Quote of the Day (Len Deighton, on What Led Him to Write Spy Fiction)

“I was 10 when World War II started. My parents were servants. We lived in a tiny mews house in central London. Our neighbor Anna Wolkoff was the daughter of a czarist admiral. We knew her. My mother sometimes cooked for her dinner parties. I remember her arrest, late at night. The police came. I watched out the window with my parents. We learned she was a spy. Antisemitic. A Nazi sympathizer. My dad fought the Germans in the trenches in World War I. In 1939 he commanded a civilian first-aid post. Anna’s betrayal had a profound effect on my family.”—British novelist Len Deighton (1929-2026), quoted in “By the Book: Len Deighton,” The New York Times Book Review, June 25, 2023

Like fellow spytale spinner John le Carre, Len Deighton—who died earlier this week—found in the genre a vehicle for exploring his childhood memories of trauma. In le Carre’s case, the trauma was inspired by his con man father, a cause of such embarrassment to the son, even into middle age, that it inspired his novel A Perfect Spy.

For Deighton, as indicated by the quote I’ve used, personal betrayal and the trauma it came from Anna Wolkoff. I couldn’t read about her case without seeing this as a British version of the spy-next-door cable drama of the 2010s, The Americans, starring Keri Russell.

Deighton might be known best for several espionage trilogies (e.g., the “Harry Palmer” books and the so-called “Game Set Match” sequence) that, like le Carre, de-romanticized the business of spycraft set out in Ian Fleming’s James Bond tales.

But the nightmare possibility created by Wolkoff—what if she and others like her had helped pave the way for a Nazi takeover of Britain?—may have inspired his 1978 foray into speculative fiction, SS-GB.

That novel is part of a small but intriguing genre of alternative history in which the Nazis remained in control of Europe, including:

*The Man in the High Castle, by Philip K. Dick;
*Fatherland, by Robert Harris; and
*Dominion, by C. J. Sansom.

Quote of the Day (Laurence Rees, on a Prior Use of Political Deflection)

“[D]eflection [was] akin to modern ‘whataboutism.’ When confronted with the Holocaust they [leading former Nazis] voiced a series of blatantly false equivalences, such as the firebombing of Hamburg or colonial injustices, dismissing the charges as 'victor's justice.' This allowed them to label the Allies as hypocrites, reinforcing a belief in their victimhood.”— English historian and documentary filmmaker Laurence Rees interviewed by Danny Bird, “The Idea That There’s a Widespread Movement to Learn From History or to Understand It Meaningfully is False,” BBC History, February 2025

For the contemporary resort to “whataboutism” or “deflection,” please see Mona Charen’s June 2025 article in The Bulwark.

(The image accompanying this post shows former Nazi high officials who were defendants in the postwar Nuremberg trials.)

TV Quote of the Day (Norm Macdonald, on 20th-Century German Militarism)

“The entire earth, there’s only one country that frightens me – that’s the country of Germany. I don’t know if you guys are students of history or not, but… For those of you who aren’t, Germany, in the previous century – in the early part… they decided to go to war. And who did they choose to go to war with? The world. So you think that would last about five seconds and the world would f------g win, and that would be that. But it was actually close!”—Canadian stand-up comic, actor, and writer Norm Macdonald (1959-2021), “Hitler’s Dog, Gossip and Trickery” (special), Sept. 18, 2017

Well, there are a whole bunch of people right now who are not “students of history,” and that would be those American voters who put back in office a President who complained relentlessly about the cost of paying for the defense of Europe.

Now, as Isaac Stanley-Becker’s story in the new January 2026 issue of The Atlantic notes, Germany, which turned away from its militaristic tradition in atonement for World War II, is re-starting its war machine in earnest. 

It’s not just Vladimir Putin’s threat to Ukraine that has scared it, but the harsh rhetoric of Donald Trump (given unforgettable form by his chief attack dog, Vice President J.D. Vance, at the Munich security conference earlier this year).

And all of that was before the release late last week of the administration’s new national security strategy.

By overwhelmingly shifting blame for the rise in tensions in Europe from Russia to European democracies (which, the document helpfully informs us, is risking “civilizational erasure”), the reactionary regime in Washington is laying out nothing less than “a clear plan for subversion in Europe,” aptly notes Tara Varma’s summary for the Brookings Institution. 

Europe’s only alternative, she concludes, is clear: “prepare, invest in its own security and resilience, and resist these intimidation and influence operations coming from its closest ally.”

It might take a while, but MAGA will rue the consequences of what it has wrought in a rearming Germany. As Macdonald noted, this principal power in Central Europe was awfully good at making war in the first half of the 20^th century. The United States learned, to its regret, that isolationism only allowed that war machine to run amok.

Who is to say, in a country where the far right is rearing its head again, that history won’t repeat itself?

The image accompanying this post, of German troops parading through Warsaw, Poland, in September 1939, comes from the National Archives at College Park, Still Picture Records Section, Special Media Archives Services Division (NWCS-S).

Theater Review: A Prescient, and Newly Relevant, Warning About Fascism

For 30 years, the Mint Theater has specialized in rediscovering plays often unfairly confined to the dustbin of history. In my experience attending nearly 20 of these shows, I’ve found them lovingly and shrewdly presented.

But no production of this Off-Broadway company has struck me so powerfully as Crooked Cross, which has not been revived in the UK since its 1937 premiere at London’s Westminster Theatre—and not produced at all in the US till now.

This drama by British author Sally Carson about the rise of Nazism in the critical December 1932-summer 1933 period only runs through today, so many readers will not be able to see it before it closes.

Even so, I urge you to buy the 1934 novel that she herself expertly adapted, which Persephone Books republished this past April. And while you’re at it, buy another copy for friends still open to understanding its message for today—and, if Persephone gets around to reissuing them, its two sequels: The Prisoner (1936) and A Traveller Came By (1938).

The drama has turned up again at a time when, like Germany transitioning from the Weimar Republic, Americans are unsettled by economic dislocation and a relative loss of power in the world—and decide to embrace a nationalist leader willing to break norms and laws at lightning speed.

A publisher’s reader and dance teacher when the novel and play of Crooked Cross were created, Carson had little time to establish herself in the literary world. Starting a family in 1938, she died of breast cancer only three years later, only aged 38.

By that time, the world was so caught up in maelstrom of fighting the Axis powers that it forgot about the English Cassandra whose warnings were disregarded by a war-weary electorate and appeasers in Whitehall.

Crooked Cross starts like a Christmas romantic comedy, with Lexa Kluger, a vibrant twentysomething woman hanging ornaments with her parents, two brothers and her fiancée, Moritz Weissmann, in their Bavarian home.

Over nine scenes, the tone becomes more like a thriller or horror film, with lives at stake and darkness spreading over their picturesque mountain community of Kranach and their country.

Carson outlines, step by step, how large national events shatter this harmony. Moritz loses his promising job as a doctor in a prestigious hospital because of his Jewish background and teaching first aid to a Marxist audience. Moritz’s father is not only dismissed from his university job because of his religion but is seized and disappeared by the newly empowered Nazi regime.

The trends highlighted by Carson will seem all too familiar to many today:

*A suddenly restrictive border policy meant to punish a minority;
*A new government that uses the slenderest of pretexts to reduce opposition;
*Nationalist right-wing groups willing to overthrow the government;
*Universities that cravenly yield to government pressure.

But what will especially strike a chord with modern audiences is Carson’s psychological understanding of what gives rise to authoritarianism, and the divisions it causes in families.

The Klugers react differently over how to deal with the ascendant Nazi Party. Frau Kluger (played by Katie Firth) nags her husband into joining it. Their son Erich (played with chilling authority by Jakob Winter) embraces Hitler’s principles and strategies with fanatical devotion, while second brother Helmy (Gavin Michaels), though closer to Lexa and Mauritz, swallows his ambivalence in the hope that the party will provide income and a purpose that’s been missing from his life.

Lexa will have none of this. She struggles to make her family grasp the dangers posed by Nazism to the man she loves—and when they urge her to transfer her affection to a nice Aryan youth, Otto, she moves from tense, even barbed, remarks (e.g., telling Erich, a former ski instructor whose work with aging female customers involved more than athletics, “I don’t imagine the Storm Troopers are immune to your charms”) to an outbreak break with them all.

Crooked Cross now plays to audiences passing an awareness of outcomes that British theatergoers of the prewar period could not have possessed, and it is staged now without imposing such retrospective historical knowledge.

In light of that, Carson’s insights are all the more prophetic and prescient, particularly in the damage caused by a nihilistic rejection of imperfect but irreplaceable representative government. Lexa’s question to her siblings reverberates as much now as in the 1930s: “When you’ve broken everything you can touch, all of you — what do you think you’ll do then?”

Quote of the Day (Philip Kerr, on Jesse Owens Thwarting an Early Attempt at Olympic Marketing)

“At the gun Jesse Owens was away to a good start, and by the first thirty metres he was powering fluently into a clear lead. In the seat next to me the matron was on her feet again. She had been wrong, I thought, to describe Owens as a gazelle. Watching the tall, graceful negro accelerate down the track, making a mockery of crackpot theories of Aryan superiority, I thought that Owens was nothing so much as a Man, for whom other men were simply a painful embarrassment. To run like that was the meaning of the earth, and if ever there was a master-race, it was certainly not going to exclude someone like Jesse Owens. His victory drew a tremendous cheer from the German crowd, and I found it comforting that the only race they were shouting about was the one they had just seen. Perhaps, I thought, Germany did not want to go to war after all. I looked towards that part of the stadium that was reserved for Hitler and other senior party officials, to see if they were present to witness the depth of popular sentiment being demonstrated on behalf of the black American. But of the leaders of the Third Reich there was no still sign.”—British mystery novelist Philip Kerr (1956-2018), March Violets (1989)

I am not the type of person to sit in front of a TV for a fortnight to watch the Olympics. But there are evidently enough such people to lead host countries to consider it a golden marketing opportunity to showcase their sites to potential tourists worldwide.

You can almost see, for instance, French officials wide-eyed at the possibility of holding the opening ceremonies at this year’s Olympics on the Seine River. 

Who needs a clunky ol’ stadium when you could have the traditional parade of athletes this time on boats sailing on the “lifeblood of Paris”—all surely presaging throngs booking flights with romantic cruises in mind?

The preparation to make this all happen—the necessity to make the high cost of hosting the games pay off without the slightest blemish—is enormous. It’s especially so if you consider the event not just a marketing opportunity but a potential propaganda bonanza, as Nazi Germany did in the summer of 1936.

It started with the construction of a spanking-new stadium and state-of-the-art village for housing the athletes, with Leni Riefenstahl directing (in a production overseen by Joseph Goebbels’ propaganda ministry) the documentary Olympia.

But, as Philip Kerr makes clear periodically in his marvelous detective novel set during this period, March Violets, cleaning up Berlin’s omnipresent signs of intolerance extended to taking down display cases for the notoriously anti-Semitic journal Der Stermer.

“It’s for the Olympiad,” a couple of workers tell Kerr’s German stand-in for Philip Marlowe, Bernie Gunther. “We’re ordered to take them all down so as not to shock the foreign visitors who will be coming to Berlin to see the Games.”

Even books normally censored by the regime, Gunther learns later, are allowed to appear in shops for the duration of the Olympics.

The campaign to showcase the Aryan “master race” didn’t work out quite as the Nazis planned.  German athletes came away with the most medals of any country, but that wasn’t enough for Goebbels.  He grumbled in his diary after the second day of competition, about the electrifying performance of African-American runner Jesse Owens:

"We Germans won a gold medal, the Americans three, of which two were Negroes. That is a disgrace. White people should be ashamed of themselves."

Overall, though, the games succeeded in whitewashing Hitler’s totalitarian regime. Most visitors saw no confirmation of the various reports they’d read in newspapers or heard on the radio about mistreatment of Jews.

Increasingly, 21^st-century authoritarian regimes like Russia and China hope that hosting the Olympics will scrub their image clean as thoroughly as the Berlin games. As Victor Matheson and Andrew Zimbalist note in this April 2021 article for the Georgetown Journal of International Affairs, voters in a number of Western democracies, given the choice in referendums, are rebelling at the “spiraling costs and…financial risks that the Olympics place on host cities.”

Russia’s Vladimir Putin had no such compunctions about holding the events in Sochi in 2014, nor did China’s Xi Jinping with Beijing two years ago. 

It’s citizens of those countries who have had to swallow in silence the systematic harassment, disappearances, and deportations of anyone daring to question what it takes to make ugly authoritarian look picture-perfect for a world audience.

Quote of the Day (Klaus Mann, on a Real Figure of Horror)

“The minister of propaganda, overlord of the spiritual life of millions, limped nimbly through the glittering throng which bowed down before him. An icy wind seemed to blow as he passed. It was as though an evil, solitary and cruel god had clambered down among the everyday bustle of pleasure seeking, cowardly, pitiful mortals. For several seconds the whole company remained as if paralyzed with horror….Hate and humility shone in the timid gazes turned on the fearsome dwarf. The object of attention tried an affable smile, which stretched his thin-lipped mouth from ear to ear, to soften the dreadful spell he cast about him. With a friendly expression in his sly, deep-set eyes, he was at pains to charm and placate. Dragging his clubfoot gracefully behind him, he moved agilely through the room, showing these two thousand slaves, fellow-travelers, swindlers, dupes and fools the profile of a bird of prey. All the while his eyes bore a malicious, abstracted smile as they flitted over the group of millionaires, ambassadors, regimental commanders and film stars. It was when he came to the director of the state theater, Hendrik Hofgen, privy councillor and senator, that his glance at last came to rest.”—German novelist Klaus Mann (1906-1949), Mephisto, translated by Robin Smyth (original publication, 1936; English translation, 1977)

When I was considering a literary work that conveyed an essential quality associated with Halloween, I thought of how the horror genre in fiction and film often acted as a metaphor for the terror of everyday life. Then I imagined instances of how actual historic terror needed little artifice. Nothing to my mind surpasses the rise of Nazism and the monstrous evil it unleashed on the world.

The Faust legend of bartering one’s soul to the Devil, which originated with an actual historical German alchemist of the Renaissance, has long fascinated intellectuals and entertainers in the land in which he was born, but few figures as much as Nobel Literature laureate Thomas Mann and his son Klaus. Both made their Faust stand-in a member of the German culturati: the fictional composer Adrian Leverkühn in Thomas' four-decade saga Doktor Faustus, the actor-turned-theater director Hendrik Hofgen in Klaus’ Mephisto.

Despite choosing the same legend as the source of their work, Thomas and Klaus treated their subjects quite differently. Doktor Faustus is oblique, even elliptical in tying the fate of its protagonist to that of the Third Reich as a whole. In contrast, as seen here, Mephisto is a searing satire of intellectuals exchanging what are ostensibly supposed to be their greatest ideals for personal advancement.

In the opening chapter from which the above quote comes, Klaus Mann gives no names to the members of the Nazi hierarchy, but he identifies them by title and physical appearance so exactly that nomenclature is unnecessary. 

That’s particularly the case with minister of propaganda Joseph Goebbels—rendered here in all his physical and moral deformity, in a fashion perhaps only surpassed by King Richard III as dramatized by William Shakespeare.

The figure approached by Goebbels at the end of this quote—making his stage entrance, as it were—is Hendrik Hofgen. The actor-director, about to be complimented by both Goebbels and the propaganda chief’s rival in Adolf Hitler’s circle, Herman Goering, has achieved a career zenith with his production of Goethe’s Faust, in which he has played Mephistopheles, the wily devil who lures Faust into surrendering his soul.

That production will become a defining one, as Hofgen bargains away what he cares for the most—his art—in an attempt to ally with the evil regime stalking his nation.

If the portrait of Hofgen becomes so lacerating, it is partly because Mann knew his subject at close range. The real-life inspiration for Hofgen, Gustaf Gründgens, was in fact Mann’s onetime brother-in-law and fellow sympathizer with the left, but had long since yielded both the family connection and his politics. 

Klaus shared the opinion of his sister Erika that Grundgens’ Weimar-era leftism was “insincere, snobby, and quasi-opportunistic.”

“Opportunistic”—maybe one of the best adjectives one can come up with to describe how the monsters marauding geopolitics came to establish their shadowy dominion. A monster does not rise unaided, but instead with what Klaus Mann aptly summarized as “slaves, fellow-travelers, swindlers, dupes and fools.”

Hitler may have used Goebbels to spread hatred and untruths through radio, movies and theater, just as Donald Trump has employed Steve Bannon to broadcast “alternative facts” through social media. But propaganda mavens need their own henchmen. Bannon has found his among GOP lawmakers on Capitol Hill too terrified of their once and future Presidential standard-bearer.

In the 1930s, Germany—the land that had given the world Martin Luther, the author of The Freedom of a Christian—found itself under the sway of Goebbels, “overlord of the spiritual life of millions.” Those intellectuals and entertainers who, unlike the Mann family, did not go into exile soon learned to look the other way, then bend, smile and fawn over the thugs now running their country. 

The “dreadful spell” cast by Goebbels and his minions continues to be felt by the all too susceptible members of our world, three-quarters of a century after the fall of the prematurely named “Thousand-Year Reich.”

Quote of the Day (Richard J. Evans, on the Nazi Path to Power)

“By the time he came out of prison [in late 1924, for leading a coup attempt the year before to overthrow Germany’s Weimar Republic], Hitler had assembled the ideology of Nazism from disparate elements of antisemitism, pan-Germanism, eugenics and so-called racial hygiene, geopolitical expansionism, hostility to democracy, and hostility to cultural modernism, which had been floating around for some time but had not so far been integrated into a coherent whole. He gathered around him a team of immediate subordinates—the talented propagandist Joseph Goebbels, the decisive man of action Hermann Goring and others—who built up his image as leader and reinforced his sense of destiny. But despite all this, and despite the violent activism of his brownshirt paramilitaries on the streets, he got nowhere politically until the very end of the 1920s….In October 1929, however, the Wall Street crash brought the German economy tumbling down with it....The political effects of the Depression were calamitous. The Grand Coalition broke up in disarray; so deep were the divisions between the parties over how to deal with the crisis that a parliamentary majority could no longer be found for any kind of decisive action….The Nazis, then, as the elections of September 1930 and July 1932 showed, were a catch-all party of social protest with particularly strong middle-class support and relatively weak, though still very significant, working-class backing at the polls. They had broken out of their core constituency of the Protestant lower middle classes and farming community.”— Cambridge Univ. historian Richard J. Evans, The Third Reich in Power, 1933-1939 (2005)

Unfortunately, the blueprint for Fascism remains fundamentally the same in the 21^st century as it was in the 1920s and 1930s: the exploitation of multiple far-right ideologies by a single demagogue; the assistance of propagandists who tended to imagery; legislative deadlock; calamitous economic conditions; and then, seemingly out of nowhere, a political coalition with sudden breakout appeal.

This Day in Classical Music History (Wagner Dies, But His Controversies Survive)

Feb. 13, 1883—A heart attack suffered on vacation in Venice may have ended the life of Richard Wagner at age 69, but the tumult he engendered outlived him. It survives, in some ways, even hotter today, as biographers, musicologists, even the entire German nation consider whether this musical revolutionary spurred reactionary politics that infected an entire continent.

The controversy starts, though, with Wagner’s personal life. Over a week ago, Joseph Horowitz’s article in The Wall Street Journal took to task Simon Callow for propagating the “monster” myth about the composer in the actor-biographer’s new book, Being Wagner.

To be sure, Horowitz is correct that Wagner was an early victim of “fake news." The article cites an 1866 newspaper report that, ignoring generous-to-a-fault payments Wagner made his estranged wife Minna, claimed that she had been reduced to poverty following their separation. Horowitz might just as easily have mentioned the rumor that Wagner’s fatal cardiac incident resulted from his argument with second wife Cosima over excessive attention to a 23-year-old soprano who played one of the flower-maidens in his recent triumph, Parsifal.

In one way, it is surprising that so much murkiness has developed around what Wagner did, said, or meant, as he is virtually unrivaled among composers in the documentation he left about himself (approximately 12,000 letters, along with additional prose works that are projected to run to eight volumes when scholars complete the task by 2030).

But, on second thought, such a swirl of rumors might be understandable, as Wagner’s contemporaries believed him capable of almost anything—not just herculean feats of creativity, but also impulsive acts destructive to his livelihood, his family, and his reputation.

How, for instance, could the composer who counted on wealthy patrons to bankroll his outsized ambitions be the same man who cuckolded those benefactors? How could the member of the culturati who counted Jews among his friends and supporters be the same man who wrote the notorious 1850 essay, Das Judenthum in der Musik (Judaism in Music)—which even Horowitz acknowledges as “egregiously anti-Semitic”?

In fact, amid constant upheaval in his life, anti-Semitism prevailed as a leitmotif in Wagner's thought. As he aged, he edged away from the radical ideology that forced him into exile after 1848. But, even with his late-life embrace of Christianity and German nationalism and his exclusion of much youthful writing that now embarrassed him, he never repudiated his poisonous racial nonsense.

Wagner was hardly the only anti-Semitic major figure in classical music history, nor can he be held solely or even largely responsible for the Holocaust. But his prejudice was virulent; Hitler idolized him; and the element of bombast so present in his music made it a natural culture lodestone for the Fuehrer.

Oscar Wilde, in his inimitable way, sent up that last quality perhaps the best of anyone I have read: “I like Wagner’s music better than any other music. It is so loud that one can talk the whole time without people hearing what one says. That is a great advantage.”

Not hearing what is being said—when your laughter dies down, just remember that this last effect of bombast is also what allowed millions of ordinary Germans to pay no mind to Hitler when he divulged his mad notions about conquests and scapegoats.

Quote of the Day (Christopher Isherwood, on a ‘Clever and Unscrupulous Liar’)

“It is indeed tragic to see how, even in these days, a clever and unscrupulous liar can deceive millions.”— “Mr. Norris”—himself a “clever and unscrupulous liar,” commenting on the far more dangerous one who took over Germany in 1933, in Christopher Isherwood, Mr. Norris Changes Trains (1935)

Christopher Isherwood’s novel is not just a study in a louche, corrupt con man, but also of how the society that makes his kind possible also endangers the prospects of democracy. I’m afraid that this year, as in no other in my lifetime (and that includes Richard Nixon’s twists and turns amid Watergate and his impeachment crisis), we are witnessing a similar frail democracy thrashing about. Let’s hope it doesn’t lead to what transpired in 1930s Germany.

Quote of the Day (Dwight Eisenhower, on the ‘Book Burners’)

“Don't join the book burners. Don't think you are going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don't be afraid to go in your library and read every book, as long as that document does not offend our own ideas of decency. That should be the only censorship.”—President Dwight D. Eisenhower, “Remarks at the Dartmouth College Commencement Exercises, Hanover, New Hampshire,” June 14, 1953

A quarter century before Dwight Eisenhower warned Dartmouth graduates against book burners, the practice would have been regarded as a throwback to the witch-burnings of the Middle Ages. But on this date in 1933, German counterparts to Dartmouth—the finest their country had produced—gathered in university towns to incinerate approximately 25,000 books for propagating“un-German” ideas.

The authors whose works were burned that day form an indelible part of the modern era: Henri Barbusse, Franz Boas, John Dos Passos, Albert Einstein, Lion Feuchtwanger, Friedrich Forster, Sigmund Freud, John Galsworthy, Andre Gide, Ernst Glaeser, Maxim Gorki, Werner Hegemann, Ernest Hemingway, Erich Kästner, Helen Keller, Alfred Kerr, Jack London, Emil Ludwig, Heinrich Mann, Thomas Mann, Karl Marx, Hugo Preuss, Marcel Proust, Erich Maria Remarque, Walther Rathenau, Margaret Sanger, Arthur Schnitzler, Upton Sinclair, Kurt Tucholsky, Jakob Wassermann, H.G. Wells, Theodor Wolff, Emile Zola, Arnold Zweig, and Stefan Zweig.

High Nazi officials, along with professors, university rectors, and university student leader,s addressed the mass audiences at the awful ceremonies, in which the books were heaped onto bonfires attended by band playing and “fire oaths.”

It was only less than half a year since Adolf Hitler had become Chancellor of Germany, but he had already provided an extraordinarily vivid symbol of how fast he would move against enemies—not just those he could see, but those whose thoughts he wished to suppress.

Only two months before Eisenhower spoke, Senator Joseph McCarthy had demonstrated that the same 

thing could happen here—or, rather, in United States Information Service (USIS) posts in Western Europe, many of whose libraries felt pressured by the senator’s bumptious young aides Roy Cohn and David Schine to remove books by the likes of Dashiell Hammett, W.E.B. Du Bois, John Steinbeck, Herman Melville, and Henry Thoreau.

When American forces came upon Nazi concentration camps at the end of WWII, General Eisenhower had members of Congress and journalists visit the gruesome sites so that the horror of what occurred would be seen, understood and documented. He knew, as well as anyone, that it was but a short step from burning books to burning people. Privately, he had grown to loathe McCarthy for his bullying. But concern about looking undignified—his vow not to "get into a pissing contest with that skunk"—led him to issue only veiled warnings such as the one at Dartmouth. Onlyy when “Tailgunner Joe” went after the institution to which Ike gave his best years, the U.S. Army, did the President finally determine that this modern-day know-nothing needed to be destroyed--and even then, his hand remained, publicly, largely hidden from the controversy.

(The image accompanying this post, of the May 10, 1933 book burning in Berlin, comes from the U.S. National Archives.)