The Peripatetic Philosopher looks at the love of Sons & Mothers

SONS & MOTHERS

James r. fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© November 11, 2019

MOM, 30, 5-1; JIM, 12, 5-9

Recently, I’ve been reading “The Trial of Adolf Hitler: The Beer Hall Putsch and the Rise of Nazi Germany” (2017) by David King.  Previously, I had read “1924: The Year that made Hitler” (2016) by Peter Ross Range and “Hitler’s Thirty Days to Power, January 1933” (2003) by Henry Ashby Turner, Jr., the latter book tracks with my own entry into this world.  

My life has been in that hysterical moment when the world became mad and has never recovered its sanity since.

Now what does my fascination with this terrible man and this terrifying period have to do with “Sons & Mothers”?   Everything!

Everyone has at least one other person whose life looms large in their own.  This, as I hope to show, is particularly true of those who exercise demonstrative leadership and cultural influence on the character of their time.

Three such people come to mind: President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, General Douglas MacArthur and Adolf Hitler.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR)

FDR's mother, Sara Roosevelt's influence was so complete that FDR never had a home separate from her in his entire life.  She commissioned a pair of houses to be built in New York City as a gift to her son and his new wife, with the stipulation she could move in next door.  Sara Roosevelt oversaw a series of connecting doors between the two houses, allowing her access to the drawing room and children’s bedrooms. 

When he became president, she moved to Washington, DC and lived to see her son elected to the presidency three times.  Sara continued to support her son’s career, even standing in as First Lady on occasion. 

FDR’s "New Deal,” the social security culture; his vigorous support of the labor union movement; his management of the military and domestic policy during The Great Depression and WWII; his critical support of management’s role in the wartime culture, his calming of national anxiety with his “Fireside chats” on the radio during the nation's darkest hours of that war; and his unflinching optimism in the face of discouraging news from the war front, set the tone for Americans not only to persist and survive, but to prevail.     

The cultural legacy of his presidency permeates every phase of today’s society while Democrats and Republicans, paradoxically, are so identical in their policies and politics that their espousals ring absurd to counterfeit with both parties preoccupied with white noise failing to see the counter productivity of their gridlock ways. 

The legacy of this president is that we have become a welfare and debtor nation with the national debt soaring over $20 trillion with no relaxation of its pace.  Paradoxically, the Social Security System has become so sacrosanct that neither political party dare touch it, although it was originally meant as a temporary measure during The Great Depression of the 1930s.

Adding to the irony, while domestic welfare gets the majority of the attention, it is corporate welfare that is truly crippling.  Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan attempted to address this in 1998 but without corroborating support from either political party.

Moynihan pointed out, at the time, that the US Congress was robbing "Peter to pay Paul," using the Social Security Trust Fund to pay for its out-of-control and self-indulgent domestic agenda.

So, in retrospect, it wasn't FDR's fault that we are a bankrupt nation, but the unintended consequences of the domestic culture he came to establish, which much of the Western world has come to adopt as well.

General Douglas MacArthur

Douglas MacArthur was a military brat born into a military family.  His mother, Mary Pinkney MacArthur, nicknamed “Pinky” had three sons of whom Douglas was the youngest and favorite. 

He excelled in school and in athletics, was on the tennis team, quarterback on the football team, shortstop on the baseball team, as well as valedictorian of his class with a final average of 97.33 out of 100.   He would go to the US Military Academy at West Point where he played left field on the baseball team and finished first in his class with the third highest score ever recorded. 

When he entered West Point, his mother moved there as well.  Like FDR’s mother, Sara, wherever Douglas MacArthur was posted, his mother “Pinky” would soon follow even after he married.

Whereas FDR was a tactician MacArthur was a strategist.  FDR was an aristocrat who enjoyed his cigarettes, booze, fine wine, good company, and stimulating conversation sprinkled with salty humor.   

MacArthur, on the other hand, was a soldier, 24/7 who was comfortable alone in his modest home and equally modest office where he could read maps, manipulate his markers and create new strategies.   

Much of MacArthur’s military career was in the Far East where he absorbed the diverse cultures to the point that they permeated his leadership.  For example, he not only turned Japan from a bitter enemy, a country that drove the United States into WWII with the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in Honolulu on December 7, 1941l, into a vital ally, but changed the Japanese culture to reflect his own systemic image of that nation in the post-WWII world.

The general was a student of Japanese history and culture taking the view that a few militarist extremists had hijacked Japan starting in 1931 with the Mukden Incident justifying the 1937-1938 Nanking Massacre and atrocities committed by the Imperial Japanese Army during the Second Sino-Japanese War (see Iris Chang’s “The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of WWII,” 1997).

Unlike the vengeance of The Versailles Treaty of WWI against Germany, General MacArthur had a more rational and urbane perspective not often familiar with Western conquerors. The world of today owes the general his due for that cultural enlightenment. But alas, Western minds cannot think past the general’s arrogant, aloof and elitist disposition.

President Harry S. Truman tapped MacArthur to oversee the occupation, rebuilding and democratization of Japan. Though his official title was Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP), he became in effect that defeated nation’s American Viceroy.

Upon assuming command as SCAP—a position he had craved—MacArthur established his headquarters in the relatively undamaged Dai Ichi building in Tokyo, and could gaze from his modest sixth-floor office across a broad boulevard at the palace of Japan’s wartime emperor, Hirohito.

As was his inclination, he often didn't bother with authorization before making strategic moves.  For example, when MacArthur assumed his new role in late 1945, 430,000 American troops were garrisoned across Japan, two-thirds of them flooding the Tokyo-Yokohama area.

At the general’s directive, signs and street names in the area were rendered in English as well as Japanese, while in the Americanized city center, English alone prevailed. Display of the Japanese Rising Sun flag was drastically limited. Buildings that had survived the war were largely requisitioned as offices and barracks for Americans.

MacArthur recognized that hundreds of thousands of American soldiers living in ostentatious sybaritic luxury were still anxious to return home.  This constituted a problem certain to fester. Indeed, sporadic outbreaks of unrest had already arisen among G.I’s seeking a quick return stateside. There were simply too many of them with too little to do. Ignoring US Pentagon concerns about lowering U.S. troop levels in occupied Japan, MacArthur began returning veteran to the states.

Although the US State Department cautioned that “the occupation forces are the instruments of policy and not the determinants of policy,” MacArthur ignored this sentiment, shipping units home when he could. By mid-1946 the number of occupation soldiers had been halved to 200,000. In 1947 troop strength dropped to 120,000, the following year to just 102,000. The Eighth Army in Japan was reduced to undersized regiments and divisions whose level of preparedness kept diminishing.

Although the Japanese bore the brunt of occupation costs, the newly elected Republican U.S. Congress carped about excesses in the military budget. Describing contested expenditures as “war termination costs,” MacArthur ignored this criticism as well.

Aloof and vain, Viceroy MacArthur was almost as reclusive as the Wizard of Oz. He kept much of the local Japanese government intact and did not attempt to micromanage, preferring to rule much the way the British had run India for decades before the war. And as few Americans were competent in Japanese, MacArthur kept the bureaucrats and technocrats doing so who had always run Japan.

This sage wisdom was not followed in the Iraq War (2003 – 2011) when Saddam Hussein was disposed during the administration of President George Bush.  As a consequence, Iraq remains to the present day an unstable government and an international crisis center.

MacArthur’s "hands off" style of management included his never visiting either his occupation army or his domain. If troops paraded past the Dai Ichi Building, he would make a show of accepting their salutes, but rather than personally inspect the garrisons and camps, he would send substitutes—occasionally his wife, Jean, and a staff general. Yet this pattern of distant command and remote governance seems to have worked, as MacArthur retained the country’s institutions and culture intact with strategic adaptations.

Every six months MacArthur met with Hirohito, whom he had effectively succeeded. MacArthur had their first meeting, in September 1945, preserved in an iconic image of his tenure in Japan. Hirohito arrived at the embassy one morning, dressed in severe black formal attire, and the general met him in a slightly rumpled khaki uniform, tieless. A SCAP cameraman captured the pair standing side by side, the diminutive emperor almost literally in the shadow of the tall, sturdy American. Japanese officialdom saw the image as deeply humiliating, and the contrast unmistakably symbolized MacArthur’s Japan.

Yet MacArthur also understood the symbolic importance of the emperor, and in early 1946 he prevailed upon Washington to spare Hirohito—whatever his role in condoning and then encouraging the war—from facing charges as a war criminal. Hirohito escaped the scaffold; Japanese pride was massaged, and order was maintained.

[An international military tribunal in Tokyo however tried convicted and executed Prime Ministers Hideki Tojo and Koki Hirota and five top generals.]

The orders under which MacArthur initially became de facto ruler of postwar Japan—known as the “U.S. Initial Post-Surrender Policy for Japan”—directed him to exercise his authority indirectly through the state where possible, while conferring upon him discretionary power to enforce the 1945 surrender terms.

The most significant of which was the repatriation of hundreds of thousands of Japanese troops from areas they held at the end of the war. That process took many months, as MacArthur insisted only Japanese ships be used, yet the Allies had sunk most of the nation’s merchant fleet. Also, he directed his troops to deal with the widespread malnutrition that plagued postwar Japan, dispensing from military stocks thousands of tons of emergency food supplies in the spring and summer of 1946 and also distributed foodstuffs shipped from abroad.

MacArthur had already ordered the recall of all Japanese diplomatic personnel abroad. Next, he severed all diplomatic ties between Japan and other nations. Thereafter, SCAP’s own Diplomatic Section managed Japan’s foreign relations.

MacArthur’s occupation staff in Tokyo at first numbered about 1,500 and grew to more than 3,000 by 1948. Most of his minions ranged politically from conservative to ultraconservative, and they established policies that continued, rather than dismantled the zaibatsu (business conglomerates) that had long dominated the Japanese economy. Entrenched Japanese bureaucracies from the national level to the villages and towns continued largely undisturbed.

Reform nonetheless crept into Japan, for MacArthur’s regime also enforced policies set by the Truman administration. The “Basic Directive” triggered war crimes trials in 1945–46, as well as replacement of the Meiji Charter Oath of 1868, under which Japan had been ruled by oligarchs on behalf of a semi divine emperor.

A four-power Allied agreement (between the United States, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union and China) called for a commission to formulate a new Japanese constitution by late February 1946. To evade meddlesome Stalinist input, MacArthur’s headquarters pre-empted the commission with its own document, “Three Basic Points.”

This was presented as a Japanese initiative. The first of the points allowed the emperor to remain head of state, though his powers would henceforth derive from the new constitution, which itself would reflect the will of the people. The second point called for Japan’s renunciation of the right to wage war or to maintain armed forces. The third point abolished the feudal system and reformed the peerage. Each point embodied mandates from Washington based on the Allies’ August 1945 Potsdam Agreement.

The new constitution resulting in 92 articles reflected America’s New Deal policies. It established a social welfare and civil rights system, even enfranchising women. When deliberations ended on February 10, Lt. Col. Charles Kades, said to the Vienna-born linguist Beate Sirota, the only woman in the room,

“My God, you have given Japanese women more rights than in the American Constitution!”

She retorted, “That’s not very difficult to do, because women are not in the American Constitution.” 

Once Hirohito gave his “full approval” of the draft, MacArthur announced his concurrence, and on March 6, 1946, the Japanese government made public its new constitution.

Though now in his late 60s—his eyesight failing and his right hand beginning to tremble—MacArthur appeared sturdy as long as he was seen as a desk general. When Dwight Eisenhower, once MacArthur’s aide and now his five-star peer as chief of staff, had visited Tokyo in 1946, the viceroy gossiped about prospects for the next presidential campaign.

But it was not presidential politics but war in Korea that finally brought MacArthur back to the United States. The MacArthur intrigue would continue during the Korean War with the general often stepping out of line with President Truman with a desire to wage a possible atomic war with China.

President Truman eventually relieved the general of his command marking the end of the general’s career. He would later address the US Congress with these parting words, “Old soldiers never die. They just fade away.”

Adolf Hitler was a Mother’s Loving Son!

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and General Douglas MacArthur knew the love of a mother with the daring to know their own mind. When such love is missing, the individual struggles to find his own way.

We all know what a monster Adolf Hitler became, but we could miss the fact that he was once a devoted son to his mother.  She was a deeply religious person only to die when Adolf was 18. He had already quit school where he was a poor and indifferent student at 16 with his mother signing his release from compulsory education.  She was disinclined to discourage his wild allusions of becoming a great artist as she was fond of his sketches and water colors as possible evidence of such talent.

Although soon to die, she did not protest her thin, gawky, sad looking 18-year-old son moving to the old world city of Vienna, the capital of the Austro-Hungarian empire. In February 1908, Hitler moved there with the goal of attending the art academy and becoming a great artist.

Vienna was a city alive with music and full of diverse people who loved the arts and felt lucky to call the place home. At the time, the Hapsburg Empire was ruled by Emperor Franz Josef, who was in declining health and under the influence of corrupt ministers, an empire that his family had ruled for centuries, but was now only a shadow of its former grandeur. Vienna, on the other hand, remained a remarkably vibrant city that attracted a multicultural population from all over the empire.

In Vienna, Hitler continued the same lazy lifestyle he had enjoyed in Linz after dropping out of school. Acquaintances described Hitler as a night owl who slept till noon, would go out for walks taking in all the sights, then stay up late discussing his ideas on everything from social reform to city planning. Hitler made no effort to get a regular job, considering himself far above that. He dressed like an artist and at night dressed like a young gentleman of leisure often attending the opera.

He also displayed an increasingly unstable personality with a terrible temper. At times he was quite reasonable but always prone to sudden outbursts of rage especially when he was corrected on anything. He had no real interest in women, preferring to keep away from them and even smugly rebuffed those who showed any interest in him. He strictly adhered to his Roman Catholic upbringing regarding sex, believing men and women should remain celibate until marriage.

Hitler was also given to sudden bursts of inspiration and interesting ideas but never finished anything he started. Whether composing his own opera or redesigning the city of Vienna, he would start with much enthusiasm and work hard, only to eventually lose interest.

In October 1908, Hitler tried for the second time to gain admission to the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts. However, his test drawings were judged so poor that he was not even allowed to take the formal exam. It was a bitter disappointment to Hitler and effectively left him on the outside looking in at the artistic community in Vienna.

Rebuffed and humiliated, Hitler now had no use for friends and lived by himself, moving from place to place as his savings gradually dwindled and his lifestyle spiraled downward. Despite the need for money, Hitler made no attempt to get regular employment. He eventually pawned all his possessions and actually wound up sleeping on park benches and begging for money. He quickly became a dirty, smelly, unshaven young man wearing tattered clothes and did not even own an overcoat.

In December of 1909, freezing and half starved, he moved into a homeless shelter. He ate at a soup kitchen operated by the nuns from a nearby convent.

In February 1910, now nearly 21, he moved into a home for poor men where he would stay for the next few years. Hitler sometimes earned a little money as a day laborer, shoveling snow and carrying bags at the train station. He then discovered he could earn a meager living selling pictures of famous Vienna landmarks which he copied from postcards. Another resident at the home acted as his agent, hawking Hitler's works of art to various shops where they were mostly used to fill empty picture frames. Hitler also painted posters for shop windows.

Hitler, undisciplined and moody, was always eager to discuss politics and often making speeches to the residents. He usually flew into a rage if anyone contradicted him. Eventually, Hitler quarreled with his agent, accusing him of stealing his property and falsely testified against him in court in August 1910, getting the young man an eight-day jail sentence.  Hitler took to selling his own paintings to mostly Jewish shop owners who befriended him.

[In 1938 the agent was murdered on Hitler's orders after talking to the press about Hitler's Vienna days.]

Hitler had a passion for reading, grabbing all the daily newspapers available at the men's home, reading numerous political pamphlets and borrowing many books from the library on German history and mythology. He had a curious but academically untrained mind and examined the complex philosophical works of Nietzsche, Hegel, Fichte, Treitschke and the Englishman, Houston Stewart Chamberlain without any proper intellectual guidance.

That said, Hitler picked up bits and pieces of philosophy and ideas from these philosophers and wound up with a hodgepodge of racist, nationalistic, anti-Semitic attitudes that over time became a die-hard philosophy, later to be described in his book, Mein Kampf.

The utter misery of his poverty also deeply influenced Hitler. He adopted a harsh, survivalist mentality, which left little room for consideration of kindness and compassion – an attitude that would stay with him until the end.

"I owe it to that period that I grew hard and am still capable of being hard," Hitler writes in Mein Kampf.

Even before he came to Vienna, Hitler had a personality notable for its lack of empathy. Many historians have concluded that Hitler suffered psychological distress partly brought on by an unhappy childhood, notably his relationship with his father, a domineering, at times cruel man, while at the same time, he had an extraordinary attachment to his over-indulgent mother.

In Vienna, and later, Hitler suffered bouts of depression. Other times he experienced extreme highs, only to be followed by drops to perilous depths. One consistent personality trait was hysteria that surfaced whenever someone displeased him. Hitler's personality has been described as basically paranoia in nature.

Now, at age 21, he was becoming keenly interested in politics, watching events unfold around him in Vienna. After witnessing a large protest march by workers, he immersed himself in an intensive study of the politics of the workers' party, the Social Democrats.

He gained appreciation of how the Social Democrats organized large rallies and used propaganda and fear as political weapons.

This heightened his interest in German nationalism and anti-Semitism. Vienna, a city of two million, had a Jewish population of just under 200,000, including many traditionally dressed ethnic Jews. In Linz, Hitler had only known a few "Germanized" Jews. The poor men's home where Hitler lived was near a Jewish community.

Among the middle class in Vienna, anti-Semitism was considered rather fashionable. The mayor, Karl Lueger, a noted anti-Semite, was a member of the Christian Social Party which included anti-Semitism in its political platform.

Hitler admired Lueger, a powerful politician, for his speech-making skills and effective use of propaganda in gaining popular appeal. He also admired Lueger's skill in manipulating established institutions such as the Catholic Church. He studied Lueger carefully and modeled some of his later behavior on what he learned.

There were also anti-Semitic tabloids and pamphlets available at the newsstands and at local coffee shops. On first reading them, Hitler claims in his book Mein Kampf to have been put off.

"The tone, particularly of the Viennese anti-Semitic press, seemed to me unworthy of the cultural tradition of a great nation."

In Mein Kampf, he describes the transformation in his thinking regarding the Jews. It began with a chance meeting.

"Once, as I was strolling through the inner city, I suddenly encountered an apparition in a black caftan and black hair locks. Is this a Jew? This was my first thought.

"They had not looked like that in Linz. I observed the man furtively and cautiously, but the longer I stared at this foreign face, scrutinizing feature for feature, the more my first question assumed a new form: is this a German?"

To answer his own question, he immersed himself in anti-Semitic literature. Then he went out and studied Jews as they passed by.

"The more I saw, the more sharply they became distinguished in my eyes from the rest of humanity...

"For me this was the time of the greatest spiritual upheaval I have ever had to go through. I had ceased to be a weak-kneed cosmopolitan and become an anti-Semite."

But at this point Hitler's anti-Semitism was not apparent in his personal relationships with Jews. He still did business with Jewish shop owners selling his paintings to them. However, the seeds of hate were planted and would be nurtured by events soon to come, laying the foundation for one of the greatest tragedies in all of human history.

Hitler left Vienna at age 24, to avoid mandatory military service in the Austrian army, and thus avoided serving the multicultural Austrian Empire he now despised.

Twenty-four years after leaving Vienna, Adolf Hitler would make a triumphant return as Führer of the German Reich. However, the memory of those miserable days of failure in his youth and the attitudes and ideas he acquired would forever remain.

In May of 1913, he moved to the German Fatherland and settled in Munich. But he was tracked down by the Austrian authorities in January 1914. Faced with the possibility of prison for avoiding military service, he wrote a letter to the Austrian Consulate apologizing and told of his recent years of misery.

"I never knew the beautiful word youth," Hitler stated in his letter.

The tone of the letter impressed the Austrian officials and Hitler was not punished for dodging military service. He took the necessary medical exam which he easily failed and the matter was dropped altogether.

In Munich, Hitler continued painting, once again making a small living by selling painted pictures of landmarks to local shops. When asked by an old acquaintance how he would make a permanent living, Hitler said it did not matter since there soon would be a war.

On August 1st, 1914, a huge, enthusiastic crowd including Hitler gathered in a big public plaza in Munich – the occasion – to celebrate the German proclamation of war.

Two days later, Hitler volunteered for the German Army, enlisting in a Bavarian regiment.

He writes in Mein Kampt:

"For me, as for every German, there now began the greatest and most unforgettable time of my earthly existence. Compared to the events of this gigantic struggle, everything past receded to shallow nothingness." 

On first hearing the news of war, Hitler had sunk to his knees and thanked heaven for being alive.

Hitler, an Austrian, wondering through Vienna, poor and impressionistic, found a cause as a Private First Class in the German Army of WWI, his adopted country winning The Iron Cross for valor.

With the twisted logic of love turned into hate and vengeance into a cause, the German Fatherland became his "mother" and the "Jewish Question" his cause.  He willed death and destruction to Jews, to capitalists and communists, to democracies and monarchies, to bankers and industrialist, willing mystical bliss to all pure Aryans.

We see this black hole of despair on the faces of terrorists today, as well as on the faces of young people with dead eyes who kill indiscriminately without consciences as love between SONS and MOTHERS no longer is something to take for granted. 

Ode to Mother  & Final Thoughts 

My mother died June 6 (D-Day anniversary) 1993. I drove up from Tampa, Florida to Clinton, Iowa picking up my niece, Cheri Waddell, in Athens at the University of Georgia.

I wrote this as I visited my mother in hospital: Sunday, a. m., May 30, 1993, after a one day long trip:

Many faces

Mother dying

Oxygen mask;

Words

Many embraces;

Clear blue eyes

Little recognition;

Talking

Forces off mask;

Many hands patting,

Wiping brow;

Adjusting mask

Recorder, is it on?

Messages from . . . God?

Tired faces;

Many agendas

None aware;

This final hour

One day theirs, tears;

She smiles

More embraces;

Cut off words

What did she say?

Talking to . . . other side?

Can’t see what she sees;

Want to believe

Feed the myth;

Must be a window, a gate . . . a way

To the “other side”?

All children here

Grandchildren, too;

Does she recognize me?

Puts hands up;

Five fingers one hand, two other

“Seven” she says

“Seven” repeated in unison

What does it mean?

Smiles through toothless mouth

“19” she says

Clear as a bell

Taking deep draws on oxygen supply;

“19” she repeats with effort

Through wrinkled contours;

Fissures of earnest

The face now of a raisin;

The eyes of a toad

“1944” she completes with gusto;

What does it mean?

Jimmy, you should know;

You are the oldest

Janice born in ’43;

’41 she corrects

Searching eyes;

Tired faces

1944 must mean something;

Never know

Who’s to stay?

Cheri stays

I stay, too;

20 hours on the road for both

Now different road;

Still moving on

Others leave with relief;

Young Cheri, old me

She working on the future;

Teacher to be

Finals next week;

Me, writing impressions to keep my sanity

Wondering, how long for me?

Never know

Breathing hard now;

Oxygen support only temporary measure

In the hands of God;

Or cigarettes?

65 years a smoker;

No lungs left

Only coal tar;

Anthracite?

Who’s to say?

Still remember, though

Won’t forget;

She brought me in

Formed me;

Molded me

Structured me;

Gave me reason, purpose, too

A persona;

Was there when I needed a hand

Loving word;

A smile

A gentle push;

Through the smoke of the constant cigarette

“You’ll be okay”;

“Get through the day”

“Find a way”;

“Don’t worry, Jimmy”

Joining dad now;

Been waiting 35 years

Six brothers there;

Sister, too

Parents as well;

Many more friends

All waiting her stories;

Mischievous eye

Brilliant smile;

Has love of God

Roman Catholic Church;

Democratic Party;

Chicago Cubs;

Not necessarily in that order!

* * *

You can perceive from this poem that my mother has had a great influence on me over my modest life but I think this is true in most cases with SONS & MOTHERS.

When I read French author Romain Gary’s (1914 – 1980) nonfiction novel, Promise at Dawn (1960), I had to smile because his Russian-born Jewish mother reminded me so much of my own Roman Catholic mother.

When mother and son left Russia for France, they did so during a period of radical social change, exposing themselves to people with wildly different convictions, while encountering massive pockets of poverty as The Great Depression still held sway as World War Two loomed on the horizon..

Romain Gary’s mother often put him in difficult if not embarrassing situations as did my mother often place me. I write about this in my memoir as a novel, In the Shadow of the Courthouse (2003) and in my biographical novel, Devlin (2017) about my time in South Africa.

Much accomplished, Romain Gary was a war hero in WWII, winning the Compagnon de la Libération and the Légion d'honneur. He is also the only French author ever to have won the Prix Goncourt twice, the top French literary prize doing it under two different names.

He would marry Jean Seberg (1938 – 1979) of Marshalltown, Iowa who was chosen by director Otto Preminger (1905 – 1986) after a worldwide search to play the lead role in his 1957 film, “Joan of Arc.” Both Romain Gary and Jean Seberg would unhappily commit suicide.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and General Douglas MacArthur knew constant support and love from their mothers. Adolf Hitler had a brutal father, who died when he was 14, and a loving, but permissive mother who died when he was 18, leaving him to wander through the world without a moral center or stabilizing compass.

Reading many volumes on Adolf Hitler over the years I must confess I still find his rise to power inconceivable with such limited potential, or to understand how so many men of fine acumen could be complicit in his madness. 

Historians, academics, psychiatrists, psychologists, sociologists, journalists and physicians have weighed in on Adolf Hitler’s mental health, but very few mention the absence of love in his life. We are not born into the world as monsters or saints. Life through the instrument of love or hate makes us the way we become.  That is my view.  What is yours?

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