Treason in the Blood
Brown, Anthony Cave
Philby's father, St. John, long a footnote in modern British history. Philby pore had an enormous effect on his son, and was one of those unpleasant men whose lives make interesting reading. It is...
...These opposing currents were magnified in him into an almost hysterical perversity...
...He was not a stupid or unimaginative man, and it seems likely that one so given to catch phrases was driven by a desire for concealment behind the bland and unexceptionable, a desire equaled only by his impulse to disagree publicly with—and, if possible, subvert—the policies of his class and country...
...I n 1964, Look magazine published an article entitled "The Vanishing American Jew...
...Three decades later, the subject is with us again and the weight of opinion is shifting...
...He supported them, if such can be said, by sending them rare postage stamps and pearls...
...JOHN PHILBY, KIM PHILBY AND THE SPY CASE OF THE CENTURY Anthony Cave Brown Houghton Mifflin/677 pages / $29.95 reviewed by RICHARD LAMB The American Spectator April 1995 65 necessity, that he passed on to his son, for whom it was not an epistolary ploy but an entire secret career...
...The major Jewish institutions then were strong and well-funded, and the Jewish community feared "vanishing" much less than it feared Barry Goldwater...
...In fact she suffered from severe depression, practiced self-mutilation, and injected herself with her own urine...
...It was a talent, or a TREASON IN THE BLOOD: H. ST...
...As Grand Vizier to Ibn Saud, St...
...John's character...
...It is those clichés that are most indicative of St...
...John had the engine, leapt and sputtered like something high-powered and experimental, and was completely unsuccessful...
...Schoolboy, varsity man, budding mandarin, and paterfamilias, Philby maintained a façade of a career and seemed every inch the bourgeois gentilhomme, despite not marrying his wife until seven years and three children after meeting her...
...His accomplishment was keeping Ibn Saud's oil concession from a government he despised...
...Brown quotes extensively from his correspondence, and in it, he remains dead...
...The article caused a brief stir, but was soon forgotten...
...S t. John was indisputably Kim's creator...
...He lacked Burton's literary talent, however, and his multitude of books is forgotten: one imagines them to resemble the rantings of a retired district commissioner, maddened by syphilis or fluoride in the water...
...On the surface she was the model of county family, elegant bone structure, point-to-points, and rectitude...
...In the upper-middle-class bureaucratic atmosphere he was required to cleave, the classically trained mind and tweedy dash provided a minimal coefficient of drag...
...He was not usually given to this sort of wit...
...Kim, the second generation, flew...
...1 f St...
...Over the years, as he gradually betrayed country, class, and old school tie, Philby met with Soviet case officers in obscure London districts like Rotherhithe and, posted to Washington, drove into the Virginia countryside to leave critical secret information in obscure dead drops...
...It is tempting to see Kim Philby's treason as an exploit, a monumental prank, a poke at the transfer of imperial power from Britain to the United States...
...John, who was all drag, was more human...
...John described himself as a Communist who read the Times, which seems a bit fatuous, like much about him...
...It was altogether more than his father had managed...
...His exploration of the Empty Quarter, which brought him fame, groups him with such English Arabists as Doughty, Thesiger, and Lawrence...
...The data from the massive 1990 study, the National Jewish Population Survey, points to significant demographic problems...
...She died at 47 of congestive heart failure, not before taking a job as a cook in an Eaton Square household because her husband, by then very well paid as the Economist's man in the Middle East, gave her no money...
...In policy he was a natural dissident, in parenthood a recusant: he lived in Jeddah, on the Red Sea, thousands of miles from his London-based family...
...As a child, he underwent his family's financial ruin...
...On June 1, 1934, Philby met with a Soviet intelligence officer named Arnold Deutsch and (in German) offered his services to the cause of international Communism...
...He became a Soviet agent, charged with penetrating the upperreaches of British intelligence...
...John won a scholarship to Cambridge, and displayed the twin tendencies typical of his station, alternately making a fetish of his class trappings and resenting the blithe sense of entitlement that is the most central, unavailable trapping...
...As a writer of letters he had a taste for cliche...
...While Look did not predict that the American Jewish community would actually "vanish," it did foresee trouble ahead...
...John was a mass of contradictions, a poorly contained atomic pile of undirected rage and dissatisfaction, Kim was a magnificent weapon, a bearer of his father's rage—but a rage providing propulsion, and making a bang on impact...
...His mother opened a residential hotel, his estranged father died a gamekeeper...
...His son, in the ruthless service of another empire, was responsible for the death of, among others, the anti-Hitler (and also anti-Communist) German Catholic resistance, and the American agents who landed in Albania in 1950...
...For the 1960s, this was a rare foray into the subject of Jewish intermarriage and its demographic impact...
...The intermarElliott Abrams is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and the author of Undue Process: A Story of How Political Differences Are Turned Into Crimes (Free Press...
...John convinced him to give the concession for Saudi oil to the Americans...
...General MacArthur believed that Philby betrayed his order of battle to Communist intelligence services, resulting in the death, wounding, and capture of 30,000 troops after the Chinese crossed the Yalu River and attacked him in late 1950...
...his illustrious and ill-starred career as an orientalist places him with Sir Richard Burton—as do his hominess and satanic appearance...
Vol. 28 • April 1995 • No. 4
