BETWEEN ENDS
Kelley, John & Kristol, William & North, Gary
The Hunt for the Czar by Guy Richards Doubleday, 254 pp. 7.95 Pick up any recent history of twentieth-century Europe. Look through the index for "Czar Nicholas II." Somewhere in that textbook you...
...Finally he consented to print it, but only after "toning down" my already guarded statements...
...Jobn L. Kelley...
...America's new left abhors their country's persistent nationalism and sense of superiority to that much maligned purveyor of peace: Russia...
...Usually one predominates until a change in the climate of opinion finds a different myth more soothing...
...Smith, not knowing at first who this "Mr...
...Yet he absolutely refuses to believe that any important event could have happened unless some legitimate newspaper reported it...
...Somewhere in that textbook you will find a paragraph on the execution of the Czar and his family in Ekaterinburg (now Sverdlovsk) in far western Siberia...
...Strangely, Pusey doesn't mention the Ludlow Amendment of the 1930's, an anachronistic proposal by the isolationists of that era who had learned their "lesson" from World War One...
...Robert Wilton, correspondent with the London Times, stayed with the massacre account, and that is the one which the governments officially accepted...
...At this point the Richards book gets fantastic (so far, we've been dealing with the comparatively "obvious...
...But he and his mother had been away in Japan that summer, and, he recalled, his father had come into a windfall money gain at the end of the summer, 1918 - enough to enable him to buy the newspaper...
...There is a photo of the visitor in the July paper, and Richards includes it in the book...
...Eugenia Smith and Goleniewski (they spoke in Russian...
...the second reports that he claimed to be the "natural son of Grand Duke Nicholas Nicholaevitch, uncle of the late Czar...
...But the other side won the battle...
...The book is one of the best detective stories one could wish for...
...The immediate family that escaped-the late Dowager Czarina and her relatives-never put claim, thus indicating, Richards believes, that they truly believe the Imperial family survived...
...And to Doubleday's great credit, he was permitted to publish his findings...
...Nut stuff" has to be kept out of "respectable" newspapers...
...Medical reports made in the early 'sixties indicate that he has a blood clotting problem in his background, although he does not suffer from outright hemophilia any longer...
...In the voluminous files left by McGarry, the research team discovered a carbon of a letter sent to a friend telling of a Paris meeting with the Czar and his wife in 1923...
...Yet publicly she maintained that they were all dead, and that is what is important, right...
...This is how "climates of opinion," as the late Cornell scholar, Carl Becker, called them, operate in today's society...
...The question of legal title to the area also was of little importance because of the poor land use of the area by the Mexicans...
...Other testimony has been provided by Count Kyril de Shishmarev, member of the Knights of St...
...Jobn L. Kelley waters of Pearl Harbor...
...Though Richards does not mention it, the photo is in an almost identical pose to one of a young, beardless Czar Nicholas...
...Often the textbook will give a grisly account of the bloody deaths, the hacking to peices of the corpses, the pouring of sulphuric acid on the remains...
...Also in the files was an autographed photo to Barrows from this same Nicholas Romanov...
...He hesitated to publish the review for weeks, although I have reviewed for the paper for over five years and am a personal friend of his...
...Such is the fate of reactionary moaarchs who oppose history...
...And the textbooks, I suspect, will not soon be revised in light of the revelations in The Hunt for the Czar...
...A fine sentiment, perhaps, but not one easily conformed to by "responsible, modern, all-the-facts, democratic" journalism...
...He claims that he turned over a passport containing microdotted data that would prove his true identity, but (and this is known) the CIA refuses to return his passport to him...
...Chapter six of the Richards book is devoted to the hunt for the authors...
...In the latter category of palmist resides one Merlo J. Pusey who signed his name to The Way We Go to War...
...Unless the meeting was staged (and the CIA would have had to have been involved, since Goleniewski was under full surveillance by that organization), it indicates that Mrs...
...Trumpets sound forth and out spring William Ap-pleman Williams, Gar Alperovitz and a bespectacled coterie to rewrite the origins of the Cold War...
...Truth becomes limited to what the Times-New York or London-wishes to print...
...As it was later discovered, the blueprints had been sent by McGarry to Boris Brasol, the former official of the Czarist government...
...Assuming this to be true, what then...
...His real driving force, of course, is his dislike for America's Vietnam involvement...
...However, the book also presents counter-evidence which brings questions to mind...
...Unfortunately for the textbooks, it never happened...
...Enter Colonel Michael Goleniewski (Golenievski), former intelligence agent of the Polish Army, former quadruple agent, the man who broke the Philby conspiracy story and a host of other key spy cases through his information secretly passed to the CIA in the 'fifties--the man who defected in the last days of the Eisenhower Administration...
...The VFW organized an auxiliary of Future Gold Star Mothers to demand that the Federal government pay their travel expenses to Europe to select the grave sites for their sons' final resting places...
...But no record of such a person exists...
...Richards has already written a book about him, Imperial Agent, published in 1966 by Devin-Adair...
...Pusey should have noted America's long efforts to purchase the disputed territory, the instability of Mexican governments, the $2,026,139.68 arbitrated debt on which Mexico had stopped payment in 1843, not to mention the almost non-existent central control of such outlying provinces as California...
...As Wilton said in his confrontation with Lasies in the Ekaterinburg railway station in May 1919: "Commander Lasies, even if the Czar and the Imperial Family are living, it is necessary to say they are dead...
...Richards' team found one answer buried in the files of the San Francisco Examiner...
...He only glanced at the evidence...
...America's out-of-work intellectual dilettantes discover the sweat shop and judicial intransigence at the turn of the century...
...In two articles, 16 October 1919 and 26 July 1920, accounts are given of a visit from Romanov to Barrows...
...Pusey's proposed War Powers Act to limit the powers of the President makes about as much sense as the program of the Veterans of Future Wars, an organization of the 1920's founded by a group of Prince-tonian pacifists who felt that the next world war would be so horrendous that all fighting-aged men should receive their "bonus" before they went to battle, inasmuch as they would not be returning...
...Smith claims to be Anastasia, and a book has been written about her (Anastasia, Speller & Sons, 1963...
...All of this is faithfully recorded in Guy Richard's startling book, The Hunt for the Czar...
...Cleo generously provides George Bancroft...
...Who was this "Colonel Nicholas Romanov...
...The photo is blurred, but enough detail exists to render doubtful the claim that this elderly man was, in fact, the Czar...
...That piece of nonsense would have required a plebiscite on a declaration of war if the aggressor's attack took place on other than American territorial sovereignty...
...The evidence did not convince many early reporters, most notably the French official, Joseph Lasies, whose refutation of the legend appeared in the same year as Sokolov's...
...Also insignificant is the odd fact that the financing behind the book came from the Czar's mother, the Dowager Czarina, who insisted to her intimate friends until her death in exile in 1928 that the whole family had escaped and was well...
...When I was originally asked to review this book by the editor of the most competent (though little known) book review column in any West Coast newspaper, the editor did not know what the book contained...
...Millions of dollars are stored in European and American banks, waiting for an heir to claim the Romanov fortune...
...Roosevelt's comments on a similar dispute, U.S.-British claims to the Oregon Territory, are applicable to the Mexican situation: "The real truth is that such titles are of very little value and are rightly enough disregarded by any nation strong enough to do so . . ." Perhaps the distinguishtd diplomatic historian Samuel Flagg Bemis best judged Polk's actions when he wrote that "it would be well-nigh impossible today to find a citizen of the United States who would desire to undo President Polk's diplomacy, President Polk's war and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo . . ." Of course this indicates the tendency of Pusey's myth: it rearranges the facts to fit his story...
...Also, Goleniewski claims to have matured late, having the body of a child from ages fourteen to twenty-three...
...The fact that no bodies were ever recovered should not be regarded as evidence (though no acid works as fast as the account demands...
...What, then, became of the Czar and his family...
...His real reason: "I've watched for a review of it...
...On the basis of what I know of the CIA investigation of Goleniewski's identity, I believe he is the Czarevich Alexei...
...It is rare...
...It was all great fun, and I am sure they were still laughing as the U.S.S...
...His son at first could hardly believe that his father had been part of a team sent by Kaiser Wilhelm and (probably) George V of England to rescue their cousin Nicholas...
...This evidence is Richards' "hard" evidence...
...Barrows was to become General Barrows in the California National Guard...
...So died the Romanovs, and with them the last great European dynasty...
...It almost sounds like the words of Rousseau in the introduction to his Essay on the Origin of Inequality: "Let us begin by laying facts aside, as they do not affect the question...
...he has said so on numerous occasions...
...It is important because Mrs...
...the fact that it is unlikely that any textbooks will rewrite the record in the light of new evidence is even more discouraging...
...thus, he could pass as a child (he began to grow he says, in 1927...
...Chapter twelve reprints a translation of a taped meeting of Mrs...
...The editor of the book, "James P. Smyth," turned out to be William R. McGarry, whose biography is available in The National Cyclopedia of American Biography, vol...
...Establishments feed on this phenomenon...
...Since the photo was not supplied to Richards by Goleniewski, things are even more complicated...
...How about an investigation...
...The implications of such a statement are considerable...
...Richards makes it clear that Goleniewski is an arrogant, unlikable man...
...He really enjoys finding out what happened, even to the point of staking his reputation on his controversial findings...
...Of course no single myth ever totally engages the American historical profession...
...it has sent him photocopies instead...
...America wants a dose of Divine Providence to justify Jacksonian democracy...
...To which the most appropriate response I could make has previously been penned by Teddy Roosevelt in The Winning of the West: "The most ultimately righteous of all wars is a war with savages, though it is apt to be the most terrible and most inhuman...
...4.95 Carl Becker once observed that the historian is merely the "mythmaker for the tribe...
...When I submitted my short review, calling attention to only the most verifiable facts in the book, he was obviously displeased...
...The interesting figure, however, we know very little about...
...Goleniewski it is, and the father looks like him...
...John of Jerusalem (Knights of Malta), and a childhood friend of the Czarevitch Alexei...
...Herman Kimsey, the fromer CIA official mentioned earlier, has been quoted in the Washington Daily News and in a UPI story as saying he had knowledge of fingerprints, soleprint, and dental comparisons between Goleniewski and the Czarevitch, and that the data match...
...When comparing the two beardless photographs, the resemblance is convincing: same ear, same nose, same mouth, same eyes...
...He seemed to be a mild-mannered newspaperman of the Clark Kent variety, Charles J. Fox, owner of the North China Star, published in Tientsin...
...This the Examiner reporters never bothered to trace down...
...The bulk of the book is devoted to other matters...
...Gary North Swamproot vs...
...He was willing to admit that a conspiracy of silence might be operating, but he still was not willing to break it...
...leave England's most distinguished non-royal family to its private grief...
...Arizona, with its human cargo, slowly sank into the waters of Pearl Harbor...
...This is probably the most exciting chapter in the book for anyone who regards himself as an historian, professional or amateur...
...In any case, what Richards wants is a full-scale investigation by a Presidential commission...
...Nut stuff," he said...
...he lets his evidence do that for him...
...Voila...
...unfortunately, the elderly man looks nothing like the passport photo of 1919: different ear (though it looks like Goleniewski's ear), different shape of face...
...The result is rarely a synthesis of thesis and antithesis...
...The Ludlow Amendment...
...Counter-myths (and much better ones) may be provided by Traeger, Liska and other defenders of America's Vietnam involvement, but like the battle between Swamproot and Snakeroot, I am afraid Pusey and Company will have their day...
...and Mexico, Pusey judges this as an early example of war by executive fiat...
...Most impressive is the passport photo his team of Romanov buffs located in the private files of the late David P. Barrows, the former President of the University of California (early 1920s...
...he had been Colonel Barrows in the Allied Expeditionary Force into Siberia in 1918-19, chief of intelligence for Major General Graves...
...There is too much money legitimately at stake, too much information that this Polish defector may have on a strong anti-Communist underground, too much covering-up going on...
...i In his vivisection of executive aggrandizement of war-making power, Pusey hits upon some good points, but comes up with all the wrong conclusions...
...Of course the fag-end of Beard's thought lives on in Jackson Turner Main...
...He is careful not to overstate his case...
...Guy Richards is a different kind of journalist...
...The first claims that the visitor said he was no relation to the Czar...
...both were mysteriously called off...
...He has found some startling things...
...Richards includes a photo of Goleniewski and a man who was supposedly his father, a photo ca...
...While his myth is a rather poorly constructed one, alas, its time has come...
...A tragedy, and yet a necessary step in the march of progress...
...Lamenting Polk's order to General Zachary Taylor to occupy disputed territory which led to war between the U.S...
...Like all good liberals, Pusey wants to rearrange our federal institutions to assure the country that we shall never experience another Vietnam...
...to his horror, he found he had been misled by a forged signature, "Hoover," and that he was actually in custody of the CIA, which he regarded as highly vulnerable in terms of its own internal security...
...He thought he was defecting to the FBI...
...On several meetings, Goleniewski has provided Kyril with data known only to the two of them...
...The evidence seems to fit together...
...He entered school in Poland, and rose in the Polish Army after 1945...
...No other paper will touch it...
...The blueprints were letters addressed to "Fox" from "Wilhelm" and "Nicholas," thanking him for his work in rescuing "Nicholas...
...The fact that no one has even bothered to make such a search before is discouraging...
...Borg" was, became more and more confused, then startled, then tearful when she learned he was her brother...
...It is not very sharp, and the man looks young, but the photo matches the features of the man on the passport...
...Of course, as all good progressive humanists know in their hearts, it should have happened...
...For example, this liberal editor knows that the newspaper guild is made up of average men who lack very extraordinary qualities...
...Imperial Agent, p. 260...
...J. Allen Smith and Charles A. Beard "discover" that the Constitution was written and adopted by a bunch of dirty old economic men, and thus may be treated as less than sacrosanct...
...When he defected as the leader of an underground anti-Communist group, the Heckenshuetzes, he had already passed some two thousand microfilmed documents to the West, exposing there over two hundred KGB operatives...
...Two Congressional investigations were planned in the early 'sixties...
...The fact that the main source of the details is a 1920 book by Nicholas Sokolov-an intensely anti-Bolshevik White Russian judge commissioned by White Russian authorities to conduct the investigation seven months after the "massacre" (during the White Russian liberation of Siberia)-is not at all suspicious...
...1942...
...The man claims that his family moved to Poland where a fairly large Russian colony existed and where they would not be conspicuous as visitors...
...XXXIX, p. 609...
...All of which boils down to the simple fact that professional historians and other amateur inspectors of George Washington's wooden teeth are very much political animals...
...It claims to be the diaries of two men who participated in the rescue...
...Kyril is convinced, in spite of the fact that Goleniewski has now turned on him as an enemy...
...But Goleniewski has since turned on her, too...
...Witness the almost complete overturn of Beard's Economic Interpretation of the Constitution by the writings of Brown and McDonald in the fifties...
...The passport photo, dated 1919, was for Colonel Nicholas Romanov, signed by General Semonov of the White Russian Cossack forces...
...Not the least of which is that the prime reason that historians rewrite our national chronicle each generation is precisely to provide a new myth for a new tribe...
...Pusey laments that we were oh-so-severe on those weak little Vietnamese when we shot up their navy after the Tonkin Gulf attacks on the Turner Joy and Maddox...
...History The Way We Go To War by Merlo J. Pusey Houghton Mifflin, 202 pp...
...He was, according to Richards, one of America's most successful secret agents of the World War I period...
...A former CIA official, an expert in analysis and research who now works with Richards, thinks the signatures may be genuine...
...He did not read the book, refusing on the grounds that he did not read nut stuff...
...it appears they have been found...
...Richards, a successful New York newspaperman, has provided compelling evidence that the family escaped in 1918...
...There always is some competition just as Swamproot and Snakeroot went a couple of rounds before Geritol won out...
...First, a peculiar book published in 1920 in California, Rescuing the Czar...
...Given the reception so far of the government, he is unlikely to get his wish...
...The hunt for the record of the escape had begun in the mid-'fifties when two blueprinted documents came into the hands of one of Richards' correspondents (I'm guessing, but I think it may have been Colonel Philip Corso, mentioned in Richards' other book, Imperial Agent...
Vol. 4 • November 1970 • No. 1
