Aftermath of Malice

Interest in the Bang-Jensen story will never wholly subside. For one thing, critics of the United Nations, on whatever count, will continue for years to find a great store of ammunition in it. For another, the circumstances under which the Danish diplomat met his death are still so far from being fully explained that trying to read this or that significance into them will remain a fascinating study. If it were ever established that Bang-Jensen was not a suicide, but was murdered, as many persist in believing, then the question of motives for such a crime would be the subject of lively speculation and of acrimonious debate. The backdrop to the Bang-Jensen tragedy is the Hungarian revolution of 1956 and the savage crushing of it by the Soviet Union’s armed forces; and interest in that will never subside while the Red regime in Moscow survives. In Betrayal at the UN, by DeWitt Copp and Marshall Peck, there is certainly enough new material to warm up old controversies and start a few new ones.

The whole story is told in the first person and that person is never identified as either Copp or Peck, but is a composite author named Peter Marshall. So far as the form of the book goes, this is not Bang-Jensen’s story, but a recital of Peter Marshall’s encounters with the great number of persons from whom he sought information about Bang-Jensen, his impressions of them, their looks, their manners, their probable veracity or mendacity, and so forth. Even documents are dealt with in the same way. “I, Peter Marshall, read the Gross report and found it a vicious slander,” or something like that. The book is a swift-moving record of a reportorial adventure. If these two newspapermen had dug up nothing new about Bang-Jensen, his controversy with the UN, and his still mysterious end, they would at least have written a good story about the way in which a seasoned reporter goes about his business.

RG

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Rodney Gilbert

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Interest in the Bang-Jensen story will never wholly subside. For one thing, critics of the United Nations, on whatever count, will continue for years to find a great store of ammunition in it. For another, the circumstances under which the Danish diplomat met his death are still so far from being fully explained that trying to read this or that significance into them will remain a fascinating study. If it were ever established that Bang-Jensen was not a suicide, but was murdered, as many persist in believing, then the question of motives for such a crime would be the subject of lively speculation and of acrimonious debate. The backdrop to the Bang-Jensen tragedy is the Hungarian revolution of 1956 and the savage crushing of it by the Soviet Union’s armed forces; and interest in that will never subside while the Red regime in Moscow survives. In Betrayal at the UN, by DeWitt Copp and Marshall Peck, there is certainly enough new material to warm up old controversies and start a few new ones.

The whole story is told in the first person and that person is never identified as either Copp or Peck, but is a composite author named Peter Marshall. So far as the form of the book goes, this is not Bang-Jensen’s story, but a recital of Peter Marshall’s encounters with the great number of persons from whom he sought information about Bang-Jensen, his impressions of them, their looks, their manners, their probable veracity or mendacity, and so forth. Even documents are dealt with in the same way. “I, Peter Marshall, read the Gross report and found it a vicious slander,” or something like that. The book is a swift-moving record of a reportorial adventure. If these two newspapermen had dug up nothing new about Bang-Jensen, his controversy with the UN, and his still mysterious end, they would at least have written a good story about the way in which a seasoned reporter goes about his business.