which had openly offered refuge to hundreds of them. The wartime relationship between the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and the Nazis was no secret; he had hoped they would help him in the implementation of some “Final Solution” of the Jewish question in the Near East. Hence, newspapers in Damascus and Beirut, in Cairo and Amman, did not hide their sympathy for Eichmann or their regret that he had not “fi nished the job”; a broadcast from Cairo on the day the trial opened went as far as to inject a slightly anti-German note into its comments, complaining that there was not “a single incident in which one German plane flew over one Jewish settlement [in Palestine] and dropped one bomb on it
throughout the last world war.” That Arab nationalists have been in sympathy with Nazism is notorious, and neither Ben-Gurion nor this trial was needed “to ferret them out”; they were never in hiding. The trial revealed only that all rumors about Eichmann’s connection with Haj Amin el Husseini, the wartime Mufti of Jerusalem, were unfounded. (Along with other departmental heads, he had once been introduced to the Mufti during a reception at an S.S. office in Berlin.) Documents produced by the prosecution showed that the Mufti had been in close contact with the German Foreign Office and with Himmler, but this was nothing new. But if Ben-Gurion’s remark about “the connection between the Nazis and some Arab rulers” was pointless, his failure to mention present-day West Germany in this context was surprising. Of course, it was reassuring to hear that Israel “does not hold Adenauer responsible for Hitler,” and that “for us a decent German, although he belongs to the same nation that twenty years ago helped to murder millions of Jews, is a decent human being.” (There was no mention of decent Arabs.) While the German Federal Republic has not yet recognized the State of Israel—presumably out of fear that the Arab countries might thereupon recognize Ulbricht’s Germany—it has paid seven hundred and thirty-seven million dollars in reparation to Israel during the last ten years; the reparation payments will soon come to an end, and Israel is now trying to arrange with West Germany for a long-term loan. Hence, the relationship between the two countries, and particularly the personal relationship between Ben-Gurion and Adenauer, has been quite good, and if, as an aftermath of the trial, some deputies in the Knesset, the Israeli Parliament, succeeded in imposing certain restraints on the cultural-exchange program with West Germany, this certainly was not hoped for, or even foreseen, by Ben-Gurion. It is more noteworthy that he did not foresee, or did not care to mention, the fact that Eichmann’s capture would trigger the fi rst serious effort made by West Germans to bring to trial at least those war criminals who were directly implicated in murder. The Central Agency for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes, which was belatedly set up by the eleven West German states in 1958 (barely two years before—in May, 1960 —the West German statute of limitations wiped out all offenses except fi rst-degree murder, for which the time limit is twenty years), and of which Prosecutor Erwin Schüle is the head, had run into all kinds of difficulties, caused partly by the unwillingness of German witnesses to cooperate and partly by the unwillingness of the local courts to prosecute on the basis of material sent to
them from the Central Agency. It was not that the trial in Jerusalem produced any important new evidence of the kind needed for the discovery of Eichmann’s associates but that the news of Eichmann’s sensational capture and the prospect of his trial had an impact strong enough to persuade the local courts to use Mr. Schüle’s fi ndings and to overcome the native reluctance to do anything about the “murderers in our midst” by the time-honored expedient of posting rewards for the capture of well-known criminals.
The results were amazing. Seven months after Eichmann’s arrival in Jerusalem— and four months before the opening of the trial—Richard Baer, successor to Rudolf Höss as commandant of Auschwitz, was fi nally arrested. Then, in rapid succession, most of the members of the so-called Eichmann Commando—Franz Novak, Eichmann’s transportation officer, who had been living as a printer in Austria; Dr. Otto Hunsche, his legal expert and his assistant in Hungary, who had settled as a lawyer in West Germany; Hermann Krumey, Eichmann’s second in command in Hungary, who had become a druggist; Gustav Richter, former “Jewish adviser” in Rumania; and Dr. Günther Zöpf, who had fi lled the same post in Amsterdam—were arrested, too. (Although evidence against these five had been published in Germany years before, in books and magazine articles, not one of them had found it necessary to live under an assumed name.) For the fi rst time since the close of the war, German newspapers were full of stories about trials of Nazi criminals— all of them mass murderers— and the reluctance of the local courts to prosecute these crimes still showed itself in the fantastically lenient sentences meted out to those convicted. (Thus, Dr. Hunsche, who was personally responsible for a last-minute deportation of some twelve hundred Hungarian Jews, of whom at least six hundred were killed, received a sentence of five years of hard labor; Dr. Otto Bradfisch, of the Einsatzgruppen, the mobile killing units of the S.S. in the East, was sentenced to ten years of hard labor for the killing of fi fteen thousand Jews; and Joseph Lechthaler, who had “liquidated” the Jewish inhabitants of Slutsk and Smolevichi, in Russia, was sentenced to three years and six months.) Among the new arrests were people of great prominence under the Nazis, most of whom had already been denazified by the German courts. One was S.S. Obergruppenführer Karl Wolff, former chief of Himmler’s personal staff, who, according to a document submitted in 1946 at Nuremberg, had greeted “with particular joy” the news that “for two weeks now a train has been carrying, every day, five thou-
sand members of the Chosen People” from Warsaw to Treblinka, one of the Eastern killing centers. He still awaits trial. The trial of Wilhelm Koppe, who had at fi rst managed the gassing of Jews in Chelmno and then become the successor of Friedrich-Wilhelm Krüger in Poland, in a high post in the S.S. whose duties included making Poland judenrein (Jew-clean)—in postwar West Germany, he was the director of a chocolate factory—has not yet taken place. Occasional harsh sentences were even less reassuring, for they were meted out to offenders like Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, a former S.S. Obergruppenführer. He was tried in 1961 for his participation in the Röhm rebellion in 1934 , was sentenced to four and a half years, and then was indicted again in 1962 for the killing of six German Communists in 1933, tried before a jury in Nuremberg, and sentenced to life. Neither indictment mentioned that Bach-Zelewski had been anti-partisan chief on the Russian front or that he had participated in the Jewish massacres at Minsk and Mogilev, in White Russia. Should a German court, on the pretext that war crimes are no crimes, make “ethnic distinctions”? And is it possible that what was an unusually harsh sentence (for a German postwar court) was arrived at because Bach-Zelewski was among the very few Nazi leaders who had tried to protect Jews from the Einsatzgruppen, suffered a nervous breakdown after the mass killings, and testified for the prosecution in Nuremberg? (He was also the only such leader who in 1952 had denounced himself publicly for mass murder, but he was never prosecuted for it.) There is little hope that things will change now, even though the Adenauer administration has been forced to weed out of the judiciary a hundred and forty– odd judges and prosecutors, along with many police officers, with a more than ordinarily compromising past, and to dismiss the chief prosecutor of the Federal Supreme Court, Wolfgang Immerwahr Fränkel, because, his middle name notwithstanding, he had been less than candid when he was asked about his Nazi past. It has been estimated that of the eleven thousand five hundred judges in the Bundesrepublik, five thousand were active in the courts under the Hitler regime. In November, 1962 , shortly after the purging of the judiciary and six months after Eichmann’s name had disappeared from the news, the long-awaited trial of Martin Fellenz took place at Flensburg in an almost empty courtroom. The former Higher S.S. and Police Leader, who had been a prominent member of the Free Democratic Party in Adenauer’s Germany, was arrested in June, 1960, a few weeks after Eichmann’s capture. He was accused of participation in, and partial responsibility for, the murder of
forty thousand Jews in Poland. After more than six weeks of detailed testimony, the prosecutor demanded the maximum penalty— a life sentence, to be served at hard labor. And the court sentenced him to four years, two and a half of which he had already served while waiting in jail. Nevertheless, there can be no doubt that the Eichmann trial had its deepest and most far-reaching consequences in Germany. The attitude of the German people toward their own past, which all experts on the German question had puzzled over for fi fteen years, could hardly have been more clearly demonstrated: they themselves did not care much about it one way or the other, and did not particularly mind the presence of murderers at large in the country, since none of these particular murderers were likely to commit murder now, of their own free will; however, if world opinion— or, rather, what the Germans call das Ausland, collecting all countries outside Germany into a singular noun—became obstinate and demanded that these people be punished, they were perfectly willing to oblige, at least up to a point. When Eichmann was captured, Chancellor Adenauer had foreseen embarrassment and had voiced a fear that the trial would “stir up again all the horrors” and produce a new wave of anti-German feeling throughout the world— as it did. During the ten months that Israel needed to prepare the trial, Germany was busy bracing herself against its predictable results by showing an unprecedented zeal for searching out and prosecuting Nazi criminals within the country. At no time, however, did either the German authorities or any significant segment of public opinion demand Eichmann’s extradition, which seemed the obvious move, since every sovereign state is jealous of its right to sit in judgment on its own offenders. (The official objection of the Adenauer government that such a move was not possible because there existed no extradition treaty between Israel and West Germany is not valid; it meant only that Israel could not have been forced to extradite. Fritz Bauer, Attorney General of Hessen, applied to the federal government in Bonn to start extradition proceedings. But Mr. Bauer’s feelings in this matter were the feelings of a German Jew, and they were not shared by German public opinion. His application was not only refused by Bonn, it was hardly noticed and remained totally unsupported. Another argument against extradition, offered by the observers the West German government sent to Jerusalem, was that Germany had abolished capital punishment and hence was unable to mete out the sentence Eichmann deserved. In view of the leniency shown by German courts to Nazi murderers, it was difficult not to suspect that this objection was made in
bad faith. Surely, the greatest political hazard of an Eichmann trial in Germany would have been that a German court might not have given him the maximum penalty under German law.)
Another aspect of the matter was at once more delicate and more relevant to the political situation in Germany. It was one thing to ferret out mass murderers and other criminals from their hiding places, and it was another thing to fi nd them prominent and active in the public realm—to encounter innumerable men in the federal and state administrations whose careers had bloomed under the Hitler regime. To be sure, if the Adenauer administration had been too sensitive in employing officials with a compromising Nazi past, there might have been no administration at all. For the truth is, of course, the exact opposite of what Dr. Adenauer asserted it to be when he said that only “a relatively small percentage” of Germans had been Nazis, and that “a great majority were happy to help their Jewish fellow-citizens when they could.” (At least one West German newspaper, the Frankfurter Rundschau, asked itself the obvious question, long overdue—why so many people who must have known, for instance, the record of Wolfgang Immerwahr Frankel had kept silent— and then came up with the even more obvious answer: “Because they themselves felt incriminated.”) The logic of the Eichmann trial, as Ben-Gurion conceived of it— a trial stressing general issues, to the detriment of legal niceties—would have demanded exposure of the complicity of all German bureaus and authorities in the so-called Final Solution of the Jewish question; of all civil servants in the state ministries; of the regular armed forces, with their General Staff; of the judiciary; and of the business world. But although the prosecution went as far afield as to put witness after witness on the stand who testified to things that, while gruesome and true enough, had only the slightest connection, or none, with the deeds of the accused, it carefully avoided touching upon this highly explosive matter—upon the almost ubiquitous complicity, stretching far beyond the ranks of the Party membership. (There were widespread rumors prior to the trial that Eichmann had named “several hundred prominent personalities of the Federal Republic as his accomplices,” but these rumors were not true. In his opening speech, Mr. Hausner still mentioned Eichmann’s “accomplices in the crime [who] were neither gangsters nor men of the underworld,” and promised that we should “encounter them—the doctors and lawyers, scholars, bankers, and economists—in those councils that resolved to exterminate the Jews.” This promise was not kept—nor could it have
been kept in the form in which it was made, for in the Nazi regime there were no “councils that resolved” anything, and the “robed dignitaries with academic degrees” made no decision to exterminate the Jews; they came together only to plan the necessary steps in carrying out an order given by Hitler.) Still, one case of complicity was brought to the attention of the court—that of Dr. Hans Globke, who, more than twenty-five years ago, was co-author of an infamous commentary on the Nuremberg Laws and, somewhat later, author of the brilliant idea of compelling all German Jews to take “Israel” or “Sarah” as a middle name, and who is today one of Adenauer’s closest advisers. And Globke’s name— and only his name—was inserted into the proceedings by the defense, and probably only in the hope of “persuading” the Adenauer government to start proceedings to extradite Eichmann. Still, former Ministry Official and present Undersecretary of State Globke doubtless had more right than the former Mufti of Jerusalem to figure in the history of what the Jews had actually suffered at the hands of the Nazis.
And it was history that, as far as the prosecution was concerned, stood at the center of the trial. “It is not an individual that is in the dock at this historic trial, and not the Nazi regime alone,” Ben-Gurion said, “but anti-Semitism throughout history.” The tone set by Ben-Gurion was faithfully followed by Hausner. He began his opening address (which lasted through three sessions) with Pharaoh In Egypt and Haman’s decree “to destroy, to slay, and to cause them [the Jews] to perish.” He then proceeded to quote from Ezekiel’s words “And when I passed by thee, and saw thee polluted in thine own blood, I said unto thee: ‘In thy blood, live!,’ ” explaining that they must be understood as “the imperative that has confronted this nation ever since its fi rst appearance on the stage of history.” It was bad history and cheap rhetoric; worse, it was clearly at cross-purposes with putting Eichmann on trial at all, since it suggested that perhaps he was only an innocent executor of some mysteriously foreordained destiny, or even, for that matter, of anti-Semitism, which had been necessary to blaze the trail of “the bloodstained road travelled by this people” to fulfi ll its destiny. A few sessions later, after Salo W. Baron, Professor of Jewish History at Columbia University, had testified to the more recent history of Eastern European Jewry, Dr. Servatius could no longer resist temptation and asked the obvious questions: “Why did all this bad luck fall upon the Jewish people?” and “Don’t you think that irrational motives are at the basis of the fate of this people? Beyond the understanding of a human being?” Is not there perhaps something
like “the spirit of history, which brings history forward . . . without the influence of men?” Is not Mr. Hausner basically in agreement with “the school of historical law”— an allusion to Hegel— and has he not shown that what “the leaders do will not always lead to the aim and destination they wanted?” And Dr. Servatius added, “Here the intention was to destroy the Jewish people and the objective was not reached and a new flourishing state came into being.” The argument of the defense had now come perilously close to the newest anti-Semitic theory about the Elders of Zion, which had been set forth in all seriousness a few weeks earlier in the old Egyptian National Assembly by Hussain Zulficar Sabri, Nasser’s Deputy Foreign Minister: Hitler was innocent of the slaughter of the Jews; he was a victim of the Zionists, who had compelled “Hitler to perpetrate crimes and to create the legend that would eventually enable them to achieve their aim—the creation of the State of Israel.” Except that Dr. Servatius, following the philosophy of history expounded by the prosecutor, had put History in the place of the Elders of Zion.
Despite the intentions of Ben-Gurion and the efforts of the prosecution, there remained an individual in the dock, a person of flesh and blood, and even if Ben-Gurion, as he claimed, did not “care what verdict is delivered against Eichmann,” it was undeniably the sole task of the Jerusalem court to deliver one.
IIN COLD BLOOD: THE CORNER
Truman Capote
OCTOBER 16, 1965
nstitutional dourness and cheerful domesticity coexist on the fourth floor of the Finney County Courthouse, in Garden City, Kansas. The presence of the county jail supplies the fi rst quality, and the so-called Sheriff’s Residence, a pleasant apartment separated from the five cells that make up the jail proper by steel doors and a short corridor, accounts for the second. For the last three years, the Sheriff’s Residence has in fact been occupied not by the sheriff, Earl Robinson, but by the under-sheriff and his wife, Wendle and Josephine— or Josie—Meier. The Meiers have been married more than twenty years. They are much alike—tall people with weight and strength to spare, with wide hands, with square and calm faces, and a kindly look, the last being especially true of Mrs. Meier, a direct and practical woman who nevertheless seems illuminated by a quite mystical serenity. As the under-sheriff’s helpmate, she puts in long hours; between five in the morning, when she begins the day by reading a chapter in the Bible, and 10 p.m. , her bedtime, she cooks for the prisoners, sews and darns for them, does their laundry, takes splendid care of her husband, and looks after the fiveroom Sheriff’s Residence, with its gemütlich mélange of plump hassocks and squashy chairs and cream-colored lace window curtains. The Meiers have one child, a daughter, who is married to a Kansas City policeman, so the couple live alone— or, as Mrs. Meier more correctly puts it, “alone except for whoever happens to be in the ladies’ cell.”
The jail actually contains six cells. The sixth, the one reserved for female prisoners, is actually an isolated unit situated inside the Sheriff’s Residence; indeed, it adjoins the Meiers’ kitchen. “But that don’t worry me,” says Josie Meier. “I enjoy the company. Having somebody to talk to while I’m doing my kitchen work. Most of those women, you got to feel sorry for them. Just met up with Old Man Trouble is all. Course, Smith and Hickock was a different matter. Far as I know, Perry Smith was the fi rst man ever stayed in the ladies’ cell. The reason was the sheriff wanted to keep him and Hickock separated from each other until after their trial.” Perry Edward Smith and Richard Eugene Hickock were a young pair of ex-convicts who had confessed that in November of 1959 they murdered in his home a prominent Finney County farm rancher, Herbert W. Clutter, and three members of his family: his wife, Bonnie; their sixteen-year-old daughter, Nancy; and a son, Kenyon, fi fteen. Smith and Hickock were arrested on December 30, 1959, in Las Vegas, Nevada; on January 6, 1960, they were returned to Garden City to await trial. Robbery and a desire to avoid the consequences of possible identification were the confessed motives for the crime.
“The afternoon they brought them in, I made six apple pies and baked some bread and all the while kept track of the goings on down there on Courthouse Square,” Josie recalls. “My kitchen window overlooks the square; you couldn’t want a better view. I’m no judge of crowds, but I’d guess there were several hundred people waiting to see the boys that killed the Clutter family. I never met any of the Clutters myself, but from everything I’ve ever heard about them they must have been very fi ne people. What happened to them is hard to forgive, and I know Wendle was worried how the crowd might act when they caught sight of Smith and Hickock. He was afraid somebody might try to get at them. So I kind of had my heart in my mouth when I saw the cars arrive, saw the reporters— all the newspaper fellows running and pushing. But by then it was dark, after six, and bitter cold, and more than half the crowd had given up and gone home. The ones that stayed, they didn’t say boo. Only stared. Later, when they brought the boys upstairs, the fi rst one I saw was Hickock. He had on light summer pants and just an old cloth shirt. Surprised he didn’t catch pneumonia, considering how cold it was. But he looked sick, all right. White as a ghost. Well, it must be a terrible experience—to be stared at by a horde of strangers, to have to walk among them, and them knowing who you are and what you did. Then they brought up Smith. I had some supper ready to serve them in their
cells—hot soup and coffee and some sandwiches and pie. Ordinarily, we feed just twice a day—breakfast at seven-thirty, and at four-thirty we serve the main meal—but I didn’t want those fellows going to bed on an empty stomach; seemed to me they must be feeling bad enough without that. But when I took Smith his supper— carried it in on a tray—he said he wasn’t hungry. He was looking out the window of the ladies’ cell. Standing with his back to me. That window has the same view as my kitchen window—trees and the square and the tops of houses. I told him, ‘Just taste the soup—it’s vegetable, and not out of a can. I made it myself. The pie, too.’ In about an hour, I went back for the tray, and he hadn’t touched a crumb. He was still at the window. Like he hadn’t moved. It was snowing, and I remember saying it was the fi rst snow of the year, and how we’d had such a beautiful long autumn right till then. And now the snow had come. And then I asked him if he had any special dish he liked—if he did, I’d try and fi x it for him the next day. He turned round and looked at me. Suspicious. Like I might be mocking him. Then he said something about a movie; he had such a quiet way of speaking— almost a whisper. Wanted to know if I had seen a movie—I forget the name. Anyway, I hadn’t seen it; never have been much for picture shows. He said this show took place in Biblical times, and there was a scene where a man was flung off a balcony, thrown to a mob of men and women, who tore him to pieces. And he said that was what came to mind when he saw the crowd on the square. The man being torn apart. And the idea that maybe that was what they might do to him. Said it scared him so bad his stomach still hurt. Which was why he couldn’t eat. Course, he was wrong, and I told him so—nobody was going to harm him, regardless of what he’d done; folks around here aren’t like that. We talked some—he was very shy—but after a while he said, ‘One thing I really like is Spanish rice.’ So I promised to make him some, and he smiled, kind of, and I decided—well, he wasn’t the worst young man I ever saw. That night, after I’d gone to bed, I said as much to my husband. But Wendle snorted. Wendle was one of the fi rst on the scene after the crime was discovered. He said he wished I’d been out at the Clutter place when they found the bodies. Then I could’ve judged for myself just how gentle Mr. Smith was. Him and his friend Hickock. He said they’d cut out your heart and never bat an eye. There was no denying it. Not with four people dead. And I lay awake wondering if either one was bothered by it—the thought of those four graves.”
A month passed, and another, and it snowed some part of almost every day. Snow whitened the wheat-tawny countryside, heaped the streets of the town, hushed them. The topmost branches of a snow-laden elm touched the window of the ladies’ cell. Squirrels lived in the tree, and Perry, after weeks of tempting them with scraps left over from breakfast, lured one off a branch onto the window sill and through the bars. It was a male squirrel, with auburn fur. He named the squirrel Big Red, and Big Red soon settled down, apparently content to share his friend’s captivity. Perry taught him several tricks—to play with a paper ball, to beg, to perch on his shoulder. All this helped to pass time, but still there were many hours the prisoner had somehow to lose. He was not allowed to read newspapers, and he was bored by the magazines Mrs. Meier lent him— old issues of Good Housekeeping and McCall’s. But he found things to do: fi le his fi ngernails with an emery board and buff them to a silky pink sheen; comb and comb his lotion-soaked-and-scented hair; brush his teeth three and four times a day; shave and shower almost as often. And he kept the cell, which contained a toilet, a washbasin, a shower stall, a cot, a chair, and a table, as neat as his person. He was proud of a compliment Mrs. Meier had paid him. “Look!” she had said, pointing at his bunk. “Look at that blanket! You could bounce dimes.” But it was at the table that he spent most of his waking life. He ate his meals there; it was where he sat when he sketched portraits of Big Red and did drawings of flowers, and the face of Jesus, and the faces and torsos of imaginary women; and it was where, on cheap sheets of ruled paper, he made diarylike notes of day-to-day occurrences.
“Thursday 7 January. Dewey here. Brought carton cigarettes. Also typed copies of Statement for my signature. I declined.” The “Statement,” a seventyeight-page document he had dictated to the Finney County court stenographer, recounted admissions—including the murder of the Clutter father and son—that he had already made to Alvin Dewey and Clarence Duntz, Special Agents of the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, who had questioned him in Las Vegas after his arrest. Dewey, speaking of his encounter with Perry Smith on January 7 th, remembered that he had been “very surprised” when Perry refused to sign the statement. “It wasn’t important,” Dewey said. “I could always testify in court as to the oral confession he’d made to Duntz and myself. And, of course, Hickock had
given us a signed confession while we were still in Las Vegas—in which he accused Smith of having committed all four murders. But I was curious. I asked Perry why he’d changed his mind. And he said, ‘Everything in my statement is accurate except for two details. If you’ll let me correct those items, then I’ll sign it.’ Well, I could guess the items he meant. Because the only serious difference between his story and Hickock’s was that he denied having murdered the Clutters singlehanded. Until now, he’d sworn Hickock killed Nancy and her mother. And I was right! That’s just what he wanted to do— admit that Hickock had been telling the truth, and that it was he, Perry Smith, who had shot and killed the whole family. He said he’d lied about it because, in his words, ‘I wanted to fi x Dick. For being such a coward. Dropping his guts all over the goddam floor.’ And the reason he’d decided to set the record straight wasn’t that he suddenly felt any kinder toward Hickock. According to him, he was doing it out of consideration for Hickock’s parents— said he was sorry for Dick’s mother. Said, ‘She’s a real sweet person. It might be some comfort to her to know Dick never pulled the trigger. None of it would have happened without him—in a way, it was mostly his fault—but the fact remains I’m the one who killed them.’ But I wasn’t certain I believed it. Not to the extent of letting him alter his statement. As I say, we weren’t dependent on a formal confession from Smith to prove any part of our case. With or without it, we had enough to hang them ten times over.” Among the elements contributing to Dewey’s confidence was the recovery of a radio and a pair of binoculars that the murderers had stolen from the Clutter house and eventually disposed of in Mexico City (where a K.B.I. agent named Harold Nye, having flown there for the purpose, traced them to a pawnshop). Moreover, Perry, while dictating his statement, had revealed the whereabouts of other potent evidence. “We hit the highway and drove east,” he’d said, in the process of describing what he and Dick had done after leaving Holcomb, the village where the murders took place. “Drove like hell, Dick driving. I think we both felt very high. I did. Very high, and very relieved at the same time. Couldn’t stop laughing, neither one of us. Suddenly it all seemed very funny—I don’t know why, it just did. But the gun was dripping blood, and my clothes were stained—there was even blood in my hair. So we turned off onto a country road, and drove maybe eight miles, till we were way out on the prairie. You could hear coyotes. We smoked a cigarette, and Dick went on making jokes. About what had happened back there. I got out of the car and siphoned some water out of the water tank and washed the blood
off the gun barrel. Then I scraped a hole in the ground with Dick’s hunting knife—the one I used on Mr. Clutter— and buried in it the empty shells and all the leftover nylon cord and adhesive tape. After that, we drove till we came to U.S. 83, and headed east toward Kansas City and Olathe [Hickock’s home town]. Around dawn, Dick stopped at one of those picnic places—what they call rest areas—where they have open fi replaces. We built a fi re and burned stuff. The gloves we’d worn, and my shirt. Dick said he wished we had an ox to roast; he said he’d never been so hungry. It was almost noon when we got to Olathe. Dick dropped me at my hotel, and went on home to have Sunday dinner with his family. Yes, he took the knife with him. The gun, too.” K.B.I. agents were dispatched to Hickock’s home, a four-room farmhouse near Olathe, and they found the knife inside a fishing-tackle box and the shotgun casually propped against a kitchen wall. (Hickock’s father, who refused to believe that his “boy” could have taken part in such a “horrible crime,” insisted that the gun hadn’t been out of the house since the fi rst week in November, and therefore couldn’t be the death weapon.) As for the empty cartridge shells, the cord, and the tape, these were retrieved with the aid of Virgil Pietz, a county-road worker, who, using a road grader in the area pinpointed by Perry Smith, shaved away the earth inch by inch until the buried articles were uncovered. Thus the last loose strings were tied. The K.B.I. had now assembled an unshakable case, for the tests established that the shells had been discharged by Hickock’s shotgun, and the remnants of cord and tape were of a piece with the materials used to bind and silence the victims.
“Monday 11 January. Have a lawyer. Mr. Fleming. Old man with red tie.” Having been informed by the defendants that they were without funds to hire legal counsel, the court, in the person of District Judge Roland H. Tate, appointed as their representatives two local lawyers, Arthur Fleming and Harrison Smith. Fleming, who was seventy-one, was a former mayor of Garden City, a short man who habitually enlivened an unsensational appearance with rather conspicuous neck-wear. He resisted the assignment. “I do not desire to serve,” he told the judge. “But if the court sees fit to appoint me, then, of course, I have no choice.” Hickock’s attorney, Harrison Smith, was forty-five, six feet tall, a golfer, and an Elk of exalted degree. He accepted the task with resigned grace: “Someone has to do it. And I’ll do my best. Though I doubt that’ll make me too popular around here.”
“Friday 15 January. Mrs. Meier playing radio in her kitchen and I heard
man say the County Attorney will seek Death Penalty. ‘The rich never hang. Only the poor and friendless.’ ” In making his announcement, the County Attorney, Duane West, an ambitious, portly man of twenty-eight who looks forty, told newsmen that day, “If the case goes before a jury, I will request the jury, upon fi nding them guilty, to sentence them to the death penalty. If the defendants waive right to jury trial and enter a plea of guilty before the judge, I will request the judge to set the death penalty. This was a matter I knew I would be called upon to decide, and my decision has not been arrived at lightly. I feel that, due to the violence of the crime and the apparent utter lack of mercy shown the victims, the only way the public can be absolutely protected is to have the death penalty set against these defendants. This is especially true since in Kansas there is no such thing as life imprisonment without possibility of parole. Persons sentenced to life imprisonment actually serve, on the average, less than fi fteen years.”
“Wednesday 20 January. Asked to take lie-detector in regards to this Walker deal.” A case like the Clutter case— a crime of such magnitude— arouses the interest of law-enforcement men everywhere, and particularly those investigators burdened with similar but unsolved crimes, for it is always possible that the solution to one mystery will solve another. Among the many officers alert to events in Garden City was the sheriff of Sarasota County, which includes Osprey, Florida, a fishing settlement not far from Tampa, and the scene, slightly more than a month after the Clutter tragedy, of a quadruple slaying on an isolated cattle-raising ranch. Again the victims were four members of a family— a young couple, Mr. and Mrs. Clifford Walker, and their two children, a boy and a girl, all of whom had been shot in the head with a rifle. Parallels aside, there was another circumstance that made Smith and Hickock fi rst-class suspects: on the nineteenth of December, the date of the Walker murders, the Clutter murderers had spent the night in a Tallahassee hotel. Not unnaturally, Osprey’s sheriff, who had no other leads whatever, was anxious to have the two men questioned and a polygraph examination administered. Dick consented to take the test, and so did Perry, who told Kansas authorities he had seen reports of the slaying in a Miami newspaper: “I remarked at the time, I said to Dick, I’ll bet whoever did this must be somebody that read about what happened out here in Kansas. A nut.” The results of the test—to the dismay of Alvin Dewey, who does not believe in extraordinary coincidences—were decisively negative. The murderer of the Walker family remains unknown.
“Sunday 31 January. Dick’s dad here to visit Dick. Said hello when I saw him go past [the cell door] but he kept going. Could be he never heard me. Understand from Mrs. M [Meier] that Mrs. H [Hickock] didn’t come because she felt too bad to. Snowing like a bitch. Dreamed last night I was up in Alaska with Dad— woke up in a puddle of cold urine!!!” Mr. Hickock spent three hours with his son. Afterward, he walked through the snow to the Garden City depot, a work-worn old man, stooped and thinned down by cancer, which would kill him a few months later. At the station, while he was waiting for a homeward-bound train, he spoke to a reporter: “I seen Dick, uh-huh. We had a long talk. And I can guarantee you it’s not like people say. Or what’s put in the papers. Those boys didn’t go to that house planning to do violence. My boy didn’t. He may have some bad sides, but he’s nowhere near bad as that. Smitty’s the one. Dick told me he didn’t even know it when Smitty attacked the man [Mr. Clutter]— cut his throat. Dick wasn’t even in the same room. He only run in when he heard them struggling. Dick was carrying his shotgun, and how he described it was ‘Smitty took my shotgun and just blew that man’s head off.’ And he says, ‘Dad, I ought to have grabbed back the gun and shot Smitty dead. Killed him ’fore he killed the rest of that family. If I’d done it, I’d be better off than I am now.’ I guess he would, too. How it is, the way folks feel, he don’t stand no chance. They’ll hang them both. And having your boy hang, knowing he will—nothing worse can happen to a man.”
Perry Smith’s only living relatives were his father and a sister, and neither of them wrote to him or came to see him. The father, Tex John Smith, was presumed to be prospecting for gold somewhere in Alaska— though investigators, despite great efforts, had been unable to locate him. The sister, on the other hand, had told investigators that she was afraid of her brother, and requested that they please not let him know her address. (When Perry was informed of this, he smiled slightly and said, “I wish she’d been in that house that night. What a sweet scene!”) Except for the squirrel, and except for the Meiers and an occasional consultation with his lawyer, Mr. Fleming, he was very much alone. He missed Dick. “Many thoughts of Dick,” he wrote in his makeshift diary one day. Since their arrest, they had not been allowed to communicate, and, freedom apart, that was what he most desired—to talk to Dick, be with him again. Dick was not the “hard rock” that Perry had once thought him— “pragmatic,” “virile,” “a real brass boy.” He had proved to be “pretty weak and shallow,” “a coward.” Still, of everyone in all the world, this, for the
moment, was the person to whom he was closest, for at least they were of the same species, brothers in the breed of Cain, and, separated from Dick, Perry felt “all by myself. Like somebody covered with sores. Somebody only a big nut would have anything to do with.”
But then, one morning in mid-February, Perry received a letter. It was postmarked Reading, Massachusetts, and it went, “Dear Perry, I was sorry to hear about the trouble you are in and I decided to write and let you know that I remember you and would like to help you in any way that I can. In case you don’t remember my name, Don Cullivan, I’ve enclosed a picture taken at about the time we met. When I fi rst read about you in the news recently I was startled and then I began to think back to those days when I knew you. While we were never close personal friends I can remember you a lot more clearly than most fellows I met in the Army. It must have been about the fall of 1951 when you were assigned to the 761st Engineer Light Equipment Company at Fort Lewis, Washington. You were short (I’m not much taller), solidly built, dark with a heavy shock of black hair and a grin on your face almost all the time. Since you had lived in Alaska quite a few of the fellows used to call you ‘Eskimo.’ One of my fi rst recollections of you was at a Company inspection in which all footlockers were open for inspection. As I recall it all the footlockers were in order, even yours, except that the inside cover of your footlocker was plastered with pictures of pin-up girls. The rest of us were sure you were in for trouble. But the inspecting officer took it in stride and when it was all over and he let it pass I think we felt you were a nervy guy. I remember that you were a fairly good pool player and I can picture you quite clearly in the Company day room at the pool table. You were one of the best truck drivers in the outfit. Remember the Army field problems we went out on? On one trip that took place in the winter I remember that we each were assigned to a truck for the duration of the problem. In our outfit, Army trucks had no heaters and it used to get pretty cold in those cabs. I remember you cutting a hole in the floorboards of your truck in order to let the heat from the engine come into the cab. The reason I remember this so well is the impression it made on me because ‘mutilation’ of Army property was a crime for which you could get severely punished. Of course I was pretty green in the Army and probably afraid to stretch the rules even a little bit, but I can remember you grinning about it (and keeping warm) while I worried about it (and froze). I recall that you bought a motorcycle, and vaguely remember
you had some trouble with it— chased by the police?— crackup? Whatever it was, it was the fi rst time I realized the wild streak in you. Some of my recollections may be wrong; this was over eight years ago and I only knew you for a period of about eight months. From what I remember, though, I got along with you very well and rather liked you. You always seemed cheerful and cocky, you were good at your Army work and I can’t remember that you did much griping. Of course you were apparently quite wild but I never knew too much about that. But now you are in real trouble. I try to imagine what you are like now. What you think about. When fi rst I read about you I was stunned. I really was. But then I put the paper down and turned to something else. But the thought of you returned. I wasn’t satisfied just to forget. I am, or try to be, fairly religious [Catholic]. I wasn’t always. I used to just drift along with little thought about the only important thing there is. I never considered death or the possibility of a life hereafter. I was too much alive: car, college, dating etc. But my kid brother died of leukemia when he was just 17 years old. He knew he was dying and afterward I used to wonder what he thought about. And now I think of you, and wonder what you think about. I didn’t know what to say to my brother in the last weeks before he died. But I know what I’d say now. And this is why I am writing you: because God made you as well as me and He loves you just as He loves me, and for the little we know of God’s will what has happened to you could have happened to me. Your friend, Don Cullivan.”
The name meant nothing, but Perry at once recognized the face in the photograph— a young soldier with crew-cut hair and round, very earnest eyes. He read the letter many times; though he found the religious passages unpersuasive (“I’ve tried to believe, but I don’t, I can’t, and there’s no use pretending”), he was thrilled by it. Here was someone offering help, a sane and respectable man who had once known and liked him, a man who signed himself “friend.”
Gratefully, in great haste, he started a reply: “Dear Don, Hell yes I remember Don Cullivan. . . .”
Dick Hickock’s cell had no window—he faced a wide corridor and the façades of other cells—but he was not isolated. There were people to talk to— a plentiful turnover of drunkards, forgers, wife beaters, and Mexican vagrants— and Dick, with his light-hearted “con-man” patter, his sex
