Evita,First Lady
Page, Joseph A.
will sound, and the dead will be raised incorruptible. And when this corruptible nature has put on incorruptibility, this mortal nature immortality, then will the words of Scripture come true: Death...
...A central thesis of the biography is that Juan Perdn was in essence a "front man" for Evita...
...Her admirers looked upon her as Cinderella incarnate, the bountiful ben- efactress of the poor and the tribune of Argentina's workers...
...If then the Jehovah's Witnesses ought to break up their act ("We regret that due to circumstances beyond our control, the Armageddon previously scheduled for this hour will not be seen"), then so ought the early church to have done...
...Why did he decide to attack smok- ing and continue price supports for tabacco...
...In a memorable moment in Visions of Glory., two young Watchtower workers cheer together for Armageddon: .9 a sudden black storm blew up, and two of the men with whom I shared proofreading tasks raced to plateglass windows and said, "Oh boy...
...But even granting that there is a difference between the excite- ment in the Watchtower office and the excitement of ! Corinthians 15, we may recognize a larger difference between those two taken together and the holy serenity of Roma Aeterna...
...A bad joke...
...Wouldn't it be wonderful if it was Armageddon...
...We may smile too...
...Unfortunately, John Barnes's biography falls far short of doing justice to its subject...
...She did not, as Barnes tells us, make radio speeches for her husband dur- ing the campaign...
...Why did he declare the "moral equivalent of war" with a battle plan for his energy program such a mish-mash that even his advisers had trouble understanding it...
...Anti-Peronists want to believe that Juan Peron was a sniveling coward who had to hide behind a woman's skirts...
...we could discover much about the persc behind that smiling image...
...For had there been no such time and no germ of truth in such a mistake, then there would be, today, no Catholic church, just as, if there had been no germ of truth concealed in Barbara Grizzuti Harrison's years as a Jehovah's Witness, she would not have written this book...
...The primitive Christians did not cut much bet- ter a figure in their day than the Jehovah's Witnesses do in ours...
...The challenge that faced her was like the one that brought early Catholicism into existence...
...22 December 1978:819 To her ent/miesi Evita, as she was popularly known, was a tacky, vindictive ex-whore who parlayed limitless energy and ambition, native guile and her rela- tionship with Coionel Juan D. Perdn into the de facto exercise of presidential au- thority...
...By relying almost exclusively upon stale, gecondary sources, Barnes has fal- len into the trap of presenting as fact aspects of the Evita legend that for differ- ent reasons have suited both detractors and worshippers of the First Lady...
...She tells of a fatal heart attack at a Witnesses meeting, in which the Witnes- ses' sole preoccupation was with what the police rescue squad would think of their comportment...
...YANKEE FROlq GEORGIA William Lee Miller Times Books, $10.95 (247 pp...
...He stood fi what many people wanted at the tim rural and moral simplicity...
...The lat conveys a similarly distorted version Eva Perdn's historical significance, t: at least the music is first-rate...
...I EVrrA, FIRST I.AM: A BIOF.,RAPIiY OF EVA PERdN John Barnes Grove Press, $8.95 |oseph A. Page T HERE is something about Argentina that breeds excess and dissolves re- straint...
...When she broke with them, with their apocalyptic dream, their vision of glory, she found herself liberated into grief and love, physical and spiritual...
...No kind of joke, obviously, and just as obviously, some kind of refutation.9 Still, men and women who had once learned to look at the world as if it would soon end could never see it again in quite the old way...
...Though the causes of this phenomenon may be difficult to pinpoint (geographic isolation, the Latin temper- ament and inexhaustibly fertile soil are among the candidates for blame), its manifestations litter the historical land- scape...
...The overthrow of her husband three years later triggered frenzied efforts to extirpate her name and image from the national consciousness...
...and arrived at the bookstores about the same time the rock opera Ev, opened in a West End theater...
...What was it that kept the early church alive to make the transition to early Catholicism...
...The ultimate refutation...
...Barnes depicts Peron as being lost without Evita...
...The apocalyptic form of the Christian faith, though not undertaken as an imaginative exercise, had had this permanent an impact upon the imagination of the Greco-Roman world...
...And the answer to that question is part of the answer to the ques- tion, Why did Barbara Grizzuti Harrison become a Catholic...
...She refused to submit t hysterectomy, and the cancer that rail have been arrested eventually killed he In addition, the book teems with fact1 errors, and also suffers from sloppy ec ing...
...The basic weakness with Evita, First Lad), stems from Barnes's failure to go I IIIIIII II IIIII I IIIII Mystery man as president beyond rabidly anti-Peronist writi published in the 1950s...
...Two books explore Carter's past i I IMMYCARTER,our mystery President, may no longer be "Jimmy Who...
...Yet the rich complexities of her personality and the drama of her meteoric career deserve much more than hyperbolized special pleading...
...Commonweal: 820...
...0 death, where is your sting...
...Evita, First Ladywas first published London...
...I II I IIII IIIIIIIIIIII IIIIIIIIIII DASRER James Wooten Summit Books, $11.95 (377 pp...
...Maybe it's Armageddon...
...A close examination of the historical record reveals that Evita had nothing to do with Perrn's restoration on October 17, 1945...
...She served critical functions, but within his scheme of gov- ernance...
...William J. Lanouette I IIII I I I I II I IIII IIIIIIIII After almost two years in the publ arena of the White House Carter st seems a mystery...
...Rome got that way in a reaction, perhaps an over-reaction, to early Chris- tian predictions that never came to pass...
...Moreover, his manipulation of Argentine politics from exile in Madrid and his as- tonishing return to the presidency in 1973 prove beyond cavil that he was a genius in his own right, and did not need Evita to succeed...
...Self-righteousness stood between them and their own grief and love...
...Do you think it's Armageddon...
...to many...
...To name one of most interesting, her doctor gave interview revealing that her illness t first been discovered when she had have an emergency appendectomy January 1950...
...Perhaps, but then what kind of joke was it when Paul's predictions did not come true...
...The death of Eva Perdn in 1952 inspired canonization peti- tions to the Vatican...
...But a book of this sort is only as strong as its material, and the sad fact is that Barnes did not research his subject very thoroughly...
...namely, how to give new expression to a religious intuition larger than the forms that had first carried it...
...And when this corruptible nature has put on incorruptibility, this mortal nature immortality, then will the words of Scripture come true: Death is swal- lowed up in victory...
...This in turn has led him to a basic misconception about Evita's rela- tionship with her husband...
...He misses, example, a touching letter written Evita to Perdn on the eve of her tri t Europe and made public for the first t :. in 1975, as well as the revealing le Perdn sent to Evita from his confinem on the island of Mart~n Garc[a in Octo 1945...
...In other words, he used her, not the reverse...
...and a practical, n~ nonsense approach to solving problem: At the time that geemed enough, .an compared to his predecessors it was...
...Its message is I Eva, the saint and/or ex-whore not: "This is it," but rather, "This-- however temporarily in-evitable-is not it.'"And~"'This is not it" seems to me to have been the intuition that remained alive in Barbara Grizzuti Harrison during the twenty years that lay between her apostasy from Jehovah's Witnesses and her conversion to Roman Catholicism...
...Barnes remains generally sympathetic even while devel- oping some of the more negative aspects of her public and private life...
...Her participation in his first run for the presidency was inconsequen- tial...
...And if it did not, we must ask after the reason...
...I laughed and laughed and laughed, because they sounded so much more like Batman and Robin anticipating a caper with the Joker than like de- cently awed men awaiting God's final judgment...
...It is not surprising, therefore, that Evita books to date amount to either hagiography or "hatchet jobs...
...The life and legend of Marfa Eva Duarte de Perdn provides an apt case- in-point...
...He ga~ us a campaign autobiography that i probably more revealing than he wishec For, if carefully examined, there ar traits and tendencies in Carter's past th, help us understand what he is doin now--and may do next...
...Jehovah's Witnesses, as Hamson tells it, divide mankind, as early Christianity did, into "sheep" and "goats" and allow their preoccupation with this dis- tinction to distort their simplest emo-tions...
...and virtually ruled the country until her untimely death from cancer...
...to most people, but he is "Jimmy Why...
...But far more important causes led to his downfall in 1955...
...The Brooklyn of the Jehovah's Witnes- ses is now in the same predicament...
...Evita, First Lady does manage to avoid the manic excesses of prior treat- ments of Eva Perrn...
...the intuition, namely, that things need not be as they are...
...The authority she wielded as First Lady was delegated to her by the President...
...What other explanation can there be for the survival of Christianity in the face of so massive a refutation by events...
...Death, where is your victor...
...Primitive Christianity became early Catholicism because Paganism, whatever its sober beauty, was simply no longer an option...
...The deeper question is, How did Rome get that way...
...actively campaigned to promote his presidential candidacy in 1946...
...According to Barnes, she re- scued him from oblivion when he was arrested and deported to an island on the River Plate in October 1945...
...an ant Washington bias...
...He also writes with style and sensitivity...
...I say it was the overwhelming power of the central Jewish and Christian intui- tion, the intuition which most sharply distinguished those groups from classical paganism and today distinguishes them again from eastern religion...
...He seemed to con from nowhere, grasp the Democrat nomination, and win the election befo...
...Even the bizarre numerical speculations of Charles Taze Russell had their parallels--in fact, their antecedents--in the Book of Revelation...
...Peronist mythology exaggerates Evita's exploits in order to make her worthy of her exalted role as Perrn's indispensable helpmate...
...The theophany on Calvary is backlit by the resurrection...
...That there need be no bowing to necessity because there exists no neces- sity to which to bow...
...The theophany that concludes the Book of Job, whatever rise it may say, does not say that Yahweh and Job are, finally, fellow- prisoners...
...However, the weight of the ob- jective evidence supports none of these assertions...
...God exists, but God is freedom itself...
...Indeed, he seems totally unfar tar with most of the more recent rev~ tions about Evita appearing in Argent books, magazines and newspapers d ing the early 1970s...
...For him, the laws of nature are no less subject to abrogation than are the conventions of society...
...By one reckoning, the Jehovah's Witnesses have incorrectly predicted the End of the World seventeen times...
...Why did he waver on a weapon as inhumane as the neutron bomb...
...And yet as she doubles back now to question her years with the Witnesses" dream, so the Catholic church might well double back to question itself about the time when not just a few Christians but every Christian believed that the world was about to end...
...And yet, Jimmy Carter has reveale much about himself in his past...
Vol. 105 • December 1978 • No. 25
