Certitude Read online

  Rudyard Kipling

  (1865–1936)

  War had been declared, and Rudyard Kipling’s son Jack was eager to fight. But because Jack was nearsighted, his application for an officer’s commission was turned down. So the famous father stepped in to assist. He tapped an old friend, a colonel in the Irish Guards, for a favor, and by mid-September 1914, young Jack was reporting for duty to a barracks in Essex. A year later, six weeks after his eighteenth birthday, Lieutenant Kipling was killed in action at the Battle of Loos.

  Jack had been more than willing to go to war, but his patriotic valor was nothing compared with his father’s rabid enthusiasm. The great booster of the British Empire was also a furious enemy of Germany. Both a consumer and a disseminator of propaganda about the “atrocities” the kaiser’s army had inflicted on the population of Belgium, Kipling published pamphlets under the auspices of the War Propaganda Bureau and gave speeches at recruiting rallies. At one such event, a month before his son was shipped to France, Kipling declared, “There is no crime, no cruelty, no abomination that the mind of man can conceive which the German has not perpetrated, is not perpetrating, and will not perpetrate if he is allowed to go on.”

  Here’s the question: Could one read Kipling’s postwar poem “Common Form”—which is more frequently glossed as a denunciation of politicians who claimed that Britain was adequately armed against the German threat—as a rueful epitaph for his boy Jack?

  If any question why we died,

  Tell them, because our fathers lied.

  William Jennings Bryan

  (1860–1925)

  When the Tennessee legislature banned the teaching of evolution in every public classroom in the state, William Jennings Bryan fired off a congratulatory telegram to the governor: “The Christian parents of the state owe you a debt of gratitude for saving their children from the poisonous influence of an unproven hypothesis.”

  Bryan is as famous for his eloquence as for his implacable opposition to Darwinism. The silver-tongued statesman who declared that “all the ills from which America suffers can be traced to the teaching of evolution” should therefore be allowed to speak for himself:

  “Evolution seems to close the heart to some of the plainest spiritual truths while it opens the mind to the wildest guesses advanced in the name of science.”

  “There is no more reason to believe that man descended from some inferior animal than there is to believe that a stately mansion has descended from a small cottage.”

  “It is better to trust in the Rock of Ages than to know the ages of rock.”

  “I would rather begin with God and reason down than begin with a piece of dirt and reason up.”

  “If we have to give up either religion or education, we should give up education.”

  Remember the Scopes Trial? (One wag had it that Clarence Darrow “made a monkey out of” Bryan.) Five days after the verdict, Bryan died in his sleep. His tombstone reads, “He kept the Faith.”

  Aimee Semple McPherson

  (1890–1944)

  There’s no business like show business—except maybe God’s business, and for Aimee Semple McPherson, the two were one and the same. When at last she settled down after years of itinerant preaching, she turned her Angelus Temple into a venue for the most engrossing religious spectacle of her time. McPherson was both the first woman to preach a sermon over the radio and the first woman in the country to be granted a broadcast license (for KFSG in Los Angeles, as in Foursquare Gospel, the name of her church), but really she was happy to use any medium at all to spread the good word. Like her spiritual twin, P. T. Barnum, she was firm in her faith that there’s no such thing as bad publicity.

  Of which she got plenty. On May 18, 1926, McPherson went for a swim at Ocean Park beach in Santa Monica—and disappeared. It was assumed that she’d drowned. The faithful mourned. But thirty-five days later, she turned up just over the border in Mexico, telling a fabulous tale of kidnap, torture, and dramatic escape. It seems more likely that she was enjoying a fling with her married lover (a radio engineer for KFSG), but despite a grand jury investigation and plenty of muckraking, no one has ever established the truth.

  McPherson never recanted. She never even adjusted the more incredible details. As she repeatedly told reporters throughout the six weeks of white-hot scandal, “That’s my story, boys, and I’m sticking with it.”

  Winston Churchill

  (1874–1965)

  It’s hard to argue with Isaiah Berlin, who called Winston Churchill “the largest human being of our time”—but the mythic stature of the hero who saved his nation in World War II shouldn’t blind us to his epic blunders. Though he once confided to H. H. Asquith that his life’s ambition was “to command great victorious armies in battle,” history suggests that he should have left the fighting to the generals.

  Remember Gallipoli? Churchill’s plans for a naval attack on the Dardanelles in April 1915 resulted in complete catastrophe: twenty-one thousand British troops killed; zero tactical gain. (A historical footnote too odd to ignore: The disastrously faulty intelligence concerning Turkish troop strength was provided by another mythic figure, Lieutenant T. E. Lawrence, a.k.a. “Lawrence of Arabia.”) In the aftermath of the Gallipoli debacle, Churchill was removed from his job as First Lord of the Admiralty and given the less critical cabinet role of Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster; he soon resigned and took up the command of an infantry battalion on the Western Front.

  The next world war found Winston once again First Lord of the Admiralty, and in early 1940, he was the main architect of the Norway campaign, another disaster for the Allies—but this time Winnie escaped censure. Indeed, when a vote of no confidence after the Norway fiasco ousted Neville Chamberlain as prime minister, it was Churchill who took his place. Just in time for his finest hour.

  Lincoln Steffens

  (1866–1936)

  “I’ve seen the future, and it works”—that one, spectacularly misguided pronouncement has guaranteed immortality to Lincoln Steffens, a muckraking journalist whose other accomplishments (among them a splendid, utterly unreliable autobiography) are fast receding into the haze of neglected history.

  Steffens’s remark—which he repeated again and again in various versions—was his judgment on Soviet Russia, where he went in 1919, tagging along with an American emissary to the Bolshevik camp. The country was then still in the throes of civil war, but Steffens was confident of the outcome. In Moscow, he interviewed Lenin, and called him a “liberal…the greatest of liberals.” He hailed the advent of a new economic and scientific culture that would bring an end to poverty and crime. His euphoric claims about the miraculous efficiency of the Soviet system reached a comical pitch when he announced in a Paris bar to a group of fellow journalists, “I tell you, they have abolished prostitution”—to which one of his colleagues replied, “My God, Steff! What did you do?”

  It comes as no surprise to learn that Steffens’s famous phrase was composed before he ever set eyes on the budding promise of the Soviet state in its infancy. He was already at work polishing his mantra aboard the train to Stockholm, days before he made contact with the Bolshevik agents who were to escort him across the frontier and into the future.

  Pope John Paul II

  (1920–2005)

  What good is a pope who changes his mind? Karol Józef Wojtyla, who became Pope John Paul II in 1978, published his views on “artificial” contraception in 1960: He was against it. If you find that phrasing flabby, here it is from the horse’s mouth: “[C]ontraception is…so profoundly unlawful, as never to be, for any reason, justified.” Why? With a prophylactic, the conjugal act—remember, you’re married— “ceases to be an act of love.” Roll on a condom and love-making is reduced to mere bodily union.

  Only the “natural” kind of contraception is allowed —the periodic continence or intermittent abstinence more familiarly known as the rhythm method.

  As a practical matter, John Paul II put the Catholic Church’s t
eaching on contraceptives into a deep freeze during the twenty-six years of his papacy. His insistence on chastity as the only permissible form of birth control would have been merely tragic if AIDS hadn’t come along. But twenty-five million people have died of the disease since the early 1980s. In 1993—by which time the pathology of AIDS was common knowledge even in the Holy See—he issued an encyclical restating his absolutist position. As late as 2005—with his dying breath, you might say—he reaffirmed the Vatican’s ban on the use of condoms to stop the spread of HIV.

  And now he’s on the fast track to sainthood.

  Herbert Hoover

  (1874–1964)

  In the third volume of his memoirs, The Great Depression, Herbert Hoover insists, “I did not say ‘Prosperity is just around the corner.’” Maybe not. But look up Hoover on the Web and you’ll find that in the popular imagination, the thirtyfirst president is inextricably linked with confidently asserted optimism.

  Could it be that Americans are remembering this 1928 campaign speech? “We in America today are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of any land. The poor-house is vanishing from among us.”

  Then the stock market crashed in October of 1929. Weeks later, the president paraded his sangfroid: “Any lack of confidence in the economic future or the basic strength of business in the United States is foolish.”

  In May of 1930, Hoover declared, “I am convinced we have passed the worst.” A month later, in reply to a delegation requesting a federal public works program, he said, “Gentlemen, you have come sixty days too late. The Depression is over.” (Compare that with his memorable phrase “Nobody is actually starving.”)

  Two hungry years later: “It can be demonstrated that the tide has turned and that the gigantic forces of depression are today in retreat.” (That’s from a speech delivered on October 22, 1932.) Wrong again.

  As any connoisseur of today’s faux scandals will tell you, just as damaging as actual misconduct is the appearance of misconduct. So, too, with certitude….

  About the Authors

  Adam Begley has been the books editor of the New York Observer since 1996. He’s certain of one thing: how lucky he is to share his life in Northamptonshire, England, with his wife, two stepchildren, and three cats.

  Edward Sorel is the author/illustrator of Unauthorized Portraits and Literary Lives and is a contributor to The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and the Nation. In 2005, he completed his mural for the Waverly Inn in Greenwich Village, reproduced in The Mural at the Waverly Inn.

  Copyright © 2009

  by Adam Begley and Edward Sorel

  Introduction copyright © 2009 by Christopher Hitchens

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Harmony Books,

  an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group,

  a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  www.crownpublishing.com

  Harmony Books is a registered trademark

  and the Harmony Books colophon

  is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

  The illustration “The Bush Gang” was originally published in Vanity Fair,

  and the illustrations “Aimee Semple McPherson” and “John Brown”

  were originally published in The New Yorker.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Begley, Adam.

  Certitude A profusely illlustrated guide to blockheads and bullheads,

  past & present / Adam Begley; illustrations by Edward Sorel.—1st ed.

  1. Biography—Anecdotes. 2. World history—Anecdotes.

  3. Certainty—Anecdotes. I. Sorel, Edward, 1929–II. Title.

  CT105.B39 2009

  909—dc22 2008051786

  eISBN: 978-0-307-45981-7

  v3.0