POLITICAL BOOKNOTES
POLITICAL BOOKNOTES The Butcher of Lyon: The Story of Infamous Klaus Barbie. Brendan Murphy. Empire Books, $13.95. In late 1943 and early 1944, when it became clear to French Jews around Lyon...
...Barbie wanted baseball explained to him and he was very interested in trying to understand it ." Can it be doubted that if the British had picked up Barbie, instead of the Americans, he would have been engaged in similar conversation about cricket...
...Even in his most recent comments on his Nazi past, Barbie has been unrepentant...
...Doubleday, $17.95...
...Harper & Row, $6.95...
...Martin P. Wittenberg...
...It is this fraternity of the unforgiveable and the forgiven that Martin Mayer, having in previous books disposed of the financiers, the hucksters, the educators, and the lawyers who make up our society or put it out of joint, now chooses to write about...
...If you work hard in the gubernatorial campaign, for example, it is unlikely that you will have a chance to put into effect the policies you support...
...Harvard University Press, $18.50...
...Eleanor Smeal...
...The long list of villains, interestingly enough, includes fellow supplysiders Jude Wanniski and Arthur Laffer, and ultimately even President Reagan, who, Roberts suggests, may be "more rhetoric than belief...
...How Barbie managed to survive as a free man for more than 30 years is a story that brings shame to virtually everyone connected to the case—especially the American officials who sheltered him, lied for him, and eventually helped him escape to sanctuary in Bolivia as the French closed in on him...
...The understandable desire of most Americans who fought in the war to leave Europe as soon as possible also left counterintelligence in the hands of younger, inexperienced men who did not have the same emotional commitment to punishing Nazis that their predecessors did...
...The French ambassador's wish for Christmas was "peace throughout the world!' The Soviet ambassador hoped for "freedom from imperialism for the enslaved peoples of the world:' "Finally',' said the announcer, "we asked His Majesty the King's ambassador from London, Sir Oliver Franks, what he would prefer this day...
...its duties are executed by a staff of less than half the number of police officers it takes to patrol New York City...
...He says that the United Nations "lives in a politicized fairyland and limits its contacts with anything other than the unreal world of reified nationstates . . ..Giant meetings on the environment, housing, the status of women, world hunger, etc., have produced bad papers, dishonest rhetoric, drunken delegates, overpaid secretariats, [and] boredom beyond the capacity of any but veterans of these engagements to sustain ." The General Assembly is an "empty shell within which reverberate the loud voices of beggars pretending to be horsemen" UNESCO is "an essentially negative force with a mission to validate bureaucratic control of intellectual and spiritual activities ." As for the U.S...
...After the war the French twice tried Barbie for that and other equally heinous offenses and sentenced him to death...
...And it means that less and less thoughtful people work in politics because they see so little chance to put their thoughts into action...
...He was there;' said one of the survivors of Barbie's interrogations, "directing everything!' In one of his final acts, it is said, Barbie organized the extermination of hundreds of French Resistance fighters held at the prison he personally commanded...
...Temporary retrenchments may occur, he says, but "supply-side economics will ultimately prevail...
...In short order he became known to operatives in the U.S...
...It is a case study of the kind of moral blindness that organizational expediency, buck passing and save-thine-own-hide actions can foster...
...government simply furthered the coverup...
...Even on the domestic scene, Mayer sometimes fails to probe beneath the surface...
...Baseball...
...support for Portugal's claims to Goa...
...Or, as one of Barbie's American handlers explained it, "There is no such thing as morality or ethics, there is only expediency...
...What is there to regret...
...Paul Craig Roberts...
...Abroad, our representatives, like those of other countries, are in danger of contracting "localitis"that is, of identifying themselves with the views of the host country...
...In a war, everyone kills...
...Barbie now awaits trial for his crimes...
...One of the relatively few existing inculpating documents of the many wartime atrocities in the Lyon district was the telegrammed confirmation to Gestapo headquarters that the Jewish orphans had been rounded up and dispatched to their deaths...
...Times Books, $17.95...
...What is striking is how often the same kind of moral relativism is applied nowadays in other circumstances...
...It is dogged in probing Barbie's past...
...For 11 months dozens of Jewish children were snatched from German supervision and given safe haven at a hillside farm in the village of Izieu...
...As a tour de force of the world's diplomatic scene, the book ultimately falls short...
...It makes moral judgments about him and his worthiness to serve the anticommunist cause...
...Almost upon introduction, he endeared himself to CIC agent Robert Taylor and became a leader of a large ring of sources providing information to the CIC...
...Mayer points to John Kenneth Galbraith's memoir of his time as ambassador to India...
...is too great' In fairness to Taylor and other CIC officals who relied on him, there was not much evidence available in 1945 that implicated Barbie in war crimes...
...And he could turn the coin, making the prospect of losing him seem a lurking disaster by threatening to expose what he knew to the enemies of the organization for which he worked...
...They accused the accusers of acting out of partisan leftist motives...
...Elizabeth Lieman Why and How Women Will Elect the Next President...
...I think I'd quite like a small box of candied fruit ?' Mayer would like to see the world's business conducted on a nation-to-nation basis by the career people trained to do it...
...Social class and economic circumstance play a much greater role in determining the political views of women than Smeal acknowledges in this book on the gender gap...
...None survived...
...Galbraith's two enemies seemed to be the American ambassador to Pakistan (who was a partisan of that country's interests in Kashmir), and our envoy to Portugal (who urged U.S...
...If taxes there must be, however, Roberts favors a flat-rate national sales tax...
...State Department, Mayer points out that each geographic bureau sees the world as a cell in which the nucleus consists of the countries from its own area...
...His training as an investigator does not qualify him to be taken seriously as a sage in world affairs...
...Leonard Reed The Supply-Side Revolution: An Insider's Account of Policymaking in Washington...
...The Allies had compiled massive lists of wanted war criminals, but the few that referred to the Butcher of Lyon had Barbie listed as "Barbier...
...Almost all the bitter irony of this story has been captured in Murphy's account...
...Murphy presents an overwhelming case that fear of embarrassing exposure, rather than true security concerns, was the prime motiviation for their efforts on behalf of Barbie...
...Franks was pleasantly surprised by a phone call from a local radio station welcoming him and asking him what he'd like for Christmas...
...The period from 1952 to 1980 was the time when the states and municipalities became thoroughly civil-serviced, as only a few of them had been before...
...Protecting Barbie became the overriding concern after his network of field operatives began flagrantly breaking the law—with the encouragement of the CICby spying outside the Americancontrolled zone of Germany...
...An excellent examination of an important and lamentable development in this nation's history...
...but he noted that by the same token errors are a consequence of the mistakes that have preceded them—and from this they derive a certain cosmic forgiveness...
...Even though there were standing orders to arrest all former Gestapo officials, many, like Barbie, were recruited into the anticommunist crusade...
...Since your candidate, if elected, will have only a handful of patronage jobs, he will rely mostly on civil servants who have not been out campaigning door-to-door and who thus have not had the opportunity to arrive at political convictions based on a real knowledge of the needs and concerns of the people...
...Corporate PAC money has no apparent influence on policy-making, but an "extraordinary" editorial in the nowdefunct Washington Star played a critical role in getting the president's 1981 budget passed...
...because the new Socialist government has outlawed the death penalty, the maximum punishment he faces is life imprisonment...
...Career officers are no less immune to localitis...
...They were more prone to rely on sources like Barbie...
...In a war, there is neither good nor evil...
...Equally as important to Barbie's survival was the abrupt change in the political climate in Europe that turned the Allies' focus away from settling the score with the Nazis to battling communists...
...Harrison Rainie The Decline of American Political Parties 1952-1980...
...It is also true in the criminal justice system, where persons patently guilty of the most serious offenses are routinely freed or merely slapped on the wrist because they can provide information about cases deemed more important, or because their testimony wipes an important, unsolved case off the books...
...But bright young people are not immune to the lure of promotion, and the brighter they are the sooner they discover the system's love of conformity...
...In the end, Murphy is as judicious on the moral questions as anyone can be...
...And the most fascinating thing—do you know what they were talking about...
...Charles Peters The Diplomats...
...What is surprising is not that the system breeds mice but that it has also produced the likes of Jacob Beam, Charles Bohlen, and George Kennan (although there is reason to suspect that it was too suffocating to keep Kennan...
...They protested his innocence...
...If American diplomacy copes reasonably successfully with the dilemmas of the eighties, it will be because a few eccentrics seem always to work their way out of the gelatinous environment of the State Department...
...But he finds their arguments wanting...
...It was a "distressing life" to be a "Reaganaut in the Reagan administration," says Paul Craig Roberts about the year and a month he spent as an assistant treasury secretary in 1981-82...
...In this case, protecting the Cold War operations of U.S...
...But she corrals an impressive array of convincing statistics to prove that the gap is nevertheless a powerful political lever and offers detailed information on how women can use that clout by organizing PACs, choosing candidates, and running for office...
...I admire the Nazi discipline...
...One CIC agent, Gene Bramel, described to Murphy how he once saw Barbie and another agent deeply engrossed in conversation at a beer hall...
...He gives due weight to the concerns of the CIC officials that their important activities might be exposed to the Soviets through French communists...
...I am proud to have been a commanding officer of the best military outfit of the Third Reich, and if I had to be born a thousand times again, I would be a thousand times what I have been!' After the victory of Allied forces in 1945, Barbie immediately began to act on his notion that his salvation lay in selling his skills as an anticommunist intelligence agent...
...Barbie's adept exploitation of his position was highlighted when he was jailed briefly for questioning about his wartime activities...
...And Mayer cites, as the classic example of localitis, Andrew Young's statement upon his resignation as U.S...
...The officer at an American embassy files his reports through the ambassador, who is accustomed to the reverence usually reserved for emperors and sevenfoot basketball players...
...It was signed by Klaus Barbie, the head of the Gestapo in Lyon...
...I am a convinced Nazi...
...he said to one interviewer...
...The question of who bears the tax burden, he says, is largely "irrelevant:' —Robert S. McIntyre The Tarnished Door...
...Harvard University Press, $15...
...The varieties of Barbie's tortures and executions seem to have been limited only by his imagination...
...And it is a brave young officer who turns in a report with observations that vary from those of the ambassador—or that the ambassador knows do not conform to the picture of reality held by, let us say, a Reagan administration...
...And Sir Oliver heard himself say, "Well, as a matter of fact, it's very kind of you...
...He was later released when his interrogators concluded, "His knowledge as to the mission of CIC, its agents, subagents, funds, etc...
...When the French demanded Barbie be handed over, his CIC handlers lied to their superiors, saying they did not know where he was...
...Most of this work was directed against the French, whose security forces were feared to have been penetrated by Soviet-controlled communists...
...Always the judgment is the same: It is more important to solve our current problem than to address the moral issues of the past...
...The rack, electric probes, the knout (a leather ball studded with metal points attached to a long handle) and la baignoire (where the victim was placed in a tub, hands bound, his feet tied to a bar that could be yanked to thrust him underwater) were all standard features of his torture sessions...
...Still, the pressures built, evidence grew, and, instead of acting on it, the U.S...
...Any good secret police officer getting into that area of CIC would have been a winner in nothing flat, even if he had murdered 500 babies on the side...
...after all, he had "never implied or indicated that he used torture...
...A sudden change in the government of Bolivia—a country that had harbored him since 1951—led to his extradition to France last year...
...The result has been a disastrous division between politics and policy...
...Milton Mayer...
...In short, "The Reagan administration was not a supportive environment for a Reaganite...
...The aid our government provided Barbie makes for a painful tale, not so much because genuine malevolence motivated his protectors, but because reasonably well-intentioned American operatives lost their bearings...
...At the same time, the French were bringing pressure on the Americans to turn Barbie over to them...
...Nobody who knows the foreign service can deny the extremely high caliber of its officers...
...In describing the training and development of the American foreign service, for example, he notes that although the Foreign Service Institute decries the tendency of officers to buck everything upstairs, still "the foreign service draws more than its share of mice...
...Soon enough, though, their refuge was destroyed as two truckloads of German soldiers surrounded the farm and seized 41 of the orphans just days before Easter...
...Within a month, the canny Barbie had beguiled Taylor, who fended off requests to turn Barbie in to authorities by insisting,"His value as an informant infinitely outweighs any use he may have in prison ." It was a life-saving succor to Klaus Barbie that he learned early in his adulthood how to make himself appear invaluable, in both senses of the word...
...He squeezed the trigger often—typically putting a bullet into the back of the neck of some tortured prisoner who was just about to be returned to his cell...
...on the day before Christmas...
...They were herded onto the trucks and eventually taken to Auschwitz...
...It would be tempting, but wrong, to dismiss this episode as a regrettable but rare lapse of ethical judgment...
...Sohn Crewdson...
...The answer, of course, is an unequivocal yes...
...In late 1943 and early 1944, when it became clear to French Jews around Lyon that the Nazis were systematically slaughtering as many Jews as they could gather, a resistance group was born...
...The book is everything that Barbie's American saviors were not...
...As for taxes, Roberts is agin 'em...
...They needed Barbie because they were incompetent:' former C1C agent James Ratliffe told Murphy...
...Roberts has an unusual "insider's" view of how the political world really works...
...ambassador to the U.N.: "I have sought to represent the less-developed countries of the world to the people of the United States...
...The personnel folder of the maverick officer will soon be one of many under consideration for promotion by a selection board in Washington...
...Other administration officials would leak rumors to the press that you were a kook...
...Mairi N. Morrison...
...The result of three years' reporting for The New York Times (which won Crewdson a Pulitzer in 1981), this book is the most readable, sensible account yet available on the emotionally charged subject of illegal immigration...
...Barbie ingratiated himself to his protectors with equal measures of charm and diligence...
...The radio program was broadcast the next day, complete with comments from other ambassadors...
...Not surprisingly, the hero of Supply Side Revolution turns out to be Paul Craig Roberts himself...
...Because he could ingratiate himself to superiors with good work and sycophancy, they deemed his services helpful...
...George Kennan once wrote that errors in foreign policy serve as forerunners for mistakes that will be built on them—and that they therefore incur a cosmic unforgiveableness...
...Army Counter-Intelligence Corps (CIC), who saw his value because of his wide network of associates in Germany and France...
...It was after a day of persistent, vicious beating, done for the most part by Barbie himself, that famed French Resistance leader Jean Moulin eventually fainted into death...
...It is a grim postscript to Barbie's story that he helped Bolivian security goons organize the same kind of antiresistance activities that he had perfected in Lyon...
...The CIC operatives' initial response was disbelief that Barbie was capable of such horrors...
...Crewdson paints a sobering portrait of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, where horror stories of officials making fortunes selling everything from green cards to housemaids abound, and points out that it is sorely understaffed...
...This is a sassy tweak on the nose for President Reagan, who, Smeal says, is underestimating the women's vote and will pay a steep political price in 1984 for his opposition to abortion and affirmative action...
...But the "Butcher of Lyon" escaped his fate for more than 30 years...
...Too many embittered foreign service officers, serving in remote posts like Ouagadougou, know the price of having been right inopportunely...
...You didn't get invited to White House receptions or victory parties...
...One of its major missions was to kidnap and save children who had been placed in the care of a Germansanctioned social agency after their parents had been sent to death camps...
...What he overlooks is that the service doesn't draw mice, it creates them by placing a high premium on mousehood...
...Dogs were used in assaults and sexual attacks on women...
...I picked up my glass of beer and went over:' recalled Bramel...
...Crewdson also points out the useful distinction between illegal border-crossers (against whom most enforcement is directed, though they are least likely to take jobs away from Americans) and visa abusers—foreign students, tourists, and forgers—who are a more likely threat to American employment...
...Since the federal government was already staffed overwhelmingly by career employees, it meant that during these 28 years practically all the jobs that had been available to reward political participation had vanished...
...Nevertheless, Roberts tells us in this feisty book, much was accomplished during his short tenure in government: federal spending was "brought under control" (in case you hadn't noticed) and "incentives to work, save, and invest were...
...It is marred, however, by the author's apparent ignorance of the importance of political patronage—or, more precisely, the lack of it—in the decline of the parties...
...Unlike some of his previous works, where Mayer assumes the persona of the hard-bitten investigator only to deliver far less than he promises, The Diplomats offers some revealing insights, as well as moments of humor...
...One such moment is his description of the arrival in the 1940s of Sir Oliver Franks, the new ambassador from Britain, to the U.S...
...Army Intelligence from embarrassment— more than from penetration—took precedence over bringing justice to one of the worst war criminals of the day...
...Most of all, it asks the question no one in charge of Barbie ever asked: Is it possible for a person to have done such evil things in the past that he is not worthy of surviving as a free man, no matter how valuable his current services are...
...There are just too many uncovered bases, and the result is a sort of random poking about interspersed with analysis that reflects Mayer's own biases...
...As the noose tightened, they took the coverup a step further by arranging for Barbie to escape the continent in March 1951 through a clandestine smuggling operation known as the "Rat Line:' run by Croatian dissidents who transported "rats" to South America...
...restored...
...And a sentence in an officer's efficiency rating, ostensibly praising his independence of mind as "sometimes carried to an unusual degree:' can stand out like a red flag...
...This is true not just in the spy business...
...By mid-1950, much of the worst about Barbie's war crimes had surfaced in newspaper accounts, and the French government began to press for his arrest...
Vol. 16 • March 1984 • No. 2
