Adolf Hitler

...To be sure, Hitler's General Staff had always distrusted him and truly hated him at the end...

...In effect, he made the Jews sacrificial offerings to a concept...

...henceforth the only hope lay in negotiating a peace with the West...

...The language of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 did not, however, deter HEW's Office of Education...

...When America entered the War the following month, even that hope went out the window...

...That Hitler should have commanded such allegiance from so generally enlightened a people is a testament to his magnetic personality...

...instead, the Court has required racial balance under the guise of "remedying" the state-imposed segrega...

...His generals were the victims, of course, and deserve at least some sympathy for their predicament...

...Two months before his first Bermuda Race his 40-foot racer The Panic mysteriously sank at her moorings during the night, and she almost repeated the performance a year later in the middle of the Chesapeake...

...When he put the pistol to his head, the Russians were in the next street, gleefully making the rubble bounce...

...While no one in his right mind would argue that Hitler has undergone, or is undergoing, any such sea-change, our fascination with his life is, if anything, increasing as the years pass...

...And by forcing the socialists to assume the blame for something they had not brought about, Wilson gave Adolf Hider a political tool that he was destined to wield with devastating force...

...Still a member in good standing of the Church of Rome despite detestation of its hierarchy ('I am now as before a Catholic and will always remain so'), he carried within him its teaching that the Jew was the killer of God...

...Such men have appeared numerous times in history, but seldom have they had so powerful a following...

...he once remarked that the inscription on his tombstone should read, "He was the victim of his generals...

...Like all informed critics of court-ordered busing, Graglia applauds Brown's prohibition of state-imposed racial discrimination as a justifiable and understandable interpretation of the Constitution, but he faults the Supreme Court for undercutting the new law with an impression of hesitation and uncertainty in the ensuing decade...

...tortured Terry 0 'Rourke is t~ Los Angeles attorney...

...Obviously "THE BIG ONE" was a success or this book would never have been written, but as a movie actor I despise film critics who in a few sentences presume to tell a story which has taken others months of hard work and preparation to bring to the screen, so I will simply recommend Airborne wholeheartedly as being well worth the price of admission: ih fact it is cheap at the price...

...The good is oft interred with their bones...

...He believed, Toland writes, "that he was observing God's injunction to cleanse the world of vermin...

...The Junkers, as everyone by now knows, tried again and again to kill him...

...many of the socialists were Jews--a fact that lodged in the fevered brain of Hitler, who was then recuperating from his war wounds...

...He offered what most men need--jobs, order, and hope...

...reading of statutes, and seeming absence of neutrality and objectivity...

...After reading this detailed account of his life from its rather ordinary beginnings in Austria, through the years of the First World War (an excellent soldier, he was twice decorated for valor and at War's end was left temporarily blinded by mustard gas), the period of political turmoil and party strife in the 1920s, the fabulous rise to power in the 1930s and on through the cataclysm that followed, I believe I understand him...

...only later in a different age did their spirits pick up a crown...

...His opposition in Germany, as elsewhere, came mainly from conservatives, reactionaries, and intellectuals...

...Though not many would argue with that assessment of Hitler, I fear that Toland engages in wishful thinking when he insists that only a few people still believed in him in those last days...

...That Hitler failed to accomplish his wild dreams of "unifying" Europe and saving it from the Bolshevist menace is obvious enough, but then so too were Jeanne d'Arc and Napoleon (to name but two such idealists) unsuccessful in their immediate efforts...

...tion prohibited by Brown...

...Soon after Buckley found Cyrano his chosen conveyance for "THE BIG ONE," she "several times ran aground in Bahamian waters" and then, while she was on charter to a friend for a dinner cruise on the Hudson, a cable snapped upon which a nonswimmer was sitting, with tragic results...

...Only one month before her great Transatlantic effort, Cyrano, on charter once more, was the silent witness of another disaster when the charterer's wife, a certified diver, was found dead on the ocean floor forty feet below...

...only the very lucky exit at the proper time...

...As the existentialists are fond of saying, we usually die too late or too soon...

...That Hitler possessed many of the ordinary virtues and traits of a man of his time makes him all the more frightening to behold...

...Don't forget the supporting cast, though: they all came through nobly, and son Christopher is already a literary force to be reckoned with ...A lovely "TRIP" and you can smell the sea...

...One can find no better instance of idealism gone mad...

...The amazing thing is that Germany could have stood so long against such overwhelming opposition...

...But one cannot read the book, I am convinced, without arriving at a better understanding than one had before of the horrific events in Europe between 1920 and 1945...

...Graglia thoroughly demonstrates that while imposing its requirement of racial balance the Supreme Court has never openly stated that school racial imbalance is unconstitutional...

...The evil that men do lives after them...

...Everything that could go wrong or break down during this production did so, but Buckley led his troops to final victory, with great panache (though he does not say so himsel 0 relying almost entirely on a saltsoaked sextant, and occasional glimpses of the sun, the moon, and the swinging stars...

...BOOK REVIEW Disaster by Decree Lino A. Graglia / Cornell University Press / $11.50 Terry O'Rourke Professor Lino Graglia of the University of Texas Law School has written a concise and lucid account of the Supreme Court's decisions on race and education...

...Behind him were the young, the proletariat, and the forward-looking...

...The Court's "remedy" rationale has allowed it to The Alternative: An American Spectator January 1977 27...

...It is important to note that...

...they knew by the late 1930s thathe could lead the nation only to destruction...

...In what Graglia rightly describes as an "administrative and judicial pei-version of legislative purpose," the Office of Education promulgated, and the lower courts upheld, a series of administrative guidelines purportedly designed to implement the Civil Rights Act, but instead authorizing the transfer and assignment of students according to race when the result was to increase racial balance...

...He seemed, indeed, the archetypal answer to German prayers...

...As I've said before, Adolf Hitler is a splendid work of biographical art--well written, objective throughout, filled with fascinating details, free of the psychoanalytical claptrap that mars so much contemporary biography,, instructive in the best sense, and more than a little humbling in the tale it tells about a genius (or call him monster, if you will) who contained within his being elements of Everyman, albeit blown up to epic size...

...So let it be with Caesar...

...In a letter to the Times in 1938, Winston Churchill paid him this grudging compliment: "I have always said that I hoped if Great Britain were beaten in a war we should find a Hitler who would lead us back m our rightful place among nations...

...In no other book that I know of has Hitler been made more convincingly real...

...than he did...

...Until Power placed him above the law, or rather made him a law unto himself, he was little more than a fanatical patriot of iron will, a forensic genius determined to lift up his adopted people after the ignominious Armistice in 1918, the result, he believed, of betrayal at home rather than defeat abroad...

...BOOK REVIEW Adolf Hitler John Toland / Doubleday / $14.95 William H. Nolte While reading John Toland's enormous, splendid biography of Hitler I couldn't help wondering what the future will make of this most gifted and appalling tyrant, certainly the most awesome mover of men, at least in the West, since Napoleon...

...Beginning with the 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, which barred the use of racial criteria in assigning children to public schools, Graglia traces the Court's capricious course to its present position mandating the busing of schoolchildren on the basis of race...

...And why not...

...During the Vineyard Race Buckley blew the navigation and the same craft ended up on the rocks, and in another race, with his wife aboard, The Panic was later dismasted off Block Island...

...Certainly the number of the faithful had shrunk since, say, 1938, which was truly Hitler's year, at which time the vast majority of Germans considered him their savior, and many people throughout Europe admired him as the leading man of the age...

...It was the Idea of Jewishness, rather than individual Jews, that he opposed with single-minded fury...

...So too does the understanding he displays of his wife's apprehensions about the whole undertaking and of her anguish at the realization that she is saying goodbye to the three most precious things in her life--her only son, her only sister, and her husband...

...The Act's definition of "desegregation" was clear-cut: " 'Desegregation' means the assignment of students to public schools and within such schools without regard to their race, color, religion, or national origin, but 'desegregation' shall not mean the assignment of students to public schools in order to overcome racial imbalance...

...It is one of the worst examples of the modern Court's tendency, so aptly described by Milton Handler, to indulge in "overgeneralization, disrespect of precedent, needless obscurity of opinions...

...New impetus for the desegregation movement came in 1964 with the enactment of the Civil Rights Act, which reaffirmed Brown's prohibition against discrimination in education...

...Like Napoleon he was, par excellence, The Man on Horseback...

...In addition, the Act expressly stated that it did not "empower any official or court of the United States to issue any order to achieve a racial balance in any school by requiring the transportation of pupils or students from one school to another or one district to another in order to acheive such racial balance...

...I frankly fear that, as in the case of so many other Caesar-figures and all-too-human saviors, distance will make clean, or in any event blur the visage which today, little more than thirty Years after his suicide in his Berlin bunker, leers at us with such nightmarish clarity...

...Court-ordered busing has become the most divisive domestic issue of the 1970s-directly affecting the lives of hundreds of thousands of parents and children, and contravening the fundamental principle that government should make no decision based on racewand Professor Graglia's account of the Supreme Court's role in reintroducing race as a permissible and sometimes constitutionally required basis of government action should astound even the most hardened critics of the Court...

...Thus Shakespeare's Antony, over the body of Caesar and in the face of the multitude, gave the lie to the very views he expressed and with rhetorical flourish transformed the dead tyrant into a dreaming demigod...

...Certainly this was the case with his infamous Judeophobia...

...The failure of their efforts helped convince Hitler that he was fated to accomplish his mission even though he knew, as he admitted to his Generals in November of 1941, that victory was impossible...

...That good and evil, especially in the political realm, are relative terms, and even interchangeable terms, can be seen in the fact that Hitler would, as Toland puts it, ~ have gone down as one of the greatest figures in German history" had he died seven or eight years sooner William H. Nolte is Chairman of the English department of the University of So,th Carolina...

...Toland attaches great importance to the fact that Woodrow Wilson refused to make an armistice with the Kaiser and the imperial German generals, who had lost the War, but insisted on dealing only with democratic elements in Germany--that is, with the socialists...

...Hitler will be with us for a long time, whether as ogre or failed messiah...

...Finally, in Swarm v. CharlotteMecklenburg (1971) and afterward, the Supreme Court ruled that racial balance was required, as was cross-district busing where necessary to achieve it...

...And it was, he always protested, only the Russians whom he really wished to defeat...

...That such a people should have followed him over the brink is a sad commentary on human nature...

...Of this Hitler was well aware...

...The Supreme Court's compulsorybusing decisions are virtually unparalleled examples of judicial obliquity and obfuscation...

...Buckley is a confirmed optimist but he is also a realist and his precautions against possible mid-Atlantic emergencies, (sinking in two minutes, or in five and over) make fascinating reading...

...An idle speculation, perhaps, particularly since no one can know what needs will oppress future generations or what their aspirations will be...

...Apparently none of his great rivals--Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill--has so captured the posthumous mind...

...Between Bismarck's victory in the Franco.Prussian War in 1871 (a victory, as Renan told the French at the 26 The Alternative: An American Spectator January 1977 time, of the German schoolmaster) and the beginning of the Second World War, Germany was undoubtedly the leading nation of the world in most of the indices relating to culture or civilization...

...Toland concludes his biography with this sentence: "The most extraordinary figure in the history of the twentieth century had vanished--unlamented except by a faithful few...

...Toland leaves no doubt that in the final years Hitler had succumbed to a messianic delusion--that is, he had begun to confuse his will with the will of God...

...Just what moral there is in the study God only knows...