It is a pleasure, in my latest Q&A, to talk with Kevin Williamson, my old friend and colleague. We cover the waterfront, or a stretch of it: climate change; U.S. politics; transgenderism; Ukraine; books; “Barbenheimer” — especially the “heimer” part, Oppenheimer, the new biopic.
I have not seen it. I don’t plan to. Then how in the world can I talk about it? I know that Lewis L. Strauss is a villain of the piece. I know some other things, too. I object to a gross misteaching.
More than most, I think, I believe in the separation of art from politics, and even, to a degree, the separation of art from facts. I know that Oppenheimer is “just a movie.” But is it? This movie will teach, or misteach, millions upon millions about J. Robert Oppenheimer, Admiral Strauss, and the controversy of that time. How many will read No Sacrifice Too Great, the biography of Strauss by Richard Pfau, published in 1985? Eleven?
Talking with Kevin, I thought of a piece written by Tom Wicker, for the New York Times. It was published in 1991. Wicker was responding to JFK, the latest Oliver Stone movie. In this movie, Kennedy is the victim of a plot by the U.S. military, the CIA, and the FBI, with the complicity of Vice President Johnson.
Just a movie, right? Well, yes and no. As Wicker says, the movie rewrites history. It is a misleader, and miseducator.
I imagine that some number got their view of the Kennedy assassination from Stone’s movie. But there are a zillion books, documentaries, and other things about the Kennedy assassination. The Stone movie can do only modest harm. But when will people ever get another view of the Oppenheimer–Strauss matter?
As I mentioned to Kevin, I have not seen The Death of Klinghoffer, the opera by John Adams. Don’t think I will. To me, the Achille Lauro hijacking is a contemporary event. I was riveted to news about it. To me, it is not really a subject for artistic treatment.
In 1985, you recall, Palestinian terrorists hijacked an Italian cruise liner, the Achille Lauro. They murdered Leon Klinghoffer, an elderly American Jew, confined to a wheelchair. They shot him and dumped his body overboard.
Writing in 2014, the editors of the New York Times said, “The opera gives voice to all sides in this terrible murder.” Here on the Corner, I wrote,
“All sides” — really? Maybe I am misreading the editors, but this “all sides” business seems an almost comical example of moral relativism run amok.
Palestinian terrorists murdered an innocent, helpless man in cold blood because he was Jewish. Period. The terrorists have a “side,” true: They are monsters. Or am I being judgmental, in my simple, Reagan-like way?
Let me give you a footnote: By sheer coincidence, John Adams also composed an opera about Oppenheimer, Doctor Atomic.
Before closing, I’d like to return to Lewis Strauss. In 1997, I wrote an item about him for The Weekly Standard, where I was working. Alfred Kazin, the famed literary critic, had “casually perpetrated a drive-by infamy,” I said. In the course of an essay on another subject,
Kazin gratuitously smeared Adm. Lewis L. Strauss, who in a long and controversial career was private secretary to Herbert Hoover, an investment banker on Wall Street, a wartime naval strategist, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, and secretary of commerce. In a discussion of the sainted J. Robert Oppenheimer, whom Strauss opposed, Kazin remarked en passant that Strauss “pronounced his own name ‘Straws’ to make himself sound less Jewish.”
This would be a hilarious allegation if it were not so contemptible. Strauss was as prominent a Jew as could be found in the United States for four decades. If Strauss was out to disguise his faith, he could not have done a poorer job of it.
I elaborated,
He was a member of numerous Jewish organizations, assuming a leading role in many of them. In the summer of 1939, he was in Europe, attempting to rescue Jews from Germany. For over 10 years, he was president of Temple Emanu-El in New York. He once refused to eat a ham lunch that Queen Elizabeth served him. And until his death in 1974, he was in the forefront of Jewish philanthropy, donating large chunks of his fortune.
A bit more:
Kazin’s lame excuse for the libel is that he heard it from people, long ago. The truth is that Strauss grew up in Richmond, Va., and, like other southerners, pronounced the name “Straws.” (So had his father and grandfather.) Presented with this explanation, Kazin would have none of it, insisting that anyone saying “Straws” had to be trying to pass. With Strauss’s Jewish credentials, Kazin was irritably unimpressed.
The truth is, Lewis Strauss had no interest in making himself appear other than as he was. He was notoriously blunt, bold, and proud — even if he pronounced his name as a Virginian, rather than as a German.
So many issues, so little time. I have given tastes in this little post. And, again, my Q&A with KDW — the singular Kevin D. Williamson — is here.