Certitude Read online

  Fooling Stalin proved surprisingly easy: When Hitler moved more than three million soldiers to the Soviet border, the German government innocently explained that the troops were now safe from RAF bombs and that the stockpiling of troops and supplies was meant to dupe the British into thinking that an invasion of Russia was imminent. In fact, the Germans confided, it was Britain they planned to invade.

  Utterly hoodwinked, Stalin hesitated in the hours after Operation Barbarossa had begun: He wanted to make sure the attack had been sanctioned by Hitler, that it wasn’t the work of a rogue general.

  Nancy Davis Reagan

  (b. 1921)

  The cover of Time magazine on May 16, 1988, featured a Polaroid snapshot of Nancy Reagan wafting through the night sky above Washington. The First Lady was looking up at the stars with the same rapt adoration—they called it “the Gaze”—with which she used to watch her husband at the podium. The headline read: “Astrology in the White House.”

  The magazine cover coincided with the publication of the memoirs of Ronald Reagan’s former chief of staff, with whom Nancy had feuded. The disgruntled minion revealed to the world the extent of Nancy’s influence over her husband’s administration—and the celestial nature of that influence.

  It seems that after the 1981 assassination attempt on poor Ronnie, Nancy was deeply worried about him. So she consulted her astrologer. Thereafter, the president’s comings and goings were arranged—unbeknownst to him—in accordance with an astrological chart showing the “good” and “bad” days. No public event could be scheduled without the prior approval of Nancy’s “friend,” as the astrologer (Joan Quigley) was known.

  In 1987, for instance, when Reagan met with Mikhail Gorbachev in Washington, D.C., the charts of both leaders were consulted and it was determined that 2:00 P.M. on December 8 was the ideal moment. The entire summit was built around that hour.

  World peace has yet to be achieved. The fault, dear Nancy, is not in our stars, but in ourselves….

  Edgar Degas

  (1834–1917)

  To say that some of his best friends were Jewish is, in the case of the great Impressionist Edgar Degas, simply the truth. From age eleven, when they met at their Paris lycée, he and Ludovic Halévy were inseparable; thirty years later, Degas was still having dinner at the Halévys once a week, and lunch just as often.

  The Halévys were Jewish; Degas was not, and in 1894, when the Dreyfus Affair erupted, a fifty-year friendship came to an abrupt end.

  All of France divided into two camps: the Dreyfusards, who believed in the innocence of Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish artillery officer convicted of treason on trumped-up charges and sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil’s Island; and the anti-Dreyfusards, who were wrongly convinced of his guilt.

  Degas was an extreme anti-Dreyfusard: Not only was he adamant in his belief that the French military courts could never have been mistaken in convicting Captain Dreyfus, but he also felt that the Jewish population of France should suffer punishment for the crimes Dreyfus committed. He broke off contact with his fellow painters Camille Pissarro and Mary Cassatt with whom he’d been close friends—Pissarro because his father’s family was Jewish, Cassatt because she was outspoken in her defense of Dreyfus.

  In 1906, a court of appeals officially exonerated Dreyfus: He was readmitted into the army, promoted, and made a Chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur. Still, Edgar Degas refused to acknowledge his innocence.

  Anthony Comstock

  (1844–1915)

  It’s a tough job, legislating morality. But you get results—just ask Anthony Comstock. Proud of his work as the founder of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, prouder still to have given his name to the Comstock Act of 1873 (which made it a federal crime to send through the mail “obscene, lewd, or lascivious” materials—not just pornography but also educational information about birth control and abortion), Comstock looked back on four decades of his antiporn crusade and listed his accomplishments: “I have convicted persons enough to fill a passenger train of sixty-one coaches, sixty coaches containing sixty passengers each and the sixty-first almost full. I have destroyed 160 tons of obscene literature.”

  As a special agent of the U.S. Post Office, Comstock had police powers; and he was armed, thanks to the New York State legislature, with a gun. He wielded the power of life and death. He boasted of having driven certain purveyors of the lewd and lascivious to suicide, among them Ida Craddock, the author of sex manuals such as The Wedding Night and Right Marital Living. Craddock killed herself rather than serve a five-year sentence for the circulation of those “obscene” materials.

  But a nagging question remains: After all the convictions and bannings and suicides, has vice actually been suppressed? Picture Comstock today, dressed as always all in black and sporting his famous muttonchop whiskers, clicking through the unending supply of Internet porn.

  James I, King of England

  (1566–1635)

  English poets from the mid-seventeenth-century onward owe a tremendous debt to King James I: He commissioned the King James Bible, an inexhaustible trove of poetic language bound to resonate with churchgoing readers. But in the years before he turned his attention to the word of God, James’s abiding fascination was with the devil and his minions; that is, with witches.

  In 1590, while he was still King James VI of Scotland, he immersed himself in a bizarre witch hunt that began with the routine denunciation of a midwife (she’d made the mistake of healing the sick and staying out late at night). Soon enough some seventy witches had been rounded up and a fiendish plot revealed: The coven had stirred up tempests meant to sink the ship in which the king was sailing home from Denmark with his new bride, Queen Anne.

  James personally oversaw the questioning of a schoolmaster known as Dr. Fian. In order to elicit the required testimony, the subject’s head was jerked violently with a rope. He was fitted with “the bootes,” viselike contraptions designed to squeeze the calves. The nails were yanked from his fingers with pincers. The bootes were reapplied, and his legs crushed.

  Dr. Fian was eventually executed, his mangled body publicly burned.

  Six years later, James published his Daemonologie, in which he shared with the world his hard-earned witchcraft wisdom. In a nutshell: “Loath they are to confess without torture, which witnesseth their guiltiness.”

  Tom Cruise

  (b. 1962)

  For a scary moment in the summer of 2005, it looked as though Tom Cruise might be going off the rails.

  The early warning sign came when he insisted on having a tent staffed with “volunteer Scientology ministers” on the set of War of the Worlds (they were there, he said, “to help the sick and injured”). By April, he was exchanging sharp words with an interviewer from Der Spiegel who made the mistake of uttering the word “pseudoscience.” (This was after Cruise had insisted that he himself had “helped hundreds of people get off drugs,” and that Scientology has “the only successful drug rehabilitation program in the world.”)

  Then there was the Brooke Shields fiasco: Scientology considers modern psychiatry and its medications to be a menace; Brooke admitted to popping pills to treat her postpartum depression, and so tactful Tom publicly chastised her (and added that her career had tanked).

  Then came the “couch incident”—the forty-two-year-old Cruise leaping all over Oprah’s furniture, professing undying love for his twenty-six-year-old squeeze, Katie Holmes.

  Suddenly everyone was asking, will Scientology sink the most powerful actor in Hollywood?

  Apparently not. Even though it’s been revealed that Cruise is the Scientology No. 2, and anyone with access to the Web and the slightest curiosity has seen his kookyscary ravings about his creepy cult (“we are the way to happiness, we bring peace and unite cultures”)—he’s still a big-time box office draw.

  William Butler Yeats

  (1865–1939)

  When the young William Butler Yeats attended his first séance, it wa
s a jolting experience: His body, he recalled, “moved like a suddenly unrolled watch-spring”—he was thrown back against the wall; he rapped the table with the knuckles of his neighbor’s hand. He tried to pray, to ward off evil spirits—but out of his mouth instead came lines from Paradise Lost.

  Fast forward three decades to Yeats’s honeymoon. He’s fifty-two; his bride, George Hyde-Lees, is twenty-five. Yeats (who’d been in love with one woman, Maude Gonne, for most of his adult life, and had also proposed, two months earlier, to Maude’s daughter, Iseult) was in crisis, wracked with worry that his marriage was a mistake. But then, on day four of the honeymoon, clever George developed a new and useful talent: automatic writing. She became a conduit to the spirit world: Yeats would ask questions, and the pen in George’s hands would provide the answers. Yeats had found happiness at last.

  George’s automatic writing sessions (four hundred of them in all, producing some four thousand pages) gave Yeats the framework for his “system”—the vast architecture of “gyres” and “phases” that he codified in that famously impenetrable mystic credo The Vision.

  To his publisher, Yeats said, “I dare say I delude myself in thinking this book is my book of books.” (It bombed.)

  He was the best poet of the twentieth century—and the most easily misled.

  Mother Ann Lee

  (1736–84)

  In a prison cell in Manchester, England, Ann Lee had a vision: She saw a copulating Adam and Eve tossed out of the Garden of Eden by a disgusted deity. From this she concluded that the original sin was not disobedience but sex. And if hanky-panky displeased the Supreme Being, then celibacy must delight Him. Hence the Shakers, the religious sect that flourished until its own founding principle brought about an inevitable decline.

  The charismatic leader of a tiny sect of “Shaking Quakers,” Lee had other visions: Jesus appeared to her and let her know that she was Himself made flesh—a living, female counterpart to Christ. It was also revealed to her that she should leave England for America; she and eight followers landed in New York City in 1774.

  Celibacy continued to be the ideological core of the sect. Fierce in her condemnation of lust in all its guises (except ecstatic dancing, of course, and the obscure gratification of speaking in tongues), Lee’s antisexual ardor is said to have begun in childhood. Her extreme feelings about fornication could only have been confirmed by a marriage she’d done her level best to avoid, four still-births, and the death of four other children in infancy.

  The downside of celibacy (practiced successfully, it leads to extinction), Mother Lee ignored. From a peak of six thousand in the early nineteenth century, the Shaker population has dwindled drastically—only four remain.

  Bush and Co.

  Take a man with a troubled past eager to convince himself of his special role in history, a man who gambles on gut instinct and then chooses to see the gamble as destiny in the making; now drop that man into the Oval Office, proclaim him commander in chief, and surround him with clever, manipulative advisers, each one equipped with a private cache of certitude. It’s a perfect storm. It’s the presidency of George W. Bush.

  On April 18, 2006, George W. Bush proclaimed, “I’m the decider, and I decide what is best.” He’d been in the White House for six years, and at last he’d uttered the phrase that revealed precisely the deep logic of his behavior. Beginning with status conferred by others—by the Bush and Walker families, say, or by the Supreme Court—“I’m the decider” is the naked, narcissistic “I” dressed up with authority, the spoiled, stubborn son of privilege in the role of resolute leader. “I decide what is best” is the reality he makes: Because he’s the decider, he decides, and because he has decided, what he has decided is best. Doubt doesn’t enter into the equation—it’s excluded by the perfect circularity of the logic. Second thoughts are for wimps. Welcome to Iraq.

  Among his enablers, Dick Cheney takes pride of place. Working W.’s oedipal weakness with ruthless cunning, Cheney offered his puppet an irresistible prize: expanded presidential powers. (How could the son fail to grasp the underlying message: “You will be greater than your father”?) Cheney also opened the door to his old neocon pals, Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, who seized the opportunity presented by 9/11 to implant in Bush their unshakable dogma about projecting America’s power around the globe and establishing democracy in the Middle East. And Cheney, remember, was an expert on WMD.

  But let’s not forget Karl Rove, “Boy Genius,” whose dream of enduring Republican dominance meant persuading Bush that the Rove brand of partisan politics was the key to a successful, two-term presidency. (Take that, Dad!) Rove’s presence in the West Wing meant that George W.’s domestic policy lurched to the right at every crucial juncture; and in the wake of 9/11, he made sure that the threat of terrorist strikes would become a handy weapon in the Republican arsenal.

  Last, least, but not wholly without blame, Condoleezza Rice, who developed a kind of freaky empathy, sensing the burgeoning certainties of her boss and echoing them precisely, so that she seemed almost to anticipate his next unswerving conviction.

  Neither George Bush nor his cronies ever admitted to error. Even after his popularity plummeted and his presidency was declared moribund, the president himself continued to radiate untroubled confidence in his own immaculate judgment.

  André Maginot

  (1877–1932)

  When your last name is attached to one of the great failures in the history of military strategy, when, in fact, your name becomes synonymous with misplaced confidence, it’s a good idea to sink quietly into obscurity—which is exactly what André Maginot has done in the seven decades since he died (after eating contaminated oysters) at age fifty-five.

  A career politician who in 1914 resigned his post as undersecretary of state for war to enlist in the infantry, Maginot was wounded near Verdun and decorated with France’s highest military honor. After his childhood home in Lorraine was obliterated by bombardment, he vowed that Alsace-Lorraine would never again suffer invasion. Returning to government service, he dedicated himself to the idea of fortifying the border with Germany.

  Maginot turned himself into a relentless lobbyist, agitating year after year for a fixed defensive line, modern and impenetrable. (Charles de Gaulle was among the prominent opponents of the scheme, preferring to spend more on tanks and combat aircraft.) Eventually, in 1929, Maginot browbeat the Assemblée Nationale into allocating 3.3 billion francs for his complex of concrete forts, proving again the power of single-minded persistence.

  Perhaps it’s just as well that he didn’t live to see the consequence of his valiant determination. In 1940, the German Blitzkrieg simply circumvented the Maginot Line, driving through Belgium toward Dunkirk and through the Ardennes down to Paris. The ingenious fortifications proved useless: France fell in just six weeks.

  Sam Goldwyn

  (1879–1974)

  Talent, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. Unless of course the beholder is the all-powerful boss of a movie studio that bears his name, in which case beauty and talent are plentiful wherever he says. Especially if he’s the kind of guy who likes to boast, “I am willing to admit that I may not always be right, but I am never wrong.”

  When Sam Goldwyn decided that he had found the next Garbo in a Russian actress named Anna Sten (née Anel Sudakevich), nothing could persuade him otherwise. He brought her to Hollywood and began an expensive and bootless eighteen-month makeover. First she had to learn English, then Hollywood-style acting (before Goldwyn discovered her, she’d already been discovered, at age fifteen, by Stanislavski, who left his mark). Goldwyn launched a million-dollar publicity campaign to prepare audiences for her first American movie, a loose adaptation of Emile Zola’s Nana. The film premiered in New York in February of 1934. It flopped. Goldwyn refused to give up. In the same year he produced We Live Again—another flop. Finally he paired Anna with Gary Cooper, but that didn’t work, either. American audiences refused to fall in love, and Sten becam
e known as “Goldwyn’s folly.”

  The irony is that she was actually a good actress—she just wasn’t Greta Garbo, even if Sam Goldwyn said so.

  Thomas Wentworth Higginson

  (1823–1911)

  Thomas Wentworth Higginson was no dope: A talented essayist, he engaged in lively polemics in the leading magazines of his day. Nor was he small-minded: An ardent feminist, he was already a prominent champion of women’s suffrage more than half a century before the passage of the 19th Amendment. No one ever accused him of being a hidebound conservative: A militant abolitionist, he led the first black regiment in the Civil War.

  And yet he could not bring himself to believe that the world was ready for Emily Dickinson’s wildly odd and original poetry.

  Dickinson wrote to him in 1862, enclosing four poems and asking, “Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?” He was not too busy, and his answer must have encouraged her (we only have her half of the correspondence), for this was the start of a twenty-five-year epistolary dalliance, flirtatious but chaste (they met only twice). From the beginning he urged that she “delay” publication.

  Thanks to Dickinson’s own ambivalence, the delay lasted until four years after her death, when her family asked Higginson to help edit a volume of her poetry. He agreed. But the edition he published in 1890 ironed out the meter, regularized the punctuation—removing those distinctive dashes—and simply dropped passages deemed ungainly or obscure. In other words, he published shrink-wrapped Dickinson packaged for a late-Victorian audience.