The stratagem saved many lives, since it enabled the enemy to put down his weapons without feeling humiliated. Linebarger would later consider it “the single most worthwhile act that I performed in my entire life.”61
Back from Korea, Linebarger retired from active service but maintained ties with the intelligence services of the Operations Research Office and was promoted to lieutenant colonel. He resumed his teaching activities at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, where he later became dean.
We do not know what compelled him to cut his military career short. Having recently overcome a deep personal crisis, he embarked on a new married life and began to gain recognition as a writer in the genre he loved.
Perhaps some clues lie in a passage from “Under Old Earth”, the last thing of his published while he was still alive.
Lord Sto Odin sets off to suppress a rebellion against the system that he represents. He travels in a sedan chair carried by two robots dressed as Roman legionnaires. Embodied in the robots are two human personalities that are “important, useful and long-dead [...] The forward legionary, Flavius, had been Head of the Fourteen-B —an espionage division so secret that even among Lords, few knew exactly of its location or its function. He was (or had been, till he was imprinted on a robot-mind as he lay dying) the director of historical research to the whole human race.”
Transformed into a machine, Flavius can only be activated when his master pronounces a simple Latin sentence, the meaning of which “no other living person understands: Summa nulla est.” One of the titles proposed for the story was, indeed, “The Sum is Null”, an allusion to “zero sum” in Game Theory.
The other legionnaire, Livius, “had been a psychiatrist who turned into a general. He had won many battles until he chose to die, somewhat before his time, because he perceived that battle itself was a struggle for the defeat of himself.”62
Fragmented facets of Linebarger’s personality (the student of history, the psychologist and the strategist) are easy to recognize here. Indeed, the choice of Livius epitomizes the central crisis of his creator’s time.
One of the consequences of the Vietnam War was the revelation of the bad conscience of some military officers of Linebarger’s generation.
All had served in Korea and, ten years later, viewed the “escalation” in Southeast Asia with concern. For many, worry over the shift in the country’s foreign policy was united to a certain sensitivity regarding the racial problem in the United States.
Among the participants in the Congressional Conference on War and National Responsibility of 197063 were various military officials, of the same age and rank as Linebarger, concerned about both problems. Democratic Congressman John Conyers Jr. was a veteran of Korea and student of the racial problem; retired Lieutenant Colonel William R. Corson was the author of a book about Vietnam and another about African-Americans; Colonel Frank Kowalski had been on the Subversive Activities Control Board; and Lieutenant Colonel Edward L. King wrote the best seller The Death of the Army (1972).
These attitudes, it seems, crystallized as a result of the experience in Korea. With time, the consensus was that Korea was merely the first stage in a cycle of Asian wars that the United Stated had committed itself to in accordance with the “domino theory”. In Vietnam, guerilla tactics came into play, a form of warfare that made havoc of modern strategy. Between conventional war and nuclear determent, guerilla “insurgency” introduced an unforeseeable wedge. Strategy conceived for combat between industrial superpowers failed in the absence of strictly military targets and an enemy that could be identified by its insignias or uniform. An entire civilian population, fueled by ideology and driven by its own strong nationalist aspirations, became a potential “enemy”. This ambiguity helps explain the public uproar in America over the atrocities committed in Vietnam, where it was hard to visualize the enemy.
In Vietnam, the Americans were no longer hailed as liberators. Once acclaimed as champions of democracy, world opinion now began to view them as imperialists, and the image of the “ugly American”, until then known only south of the Rio Grande, spread.
For those who had worshipped liberty for generations, the idea of fighting against people struggling for their own freedom, what the Vietcong were doing, was difficult to swallow.
For centuries America had been the land of freedom for Europeans. Americans took pride in the “American dream”, which consisted of prosperity, work and democracy. They were willing to fight against tyrannies in order to offer “backward” peoples the gifts of Detroit and Menlo Park, the freedom and equal opportunity that were the keys to their success. In 1968, Cardinal Spellman could still proclaim that the United States was the “Good Samaritan of the world.”
In Ria, Linebarger ironically summed up the famous “American dream”: “...and Mother, coolly transposing the forthright Jeffersonian traditions of her own family to the world at large, had taught Ria that there was nothing in the world which could not be cured by practicality, goodwill, effort and intelligence. Ria had believed all this, and had discounted the poverty of Japan by assuming that the Japanese had not had time enough to learn how to be like her own and her mother’s people –the world-dazzling Americans.”64
This discourse, however, was vitiated from the start by imperial dreams and hegemonic aspirations. In 1850, southerner J. D. B. de Bow, a believer in manifest destiny, dreamt that “a successor of Washington [would] ascend the chair of universal empire.”
In World War II, the Americans could still believe they were defending justice and freedom in the world. In 1946, however, even as impassioned an American as James Burnham doubted whether the United States was prepared to assume leadership of the free world. When the exercise of this leadership resulted in an arms race, McCarthyism and the Korean War, the doubts began piling up. In the early sixties, the new self-critical vision led even conservative theorists to qualify the new attitude of the United States as “impure imperialism, one that invokes the defense of the world while seeking to dominate it.”65
While many were objecting to the new role of the United States as the policeman of the world, racial conflicts were floating to the surface, tensions that called into question another pillar of the American dream: the liberal value of tolerance. The trauma of the Civil War had yet to be overcome.
In 1947, Linebarger had no difficulty acknowledging that “war is cruel, sad, shameful to the soul of man; everyone knows that it hurts, degrades, injures the human body; everyone knows that it is not pleasant to undergo, not even to look at it. If any particular war is worth fighting, it is worth fighting for some reason other than the crazily obvious one —the fact that it is already war.”66
He still believed it was possible to promote the American model through propaganda, but admitted that psychological action is “reactionary because with it we follow the modern and formal presumption that the enemy soldier is an armed agent of his State; we deal with him as a man and a brother, without being conscious of the fact that we are inducing this man and brother to commit treason.” Perhaps, he goes on, it would be better to defeat the enemy through the “improvement of the economic, social and educational conditions of the people.”67
The same year that Linebarger offered these reflections, notions, by the way, unheard of in a book about strategy, he published Ria, the novel he had written in military camps. A passage in it relates the disillusionment of a Nazi official on the Russian front named Josef Kramer. He does not know what to make of the Russians, since they fail to conform to the image instilled in him by propaganda: “He hated Russians because they had deceived him, himself and millions like him. They had let the world think that they were uncouth barbarians when in fact –as anyone could see– they were spectacular engineers, successful agriculturists, and unbelievably colossal fighting men. He hated the Russians because he had come to the Ukraine expecting to li
berate stupid, good-natured drunken peasants from the furious misrule of satanic Jews. But he had found himself fighting men who were as blond as himself, and who fought with equal courage, with equal fanaticism, and with horrifyingly effective equipment.”68
In these years, Linebarger participated actively in Eisenhower’s presidential campaign, working for the Republicans despite the Democratic tradition of his family. Later, he would also collaborate with John F. Kennedy, Nelson Rockefeller, Robert Taft and Richard Nixon as an adviser on Far Eastern affairs and occasionally as a speechwriter.
Eisenhower vowed to end the war in Korea, a promise he fulfilled in 1953. In his farewell address to the nation, however, he took everyone by surprise when he sounded a warning regarding a new danger being generated by the Cold War and the arms race: “We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”69
The following year, the defeat of the French at Dien Bien Phu closed the circle of European colonialism. The Bandung Conference called upon the “unaligned” nations to assert their presence as a Third World. A new global order was emerging.
Imperialism often seeks justification in the belief that profound and natural human inequalities exist. It is only possible to unscrupulously subjugate another person if we consider him to be our inferior, usually on the basis of racist ideology.
The victims of racism in the United States were primarily descendants of African slaves. Lincoln and Kennedy, the presidents most committed to fighting against the consequences of the nation’s thorny racial past, were assassinated. Even today, after several decades of active policies of integration and the election of an Afro-American president, the reactive racism of black Muslims and the xenophobia of White Anglo-Saxon Protestants toward Catholics, Arabs, Latinos and Asians remain. The old Ku Klux Klan and bellicose neo-Nazi militia are also alive and well.
In the figures of the underpeople and the Instrumentality, Cordwainer Smith condensed the major American themes of the decade: civil rights, racism and political manipulation. The sudden evolution of historical processes necessitated a change in the master plan that had been unfolding over the course of the previous decade.
Comparing the chronology of the struggle for black civil rights in the sixties with the central role the underpeople came to play in Linebarger’s fiction, we find an unmistakable correlation.
In 1952, Linebarger went to Mexico, and in 1953 he visited Cuba, where Barcala, the great photographer for the magazine Bohemia, took his portrait. From 1955-1956 he studied psychiatry, taught classes at the University of Pennsylvania and travelled frequently abroad with his wife, living for a time in Egypt and Greece. In 1957, Paul, on the invitation of Lord Lindsay, the Marxist professor he had met in Yenan and who now directed the International Relations Department of the University of Canberra, visited Australia for the first time.
Paul was to spend a sabbatical year in Australia and contribute to a collective work on the political history of Southeast Asia. The visit also served as a cover for his and Genevieve’s intelligence activities. Paul and Genevieve traversed all of Australia in a car lent to them by Lindsay, befriended Arthur Burns, and grew closer to the Episcopal Church.
In 1960, when Linebarger was in Mexico teaching a course at the Universidad Interamericana, he suffered a case of peritonitis and nearly died. Hospitalized in Saltillo, near Monterrey, he was operated on in time to save his life, but an abscess and other complications made several additional operations necessary.
“I am not very happy with the sixties,” he wrote at the time.70 At the age of fifty-one, he felt it was time to retire. Yet this decade, the last one of his life, marked the peak of his literary creativity. During these years he created the underpeople, whose revolutionary experience serves as a metaphor for the emancipation of black Americans.
On more than one occasion it has been noted that good science fiction is not concerned with the future but the present, and this is especially true of the work of Cordwainer Smith. From 1954 to 1964, the United States underwent a process that The New York Times described as a “second American Revolution”. In the hopeful context that began with the civil rights movement and ended abruptly with the death of Kennedy, “Cordwainer Smith” wrote his best stories.
In 1954, the Supreme Court, with Earl Warren at the helm, issued a historic ruling on school integration that brought about the elimination of all segregationist legislation. The fragility of this democratic current is evident in the fact that, ten years later, Warren signed an absurd report on the Kennedy assassination that essentially prevented any serious investigation into the murder.
On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks was arrested when she refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a Montgomery (Alabama) bus. Four days later, Martin Luther King, a twenty-six-year old minister that would lead a boycott of the bus system, appeared on the scene. In less than a year, King was able to abolish segregation on public transportation.
In September 1957 (when Paul and Genevieve were still travelling in Australia), another momentous event occurred. The governor of Arkansas, Orval Faubus, prevented the admittance of a black student to a Little Rock high school. The Eisenhower administration had no choice but to send federal troops in to enforce school integration laws.
In 1960, black southerners, historically submissive, carried out their first non-violent protest: sit-ins at the Woolworth department store in Greensboro, North Carolina. Civil rights organizations adopted the method of non-violent direct action. When Martin Luther King was arrested, John F. Kennedy intervened to secure his release, thereby gaining the support of black voters.
In November, Kennedy beat Nixon in the presidential election by a slight margin.
[1960] Cordwainer Smith writes Norstrilia, featuring a non-violent organization fighting for the human rights of underpeople. It is called the Holy Insurgency, and E’telekeli is its leader.
Over the course of 1961, “freedom rides”, protest marches against discrimination, extend throughout the South.
In January, Kennedy becomes president. In May, he visits Alabama and after meeting with its racist governor George Wallace, tells the press, “This is another country!”
[1961] The underpeople appear for the first time in the story “Alpha Ralpha Boulevard”.
In 1962, Governor Barnett of Mississippi intervenes personally to prevent a black student named James Meredith from matriculating in the University of Mississippi in Oxford.
Ignoring threats, black voters register en masse in Greensboro’s electoral registries. Martin Luther King is arrested again and Bob Dylan sings “Blowin’ in the Wind.” Pete Seeger turns “We shall overcome” into the anthem of the civil rights movement.
[1962] Cordwainer Smith publishes “The Ballad of Lost C’mell”, which relates how Lord Jestocost came to side with the underpeople.
Linebarger serves as an adviser to Kennedy and writes some of his speeches. Throughout 1963, disturbances and protests flare up in nearly every state. From a Birmingham, Alabama jail, Martin Luther King writes an open letter. In August, a civil rights march is held in Washington. Before the large crowd, Reverend King gives his famous “I Have a Dream” speech.
In November, Kennedy is assassinated in Dallas.
[1963] “On the Storm Planet” appears, providing a glimpse of a time when the struggles of the underpeople will have been overcome.
The Civil Rights Act is passed in 1964, putting an end, at least constitutionally, to racial discrimination. Martin Luther King wins the Nobel Peace Prize.
[1964] In August, a year after the March on Washington, “The Dead Lady of Clown Town” appears, a story containing echoes of the civil rights movement. It might also evoke the self-immolation of Buddhist monks who at the t
ime sacrificed themselves in protest of the United States invasion of Vietnam.
In 1965, another massive march led by Martin Luther King takes place, this time from Selma to Montgomery.
Linebarger returns to Australia. He visits New Guinea, where he surprises academics and state workers with a report suggesting that Papuans be incorporated into the security forces to facilitate their integration in the government.
The same year, the National Chengchi University (Taipei) bestows upon him the degree of Doctor of Law honoris causa. Linebarger is the first person to be distinguished with this title in Taiwan, “in honor of services offered by him and his father to the Republic of China.” A year earlier, he was granted a Doctor of Letters by the Universidad Interamericana of Mexico.
In December 1965, a cardiovascular incident leaves him temporarily immobilized. By then, his health is precarious and he is often forced to cancel courses and conferences. He suffers severe metabolic and digestive disturbances. On one occasion, he shocks fellow diners at a banquet by ingesting a cocktail containing chlorohydric acid prescribed to help with digestion.
In his final years, he undergoes an interminable series of operations. His experience in the operating room and the hospital feeds his symbiotic fantasies of men and machines. The sheep of Norstrilia, which only produce stroon when they are sick, are the result of this forced leisure that found its way subliminally into his stories.71
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