The Russian Revolution of February 1917
I REMEMBER PERFECTLY well where I was and what I was doing on that fateful day. I was not yet eight years old, and my impressions were, as you may imagine, visual rather than sociological. I remember being woken by my parents and standing on the balcony of our sixth-floor flat in what was then called Petrograd gazing at the large crowds below holding banners which were inscribed with words like ‘Land and Liberty’, ‘Down with Autocracy’, ‘Down with the Tsar’s Government’, ‘All Power to the Duma’, and the like. Troops were walking rather than marching towards them in formation, and the soldiers then seemed peacefully to mingle with the crowds. All this seemed to me most fascinating and I could not be torn away from it. Later in the day, when I was taken for a walk, I did see a horrifying spectacle – a policeman, evidently loyal to the tsarist government, who, it was said, had been sniping at the demonstrators from a rooftop, being dragged by a mob to some awful end: the man looked pale and terrified and was feebly struggling with his captors. This image has remained with me and infected me with a permanent horror of any kind of violence.
Pearl Harbour (1941)
I was in New York as an official of the British Ministry of Information, working in a minor capacity in the New York office of the British Information Services, engaged on supplying American journalists and others with facts about the British war effort. On that Sunday I had lunch very late in a hotel in Lexington Avenue. I hurried back to my office in Rockefeller Centre, where I had some unfinished work to complete; on the way there, the taxi driver informed me about Pearl Harbor. I cannot deny that, after the initial shock, I felt exhilarated.
After this, there was no doubt about which side would win the war. I arrived in my office to find a colleague, an Englishwoman, writing to an American who had volunteered for the British air force and was a prisoner of war in Germany, and just as I was about to share my sense of exultation with her, I saw that she was in tears. She felt for America; she had believed, with Roosevelt, that America could win the war without entering it, and the thought of the losses which America was bound to suffer upset her deeply. I did my best to persuade her that I shared her feelings, but this was not entirely sincere. I left her to see the head of my office, who was overjoyed, as I think most Englishmen living in America were.
The Cuban Missile Crisis (1962)
I was a visiting professor at Harvard at the time. I listened to the news on the radio in the company of a large number of students gathered in one of the public rooms in Lowell House. Again, I was out of harmony with the prevailing mood. The students, and one or two professors, were in the depths of gloom: war seemed to them inevitable, and with it the use of nuclear weapons and unimaginable horrors. There was total silence at the end of the broadcast and the company broke up into little depressed groups, talking in low voices. I was convinced that the Soviet Union would not risk a global war, that all this was feinting and shadow-boxing, that there was basically nothing to fear except some act of a madman in power, and that neither Kennedy nor Khrushchev were in the least degree mad, nor were their henchmen. I went out to dinner with a French chemist and two or three American historians, and tried to persuade them that there was no reason for anxiety, let alone despair – that the only problem was how to allow the Russians not to lose too much face, how to provide them with some possibility of dignified retreat. I learnt afterwards that my assessment was totally wrong, that the fate of mankind hung by a thread, that the possibility of global war was higher than anyone in authority in the United States wished to conjecture. I remained in my fool’s paradise for the remaining four days, viewed by others as a little deranged, as indeed I must have seemed. My friends seemed worried about my mental balance. There is something more acutely embarrassing about optimism, whether well founded or baseless, in a society of convinced and rational pessimists, than the opposite – to be oppressed by anxiety in the midst of the happy and cheerful. I have never forgotten what it feels like to be conscious of being the only man with sight among the blind. The fact that I was totally mistaken, and that it was my companions who remained utterly sane while I was happily wandering in darkness, does not alter the queer, unsettling sensation.
I ought to add that I was dining with Mr and Mrs Joseph Alsop at a farewell dinner for Mr Charles Bohlen, who had been appointed US ambassador to Paris, a dinner attended by the President and Mrs Kennedy. That was the day on which the photographs of the Russian missile bases on Cuba had been shown to the President. He behaved with complete sangfroid, talked about politics and the public news of the day in an (apparently) light-hearted way during dinner, and more seriously when the ladies left, and went into the garden, where he told Charles Bohlen, and him alone, about the critical situation. But as none of the rest of us knew what had happened, that did not affect our mood. The crisis, so far as the public was concerned, broke only after I had returned to Harvard.
The deaths of John F. Kennedy (1963) and Franklin D. Roosevelt (1945)
On 22 November 1963 I arrived at Sussex University, in England, to deliver a lecture on Machiavelli. I dined with my hosts and was walking towards the lecture hall when someone said to me, ‘Isn’t this terrible?’ I thought, idiotically, he meant that it was a terrible thing to have to go in to a lecture, since he knew, as all my friends do, the agonies I suffer before talking in public, whatever the occasion. I therefore said, ‘Yes, I do feel awful, but I suppose I must go through with it.’ A few yards later someone else said to me, ‘This is appalling news.’ I realised something had happened, and was told that President Kennedy had been assassinated. I found it impossible to continue walking – the last time on which this had happened to me (in an even greater degree) was when I read about the death of President Roosevelt in 1945: then I was dictating a telegram in the British Embassy, in which I served during the war, and my assistant came in with a torn-off length of teletype tape – I said testily, ‘I cannot look at anything while I am typing,1 please, please do not interrupt. I shall be finished in half an hour.’ He said, ‘I think that you had better look at this.’ When I saw that Roosevelt had died in Warm Springs, I behaved like someone paralysed, for some time. I wished to speak to no one: the world in which I had believed seemed to me to have caved in. I realised that my feelings for Roosevelt and all he stood for were stronger than those for any other form of life at that moment. My admiration for Winston Churchill was second to that of no one: I knew he had saved our lives, but my sympathies were liberal and Roosevelt was my leader – as he was of the Americans I had come to know and with whom I had developed warm, intimate feelings of friendship. Our hopes for a vast increase in justice, enlightenment, liberty and happiness seemed dead; he was the protector of our liberty and civilisation. I continued in this state of torpor for days. I have no doubt this was unrealistic – Roosevelt’s continued rule would not have achieved these things, and his successor, in some respects, did more for their realisation than the great President himself. But I had no such thoughts at the time. Night had come – we must do our best and wait for the dawn of some unknown new day.
I did not feel so violently when I heard of the death of Kennedy, but he too, with all his obvious faults, was a liberator and a hero, on the right side on all public issues that mattered. I begged to be allowed an interval of a quarter of an hour or so before beginning my lecture. This was granted. I drank two glasses of cold water, came to, and delivered my lecture in a perfectly normal manner.
These two deaths clearly made a difference to subsequent events, and not for the better, and were among the darkest moments of my life. I do not think that the death of any public figure alive today, apart from the feelings it might evoke if one knew them personally, as friends, would have a similar effect upon me. I suspect this is true of many millions of people living at the time.
The Six-Day War (1967)
During the Six-Day War I was in London. Like many other decent men and women, and particularly, of course, my fellow Jews, I felt desperately anxious about the survival of the State of Israel. I had no doubt that Nasser would not have proclaimed a holy war, and his men not have talked of throwing the Jews into the sea or razing their towns and villages, if they had not made sure of sufficient military backing to crush the Israelis. Whatever in fact may have sparked off the conflagration, it looked to the ordinary man in the British street as if it would be a war of extermination, a second Holocaust. The fact that no other country, nor the United Nations, lifted a finger to help the encircled Israelis looked ominous. I heard the news of the Israeli victory after dinner with the American Minister in London. The British and American politicians present all expressed relief at the outcome. I felt irrepressibly exhilarated, and said to my neighbour, the editor of a well-known newspaper, ‘It shows that there is a God in Heaven after all’, to which he replied, ‘I suppose I am the only pro-Arab here’ – he was indeed a personal friend of Nasser and Heikal. I thought that magnanimity was called for, and generously (as I thought) congratulated him on his social courage, surrounded as he was by Zionists and their sympathisers – for the most part gentiles, indeed gentlemanly Wasps of impeccably patrician origin. My friend was genuinely gloomy about the outcome and left early. My wife and I remained till a late hour, and on our way back to our flat, walked on air. There was, even among people who had not until then given a thought to the Middle East, a great wave of sympathy for Israel; nothing that Communists and anti-Zionists could say at that moment could destroy the rare pleasure of feeling – even if for what turned out to be a relatively short time – at one with the majority of one’s fellow citizens. Such moments cannot last, though they sometimes, if one is fortunate, return.
1 sc. dictating to a typist.