Editor’s Note: In our current issue, we have a piece by Jay Nordlinger on John Dos Passos — specifically, on The Theme Is Freedom, a collection that Dos Passos published in 1956. Mr. Nordlinger has been expanding his piece in Impromptus. For Parts I-III, go here, here, and here.
I’ll tell you one reason I rejected the Left, many years ago: I saw people as individuals, basically; the Left around me was always shoving them into categories (“privileged white male,” etc.).
Here is Dos Passos, talking about his reporting on World War II:
Being in no way a military expert I felt the thing for me to do was to report the social transformation that the war boom was bringing about. Thrown into direct contact with all kinds of people I found myself praising and blaming men for their skills, for their character, for themselves instead of for their position in the lineup of the Marxist class war. So vanished the last traces of the Greenwich Village radical who saw only certain limited classes of men as socially good.
It was the experience of World War II, then, that sparked Dos Passos to say goodbye to Greenwich Village forever.
‐Here is Dos Passos on an encounter with President Roosevelt, during the war:
Today he looks well rested. He’s in high good humor. At breakfast they brought him the news of the capture of an island. The reporters shoot questions up over each other’s shoulders. So long as it’s on the foreign war it’s fun. His manner is boyishly gay. He shoots the answers back with zest …
Can you imagine a time when you could describe a president, with perfect Dos Passosesque accuracy, as “boyishly gay”?
‐After Hitler broke the Nazi-Soviet pact, and Stalin entered into alliance with the West, the Roosevelt administration “dropped its guard entirely against the communists,” Dos Passos writes (in the mid-1950s).
The theory was that they were another brand of New Dealer. …
A few of us who had had experience with their mighty organization thought differently. There was no way of getting anybody to listen to our misgivings.
That was tremendously frustrating for Dos Passos, Whittaker Chambers, and their like.
‐Here is more of Dos Passos, on the same subject:
Under the cover of the war effort the communists were entrenching themselves. The American liberals were too busy hating Hitler to see anything amiss. This was no time to argue with them.
‐Reading Dos Passos on World War II, I had a memory from my youth: “Military intelligence” was said to be the great oxymoron. Because there was no intelligence in the military, you see?
Dos Passos had this prejudice too. But he spent some time in the Pacific, among other places:
I came home with a deep respect for many of the professionals of the army, navy and marine corps. The two great American inventions of the war, the floating base and the amphibious landing, were the work of no mean intellects.
‐Here is Dos Passos on James Forrestal, the defense secretary who killed himself in May 1949:
No man has ever been broken by overwork. It is frustration, disillusionment and despair that shatters a man’s will to live.
‐“We used to make fun of the missionaries,” writes Dos Passos. “I came away from the Philippines with respect for them.”
A month ago, I wrote about Whitman College, an institution in Washington State. It’s not named for the poet; it’s named for Marcus and Narcissa Whitman, a husband and wife who were missionaries in the Northwest. They were killed in an Indian massacre in 1847.
The college’s nickname has always been the Missionaries. No longer, because missionaries are deemed bad, in the usual Marxian interpretation.
‐Dos Passos went to Germany, after the fighting was over. He files this:
The lieutenant worked in Intelligence. He was a young man from Brooklyn with a thoughtful ruddy face and full lips.
Suddenly, the young man wanted to talk to Dos.
“My people are Jewish,” he began, “so don’t think I’m not bitter against the krauts. I’m for shooting the war criminals wherever we can prove they are guilty and getting it over with. But for God’s sake, tell me what we are trying to do.”
The victors, in their interrogations and so forth, were treating the German officers very, very roughly. “Like you wouldn’t treat a dog,” the lieutenant told Dos. He and the writer had a fascinating conversation.
And this problem, of course, comes up in and around every war — including our current War on Terror.
‐Dos Passos reported from Nuremberg. One of the defendants could not appear in court, as he was ill and receiving medical treatment.
“What caused him to take sick?” asked a reporter of a colonel — our Colonel Burton C. Andrus.
“His illness was caused by stress of emotion,” Andrus replied. “He has been hysterical for the last three weeks. He has had crying fits in his cell. He is the bully type, strong and hard when on top, cringing and crying when not.”
I love that statement. So true, Colonel, so true.
#share#
‐On a train in Germany, Dos Passos talked with an American college professor, who had been in that country for several months. He was dismayed by the concessions that the U.S. was making to the Soviet Union.
Writes Dos Passos,
… he thought it had been pretty well proved to everybody’s satisfaction that appeasement was a dangerous business. He could understand how Americans should lose interest in Europe and want to go home, but he couldn’t understand how a whole nation could take on the psychology of the victim so quickly. [The nation in question is America.] … We were collectively just like Chamberlain with his umbrella: “Peace in our time.”
What did he suppose the Russians thought of us? I asked.
He said he had an idea. He spoke German, he explained, pretty fluently. Talking to Germans who were impregnated with Russian ideas he had discovered that the communists thought of us in the same terms the nazis did. That was one of the things that made it so easy for ex-nazis and communists to work together.
Etc.
‐“They aren’t so different from other people,” said the professor — he was talking about the Russians. “Except for their tremendous indoctrination. … After all, we know what the nazis could do to the German mind in twelve years. The communists have had a quarter of a century to work on the Slavs.”
He paused a bit — and continued, “We should never underestimate the Russians. They are one of the most talented peoples on earth, but between them and us there stands the Kremlin propaganda.”
You know, I can’t help thinking that’s still true, in 2016.
‐On that same train in Germany, Dos Passos also talked to an American captain, “redhaired.” Formerly a lawyer in San Francisco, the officer now served in our military government. And, like the professor, he was dismayed by what he was seeing. The Soviets were carving up Europe; we Americans seemed unsure of ourselves.
What he said to Dos Passos has, to me, a terribly contemporary ring:
“If the American people want to commit suicide, I suppose in a democratic country it’s the politician’s business to tie the noose for us so that we can slip it comfortably around our necks. … It’s all this apologizing that makes me sick. With all our faults we have invented a social system by which the majority of men for the first time in human history get a break, and instead of being cocky about it we apologize about it. … We built up the greatest army in the world and won the war with it, and now we’re letting everything go to pieces. … We apologized to the French for saving their country and we apologize to the British and we apologize to the Russians. … First thing you know we’ll be apologizing to the Germans for licking them. … And they all hate our guts and it damn well serves us right.”
We should chew on that for a while. In any case, thanks for joining me, ladies and gentlemen, and see you tomorrow for the conclusion of this series.