Political Murder a Outrance

...It was a little arrogant of me, perhaps, to use the word "parental" in describing my sad feeling on reading again of Trotsky's death...

...My interest in Trotsky's character, and puzzlement about it, lent emphasis to certain features of this story, One was the almost incredible facility with which the assassin, although telling one easily exposed lie after another, insinuated himself into the small trusted circle surrounding this man who knew himself to be "the object of a global man-hunt conducted with unlimited resources by a powerful modern state...

...And he was, in basic motivation, totally unregardful of himself, People who recite that he was wont to gaze at himself in the mirror of history are talking with no inkling of a knowledge of their subject...

...She was a consecrated person herself, a warm and thoughtful and much respected woman, and nothing I have ever seen in Trotsky, or learned about him, has cast any doubt whatever on that judgment of hers...

...His first wife, Alexandra Sokolovskaia, whom I visited in Petrograd in 1923, although she conceded that Trotsky was arrogant and touchy — amour propre was her name for this trait—described him to me as "the most consecrated person I have ever known...

...The identity, parentage and life story of the murderer, the longtime strategy with which he approached his victim, the details of his crime, his behavior under investigation, and his state of mind as revealed in a psychoanalysis extending over six months—all are set forth in Levine's book without leaving a doubt anywhere...

...Such a combination of values is rare indeed, and must have cost the author an endless amount of discriminating and patient effort...

...As factual truth, the book has been so highly praised by those most competent to judge—William Henry Chamberlin, David Dallin, Sidney Hook, Eugene Lyons, Bertram Wolfe, among others—that I need hardly add my concurring opinion, Besides factual exactitude, the tale is so well told as to have much of the suspense and excitement of a "mystery," a spy thriller, a "whodunit"—"detective story" is the name we used during the reign of Sherlock Holmes and Dr...

...L-6, 150E.35St.,NewYork 16, N. Y., for free copy...

...Even after his home had been invaded, and his bedroom and its surroundings machine-gunned by a gang of 20 gunmen dressed up in police uniforms, he stuck to the fastidious notion that it would be inhospitable to search everybody who entered the fortification...

...His understanding of other people—often so penetrating in his books—was in some peculiar way abstract...

...and there is a deep and tender sorrow, a feeling of bereavement almost parental, in my heart, as I read again and in full detail the story of his death...

...For besides requiring some detective work on his own part, the story had to be pieced together from a wide variety of sources, among them incidental ONCE UPON A TIME, when popular fiction admitted both Good Guys and Bad Guys, evil was a palpable force, waiting beyond the cottonwood trees...

...Although I have to preach that sermon, I do not want to conclude my comment on this devastating book in just that way...

...Trotsky was my friend...

...But a more immediate cause was the terrible pathos in Trotsky's cry when he emerged bleeding from his study after the violent struggle with his assassin...

...He was not, it seemed to me, emotionally perceptive...

...Now we have a more permissive universe, peopled only by Good Guys, a few of whom do not see the light until the closing chapters...

...So like a child, so little like the imperious, world-commanding character he had been...

...A feeling of frustration enters into the tragedy of it: "If only a sufficiently suspicious person had been around," you keep saying, "somebody constantly aware of the ingenuity of the GPU, and the throngs of its trained agents that haunt the honest world...

...The rabbit hutch I could visualize accurately because it had struck me as so amusingly strange to be introduced to a flock of rabbits by the War Commissar and Commander-in-Chief of the Red Army...

...I read the book in the intervals of reading a best-selling novel and found that, although severely restricted to fact, it stood up very well in competition with a brilliant adventure in modern political fiction...

...About the only dissatisfaction I can record—aside from the inability, insuperable in all Russian-born Americans, to understand the meaning of the English word "had," the difference I mean, between our perfect and pluperfect tenses—is the lack of a plan of the fortified house in Coyoacan where Trotsky lived...

...Still his family and friends were as careless as he about investigating the various loops and tangles in the tale the assassin told about himself, or certain peculiarities in his behavior that seemed transparently suspicious afterward...

...He was richly endowed, consecrated, highly trained, sacrificial fanatic of the Religion of Immoral-ism invented intellectually by Karl Marx, inculcated by Lenin, and brought to its full bloom of bloodshed by the natural-born gangster who not altogther accidentally succeeded them...

...remarks in the memoirs of various agents of the GPU who have defected and sought asylum in the Western world...

...Although I spent some hours in that house a few months before the murder, I was unable to place the events as they were described: the study, the dining room, the bedroom, the grandchild's bedroom, etc...

...It is that false and foolish religion, its notion that a "society where all men are brothers" can be brought into being by carrying unbrotherly behavior to its extreme, which must be exposed, refuted, rooted out and swept from the chambers of all grown-up minds, if civilized culture is to survive...

...It is skilfully and fluently pieced together...

...Levine brings to life the whole complex of men, ideas and circumstances in which this deeply significant murder occurred: One could discuss an immense variety of moral and political problems without departing from the subject matter of his book...

...Every act of his, even the awfully foolish one after Lenin died, was dictated by a selfless devotion to the cause be believed in...

...There can be no real snakes in Eden any more...

...I am afraid I have traveled rather far from The Mind of an Assassin in these reflections, but it is only because of the excellent vividness of the book...

...With all his faults, Trotsky was a very great man—the greatest revolutionary orator and organizer and warrior, I suppose — whatever else you think of him — in all man's history...

...Although it gave Levine his excellent title, the mind of the assassin—as revealed in a psychoanalytic investigation lasting 972 hours!—is to me the least interesting part of the book...

...It seems surprising that no one involved in the making of the book realized the desirability of providing such a plan...

...The word was dictated in part by my sense of the almost puerile naivete of anyone with a mind like his who, in the day-light of modern science, solemnly still believed in the outdated gigantic exercise in wishful thinking called dialectical materialism...

...nobody must be allowed to see you without being searched...

...To me this was an example of something I had noticed before in the wide-ranging and ardent intelligence of this prodigious man...

...I don't know how you can compare Danton or Robespierre or Spartacus, or any of the other great revolutionists—except only Lenin—with Trotsky either in ability or achievement...

...A Problem can be exorcised, as sin cannot be, by A Liberal Education (words and music by Mark Van Doren).'' From the current issue of NATIONAL REVIEW...

...After the deed was done and he was dying, he murmured to his wife: "Natasha, I love you...

...Write to Dept...

...Watson...

...Oh ...Oh...

...I suppose we all, even the most arrogant, carry that little child around in us...

...Look what they have done to me...

...That makes the story sadly terrible...

...Indeed some of the psychoanalytic cliches employed to describe Ramon Mercader seem rather superficial, as alas "depth psychology" frequently does, compared to the simple and obvious facts of his character...

...But for the rest of the story, not only of the murder, but of the machine-gun raid of the gang led by the criminal artist Siqueiros three months before, I needed a plan...

...We must either trust them, he said in effect, or not let them in...

...Reviewed by Max Eastman Author, poet, translator of Trotsky's works WE HAVE AT LAST a full history of the plot of Stalin's international murder gang to wipe out Leon Trotsky...

...The phrase I quoted is from Trotsky, who was as firm-willed and fixated a believer in that disastrous religion as his assassin...

...there must be instead, to account for unpleasantness and violence, a Problem...