Last Call: In the Wee Small Hours
Shattan, Joseph
LAST CALL by Joseph Shattan In the Wee Small Hours As I TOSS AND TURN IN MY BED IN THE darkest hours, pondering such dilemmas as how to slither out of that review I promised the editor of TAS, or...
...on the contrary, he had the most remarkable powers of self-discipline...
...Indeed, the more I consider the relationship between religious belief and getting a good night's sleep, the more I'm astounded that selfless, compassionate people like the Pope succeed in getting any sleep at all...
...You spend all of your waking hours plotting to defeat some hated adversary and then you crawl into bed pleasantly exhausted, satisfied that you've done your bit to destroy the Anti-Christ...
...Or was it simply a matter of Churchill's having the right sort of constitution and temperament...
...LAST CALL by Joseph Shattan In the Wee Small Hours As I TOSS AND TURN IN MY BED IN THE darkest hours, pondering such dilemmas as how to slither out of that review I promised the editor of TAS, or how to finish the book I'm writing before my grant expires, I often ask myself how the great figures of history, entrusted with the gravest responsibilities, ever managed to get a good night's sleep...
...And maybe the next time I find myself wide awake in the wee hours, I'll just think of how scornfully history will treat a James Carville, say, and quickly drift off into a deep and restful slumber...
...Perhaps there is something in human nature, even in a monster, that recoils in horror from truly gargantuan acts of evil...
...It's a question that's received surprisingly little attention...
...STILL, STALIN MAY HAVE BEEN ON TO SOMETHING...
...if I were as convinced as he was that this life is a mere antechamber to a far more significant existence in the world to come, I'd certainly sleep a lot better...
...When an excited aide phoned him at 5 a.m., instead, with news of his smashing electoral victory, an annoyed Adenauer curtly replied, "Thank you, Herr Lenz," and promptly went back to sleep...
...In the crisis of 1940, when so much responsibility lay upon me, and also at many very anxious, awkward moments in the following five years, I could always flop into bed and go to sleep after the day's work was done—subject, of course, to any emergency call...
...In The Gathering Storm, he gives us only a fleeting insight into his wartime sleeping habits: "During all the war soon to come and in its darkest times I never had any trouble in sleeping...
...One recognizes that the British prime minister had a genius both for war and rhetoric, but is there such a thing as a genius for sleep...
...ADENAUER'S REMARKABLE SERENITY WAS SUSTAINED by his deeply felt Catholicism, and it sometimes seems to me that JOSEPH SHATTAN, a Bradley Fellow at the Heritage Foundation, is writing a book tentavely titled Heroes of the Cold War...
...Take Winston Churchill...
...Yet Adenauer was anything but a nervous man...
...Although I know very little about His Holiness's sleeping habits—despite having read half a dozen papal biographies—I'd be astonished if he turned out to be a sound sleeper...
...How could this be...
...With his nation's survival quivering in the balance, how was Churchill able to doze off so promptly...
...Recall Joseph Stalin's infamous recipe for a good night's sleep: "To choose one's victim carefully," he said, "to prepare one's plan minutely, to slake an implacable vengeance, and then to go to bed, there is nothing sweeter in the world...
...In 1953, for example, on the eve of his re-election to a second term as chancellor of West Germany, the 77-year-old Adenauer went to bed at his usual hour, leaving instructions to be roused at 6:3o the following morning with the election results...
...In reality, however, he suffered from a serious sleep disorder: Witness the fact that he wouldn't dare go to bed until he'd spent most of the night drinking and carousing with Beria, Molotov, and the rest of that charming crew...
...I slept sound and awoke refreshed, and had no feelings except appetite to grapple with whatever the morning's boxes might bring...
...82 March 1999 • The American Spectator...
...Hatred, not love, is the great soporific...
...Consider the case of Pope John Paul II...
...To the best of my knowledge, however, the only great twentieth-century political figure ever to have used sleeping pills on a regular basis was the German statesman Konrad Adenauer...
...On second thought, though, I'm not at all convinced that religious devotion necessarily leads to a good night's sleep...
...Since Stalin spent a great deal of time following his own advice—choosing his victims, that is, and planning his vengeance—you'd think he'd have slept like a baby...
...Maybe this was the secret of Churchill's remarkable ability to sleep soundly during the most dangerous days of World War II—he hated the Nazis with every fiber of his being, and was convinced that he was overseeing their destruction...
...I imagine, rather, that the sorrows of the universe weigh very heavily upon him, and that his sleep is filled with groans and sighs—not over his own diminished physical state, but over mankind's impoverished moral state...
...BUT IF THE GOOD GUYS DON'T SLEEP VERY well at night, neither, I think, do the really bad guys...
...I KNOW THAT IF I OCCUPIED A POSITION OF high national authority, I would surely require a fistful of sleeping pills in order to settle down peacefully for the night...
Vol. 32 • March 1999 • No. 3
