Certitude

by Adam Begley

  Sixty-five years passed before an undoctored edition of her poetry became available.

  Nelson Bunker Hunt

  (b. 1936)

  and

  William Herbert Hunt

  (b. 1939)

  Pity poor Bunker and Herbert Hunt, two sons of Texas oil magnate H. L. Hunt. In the late 1960s, the brothers Hunt were among the richest men in the world; by the late ‘80s, after the family oil business went under—having been fatally weakened first by a crackpot silver scam and then by the crash in oil prices—Bunker and Herbert had together lost an estimated $5 billion. But as Bunker famously said, “A billion dollars isn’t what it used to be.”

  Trying to corner the market in silver when you’re already insanely rich is strange—but what’s stranger still is the psychological motivation at work. Bunker was the idea man, Herbert took care of the details, and Bunker thought of silver as a tangible, inflation-proof safeguard against the encroaching communist threat: When Western economies collapsed under pressure from the atheistic agents of communism, the brothers Hunt would be sitting pretty on top of their hoard of silver (9 percent of the world supply—which they stashed, by the way, in Switzerland, flying it over on 707s with Texas cowboys riding shotgun).

  But they didn’t just hoard the silver, which is what any normal right-wing crazy would do. They tried to manipulate the price, buying contracts on margin and driving the market up and up and up—until at last it crashed on “Silver Thursday” (March 27, 1980) and did more damage to the Hunts’ fortune than any commie could ever have dreamed.

  John Wayne

  (1907–79)

  As American as John Wayne…. Well, of course “American” meant something narrower, something whiter in the 1940s when Marion “Duke” Morrison became a bona fide Hollywood star and began to stake his claim to a rugged, manly corner of the national psyche. His public image was all apple pie patriotism—conservative, Republican, staunchly anticommunist—but in his private life, he had an urge, a compulsion, even, to embrace the exotic Other.

  He married three times. His first wife, Josephine Saenz, was the daughter of the Panamanian consul general in Los Angeles; of their divorce (after four children) Wayne said, “It was the stupidest damn thing I ever did in my life.” Except, perhaps, marrying wife No. 2, Esperanza Baur Díaz Ceballos (nicknamed “Chata”), whom he met in Mexico City. He imported the voluptuous Chata (along with her mother) to Los Angeles, where the rumors that circulated about her past were nearly as ugly as the couple’s frequent drunken brawls.

  Wayne’s third wife, Pilar Palette, was Peruvian.

  As he later remarked, “Some men collect stamps; I go for Latin Americans.”

  He did have affairs with women who were emphatically not Latin American—Marlene Dietrich, say—but his fixed idea of marital bliss was to get hitched with a Hispanic woman, a conviction that seems all the more peculiar when you consider that every time he ended up divorced, and that his second marriage was a screaming, tabloid-fodder disaster (“like shaking two volatile chemicals in a jar,” Wayne later said).

  Girolamo Savonarola

  (1453–98)

  “It would be good for religion if many books that seem useful were destroyed,” declared Savonarola, the Dominican friar who ruled Florence in the last decade of the fifteenth century. “When there were not so many books and not so many arguments and disputes, religion grew more quickly than it has since.” We all know Savonarola’s preferred method for disposing of offending texts: his infamous Bonfire of the Vanities, a huge pyre of paintings (especially nudes), sculptures (ditto), musical instruments, mirrors, women’s finery—and of course books. He envisioned a Florentine theocracy dedicated to perfecting the righteousness of the people—whether they liked it or not. Culture would be policed by the monks, education dispensed by them. As for public morality, Savonarola oudawed homosexuality and made sodomy a capital offense. He wanted, in sum, to strip all ornament from the Renaissance, and refocus attention on salvation. Thanks to incandescent sermons and the odd prophecy that seemed to come true, he inspired fervent devotion in his followers—but the fickle crowds eventually tired of his rigor, his power ebbed, and he was arrested for heresy.

  Two ironies: Savonarola, notorious burner of books, was also a prolific publisher of pamphlets, which he used to spread political propaganda. And he himself was burned at the stake in the Piazza della Signoria—the same square where he had incinerated the “immoral” works of great poets and artists.

  Walt Whitman Rostow

  (1916–2003)

  Among the best and brightest who brought us the Vietnam War, Walt Rostow stands out as the presidential adviser who never hesitated, never reconsidered, and certainly never expressed regret. An economist who became a speechwriter for John Kennedy, Rostow served as a national security adviser to Lyndon Johnson.

  When Averell Harriman dubbed him “America’s Rasputin,” Harriman had in mind the pernicious influence Rostow exerted over Johnson, but the story begins in 1961, when Rostow advised Kennedy that he should be “gearing up the whole Vietnam operation.” In 1964 and 1965, he argued for the deployment of U.S. troops in Laos and South Vietnam and for a naval blockade of North Vietnam. By 1966, he was advocating “systemic and sustained bombing” of petroleum installations in Hanoi and Haiphong.

  Fiercely anticommunist, adamant about the moral justification for the war, and impervious to criticism, he pushed for escalation at every juncture. He was so confident of an American victory that not even defeat—and the death of more than fifty-eight thousand U.S. soldiers—changed his mind.

  In 1986, asked about his role in shaping the Johnson administration’s Vietnam strategy, Rostow replied, “I don’t spend much time worrying about that period.”

  A decade later, when former defense secretary Robert McNamara apologized (almost) for his role in the “tragedy” of the war, Rostow responded by saying: “We certainly lost the battle, the test of will, in Vietnam, but we won the war in Southeast Asia.”

  Henry Ford

  (1863–1947)

  Until about 1918—by which time roughly half the cars in the United States were Model Ts—Henry Ford focused with monomaniacal intensity on the production of his automobile. After that, his attention wandered. He bought a newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, and, beginning in May 1920, used it to indulge a new hobby: spreading anti-Semitic propaganda. Under the rubric “The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem,” his paper spewed a noxious mix of slander and paranoid nonsense. Ford, it seems, had fallen under the influence of that infamous, unstoppable hoax The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which purports to be the master plan for Jewish world domination, to be achieved through economic chicanery and the dissemination of pornographic literature. In 1920, Ford sponsored the printing of five hundred thousand copies. Though the Protocols were comprehensively debunked in 1921, he remained a true believer and continued to cite them as proof of Jewish perfidy: “The only statement I care to make about the Protocols,” he said that same year, “is that they fit in with what is going on. They are sixteen years old, and they have fitted the world situation up to this time.” Is it any wonder that he made friends among the world’s most virulent anti-Semites? “I regard Henry Ford as my inspiration,” Adolf Hitler told a Detroit News reporter in 1931, adding that he kept a life-size portrait of the American automaker next to his desk.

  Mary Baker Eddy

  (1821–1910)

  There’s something spooky about the fact that even her most virulent critics refer to Mary Baker Eddy as “Mrs. Eddy”—as though she might smite them from beyond the grave if they lapse into disrespectful informality. Never mind that Eddy was the name of her third husband, Asa Gilbert Eddy, a sewing machine salesman to whom she was married for six years until his death in 1892—in the vast literature, pro and con, the founder of Christian Science is Mrs. Eddy.

  According to the postmortem, her husband died of heart failure, but Mrs. Eddy—whose faith denies the reality of
sickness, death, and sin—had other ideas. “I know it was poison that killed him,” she declared, “not material poison but mesmeric poison.”

  This is the scary flip side of faith healing: If good vibes can heal, bad vibes can harm. In her later years, when Mrs. Eddy grew increasingly preoccupied by what she called “malicious animal magnetism” (a kind of black magic directed at her by enemies and critics), she surrounded herself with loyal acolytes whose job it was to ward off evil emanations through prayer.

  It’s surprising that she needed any help at all. An early biographer reports that Mrs. Eddy had a commanding technique for settling disagreements: Drawing up her shoulders, she would look her adversary in the eye and say very slowly, “God has directed me in this matter. Have you anything further to say?”

  James Jesus Angleton

  (1917–87)

  There was only ever one certainty in James Angleton’s world: No one can be trusted. The chief of counterintelligence at the CIA for twenty years, Angleton is now associated in the popular imagination with this Kafkaesque motto: “Deception is a state of mind and the mind of the state.” He’s remembered by his colleagues as a paranoid workaholic, tirelessly vigilant, chain-smoking Virginia Slims, obsessed with the idea that the KGB had “compromised” the CIA. In brief, he was haunted by the fear of moles.

  How did the poor guy get that way?

  He had been the protégé of Kim Philby, the notorious British spymaster who defected to the Soviet Union in 1963. Philby was one of the British agents who instructed the young Angleton in the dark arts of espionage—and all the while the tutor was a mole. Later, Angleton became the unwitting source of top-secret information Philby passed to the Russians. The betrayal left permanent scars.

  There’s a long, comical list of statesmen Angleton suspected of spying for the Communists, among them the prime ministers of Canada, Sweden, and the United Kingdom, the chancellor of West Germany—and even Henry Kissinger.

  But the more serious consequence of Angleton’s paranoia was the sinister climate of fear and suspicion within the CIA itself, which resulted in a crowning irony: James Angleton himself was suspected of being a double agent.

  Henning von Holtzendorff

  (1853–1919)

  By the end of 1916, Germany and the Allies had fought to a bloody standstill. There was a real danger, Admiral Henning von Holtzendorff told Kaiser Wilhelm II, that the war would end “in the mutual exhaustion of all parties”—which, the admiral hastened to add, would be “a disaster for us.” Only victory would assure Germany’s future as a world power.

  But von Holtzendorff had a plan: Break England’s backbone with “the submarine weapon.” He was convinced that his U-boats could sink six hundred thousand tons a month of the shipping bound for British ports. As a result of the blockade, he promised, England would be “gasping in the reeds like a fish;” the Allies would sue for peace within six months.

  There was a catch: A declaration of unrestricted submarine warfare would surely bring the United States into the war. Not a problem, countered von Holtzendorff: England will capitulate before the Americans manage to muster their forces and transport them across the Atlantic. He told the kaiser, “I will give Your Majesty my word as an officer that not one American will land on the Continent.” The kaiser believed him.

  Germany unleashed its U-boats on February 1, 1917, exacting a terrible toll and causing the United States to declare war on April 6. The British did not capitulate, and the Americans landed more than 2 million troops in Europe Eight months after the first American offensive, Germany surrendered.

  Elijah Muhammad

  (1897–1975)

  Supreme Minister of the Nation of Islam for more than forty years, Elijah Muhammad (né Elijah Poole in Sandersville, Georgia) was largely responsible for elaborating and disseminating a refreshingly unusual racial doctrine. He taught that black people are descended from an aboriginal tribe called Shabazz that’s been around for at least 66 trillion years, since before the earth and moon were sundered by a tremendous blast. White people are of more recent vintage: They were created about seven thousand years ago by a mad scientist called Yakub who grafted the “black germ” to a “white germ” and thereby gave birth to the Caucasoid race. Apparently some six hundred years passed before Yakub and his coconspirators achieved the pinky gray color we call white—but whatever the exact hue, the Caucasians were bad news: Elijah Muhammad lumped the “blue-eyed devils” together with “the serpent, the dragon … and Satan—all mean one and the same.” The white devils usurped the proper place of the black people, but Elijah Muhammad prophesied a return to black supremacy. (According to his doctrine, all of history has already been written by twenty-four black scientists, supervised by a twenty-fifth.)

  Did Elijah Muhammad mellow in his old age? Apparently not. Asked a few years before his death whether each and every white was truly a blue-eyed devil, he replied, “Whether they are actually blue-eyed or not, if they are actually one of the members of that race they are devils.”

  Delia Salter Bacon

  (1811–59)

  As Nathaniel Hawthorne remarked after telling the tale of Delia Bacon: “This has been too sad a story.” Brilliant, penniless, and therefore obliged to live by her wits, Delia Bacon was eventually betrayed by her own cleverness. Convinced that the plays of Shakespeare were written by a conclave of Elizabethan luminaries presided over by Francis Bacon (no relation), she believed, moreover, that the plays were written in code to conceal a subversive political philosophy.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson encouraged Bacon to pursue her research in Shakespeare’s native land; she wrote to him gratefully, “Be assured, dear sir, there is no possibility of a doubt as to the main points of my theory.” She sailed for England in 1853, furnished with letters of introduction to Emerson’s friend Thomas Carlyle. (Carlyle invited her to tea; afterward he wrote to Emerson, “I have not in my life seen anything so tragically quixotic as her Shakespeare enterprise.”)

  Hawthorne, who was American consul in Liverpool at the time, recognized that she was a “monomaniac” caught in “a prodigious error,” yet nonetheless helped her publish her huge, impenetrable tract. It was ridiculed by the few critics who noticed it, but Bacon was probably unaware of the savage reception it received—she was already slipping into madness, and died two years later in an insane asylum.

  To this day doubters insist that Shakespeare—“that wretched player,” Bacon called him—could never have written his thirty-eight plays.

  John Brown

  (1800–59)

  “Misguided fanatic”—that’s what Abraham Lincoln called him, and certainly, any dispassionate consideration of his blood-soaked career from Pottawatomie onward would lead to the same conclusion: John Brown was a terrorist, convinced of the efficacy of violence. But others saw him as a man prepared to die for a high moral principle, the abolition of slavery. “The bravest and humanest man in all the country”—that’s what Henry David Thoreau called him. “I rejoice that I live in this age, that I am his contemporary.”

  Consider Brown’s last public statement, made on the day he was executed by the state of Virginia for the failed raid on Harpers Ferry (which resulted in the death of seventeen men, among them two of his own sons): “I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood. I had, as I now think, vainly flattered myself that without very much bloodshed it might be done.” Lunacy or prophecy? Both, we think.

  You didn’t need a crystal ball to see in 1859 that the country was headed for civil war; but to believe, without the least tremor of doubt, that capturing the Harpers Ferry armory with nineteen men and distributing its one hundred thousand muskets and rifles to the local slaves would set off a chain reaction, unchaining the chattel of the South, and thereby ridding the nation of the “peculiar institution”—now that’s crazy.

  John Charles Hagee

  (b. 1940)

  The televangelist Rev. John Hagee
, founder and senior pastor of the Cornerstone Church of San Antonio, Texas, has many peculiar beliefs—about gays, say (responsible for Hurricane Katrina), and the Catholic Church (Hitler’s willing partner in the extermination of Jews). But his core convictions concern the End Times, and those convictions have made him one of Israel’s staunchest allies.

  Mr. Hagee is today’s most prominent Christian Zionist (he helped found an organization called Christians United for Israel). When he’s prodded by the press (a.k.a. biased mainstream liberal media), he insists that his support of Israel “has nothing to do with any kind of ‘end times’ Bible scenario.” His denials strain credulity; even a cursory examination of his extensive bibliography reveals the nature of his twin fixation: The Beginning of the End (1996), Final Dawn over Jerusalem (1998), The Battle for Jerusalem (2001), Jerusalem Countdown (2005).

  But Mr. Hagee isn’t content to map apocalyptic scriptural prophecy onto current events—he cheerfully invokes a supreme being active in current geopolitical crises. In July of 2006, for instance, in the midst of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, he declared that support for Israel was “God’s foreign policy.” He sees no need for negotiation between Israelis and Palestinians. “God,” he insists, “is going to supernaturally protect the Jewish people.” But just in case God’s caught napping, Mr. Hagee would like Israel to hurry up and bomb Iran.