AN ARTFUL AMALGAM OF THE ABSURD:
Howe, Quincy
AN ARTFUL AMALGAM OF THE ABSURD QUINCY HOWE Meeting at Potsdam CHARLES L. MEE, JR. Evans, $10.95 Albert Camus created a literature of the absurd. Samuel Beckett invented the theater of the...
...So what...
...Samuel Beckett invented the theater of the absurd...
...As Meeting at Potsdam now tells the story, Secretary of State Byrnes broke the deadlocks at the summit by persuad-ing the Big Three to refer most of their unfinished business to the Council of Foreign Ministers, where Molotov- ever obedient to Stalin's orders-gladly exercised his usual vetoes...
...It has been the same-in principle if not in detail-with the wretched Nixon...
...Mee permits to speak for itself...
...The exuberant John Gunther was a journalist born at the right season for his questing tempera-ment...
...In Meeting at Potsdam Charles Mee has made a jour-nalistic and historical breakthrough in that he has chosen a memorable inci-dent in 20th century history to demon-strate that the absurdities of our time have now reached such a pitch that the journalist's task has become to pre-sent the record in such a way that it speaks for itself...
...The man from Missouri had to be shown-shown, that is, hard evidence to show the folks back home that Amer-ica had indeed won the war and the fruits that went with such a victory...
...Churchill refused to turn over to Stalin one-third of the ships of the German Navy then in British waters...
...Although the vigilant Eden had seen through Stalin's game from the start, the groggy Church-ill had not...
...The point has nothing to do with Truman or Churchill, with the atom bomb or the cold war...
...As a start-er, Stalin refused to withdraw the Red Army from any of the European terri-tories that it still occupied...
...Today-thirty years after these hap-penings-thirty-six-year-old Charles L. Mee, Jr., Harvard graduate and former editor of Horizon Magazine, has recon-structed them into an engrossing story that tells itself with its blend of brief quotations from the Potsdam transcripts and bits and pieces from innumerable accounts by participants and witnesses, all of it held together with his own terse summations and commentaries...
...Since, then, more and more complex chal-lenges confront fewer and fewer leaders capable even of meeting, to say nothing of mastering them...
...Meanwhile at Potsdam the restric-tions of time, space, and personnel under which the original Big Three met and labored led to their firm and unani-mous agreement to disagree...
...It blasted Potsdam- and not Potsdam only-into a new age...
...This meant-among other things-that Stalin could no more par-ticipate in the occupation of Japan than Truman could participate in the ad-ministration of eastern Europe...
...The current wind-up of the Vietnam war may yet witness his successors meeting similar fates...
...The imperturbable Charles Mee is a journalist born at the right time to cope with this season of the absurd...
...It was to the fast-talking, fast-thinking, Jimmy Byrnes not to the rumbling, rambling Churchill that Truman gave heed and Byrnes came to the rescue by selling good old "Uncle Joe" the Council of Foreign Ministers...
...Unlike some accounts of Potsdam, this one gives proper credit to Joseph E. Roosevelt's second pre-war Ambassador to Moscow, who sat close to Truman throughout the conference but whose voluminous note-taking goes unmentioned...
...In-deed, it is this artful amalgam that evokes in the reader-at any rate in this reader-that eerie sense of the absurd which infuses so much contem-porary history...
...That, too, Mr...
...The news of the atomic breakthrough not only capped these absurdities...
...Truman followed through by insisting on the indefinite postponement of a general peace conference...
...Only when Truman decides, two weeks later, to drop the bomb on Japan does he raise his own voice, as he does again in his Epilogue chap-ter when Churchill declared his cold war on the Soviet Union, speaking at Fulton, Missouri, on March 5, 1946...
...In Charles Mee's book, Churchill embodied the tottering British Empire over whose liquidation he still hoped not to have to preside...
...A generation ago, when John Gun-ther was the same age as Charles Mee is today, his Inside Europe started him on his journalistic career of introducing his compatriots to an extraordinary gal-axy of world leaders and to the unpre-cedented challenges that all of them met and some of them mastered...
...During their first ten days of bickering at Potsdam the Big Three had gone from absurdity to absurdity which now speak for themselves in Charles Mee's book...
...In connection with the Second World War, no condemnation of Hitler or Stalin can surpass their own records...
...But only by sowing dissension between Truman and Stalin did Churchill see any hope of shoring up that Empire-and perky Harry Truman had not come to Pots-dam to play any such games as that...
...Unlike the peripatetic and irresolute Stimson, Davies remained before, during, and after Potsdam an unreconstructed Wilson Democrat as opposed to the cold war as Walter Lipp-mann had always been-a circumstance made all the more noteworthy by the similarity the views of Joseph Davies at Potsdam bore to the views of Charles Mee today...
...On July 24, the day before Churchill left Potsdam for Lon-don, Truman received official word of the successful atomic bomb test at Alamogordo...
...But even before the Potsdam Conference broke up on August 1, both Truman and Churchill found themselves having to do business with Stalin on Stalin's terms...
...To accept the absurd is not to con-done or to condemn it...
...Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord...
...And now comes Charles L. Mee, Jr...
...On July 25 Churchill left Potsdam for London, never to return, because it had taken until then for the complete returns from the spring general election to show that Britain's voters had replaced Churchill with Attlee as Prime Minister...
...with a mini-history of the ab-surd covering those two and a half weeks between July 15 and August 1, 1945 when Truman, Stalin, and Church-ill tried at Potsdam to define, explore, and co-ordinate their policies toward one another and toward the surround-ing world...
...Jean-Paul Sartre originated a philosophy of the absurd...
...It has to do with the historiography of Meeting at Pots-dam, almost all of which remains with-in its original bounds of letting the facts speak for themselves-chiefly in the words and deeds of the principals at Potsdam, during the course of their meeting there...
...their fates were self-made...
Vol. 102 • July 1975 • No. 9
