BETWEEN ENDS
Kristol, William & North, Gary & Kelley, John
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...
...XXXIX, p. 609...
...He thought he was defecting to the FBI...
...But the other side won the battle...
...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...
...Richards has already written a book about him, Imperial Agent, published in 1966 by Devin-Adair...
...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...
...Like all good liberals, Pusey wants to rearrange our federal institutions to assure the country that we shall never experience another Vietnam...
...it appears they have been found...
...In the latter category of palmist resides one Merlo J. Pusey who signed his name to The Way We Go to War...
...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...
...Eugenia Smith and Goleniewski (they spoke in Russian...
...He has found some startling things...
...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...
...For example, this liberal editor knows that the newspaper guild is made up of average men who lack very extraordinary qualities...
...While his myth is a rather poorly constructed one, alas, its time has come...
...Robert Wilton, correspondent with the London Times, stayed with the massacre account, and that is the one which the governments officially accepted...
...This is how "climates of opinion," as the late Cornell scholar, Carl Becker, called them, operate in today's society...
...Smith claims to be Anastasia, and a book has been written about her (Anastasia, Speller & Sons, 1963...
...He did not read the book, refusing on the grounds that he did not read nut stuff...
...1942...
...It is not very sharp, and the man looks young, but the photo matches the features of the man on the passport...
...Also in the files was an autographed photo to Barrows from this same Nicholas Romanov...
...He really enjoys finding out what happened, even to the point of staking his reputation on his controversial findings...
...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...
...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...
...A tragedy, and yet a necessary step in the march of progress...
...America's out-of-work intellectual dilettantes discover the sweat shop and judicial intransigence at the turn of the century...
...Finally he consented to print it, but only after "toning down" my already guarded statements...
...Richards' team found one answer buried in the files of the San Francisco Examiner...
...He only glanced at the evidence...
...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...
...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...
...What, then, became of the Czar and his family...
...The photo is blurred, but enough detail exists to render doubtful the claim that this elderly man was, in fact, the Czar...
...The first claims that the visitor said he was no relation to the Czar...
...As it was later discovered, the blueprints had been sent by McGarry to Boris Brasol, the former official of the Czarist government...
...The implications of such a statement are considerable...
...Establishments feed on this phenomenon...
...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...
...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...
...His real driving force, of course, is his dislike for America's Vietnam involvement...
...Of course, as all good progressive humanists know in their hearts, it should have happened...
...4.95 Carl Becker once observed that the historian is merely the "mythmaker for the tribe...
...But Goleniewski has since turned on her, too...
...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...
...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...
...leave England's most distinguished non-royal family to its private grief...
...The blueprints were letters addressed to "Fox" from "Wilhelm" and "Nicholas," thanking him for his work in rescuing "Nicholas...
...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...
...Chapter six of the Richards book is devoted to the hunt for the authors...
...Imperial Agent, p. 260...
...Jobn L. Kelley...
...At this point the Richards book gets fantastic (so far, we've been dealing with the comparatively "obvious...
...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...
...Given the reception so far of the government, he is unlikely to get his wish...
...Millions of dollars are stored in European and American banks, waiting for an heir to claim the Romanov fortune...
...the second reports that he claimed to be the "natural son of Grand Duke Nicholas Nicholaevitch, uncle of the late Czar...
...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...
...When I submitted my short review, calling attention to only the most verifiable facts in the book, he was obviously displeased...
...Kyril is convinced, in spite of the fact that Goleniewski has now turned on him as an enemy...
...Such is the fate of reactionary moaarchs who oppose history...
...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...
...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...
...Richards includes a photo of Goleniewski and a man who was supposedly his father, a photo ca...
...So died the Romanovs, and with them the last great European dynasty...
...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...
...Of course the fag-end of Beard's thought lives on in Jackson Turner Main...
...Though Richards does not mention it, the photo is in an almost identical pose to one of a young, beardless Czar Nicholas...
...Trumpets sound forth and out spring William Ap-pleman Williams, Gar Alperovitz and a bespectacled coterie to rewrite the origins of the Cold War...
...and Mexico, Pusey judges this as an early example of war by executive fiat...
...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...
...Jobn L. Kelley waters of Pearl Harbor...
...However, the book also presents counter-evidence which brings questions to mind...
...When comparing the two beardless photographs, the resemblance is convincing: same ear, same nose, same mouth, same eyes...
...Also, Goleniewski claims to have matured late, having the body of a child from ages fourteen to twenty-three...
...Nut stuff," he said...
...He was, according to Richards, one of America's most successful secret agents of the World War I period...
...Yet publicly she maintained that they were all dead, and that is what is important, right...
...both were mysteriously called off...
...Yet he absolutely refuses to believe that any important event could have happened unless some legitimate newspaper reported it...
...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...
...First, a peculiar book published in 1920 in California, Rescuing the Czar...
...Of course no single myth ever totally engages the American historical profession...
...History The Way We Go To War by Merlo J. Pusey Houghton Mifflin, 202 pp...
...Goleniewski it is, and the father looks like him...
...Assuming this to be true, what then...
...Borg" was, became more and more confused, then startled, then tearful when she learned he was her brother...
...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...
...On the basis of what I know of the CIA investigation of Goleniewski's identity, I believe he is the Czarevich Alexei...
...Guy Richards is a different kind of journalist...
...A former CIA official, an expert in analysis and research who now works with Richards, thinks the signatures may be genuine...
...It is important because Mrs...
...The interesting figure, however, we know very little about...
...it has sent him photocopies instead...
...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...
...Arizona, with its human cargo, slowly sank into the waters of Pearl Harbor...
...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...
...America's new left abhors their country's persistent nationalism and sense of superiority to that much maligned purveyor of peace: Russia...
...Richards makes it clear that Goleniewski is an arrogant, unlikable man...
...John of Jerusalem (Knights of Malta), and a childhood friend of the Czarevitch Alexei...
...Gary North Swamproot vs...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...A fine sentiment, perhaps, but not one easily conformed to by "responsible, modern, all-the-facts, democratic" journalism...
...Lamenting Polk's order to General Zachary Taylor to occupy disputed territory which led to war between the U.S...
...No other paper will touch it...
...And the textbooks, I suspect, will not soon be revised in light of the revelations in The Hunt for the Czar...
...Witness the almost complete overturn of Beard's Economic Interpretation of the Constitution by the writings of Brown and McDonald in the fifties...
...Usually one predominates until a change in the climate of opinion finds a different myth more soothing...
...he has said so on numerous occasions...
...All of this is faithfully recorded in Guy Richard's startling book, The Hunt for the Czar...
...Unfortunately for the textbooks, it never happened...
...In any case, what Richards wants is a full-scale investigation by a Presidential commission...
...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...
...Who was this "Colonel Nicholas Romanov...
...This evidence is Richards' "hard" evidence...
...thus, he could pass as a child (he began to grow he says, in 1927...
...There always is some competition just as Swamproot and Snakeroot went a couple of rounds before Geritol won out...
...Voila...
...In two articles, 16 October 1919 and 26 July 1920, accounts are given of a visit from Romanov to Barrows...
...It claims to be the diaries of two men who participated in the rescue...
...He was willing to admit that a conspiracy of silence might be operating, but he still was not willing to break it...
...The bulk of the book is devoted to other matters...
...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...
...But no record of such a person exists...
...The evidence seems to fit together...
...Other testimony has been provided by Count Kyril de Shishmarev, member of the Knights of St...
...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...
...The fact that no bodies were ever recovered should not be regarded as evidence (though no acid works as fast as the account demands...
...He is careful not to overstate his case...
...The passport photo, dated 1919, was for Colonel Nicholas Romanov, signed by General Semonov of the White Russian Cossack forces...
...The book is one of the best detective stories one could wish for...
...And to Doubleday's great credit, he was permitted to publish his findings...
...It is rare...
...Two Congressional investigations were planned in the early 'sixties...
...Smith, not knowing at first who this "Mr...
...The result is rarely a synthesis of thesis and antithesis...
...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...
...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...
...This is probably the most exciting chapter in the book for anyone who regards himself as an historian, professional or amateur...
...The fact that no one has even bothered to make such a search before is discouraging...
...Chapter twelve reprints a translation of a taped meeting of Mrs...
...How about an investigation...
...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 lets his evidence do that for him...
...The Ludlow Amendment...
...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...
...It was all great fun, and I am sure they were still laughing as the U.S.S...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...This the Examiner reporters never bothered to trace down...
...His real reason: "I've watched for a review of it...
...Since the photo was not supplied to Richards by Goleniewski, things are even more complicated...
...Barrows was to become General Barrows in the California National Guard...
...Cleo generously provides George Bancroft...
...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...
...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...
...he had been Colonel Barrows in the Allied Expeditionary Force into Siberia in 1918-19, chief of intelligence for Major General Graves...
...Richards, a successful New York newspaperman, has provided compelling evidence that the family escaped in 1918...
...America wants a dose of Divine Providence to justify Jacksonian democracy...
...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...
...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...
...the fact that it is unlikely that any textbooks will rewrite the record in the light of new evidence is even more discouraging...
...He entered school in Poland, and rose in the Polish Army after 1945...
...Nut stuff" has to be kept out of "respectable" newspapers...
...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...
...Truth becomes limited to what the Times-New York or London-wishes to print...
...There is a photo of the visitor in the July paper, and Richards includes it in the book...
...On several meetings, Goleniewski has provided Kyril with data known only to the two of them...
Vol. 4 • November 1970 • No. 1
