Robert A. Heinlein In Dialogue with His Century

40. General Daniel O. Graham (1925–95) founded High Frontier, Inc., in 1982 as a lobbying organization (with K Street offices) specifically to promote the kinetic-weapons aspect of the overall strategic defense recommendation of the Citizens Advisory Council that became President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative. Because of his constant presence in Washington, D.C., he is sometimes erroneously regarded as the creator of SDI. In an e-mail to the author, 02/13/06, Dr. Jerry Pournelle recalled:

It was this [first] meeting [of the Citizens Advisory Council] or the second (Robert was at all of the early meetings) that we hammered out the Treaty of Tarzana on strategic defense policy, and came to an agreement that included Hunters’ Gang of Four, Graham, Lowell Wood, and other rivals; that “treaty” gave us a single policy recommendation that became SDI and I am convinced was a key factor in winning the goddam Cold War.…

By 1982 the Treaty of Tarzana had been signed, and Graham was the Washington point man for the strategy the Council had put together. As Reagan used to put it, it’s amazing how much you can get done if you don’t care who gets the credit.

47. The counterintuitive basing of morality in esthetics is a trope drawn (almost uniquely) from F. W. Nietzsche. Although Heinlein had a “low opinion” of Nietzsche (RAH, letter to Robert E. Turner, 07/18/73), having read Also Sprach Zarathustra in the early 1920s (probably as a result of a Wil Durant lecture in Kansas City and probably in the somewhat unfortunate 1909 Thomas Common translation), he was educated at a time when Nietzschean ideas framed the cutting edge of many intellectual fields—the anthropology of Franz Boaz, for example, and his students Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict. Nietzsche was arguably the most highly influential philosopher of the twentieth century—and he died in 1900. Much of Heinlein is saturated with Nietzschean ideas. In particular, the pivotal incident of judgment in Job: A Comedy of Justice seems drawn from Cabell’s The High Place (1923), but much of Cabell’s philosophical underpinnings come from Nietzsche by way of Vaihinger and the debates on esthetics that were taking place among the American Pragmatists during the 1920s, particularly the rather acrimonious debate between Dewey and Santayana—Pragmatism itself influenced by Nietzsche.

Heinlein had written a trial-by-esthetic-judgment once before, in the opening month of World War II: “The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag.”

49. Osamu Tezuka (1928–89), letter to RAH, 08/12/83. Tezuka goes on to add that the exception was the club president, Sakyo Komatsu (1931–2011), who was on location shooting a movie at the time. (Spellings differ slightly in some reference works—e.g., Tesuko for Tezuko—but I have used Tezuka’s spellings in his letter to Heinlein.)

No historical or documentary trace could be found of Tezuka’s “Japan Sci-Fi Writer’s Club” in any reference source, including a three-part survey of Japanese science fiction in Science Fiction Studies (the third installment of Takayuki Tatsumi’s “Generations and Controversies: An Overview of Japanese Science Fiction, 1957–1997. Science Fiction Studies no. 80 [March 2000] contains a brief summary of the preceding two parts). It is possible that the wording Tezuka used is a variant of the “Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of Japan” organization formed in 1963 and of which Komatsu was president from 1980–83. Heinlein’s visit was in the middle of the “Wintry Age” decline of written-form science fiction in Japan, when public attention was shifting over to anime and manga.