BENJAMIN DISRAELI

December 21, 1804–April 19, 1881

LONDON—The Earl of Beaconsfield, after an illness of less than a month, died at an early hour this morning.

He was first attacked during the last week of March, with gout and violent asthmatic symptoms, both of which troubles were soon alleviated by his skillful medical attendants. Since his prostration, bulletins giving reports of his condition have been issued several times each day. Early this morning his physicians were at his bedside, but the utmost exertions of the medical gentlemen failed to have effect, and the great statesman expired peacefully. He was perfectly conscious to the last.

Among the Jews who were driven out of Spain at the close of the fifteenth century, when the inquisition and other persecutions forced from that land the most industrious and active races that lived in it, were the ancestors of Lord Beaconsfield. They found a home and opportunities to restore their fortune in Venice. While living in Spain they had been forced to adopt a Christianized surname, but as soon as the shores of Venice were touched the name was changed to D’Israeli, a designation which unmistakably indicated the race to which they belonged.

They remained in Venice more than 200 years before one of the family sent his youngest son to England to seek his fortune. He married and settled in Enfield, a few miles from London. His only child, Isaac, was the father of Lord Beaconsfield. Isaac married in 1802 the daughter of George Basevi, a Justice of the Peace in Sussex, who bore him four children, of whom Benjamin (Dec. 21, 1804) was the second.

It does not appear that Isaac D’Israeli took even ordinary care to perfect the education of his boy. Universal testimony declares that the son was remarkably precocious and of very bright mind, but he was sent to a boarding-school in Winchester, to the house of a Unitarian minister, and to an attorney’s office instead of to Harrow, Rugby, Oxford or Cambridge. Lord Beaconsfield, in many ways so remarkable, is singularly so in this, that he was one of the few eminent English statesmen who had not been at Oxford or Cambridge.

Rarely has a literary success so sudden as the young Mr. Disraeli’s occurred in literature. He was only 22 years of age when “Vivian Grey” was launched anonymously into the London world. Vivian Grey, the character, was the author himself, who remained anonymous. The novel depicted the course of a young man of genius and ambition who was without friends and aspired to political honors. On its title page was this prophetic quotation: “Why, then, the world’s mine oyster, Which I with sword will open—.” It was a sufficient index of his subsequent career.

Flushed with the success of “Vivian Grey,” the young author went abroad, returning to find himself a lion in the society of London.

Count D’Orsay drew a picture of him during this period which represents a very handsome man, such as might ornament and delight any London drawing-room. His hair was of silken blackness and fell in ringlets about his neck and forehead; his dress coat was of black velvet, lined with white satin, and he carried an ivory-handled cane, inlaid with gold, and ornamented with a tassel of black silk.

Men laughed at his affectation, and generally held him in low esteem, but women approved of his peculiarities, and the more discerning of them predicted that time would see him a great man.

England, in 1831, was in the last stage of the struggle for Parliamentary reform. Then began the public life of this remarkable man who was to astonish and puzzle the world for 50 years. A son of Earl Grey, then the Premier, had been put forward in the Borough of High Wycombe, as a candidate for Parliament, and the young Mr. Disraeli entered into the contest against him. His nomination was proposed by a Radical, and a Tory seconded it, but the united votes of the two parties failed to elect him.

A second candidature, and a third, ended in like manner.

This latter was the occasion of his famous quarrel with [the Irish member of Parliament Daniel] O’Connell. O’Connell had allied himself with the Whigs, in spite of the fact that the Whigs had formerly treated him with great contempt, and thus appeared in the forefront against Mr. Disraeli, who singled him out for an attack as an “incendiary,” a “traitor,” and a “liar in word and action.”

O’Connell’s retort is known everywhere. “He,” said the Irishman, “possesses just the qualities of the impenitent thief who died upon the cross, whose name, I verily believe, must have been Mr. Disraeli. For aught I know, the present Mr. Disraeli is descended from him, and with the impression that he is, I now forgive the heir-at-law of the blasphemous thief who died upon the cross.”

Mr. Disraeli’s first reply to this was a challenge to O’Connell’s son, Morgan. Bridled in this effort, he retorted in a letter to the London Times which was regarded at the time as fuss and fury. He got to have a reputation of being a vain and frothy young man, in too great a hurry to succeed.

With the beginning of Victoria’s reign the public life of Benjamin Disraeli took a sudden turn. In accordance with constitutional usage, the accession of a new sovereign to the throne was followed by a general election, and in this Mr. Disraeli—through stupid conduct on the part of the Whigs, it is often maintained—found himself in Parliament, the junior member from Maidstone.

Parliament reassembled in November, 1837, and three weeks had not passed before the young member delivered his maiden speech.

It was on the Irish election petitions, and in direct reply to O’Connell, whom he had now come, as he promised, “to meet at Philippi.” Again and again he was interrupted, and finally was compelled to sit down amid laughter and jeers. His last words were these: “I have begun several things many times, and I have often succeeded at last. I will sit down now, but the time will come when you will hear me.”

As early as 1839 he had expressed himself on the subject of electoral reform. In July, he astonished certain classes by a declaration that denounced the tendency of Government to centralization and the monopoly of power in the hands of the middle classes. To the lower classes he appealed to yield up the Government to the upper, declaring that “the aristocracy and the laboring class constituted the nation.”

Mr. Disraeli’s power in England as a leader of the Tory Party dates from 1847. The sudden death of Lord George Bentinck, a year later, left him the acknowledged head of the Protectionists. Out of failures by the Whigs on free trade measures, he gathered strength, and the year 1852 found him far advanced in the esteem of Parliament, where he became Chancellor of the Exchequer and leader of the House of Commons. When Parliament assembled in November, and the conflict over free trade soon arose, [William] Gladstone, his rival, won the day.

Out of power, Mr. Disraeli remained in his place in the House, and on all occasions, when his patriotism was appealed to, gave Lord Palmerston his loyal and earnest support.

With the changes of 1858, which more or less had their origin in the Orsini conspiracy against the life of Napoleon III, Mr. Disraeli was intimately associated. There had been in France loud complaints against England for permitting a conspiracy to be hatched on her own soil against a neighboring power, and certain published statements indicated that the French Government was of like feeling on the subject.

Under these circumstances, Lord Palmerston moved for leave to bring in a bill relating to conspiracy to murder. Lord Palmerston’s proposal became extremely unpopular, and Mr. Disraeli, reading public feeling that had so intensified itself against the bill, declared against it.

The Spring of 1859 found Mr. Disraeli again in office as Chancellor of the Exchequer and leader of the House. But Mr. Disraeli and his colleagues were soon out of power again over the contentious issue of Parliamentary reform.

Lord Palmerston’s sudden death in October, 1865, when the returns of a general election had scarcely ceased to be received, left the Government without a head. Lord Russell was called upon, but in less than a year he resigned and Lord Derby formed an Administration with Mr. Disraeli again leader in the House. During the recess of 1866–67 it became known that the ministry had decided to introduce a Reform bill.

Six Reform bills since 1852 had been introduced, and all had failed. This one did not, and in August, 1867, it received the Queen’s signature. Mr. Disraeli’s work for it was of a tremendous order. He was not only the author of the bill, but his speeches numbered 310. By this law the right of suffrage was extended to all house-holders in a borough and to every person in a county who had a freehold of 40s. It enfranchised nearly a million of men.

Following its passage came Mr. Disraeli’s elevation to the Premiership, and the first question that met him was Irish disestablishment. A long debate ended in his defeat: he refused to abandon his position, and Parliament was dissolved. The new election showed a strong majority for the Opposition, and in December, 1868, Mr. Disraeli and his colleagues resigned in favor of Gladstone.

Gradually the Gladstone Ministry was living out its lease of power. Matters went on until February, 1874, when it found a majority of 50 against it and fell. Mr. Disraeli was called upon to form a new Cabinet, and then saw himself for the first time strong in a majority on which he could rely, and possessed of the personal confidence of the Queen.

From this time on his great career is a matter of vivid public recollection, and needs only to be indicated briefly here. England had fallen into disrepute among the nations; her want of participation in the policy of Europe was a subject of ridicule. Under him, she laid aside her insular character and obtained position as a military power in Europe; she acquired Cyprus and gained authority in Asiatic Turkey.

Victoria did not transfer her seat of empire from London to Delhi, as he had foretold that she might do, but he made her Empress of India; he summoned Indian troops into Europe to support England; he made Asia Minor acknowledge her sway, and in buying the Suez Canal shares he secured the short way to India. After all this, he was voted out of power again, and his old rival came in. He went into retirement and wrote “Endymion” to find a publisher at £10,000.

Mr. Disraeli, about the year 1840, was married, his wife being the widow of his old friend, Wyndham Lewis, who was the senior member for Maidstone when he was the junior. She was more than ten years his elder, and brought him a large fortune. It was a singularly happy union for both. He has more than once owned his great indebtedness to her. She had an enthusiastic interest in all his undertakings, and was the soul of devotion to all his purposes. In 1868, when a Peerage was offered him, he declined it for himself, but prayed that the Queen would make his wife Countess of Beaconsfield, and she bore that title until she died in 1873.

OTTO VON BISMARCK

April 1, 1815–July 30, 1898

BERLIN—Prince Bismarck died shortly before 11 o’clock this evening. Details of his death are obtained with difficulty because of the lateness of the hour, the isolation of the castle, and the endeavors of attendants of the family to prevent publicity of what they consider private details.

The death of the ex-Chancellor at the age of 83 comes as a surprise to all Europe. There was apprehension when the sinking of the Prince was first announced. But when the daily bulletins chronicled improvement in his condition and told of his devotion to his pipe, the public accepted his doctor’s assertion that there was no reason why Bismarck should not reach the age of 90 years.

The Saturday papers in Europe dismissed Bismarck with a paragraph, while his condition was overshadowed in the English papers by the condition of the Prince of Wales’s knee.

The Bismarck family, with its estate at Friedrichsruh, traces its lineage back to the 13th century. The present title, that of Fürst von Bismarck, dates from 1871. This title will be borne by Bismarck’s eldest son, known up to now as Count Herbert.

The news of the death of Prince Bismarck became known throughout New York City early in the evening. At all places where Germans congregate, at clubs, meetings, and in numerous East Side cafés, the subject was talked of all evening.

“Bismarck is dead,” said Gerthue Maaf, one of the oldest members of the Liederkranz club, “but only in the body. His fame is imperishable as the stars.”

The old-fashioned Prussian country house in which Otto von Bismarck, the future consolidator of Germany, saw the light on the 1st of April, 1815, has become a place of pilgrimage for tourists of all nations. His birth just when all Germany was rising to meet the last effort of Napoleon have made some persons picture him as a modern Hannibal, self-vowed from his cradle to eternal enmity against France.

Although the active, bright-eyed child of course had little idea of his own future greatness, there is little doubt that the surroundings of young Otto’s boyhood left a deep and lasting trace upon his mind. As a child he would hear old country gentlemen telling of the wasted lands that marked Napoleon’s destroying march through conquered Prussia in 1806 and the tremendous retribution that avenged this havoc seven years later when the Fatherland arose against the tyrant. He would listen to men from Berlin, Frankfurt, or Cologne lamenting the fatal dissensions which made the great German race almost a cipher in the politics of Europe.

He would later see the proofs of the weakness produced by Germany’s fragmentary condition, while at the same time his keen eye would detect the latent strength which might make her invincible, could those fragments be wielded into one compact whole.

While her future leader was climbing trees and leaping ditches, Germany was passing through the most momentous period of her modern history. The movement which cleared German soil of its French invaders in 1813 and dethroned Napoleon a few months later was a victory for the Teutonic race. The conquerors began to ask themselves why they should not be united permanently.

It was in the crisis of this great national excitement that Bismarck’s public career began.

This great apostle of unquestioned authority was always intolerant of authority himself. His Saxon Boswell, Dr. Moritz Busch, has chronicled the first flashes of that haughty and indomitable spirit which would one day trample in the dust the pride of Austria and France. Being called to account while a student at Gottingen for some breach of university rules, Bismarck swaggered into the presence of the horrified President with a rakish student cap and a sorely stained velvet jacket, an enormous bulldog at his heels.

Such actions, coupled with his reckless exposure of himself to all weathers and his wild gallops across country at the imminent risk of his neck, earned him the nickname of “Mad Bismarck,” and made many prim old gentlemen regard him as a harum-scarum lad who would come to no good.

Toward the end of 1833 he quitted the University of Gottingen for that of Berlin, and in June, 1835, he was admitted to the bar.

In 1847 he made his first appearance in the Parliament of Berlin as delegate of the nobility of his district. Into a circle of solemn mediocrities burst like a thunderbolt this dashing, fiery rebel. “I come among these nonentities like pepper,” said he, with grim enjoyment.

This was no exaggeration. The towering figure, the massive head thrown haughtily back, the brawny arms folded defiantly, the stern, piercing eye, the deep, challenging voice, and the crushing sarcasm, became well known in Berlin. Enemies multiplied as rapidly as acquaintances, and the new delegate quickly became, as he himself declared, “the best-hated man in all Prussia.”

This was hardly surprising. The popular excitement, which would culminate in the great tidal wave of popular movements of 1848, had reached its height. Between such a man and such a movement there could be no sympathy. No one could have been a more typically complete aristocrat than this scion of a house of secondary rank, whose own mother had belonged to the bourgeois class. Throughout his career, all popular movements were anathema to Bismarck.

Bismarck seemed to hold that the King ought to do what he pleased without letting his people say anything at all. In early 1848 he asserted that “the world could never hope for any lasting peace until all large cities, those hotbeds of democracy and constitutionalism, were swept from the face of the earth.”

In this period Bismarck beheld many things worthy of note. France had again proclaimed herself a republic. Austria was sitting sullenly amid the ruins of her ancient system. Russia was casting her mighty shadow across the whole of Europe. Germany lay a formless heap of incoherent atoms, each with its own toy sovereign and its own army of half a dozen men.

While the pillars of the world were shaking around him, Bismarck was enjoying one of the few intervals of quiet happiness which checkered his stormy life. Few sweeter love stories have been told than that which ended on the 28th of July, 1847, in the union of gentle Johanna von Puttkammer with the bearded giant whose name was a by-word throughout all Prussia.

It is fortunate that so many of Bismarck’s letters to his wife remain to show the man as he really was. Anyone who had seen him only as the world sees him might stand amazed at the hearty, boyish merriment, the simple, childlike faith, the heartfelt tenderness revealed by this man whom 99 persons out of 100 regard as an apostle of “blood and iron.”

Yet even while the future Chancellor of the German Empire was helping his new bride up Swiss hillsides and rowing her over Italian lakes, there were signs across Europe of the mighty events that would come 20 years later, among them a suggestion of universal suffrage and a rupture between Prussia and Austria.

Amid these warring influences one man stood forward. That man was Otto von Bismarck, who would mastermind the wars that unified the German states, a unification that did not include Austria, into a powerful German Empire under Prussian leadership.

One can understand Bismarck’s opposition to “German unity” at a time when that unity meant the subordination of his native Prussia and all the other States of Northern Germany to that ill-corded bundle of Czechs, Hungarians, Croats, Poles, and Ruthenians, which called itself the Austrian Empire.

In 1861 the death of his insane brother made the Prince Regent King in fact as well as in name. The new sovereign was a sworn friend of Bismarck, and one of his first acts was to appoint to the Premiership the man whom he now knew to be as great in mind as in body.

This was the beginning of the end. Austria, perceiving too late that the substance had fallen to Prussia, grew angry and menacing. She shifted her center of gravity to the eastward and ceased to be a German power.

Any ordinary man would have been carried away by this astounding triumph and by the sudden change from universal hatred to the adoration of all Prussia. But Bismarck saw that France must follow Austria before the Prussian Kingdom could become the German Empire.

All this time the secret maturing of his mighty project went steadily on. “In the streets of Paris,” wrote a traveler who saw Bismarck at the Paris Exhibition of 1867, “the tawny hair beneath the peaked helmet, the long, sweeping, reddish-brown mustache, the stern eyes, the ruddy, blonde complexion, the strange, grim expression soon became familiar. He bore himself haughtily and silently amid the fantastic festivities of Paris.”

In truth, his next entrance into “the metropolis of the universe” three years later was no smiling matter. France struggled longer than Austria, but in vain, and the same month that witnessed the surrender of Paris saw the coronation at Versailles of “William I, Emperor of Germany.”

Throughout that conflict Bismarck’s proverbial energy outdid itself. “Often,” says Dr. Busch, “when just out of bed, he began to think and work, to read and annotate dispatches, to study the newspapers, give instructions to the Councilors and other colleagues, put questions on the most various State problems, and even write or dictate.

“Then came the study of maps, the correction of papers that he had ordered to be prepared, the jotting down of ideas with the well-known big pencil, the composition of letters, the news to be telegraphed or sent to the papers for publication, and amid all this the reception of unavoidable visitors.

“Not till 2 or even 3 P.M. did the Chancellor, in places where a halt of any length was made, allow himself, a little breathing time, and then he generally took a ride in the neighborhood. Then to work again until dinner at 5 or 6 P.M., and in an hour and a half at latest he was back at his writing table, where midnight often found him reading or noting down his thoughts.”

The Emperor’s coronation was likewise that of Bismarck. But, like Napoleon and the Czar Nicholas, Bismarck lived too long. His later years were one incessant and fruitless struggle with the problems of political economy that had overmatched Frederick the Great and the revolutionary spirit that had defied even the autocrats of Russia.

When the enforcement of his arbitrary system of political economy drove yearly across the sea myriads of those sturdy laborers who were the lifeblood of Germany, Bismarck sought to enable these emigrants to become colonists without ceasing to be German citizens.

The “Iron Chancellor” began that series of annexations which established Germany in New-Guinea and the Samoan Isles, and extended the shadow of her imperial flag over 750 miles of coast along Western and Southwestern Africa. Bismarck clung to the idea of founding another German empire abroad.

“Once a German, always a German,” said he. “When a man can cast away his nationality like a worn-out coat, I have nothing more to say to him.”

When the aged Kaiser died, it was suspected that Bismarck’s ascendency under the Emperor Frederick would be less than it had been under William, but he remained Chancellor and held his former place as the foremost figure in European diplomacy.

Finally Frederick died and his son William came to the throne. Matters went from bad to worse until March 18, 1890, when Bismarck finally resigned.

The personal character of this remarkable man remains a subject of dispute, thanks to the extravagant praises of his friends on one side and the calumnies of his foes on the other. In his domestic relations his worst enemies can find nothing to blame, but they denounced his public acts as those of a tyrannical, bloodthirsty man.

Tyrannical he was, but a hard-hearted man would not have stood with tears in his eyes beside the body of his favorite dog, or have all but lost his own life in saving that of his drowning servant. And a bloodthirsty man would have reveled in the horrors of war instead of doing his utmost to alleviate them.

QUEEN VICTORIA

May 24, 1819–January 22, 1901

COWES, ISLE OF WIGHT—Queen Victoria is dead. The greatest event in the memory of this generation, almost the most stupendous change in England that could be imagined, has taken place quietly, almost gently.

The end of this splendid career came at exactly 6:30 yesterday in a simply furnished room in Osborne House. This most respected of all women, living or dead, lay in a great four-posted bed. Within view of her dying eyes there hung a portrait of the Prince Consort.

A few minutes later the inevitable element of materialism stepped into this pathetic chapter of international history, for the Court ladies went busily to work ordering their mourning from London.

For several weeks the Queen had been failing. On Wednesday she suffered a paralytic stroke, accompanied by intense weakness. It was her first illness in all her 81 years, and she would not admit she was sick.

Albert Edward, Prince of Wales for more than 59 years, is now Edward VII of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and Emperor of India.

The reign of Queen Victoria, who came to the throne in 1837, was the longest in English history; indeed, it was one of the longest in the history of Europe. Victoria’s more than half century of reign began when she was a grown-up woman and legally of age.

In a greater sense, however, was this reign a memorable one in English history. Literary endeavor and the search for knowledge in no other single reign, save that of Elizabeth, made such splendid contributions to the stock of new facts and written words that men will not let die. The scientific results achieved by the mind of man in the age of Victoria stand alone as the wonder and blessing of mankind.

No former sovereign reigned over so extensive a British Empire. In her time vast areas were added in Africa, India, and the Pacific, so that it was never quite so true as in her time that the British Empire was one on which the sun never set.

Though the royal house to which Queen Victoria belonged was that of Hanover, from the house of Stuart Victoria claimed her crown.

In Kensington Palace on the 24th of May, 1819, was born the future Queen of England.

When the child was six months old she was taken by her parents to Sidmouth, on the Devonshire coast, and here the Duke, her father, soon met his death. He had come home one day with his feet wet, and had stopped to play with his daughter before changing his boots. A fatal inflammation of the lungs ensued.

For many years, Victoria’s position as heir apparent was doubtful. Even so late as 1830, the life of William IV stood between her and the throne.

Victoria had not been brought up with any assurance that she was heir to the throne. Strict orders were in force that no one should speak to her on the subject.

But when William IV became King nearing 65 years of age, statesmen then saw as all but inevitable that this little girl, who was 12 years old, was to be the future Queen.

It was thought time for her to know her position. The story told is that her governess conveyed the information by placing in one of her books a genealogical table. Examining it, the Princess said to the governess, “I see I am nearer the throne than I thought.”

In England 18 is the age at which a royal Princess reaches her majority. Victoria passed this period on May 24, 1837. Less than a month afterward, on June 20, at 2:20 A.M., the King breathed his last. Immediately after this a carriage containing the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Lord Chamberlain departed for Kensington Palace. What followed has been described in the “Diary” of Miss Wynn:

“They knocked, they rang, they thumped for a considerable time before they could arouse a porter at the gate. They rang the bell and desired that the attendant of the Princess Victoria might be sent to inform her royal Highness that they requested an audience on business of importance.

“The attendant stated that the Princess was in such a sweet sleep that she could not disturb her. They then said: ‘We are come on business of State to the Queen, and even her sleep must give way to that.’ In a few moments she came into the room in a white nightgown and shawl, her nightcap thrown off and her hair falling upon her shoulders, her feet in slippers, tears in her eyes, but perfectly collected.”

It was arranged that a Council should be held that day at Kensington. In Greville’s “Diary” the following account of this Council is given, and Greville was not a man given to emotion:

“Never was anything like the first impression she produced, or the chorus of praise and admiration which it raised about her manner and behavior, and certainly not without justice. It was very extraordinary, and something far beyond what was looked for. Her extreme youth and inexperience, and the ignorance of the world concerning her, naturally excited intense curiosity to see how she would act on this trying occasion.

“She was plainly dressed and in mourning. After she had read her speech and taken the oath for the security of the Church of Scotland, the Privy Councilors were sworn, and, as these old men knelt before her swearing allegiance and kissing her hand, I saw her blush up to the eyes, and this was the only sign of emotion that she evinced.”

On the following day occurred the ceremony of the proclamation, when the Queen made her appearance at the open window in St. James’s Palace. At Kensington a range of apartments were set apart for her use, and there she lived until she left for Buckingham Palace.

She opened the first Parliament of her reign in November, and the following June she was formally crowned in Westminster Abbey. Harriet Martineau, an eye-witness, has described that scene with much felicity.

“The throne,” says she, “covered, as was its footstool, with cloth of gold, stood on an elevation of four steps in the center of the area.

“About 9 the first gleams of the sun started into the Abbey, and presently traveled down to the peeresses. Each lady shone out as a rainbow. The brightness, vastness, and dreamy magnificence of the scene produced a strange effect of exhaustion and sleepiness.”

Albert, Prince Consort of England, was the second son of Ernest, Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, and was three months younger than Victoria.

Prince Albert first saw the Princess Victoria in the Spring of 1836, when he made a visit to England. The two are believed to have parted reluctantly. Victoria, in a letter to her uncle, begged him to “take care of the health of one now so dear to me.”

Albert well understood how the strict etiquette of the Court obliged the Queen to take the initiative, and hence, on his second visit, in October, 1839, when the purpose of his visit was clearly understood, he waited anxiously for some sign of the Queen’s decision in his favor. This he had the happiness to obtain on the second evening of his visit, at a ball, when she gave him her bouquet, and he received a message from her that she desired to speak with him on the following day.

In the following year occurred the wedding.

One of the most charming domestic pictures that royal lives have afforded is furnished in the married life of Albert and Victoria. Prince Albert was a man of honest purposes and devoted affections; he was endowed with noble ambitions guided by intelligence. Painting, etching, and music were accomplishments that afforded amusement to both, and the Prince was a man of taste and skill in landscape gardening. He loved a country life and early hours. To these tastes the Queen learned to conform.

The difficulties encountered at the outset of this union were incident to the peculiar relations of the Queen and Prince. Head of the family though the Prince was in his position as husband, his place in public affairs was necessarily subordinate. The common judgment is that he bore himself with good sense and dignity in this trying situation. The Queen, however, soon showed her determination that in all matters not affairs of State, the Prince was to exercise paramount authority.

The Queen became the mother of nine children. At the time of her first jubilee, which was celebrated with extraordinary splendor on a perfect June day in 1887, the Queen had thirty-one grandchildren and six great-grandchildren.

The domestic life of the Queen for the 20 years her husband lived was singularly happy. Fate seemed to shower upon her every blessing to which a woman could aspire.

In the eighteen-sixties came the illness of the Prince Consort. In December 1861 he breathed his last.

Victoria’s life after her husband died was one of quiet seclusion. Her people saw little of her, and the projects honoring his memory were, for the most part, the only ones in which she manifested particular interest. In London the colossal Albert Memorial was erected, and in 1867 the Queen laid the foundation stone of the Albert Hall of Arts and Sciences.

In 1863 the Prince of Wales completed his 21st year, and was married.

In 1877 a new eminence was acquired by the Queen. She was made Empress of India.

When Victoria assumed the Crown, English statesmen had been for some years occupied with measures of electoral reform.

Under the reform bill passed in 1832, 56 boroughs in England, containing populations of less than 2,000 each, were disfranchised, 30 others were reduced to one member only, and 42 new ones were created. These boroughs which had been disfranchised were rotten boroughs. A new era in Parliamentary government was about to open.

Later on in her reign reform bills became familiar subjects in Parliamentary life.

Reform acts of 1884 and 1885 have been pronounced “the most extensive reform ever attempted in England.” They applied to Scotland as well as England, and were extended to Ireland. England thenceforth has possessed practically universal suffrage.

Also an issue during Victoria’s reign were the Corn Laws, which imposed tariffs on imported grain, thus raising food prices and prompting opposition from city residents.

Save for the war with China, begun in 1839, England had no war on her hands until the portentous cloud arose on the Bosporus in 1853.

The war in China was a war for trade. The precise occasion for declaring war was the Chinese demand for the surrender of opium. Peace was not formally secured until July, 1843. By the terms of this treaty England was to receive from China the sum of $21,000,000, and Hongkong was ceded to her in perpetuity.

The war in the Crimea was an outgrowth of designs respecting Turkey long entertained by Russia.

A dispute arose between Russia and France as to the possession of the holy places in Palestine. A commission appointed by Turkey decided in favor of Russia. Further claims on Turkey were then made by Russia.

The Sultan of Turkey then appealed to his allies, and the English and French fleets advanced for his protection. By September of 1853 English and French ships were in the Dardanelles; in October Turkey had declared war against Russia.

Operations in the Crimea began with the landing of the armies of the allies in September, 1854. They forced the Russians to retreat to Sebastopol, and in October the attack on the fortress was begun.

The incidents of this celebrated siege need only be named here. They include the battle of Balaklava, with the charge of the light cavalry, which Tennyson has celebrated; Florence Nightingale’s work in the hospitals, tales of great suffering from cold weather, the death of the Czar Nicholas, and the peace treaty concluded in March, 1856.

England lost in this war nearly 24,000 men. Those killed in action and who died of wounds numbered 3,500; cholera caused the death of 4,244, and other diseases nearly 16,000.

One year later there occurred in India the first incidents of that famous mutiny, the suppression of which would tax the best energies of England’s administrators and soldiers for more than two years.

A result of this mutiny was the formal transfer of the direct Government of India from the East India Company to the British Crown. In November, 1858, Victoria was proclaimed in the principal places of India, and thus became the sovereign to that country. The proclamation of Victoria as Empress of India occurred in May, 1876.

Had the reign of Victoria no other great achievements besides those of cheap postage and rapid travel by steam, it would still deserve to be ranked among the great epochs of English civilization. Later years, however, have seen the penny-postage system superseded by the telegraph—even a telegraph that connects continents otherwise divided by great oceans—and still later ones have seen the telephone disputing with the telegraph its claims to usefulness in the service of man.

Connected by a natural link with these inventions has also been the expansion of the iron industries of England. In 1837 the total yearly output of crude iron in England was only about 1,000,000 tons. Now it is over 8,000,000 tons. Twenty years after 1837 an invention was applied in iron manufactures which has wrought great changes in the world. This was Sir Henry Bessemer’s process for making steel by blowing air into molten pig iron. This process has caused the price of steel to be greatly reduced, so that steel now competes with iron for many purposes.

If we turn now to the literature of this reign a noble and lasting output will be found, including books produced by men of science, like Darwin, who have given us books as epoch-making as any the mind of man ever produced. It is not for contemporaries to say if the verse of Tennyson and the prose of Macaulay, Carlyle, and Thackeray will live on, but the chances are good for a reasonable degree of immortality.

The poetry of Mrs. Browning almost exclusively belongs to this reign, and so does that of her husband. Matthew Arnold’s first success, the poem on Cromwell, dates from 1843. Swinburne was born in the year of Victoria’s accession. Dickens’s first volume, “Sketches by Boz,” came out in 1836. Ere the genius of George Eliot should become known twenty years were to elapse. Carlyle had written many of his essays, but was still waiting for the day when literature should raise him above actual want.

NICHOLAS II OF RUSSIA

May 18, 1868–July, 17 1918

LONDON—Nicholas Romanoff, ex-Czar of Russia, was shot July 16, according to a Russian announcement by wireless today.

The central executive body of the Bolshevist Government announces that it has important documents concerning the former Emperor’s affairs, including his own diaries and letters from the monk Rasputin, who was killed shortly before the revolution. These will be published in the near future, the message declares.

The text of the Russian wireless message reads in part:

“At the first session of the Central Executive Committee, elected by the fifth Congress of the Councils, a message was made public that had been received by direct wire from the Ural Regional Council concerning the shooting of the ex-Czar Nicholas Romanoff.

“Recently Yekaterinburg, the capital of the Red Urals, was seriously threatened by the approach of Czechoslovak hands, and a counterrevolutionary conspiracy was discovered, which had as its object the wresting of the ex-Czar from the hands of the council’s authority. In view of this fact, the President of the Ural Regional Council decided to shoot the ex-Czar, and the decision was carried out on July 16.

“The wife and the son of Nicholas Romanoff have been sent to a place of security.

“Documents concerning the conspiracy which was discovered have been forwarded to Moscow by a special messenger. It had been recently decided to bring the ex-Czar before a tribunal to be tried for his crimes against the people, and only later occurrences led to delay in adopting this course.”

There have been rumors since June 24 that ex-Czar Nicholas of Russia had been assassinated. The first of these stated that he had been killed at Yekaterinburg by Red Guards. This report was denied later, but this denial was closely followed by a Geneva dispatch saying that Nicholas had been executed by the Bolsheviki after a trial at Yekaterinburg. This report seemed to be confirmed by advices to Washington from Stockholm.

The next report was what purported to be an intercepted wireless message from M. Tchicherin, the Bolshevist Foreign Minister, in which it was stated that Nicholas was dead. Still another report was to the effect that he had been bayonetted by a guard while being taken from Yekaterinburg to Perm. Of all these reports there was no direct confirmation.

There seemingly is no question that yesterday’s dispatch is authentic. It comes in the form of a Russian wireless dispatch, and as the wireless plants of Russia are under the control of the Bolsheviki, it appears that it is an official version of the death of the former Emperor.

NIKOLAI LENIN

April 22, 1870–January 21, 1924

MOSCOW—Nikolai Lenin died last night at 6:50 o’clock. The immediate cause of death was paralysis of the respiratory centers due to a cerebral hemorrhage.

Lenin was 54 years old. He belonged to the class known as the small nobility. He was brought up in the Orthodox faith and educated to be a professor. His father was a State Councilor. The family name was Ulianoff. “Lenin” is a pen name. Lenin’s wife, Nadjeduda Constantinova Krupshata, was with him at the end.

—Walter Duranty

While Russia declined into economic ruin, while millions starved to death within short distances of rich lands which were formerly the greatest wheat producing regions of Europe; while civilization disappeared and some districts fell even into cannibalism; while the country with the greatest agricultural resources in the world had to be fed from abroad; while preventable disease made havoc such as has been unknown for centuries—all this time Lenin easily held his power in Russia, and even kept international followers, who pleaded with their own countries to follow the example of Russia.

The Russian masses seemed to have the same feeling toward Lenin which they had formerly had toward the “Little Father.” They used to revere the Czar and to find excuses for him while hating his functionaries. In the same way the ordinary Russian found no fault with Lenin and laid the ruin of the country to those around him and to circumstances that he could not control.

While the peasant and workingmen had a superstitious reverence for Lenin, those who were nearer to him had a loyalty founded on their knowledge of his absolute disinterestedness and the intensity of his convictions. They felt that he worked hard, lived ascetically, scorned riches and was inspired by a fierce enthusiasm unmixed with baser motives.

The fact that his doctrines did not work had been several times reported to be a contributing cause to his fatal illness. No amount of fanaticism could blind him to the fact that they had not worked out right. He had readjusted those doctrines and temporarily suspended some of his axioms, in the hope of reviving industry and keeping the people fed during the interim caused by some inexplicable delay in the arrival of Utopia.

For every one legally assassinated in the French Revolution, he had caused the judicial murder of hundreds—all, of course, for the good of Russia. This was frankly admitted and defended as an essential step in clearing the stage for the communistic millennium. The age of blood was to be a preliminary to the age of gold.

His greatest disappointment was the failure of the international movement, the inability of Communists in other countries to overthrow their Governments and put the world under the rule of Soviets in the early stages of the revolution.

But temporizing with “capitalistic” Governments has been allowable, under Lenin’s system of conduct, from the beginning. Lenin was deliberately placed in Russia by the German General Staff in 1917 to put Russia out of the war. He was in Geneva when the Czar’s Government broke down. His transportation across Germany was arranged by the German high command as a strategic maneuver.

Lenin was perfectly willing to accept this help from a capitalist Government. He believed that the Russian revolution he foresaw would be followed by uprisings of the proletariat all over the world, the German revolution being one of the first. But the event proved that the Germans had calculated correctly. Lenin did put Russia out of the war. He did not succeed in his hope of a proletarian triumph in Germany. The German revolution came later from military and economic causes, not as a result of Soviet infection.

At two periods in his career Lenin was the most important man in Russia. The earlier time was during the attempted revolution of 1905. He left his mark on Russia heavily in 1905, because the insurrection which he then led checked the steps which had been taken to put Russia on a constitutional basis. Lenin was a perfect specimen of the doctrinaire in 1905, as in 1917. His devotion to dogma would not permit him to look with favor on half measures. At a later period he was ready to barter and trade in practical measures, but he would hear of no compromise where a political dogma was involved.

Already in 1905 Lenin and the Social Democratic Party, which he founded, had worked out the theory of government by a small revolutionary minority, commanding the majority and working in their interest.

The first Soviet was formed in Petrograd in 1905 after the granting of the Constitution. It was to the activity of this Soviet and the influence of Lenin that Russia owed the gradual curtailment of the Constitution granted by the Czar in 1905. The actual uprising by the followers of Lenin was quickly suppressed, but it gave reactionaries the argument that any concessions offered to the Russian people would cause revolt, and that the safety of the Government lay in the practice of despotism according to the old rules.

When he was 17 years old, Lenin’s brother Alexander was executed for complicity in a terrorist plot against the life of Alexander III. In the same year Lenin finished his course in the Simbirsk Gymnasium and entered the Kazan University. He was banished from Kazan a few months later for taking part in a students’ riot.

His offense was overlooked, however, and in 1891 he was a student in the University of St. Petersburg, where he studied law and economics. He also studied in Germany.

In 1895, arrested in St. Petersburg as a dangerous Socialist, he was exiled to Siberia for three years. In 1900 he went abroad. Living much of the time in Switzerland, he was the head of the group of exiled and condemned revolutionists of Russia and other countries. Of Lenin’s life in Switzerland, M. J. Olgin wrote:

“A smoky back room in a little café in Geneva; a few score of picturesque-looking Russian revolutionary exiles, men and women, seated around uncovered tables over glasses of beer or tea; at the head of the table a man in his forties, talking in a slow yet impassioned manner; and now and then an exclamation of disapproval, an outburst of indignation among a part of the audience, which would be instantly parried by a flashing remark of the speaker, a striking home with unusual trenchancy and venom—this is how I see now in my imagination the leader of the Bolsheviki, the great Inquisitor of the Russian social democracy, Nicolai Lenin.

“There is nothing remarkable in the appearance of this man—a typical Russian with rather irregular features; a stern but not unkindly expression; something crude in manner and dress, recalling the artisan rather than the intellectual and the thinker. You would ordinarily pass by a man of this kind without noticing him at all. Yet, had you happened to look into his eyes or to hear his public speech, you would not be likely to forget him.

“His eyes are small, but glow with compressed fire; they are clever, shrewd and alert; they seem to be constantly on guard, and they pierce you behind half-closed lids.”

With the overthrow of the Czar the Russian revolutionaries returned to Russia. [Alexander] Kerensky [head of the Russian Provisional Government] fell in November, and Lenin and [Leon] Trotsky set up the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” maintaining themselves in power by the slaughter of tens of thousands as counterrevolutionaries.

Maxim Gorky described the work of Lenin as an experiment in a laboratory, with the exception of the fact that it was performed on a living thing, and that, if the experiment did not have the expected success, the outcome would be death.

An almost complete stoppage of production, chaos in the transportation system, famine in the big cities, then in the country districts, all accompanied the Bolshevist régime almost from the beginning—effects largely due, according to outside observers, to the belief that work was no longer a necessity, but that all could live off those richer than themselves.

Spasmodic efforts to bring back production by introducing martial law with the nationalization of industries, compelling workers to do a hard day’s work at peril of their lives, were announced from time to time, but proved not to be enduring or of wide application.

Lenin’s literary output, explaining and recommending the Russian system to the rest of the world, went on unabated, in spite of the Russian collapse. The real condition of starvation and ruin in Russia was denied, and the reports of it attributed to the malice of the capitalist press.

Lenin as he was in the third year of his absolute dictatorship was described by H. G. Wells as follows in an article printed in The New York Times:

“I had come expecting to struggle with a doctrinaire Marxist. I found nothing of the sort. I had been told that Lenin lectured people; he certainly did nothing of the sort on this occasion. Much has been made of his laugh in the descriptions—a laugh which is said to be pleasing at first and afterward to become cynical.

“Lenin has a pleasant, quick-changing brownish face, with a lively smile and a habit (due, perhaps, to some defect in focusing) of screwing up one of his eyes as he pauses in his talk. He is not very much like the photographs you see of him, because he is one of those persons whose change of expression is more important than their features.”

In addressing the Russian Assembly of Political Education in 1921, Lenin, for the first time, made a partial admission of defeat and error.

“In part,” he said, “under the influence of military problems which were showered upon us and of the seemingly desperate condition in which the republic found itself under the influence of these circumstances, we made the mistake of deciding to pass immediately to communistic production and distribution.

“We decided that the peasants, according to the system of requisition of surplus, would give us the needed quantity of bread, and we should distribute it to the factories and workshops and arrive at communistic production and distribution. I cannot say that we drew up thus definitely and clearly any such plan, but we acted in that spirit.

“This, I am sorry to say, is a fact. I am sorry because an experience which did not take long has convinced us of the mistakenness of the proceeding, which was in contradiction to what we had previously written in regard to the transition from capitalism to socialism, and has convinced us that without passing through a phase of socialistic supervision and control you cannot rise even to the first degree of communism.”

Attempts of the Soviet Government to interest American capitalists and manufacturers in Russia had failed, both because of lack of support from the American Government and because an exploring party of American manufacturers came to the conclusion that Russia had nothing with which to pay them except promises. When hope to tempt this country to resume trade was at an end, the Soviet Government pleaded for provisions, which resulted in the sending of the American Relief Administration to Russia and the feeding of millions in that way.

There has been little news about Lenin from Russia in the last few months until recently, when there have been hints of discussion among the Communists as to his successor.

SUN YAT-SEN

November 12, 1866–March 12, 1925

PEKING—Dr. Sun Yat-sen, the South China leader, died this morning at 58 years of age.

Dr. Sun for some time had been suffering from cancer of the liver.

As the Southern leader yesterday was slowly passing into his final sleep, his headquarters in Canton announced that his troops had occupied Swatow, in the Province of Kwangtung, whence all the rebel leaders were said to have fled without giving battle.

The name of Dr. Sun Yat-sen first began to be heard in Chinese political affairs in the late 1880’s, when his vigorous pronouncements against the Manchu emperors of China reached beyond the boundaries of his native land. Since that time few men in public life have known more ups and downs, more victories, more defeats, than Dr. Sun, who won the title of the “Father of the Republic.”

To Dr. Sun was given the credit for having engineered the uprising by which the people retired the Manchus and proclaimed the republic in 1912.

When the revolution broke out prematurely in the Yangtze Valley in October, 1911, Dr. Sun was in England. He hurried back and was chosen head of the revolutionary Republican headquarters at Nanking, the rebels designating him “Provisional President of the Republic.”

Actually and officially he never was President of China, as the Manchus had merely appointed Yuan Shi-kai, as Premier in Peking, to mediate with the rebels. The result was the formal establishment of the republic in February, 1912, with Yuan Shi-kai as President, and Dr. Sun’s organization, by agreement, was disbanded.

Yuan served as President until his death in June, 1916, which occurred soon after his futile attempt to become emperor, an empty title he bestowed upon himself for 100 days. He was succeeded by Vice President Li Yuan-hung.

Again in 1921 the remnant of the original Chinese Republican Parliament of 1913, never having received any further mandate to sit, besides having been dissolved by Yuan Shi-kai, met in Canton and “elected” Sun Yat-sen “President of China.” The real President of China was then Hsu Shin-ch’ang, and he was in no way superseded by Dr. Sun.

However, Dr. Sun and his associates took control of affairs in South China, with headquarters in Canton, and they have administered an area with a population of about 40,000,000 people ever since. The total population of China is estimated to be 400,000,000.

Out of this assumption of power in the South grew what is called the “Republic of South China,” which, however, has never been recognized by any Government in the world.

Since 1922 the Sun group has been fighting, on the battlefield and in political councils, with General Chen Chiung-min, for control of the South, resulting in constant pillage, murder and turmoil there.

Dr. Sun’s father was a Christian farmer in Kuangtung Province, where Sun Yat-sen was born in 1866. Under the tutelage of Dr. Kerr of an American mission school, he learned English rapidly and took up the study and practice of medicine.

A political career had a stronger appeal to him than the profession of medicine, and with the launching of the Young China Party his active work in the affairs of his country began. One of the exciting incidents in his career came in October, 1896, while he was in London. While outside the Chinese Legation he was kidnapped. The intention, it was learned afterward, was to smuggle him to China, where there was a price on his head.

He was confined in the basement of the legation, but he was able to smuggle out a letter addressed to his former teacher, Sir James Cantle, who took the note to the Foreign Office. His liberation was effected by policemen sent to the legation by Lord Salisbury.

At the first opportunity Dr. Sun appeared openly in China. This opportunity came in 1911, as outlined above.

Perhaps his narrowest escape was in Canton in 1905. One of his plots to assassinate the Manchu officials and seize the city was betrayed, and a round-up of the leaders was set in motion. Dr. Sun fled with a band of hostile soldiers at his heels. Suddenly a door opened and he was drawn inside. The door closed as mysteriously as it had opened, and the pursuers passed on. A friendly servant in the house of a prominent mandarin had made the rescue. There, days later, the fugitive watched from a window of that same house as fifteen of his followers were put to death.

—Associated Press

LEON TROTSKY

November 7, 1879–August 21, 1940

By Arnaldo Cortesi

MEXICO CITY—After twenty-six hours of an extraordinarily tenacious fight for life, Leon Trotsky died at 7:25 P.M. today of wounds inflicted upon his head with a pickaxe by an assailant in his home yesterday.

Almost his last words, whispered to his secretary, were:

“Please say to our friends I am sure of the victory of the Fourth International. Go forward!”

The 60-year-old exile’s losing struggle for existence continued all last night and all day today.

The assassin, Jacques Mornard van den Dreschd, for months an intimate of the Trotsky household, had a declaration written in French on his person when he was arrested yesterday. Police said that in it he told of having quarreled with his leader when Mr. Trotsky tried to induce him to go to Russia to perform acts of sabotage.

The declaration adds that the writer decided to kill Mr. Trotsky because the latter did everything in his power to prevent van den Dreschd from marrying Sylvia Ageloff of Brooklyn, who had introduced the two men to each other.

Questioned by police, Miss Ageloff declared she introduced “Frank Jackson,” as she knew him, to Mr. Trotsky in perfect good faith not knowing he had any designs on the former Soviet War Commissar’s life.

The assassin, who entered Mexico posing as a Canadian, Frank Jackson, now is said to have been born in Teheran, Iran, son of a Belgian diplomat.

With remarkable fortitude, Mr. Trotsky, despite his very severe wound, was able to grapple with his assailant and then run from the room in which he was attacked, shouting for help. He did not collapse until his wife and his guards had rushed to his aid.

The devotion of Mrs. Trotsky filled everyone who saw her with pity. This small, white-haired, retiring woman was the first to run to her husband’s aid and to grapple with his assailant. She did not leave Mr. Trotsky’s bedside for a single minute.

Joseph Hansen, one of Mr. Trotsky’s American secretaries, issued a written account of the attack. It said, in part:

“Trotsky knew the assassin, Frank Jackson, personally for more than six months. Jackson enjoyed Trotsky’s confidence because of his connection with Trotsky’s movement in France and the United States. Jackson visited the house frequently. At no time did we have the least ground to suspect he was an agent of the GPU (Russian secret police).

“He entered the house on Aug. 20 at 5:30 o’clock. He met Mr. Trotsky in the patio near the chicken yard, where he told Trotsky he had written an article on which he wished his advice. Trotsky agreed as a matter of course and walked with him to the dining room, where they met Mrs. Trotsky.

“Trotsky then invited Jackson into the study but without previously notifying his secretaries. The first indication of something wrong was the sound of terrible cries and a violent struggle in Trotsky’s study.

“The assassin apparently struck Trotsky from behind with a miner’s pick or alpenstock—the point penetrating into the brain. Instead of dropping unconscious as the assassin had evidently planned, Trotsky still retained consciousness and struggled with the assailant. As he lay bleeding on the floor later, he described the struggle to Mrs. Trotsky and Secretary Hansen. He told Hansen: ‘Jackson shot me with a revolver. I am seriously wounded. I feel that this time it is the end.’

“Hansen tried to convince him it was only a surface wound and could not have been caused by a revolver because nobody heard a shot, but Trotsky replied: ‘No, I feel here (pointing to his heart) that this time they have succeeded.’”

Leon Trotsky, whose real name was Leba Bronstein, was born of Jewish parents in 1879 in a small town in Kherson, Russia, near the Black Sea. His father was a chemist. He received his education in the local schools, but did not attend the university. He was expelled from school at the age of 15 for desecrating a sacred icon, an image of the Orthodox Russian Church, thus giving an early indication of his radical temperament, which led him throughout his life to attack religion as well as the other factors in the existing order of things.

While still in his teens Trotsky became a revolutionist, and began to write articles, make speeches and help in the organization of revolutionary movements. He became a disciple of Karl Marx, and gradually formulated the communistic ideas which he and Lenin later were to put into practice in Russia.

Trotsky was arrested when the 1905 rebellion was put down and was exiled to Siberia. But he escaped after six months on a false passport made out in the name of Trotsky, said to have been the name of a guard. This was the way in which Trotsky got the name which has become known throughout the world ever since.

When the war started, Trotsky was editing a newspaper in Berlin, where he had found many friends among the radicals and had had help in writing a history of the first Russian revolution. Exiled from Germany as a “dangerous anarchist,” he found refuge in Vienna.

Next he went to Zurich, Switzerland, and then on to Paris. He began the publication of a radical sheet called Our World, but it was suppressed, and Trotsky was expelled from France. He was escorted to the Spanish frontier, but was arrested. On his release he sailed for New York with his wife and two sons, Leo and Sergius.

Trotsky and his family arrived here on the steamship Monserrat from Barcelona, Spain, on Jan. 14, 1917, and they went to live in a three-room apartment on Vyse Avenue, the Bronx. He found work as an editorial writer on the Russian radical daily Novy Mir. While he was here he predicted that the war would result in revolution among the working classes in the warring countries.

Following the overthrow of the Czar, Trotsky and his family returned to Russia. On his arrival in Petrograd he joined Lenin and the other Maximalists, or Bolsheviki, in the Left Wing of the Russian Socialists. They first supported the Kerensky government, but gradually broke away on the issue of peace. The November revolution, in which the Kerensky government was overthrown, brought Lenin and Trotsky to the top.

Trotsky became Lenin’s right-hand man, taking the post of Minister of Foreign Affairs and then Minister of War. It was in the latter capacity that his monumental achievement of reorganizing and directing the Red Army took place.

The numerical strength of the army he organized was about 1,500,000. In four years of almost constant fighting on various fronts it defeated the forces under Yudenitch, Kolchak, Denikin, the “White Army” of Wrangel in the Crimean, and the Polish Army.

Once the army was functioning smoothly Trotsky was able to turn his efforts to other fields. In 1919 he started to reorganize the railroad system, but his severe tactics alienated the employees and Lenin ultimately removed him in summary fashion. It was the first of many rumored quarrels with Lenin. When Lenin became incapacitated by illness in 1923, Trotsky was expected to step into Lenin’s shoes. His failure to do so ultimately caused his political ruin.

While Lenin was unable to carry on his work, the All-Russian Congress named a triumvirate to take his place. It consisted of Kameneff, Zinovleff and Stalin, who was later to prove Trotsky’s conqueror in the struggle for power.

Lenin died in January, 1924, and the inevitable fight for control of the Communist party began almost immediately after. It soon became evident that the triumvirate was too strong for Trotsky. A year later he was removed as chairman of the Revolutionary War Council, which meant his automatic dismissal as Minister of War and the beginning of the end of his political career.

The crux of his opposition, then and afterward, was on the question of “right” and “left.” Trotsky always stood for communism in the strict sense of the word, without compromise. Russia should have nothing to do with capitalistic systems of government or economics, he believed; the “world revolution” should be fostered; the well-to-do peasants should not be favored at the expense of the poorer.

In January, 1925, Trotsky went to the Caucasus, ostensibly for his health but really as an exile. Within four months he regained much of his old power and seemingly healed the breach with Stalin.

But it was only a brief truce. The mills of Stalin kept grinding and did not stop until Trotsky was deprived of every office and honor. When the tenth anniversary of the establishment of the Soviet was celebrated, in November, 1927, and a great parade of the Red Army was held in Moscow, Trotsky, who had organized the army and was once its beloved idol, stood in the street with other spectators, almost unnoticed, and watched it march by.

If the news emanating from Russia in January, 1929, is to be trusted, Trotsky, who had been exiled to Siberia, was, in fact, preparing for a return to power by means of a revolution. On Jan. 23 it was announced that 150 followers of Trotsky had been arrested and after summary trial sent into “rigorous isolation” in a number of prisons as “enemies of the proletarian dictatorship” for plotting a civil war against the State.

In the days succeeding the wholesale arrests, rumors came thick and fast that Trotsky was en route to Turkey, whence he had been banished. Official Moscow kept silent, but on Feb. 1 The New York Times correspondent definitely announced that the decision to send Trotsky out of the country had been taken.

Thus Trotsky, who in 1917 was being hailed as the “Napoleon of the Revolution,” ended, like Robespierre, a victim of the very forces he had done so much to create.

On Feb. 6, 1929, he arrived at Constantinople with his family, and busied himself with writing his memoirs and pamphlets by the hundred. It was during this stay that he wrote his voluminous “History of the Russian Revolution,” a work that bitterly attacked Stalin and sought to prove that there were two great men of New Russia—Lenin and Trotsky.

His daughter, Zinaide Wolkow, committed suicide in a Berlin rooming house in 1933. Trotsky blamed it on Stalin, because the dictator had refused to admit her to citizenship in the Soviet land.

In July, 1933, he arrived at Marseilles and received sanctuary through the French Government. Less than a year later he was expelled because he had “not observed the duties of neutrality.”

Trotsky, accompanied by his family, arrived in Oslo in June, 1935. In August, 1936, after a period of comparative quiet, he was again in the midst of turmoil, emanating from the trial of sixteen Bolsheviks in Moscow, the so-called Zinovieff-Kameneff trial. They were accused of conspiring with Trotsky to assassinate Stalin and other Soviet leaders and restore capitalism in Russia. Tried in absentia, Trotsky was pictured as the villain of the alleged conspiracy.

The verdicts of guilty were founded wholly upon confessions of the accused, which Trotsky denounced as false, characterizing the trial as a frame-up. He demanded an impartial investigation of the charges and threatened to sue a Communist paper in Norway for libel because it repeated these accusations as proven. The Norwegian Government, however, forbade him to bring the suit.

After the trial the Soviet Government demanded Trotsky’s expulsion from Norway, and although Norway declined to accede to the demand, it finally declined to renew his residence permit. Eventually the Mexican Government permitted him to come to Mexico on condition that he would not interfere in Mexican affairs.

He had no sooner taken up residence in a villa outside Mexico City than his peace was again disturbed by another treason trial in Moscow, this time of 17 Bolsheviks accused of counterrevolutionary activities. They, too, confessed, involving Trotsky as their leader.

For weeks he supplied the American and world press with statements and articles refuting the charges, accusing Stalin of trying to liquidate the Communist party and the revolution and establish a Red fascism in Russia.

To the last moment of his life Trotsky remained a stormy petrel, clinging to his extreme Communist ideas, particularly his theory of permanent revolution. Few men have ever provoked such hatred in some and such devotion in others as Trotsky. Whatever history’s verdict upon him may be, it will not fail to record that he helped fill some of its most colorful pages.

BENITO MUSSOLINI

July 29, 1883–April 28, 1945

MILAN—Benito Mussolini came back last night to the city where his fascism was born. He came back on the floor of a closed moving van, his dead body flung on the bodies of his mistress and twelve men shot with him. All were executed yesterday by Italian partisans. The story of his final downfall, his flight, his capture and his execution is not pretty, and its epilogue in the Piazza Loretto here this morning was its ugliest part. It will go down in history as a finish to tyranny as horrible as any ever visited on a tyrant.

As if he were not dead or dishonored enough, at least two young men in the crowd broke through and aimed kicks at his skull. One glanced off. But the other landed full on his right jaw and there was a hideous crunch that wholly disfigured the once-proud face.

Mussolini wore the uniform of a squadrist militiaman. It comprised a gray-brown jacket and gray trousers with red and black stripes down the sides. He wore black boots, badly soiled, and the left one hung half off as if his foot were broken. His small eyes were open and it was perhaps a final irony that this man who had thrust his chin forward for so many official photographs had to have his yellowing face propped up with a rifle butt to turn it into the sun for the only two Allied cameramen on the scene.

—Milton Bracker

Benito Mussolini, founder of Fascism and for more than 20 years the ruler of Italy in all but name, was the first of the modern totalitarian dictators to achieve power, as he was the first of them to lose it.

His career, from its beginnings in obscurity to its end, was unfailingly colorful and dramatic. Never was this more true than in his downfall, which served to provide one of the great turning points of the World War for which he bore such a heavy burden of responsibility.

Although the Fascist regime had been badly shaken by the Axis defeats in North Africa and the loss of the Italian Empire on that continent, it was the invasion of Sicily by the Anglo-American forces under Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower that set in motion the chain of events that culminated in the overthrow of Il Duce.

Mussolini was born on July 29, 1883, in the hamlet of Dovia, Province of Forli. His parents were miserably poor. As a boy he was unruly, turbulent and aggressive. On completing his elementary education he became a teacher, but soon tired of this life. He wandered through Switzerland, Germany, France and Austria, working as a bricklayer, station porter, weaver and butcher’s boy. In the evenings he attended various universities, or studied alone.

Returning to Italy he became prominent as a Socialist agitator in Forli. He founded the newspaper Lotta di Classe—Class Struggle—which became the local Socialist organ.

Mussolini stood trial for his active stand against the Italo-Turkish war, but was acquitted. His oration in his own defense helped win him national recognition as the leader of the left wing of the Socialist party, the place he held when the first World War broke out.

Within a few months he swung violently away from his radical position to one of active championing of Italian entry into the war on the side of the Allies. For this he was denounced as a traitor by his former Socialist comrades, who contended, probably truly, that he had been subsidized by Allied propagandists.

After Italy declared war on May 23, Mussolini, assigned to the Bersaglieri, made an exemplary soldier. He was wounded several times and repeatedly mentioned in dispatches.

After the war Mussolini secretly allied himself with the most reactionary elements. He founded the Fasci di Combattimento in Milan in March, 1919, for the avowed purpose of fighting the widespread unrest. The movement received a great impetus when the Italian Government sent Italian troops to fire upon Gabriel d’Annunzio and his followers in Fiume.

This move sent thousands of volunteers flocking to the standards of Fascismo. When the anarcho-syndicalists, with some help from the Communists, occupied a number of Italian factories, the Fascisti turned on them fiercely and, when the strike collapsed quickly, set up a fanfare about how they had saved Italy from a Red revolution. Actually, some historians believe the alleged strikes were deliberately fomented by a provocateur.

By the autumn of 1922 the Fascist party claimed more than 1,000,000 members. On Oct. 24 of that year, Mussolini issued this ultimatum to the Government:

“Either the government of the country is handed to us peaceably or we shall take it by force, marching on Rome and engaging in a struggle to the death with the politicians now in power.”

Four days later the black-shirted legions began the march on Rome from their headquarters in Milan, discreetly followed by Mussolini in a sleeping car. The Cabinet declared martial law, but King Victor Emmanuel refused to sign the decree. The Cabinet resigned and the King asked Mussolini to form a government.

He first formed a coalition Cabinet, although the Fascists were, of course, dominant. He himself took the posts of Minister of War and Minister of the Interior, and demanded a grant of extraordinary power from the Chamber of Deputies to balance the budget, solve the labor problem and revise Italy’s foreign policy.

Within a month he used these powers to make himself dictator. He began a drastic overhaul of the entire governmental machinery, displacing old government employees by members of his own black-shirted militia. He boasted that he would make Italy powerful, prosperous and efficient and would make the dreams of Mazzini and Garibaldi come true.

He and his unruly young Blackshirts were ruthless in grinding down these opponents, raiding political meetings and newspapers, burning buildings, disciplining obstreperous opponents with beatings and forced doses of castor oil.

Mussolini and his regime met its first great crisis in June, 1924, when Giacomo Matteotti, leader of the Socialist party and the only outstanding politician who continued publicly to defy the dictator within Italy, disappeared. Well-known Fascists were arrested as his kidnappers. When Matteotti’s murdered body was found later in the summer, a world-wide storm of indignation broke.

For a time Mussolini seemed in danger of falling, but he used the crisis ruthlessly as a means of extending his power. He abandoned all pretense of a coalition government and substituted one that was frankly Fascist. Under fascism the Government regimented every aspect of the life of the Italian people and their industry.

Although Mussolini did not regard himself as a “good” Catholic, he made enough concessions to the Roman Catholic Church to keep it friendly toward him.

Mussolini’s foreign policy was ultra-nationalistic and ultra-militaristic. As early as 1923, in the Corfu incident, the Italian fleet had bombarded the Greek island of Corfu in a dispute over the murder of four Italian commissioners. Greece appealed to the League of Nations, but Mussolini refused to recognize the right of the League to interfere.

More than a decade later he again defied the League and risked war with Great Britain when he began the carefully planned conquest of Ethiopia, which shattered the Four-Power Pact of 1933, in which Great Britain, France, Germany and Italy undertook to guarantee the peace of Europe for ten years.

Mussolini took advantage of border clashes between his troops and the Ethiopians as a pretext for the invasion, which began on Oct. 2, 1935. The Ethiopians were overwhelmed.

In May, 1936, the Council of the League of Nations refused Mussolini’s request to drop the sanctions that it had imposed, whereupon the Italian delegation walked out of the Council chamber. Friction continued between the British and Italian Governments, and British fleets were stationed in the Mediterranean. After several weeks’ tension, however, the British withdrew their ships. Later the League of Nations likewise dropped its sanctions.

Hardly had this dispute been settled when the Spanish Civil War broke out. Although Italy joined the other Western European powers in a non-intervention pact, Mussolini at first covertly and later openly sent men, arms and money to aid the rebel forces.

The hatred of Britain that Mussolini felt as the result of the sanctions policy was ameliorated little if at all by the effort at appeasement that followed the advent of Neville Chamberlain to power. This led eventually to the outstanding event of Italian foreign policy under Mussolini—the formation of the celebrated Axis with Germany, at first a secret and then an avowed declaration of solidarity.

The first important fruit of that agreement was the occupation of Austria by German troops in March, 1938. Afterward, Mussolini exchanged telegrams pledging continued friendship with Hitler.

In the succeeding crisis over Czechoslovakia, Mussolini and Hitler were again found side by side. During the days of greatest tension Mussolini called upon France and England to abandon this smaller democracy.

Despite his truculence, Prime Minister Chamberlain of Great Britain turned to Mussolini to use his good offices to keep Hitler from marching into the territory of the Sudeten Germans. Mussolini persuaded Hitler to meet Mr. Chamberlain and Premier Daladier at the Munich conference, at which Czechoslovakia was partitioned.

Soon, Mussolini took a more and more pronounced pro-Nazi attitude. His henchmen set up a cry for Corsica and Tunisia, French possessions with large Italian populations. He introduced a series of anti-Semitic measures and speeded up preparations for the war that seemed inevitable.

When it came, with the German invasion of Poland on Sept. 1, 1939, Mussolini was silent. It was not until Sept. 23 that he declared his intention of maintaining Italy’s neutrality. This position he maintained, although with marked indications of pro-German sympathy, until the German onslaught crushed the French Army. Mussolini took his country into the war on June 10, 1940, two days before the Germans reached Paris. [Prime Minister] Churchill likened his action to that of a jackal.

The course of the war soon showed that Mussolini had gravely miscalculated. Although he shared in the easy triumph over France, he received little of the spoils he had anticipated. In the autumn Italian armies invaded Greece and suffered such heavy reverses that Germany had to come to their assistance.

In North Africa, meanwhile, his forces were shattered by numerically inferior British armies. Italian air power and Navy proved unequal to the tasks that were placed upon them.

In June, 1941, Mussolini obediently followed the Fuehrer into war against Russia, and on Dec. 11 declared war on the United States.

As defeat followed defeat for Italian arms in the year and a half that followed, Mussolini appeared less and less often on his favorite balcony. The terrific blow dealt his troops by the British at El Alamein; the heavy bombings of Italian industrial cities by the Royal Air Force, and the American landings in North Africa in November, 1942, combined to crush the spirits of his followers.

Then came the Allied invasion of Sicily, the collapse of Italian and German forces, along with the end of Mussolini’s power, and finally the grisly scene in the Piazza Loretto.

ADOLF HITLER

April 20, 1889–April 30, 1945

LONDON—Adolf Hitler died this afternoon, the Hamburg radio announced tonight, and Grand Admiral Karl Doenitz, proclaiming himself the new Fuehrer by Hitler’s appointment, said that the war would continue.

Crowning days of rumors about Hitler’s health and whereabouts, the Hamburg radio said that he had fallen in the battle of Berlin at his command post in the Chancellery.

Early this evening the Germans were told that an important announcement would be broadcast tonight. There was no hint of what was coming. The stand-by announcement was repeated at 9:40 P.M.

A few minutes later the announcer said: “Achtung! Achtung! In a few moments you will hear a serious and important message to the German people.” Then the news was given to the Germans and the world after the playing of the slow movement from Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony, commemorating Wagner’s death.

Appealing to the German people for help, order and discipline, Doenitz eulogized Hitler as the hero of a lifetime of service to the nation. “It is my first task,” Doenitz added, “to save Germany from destruction by the advancing Bolshevist enemy. For this aim alone the military struggle continues.”

—Sydney Gruson

Adolf Hitler, one-time Austrian vagabond who rose to be the dictator of Germany, “augmenter of the Reich” and the scourge of Europe, was, like Lenin and Mussolini, a product of the First World War. The same general circumstances, born of the titanic conflict that carried Lenin, a bookish professional revolutionist, to the pinnacle of power in the Empire of the Czars and cleared the road to mastery for Mussolini in the Rome of the Caesars, also paved the way for Hitler’s domination in the former mighty Germany of the Hohenzollerns.

Like Lenin and Mussolini, Hitler came out of the blood and chaos of 1914–18, but of the three he was the strangest phenomenon. Lenin, while not known to the general public, had for many years before the Russian Revolution occupied a prominent place as leader and theoretician of the Bolshevist party. Mussolini was a widely known Socialist editor, orator and politician before making his bid for power. Hitler was nothing, and from nothing he became everything to most Germans.

Lenin dreamed of world revolution. Mussolini thundered of the coming world victory of Fascism. Hitler actually challenged the earth to combat by unleashing another war of nations.

Before the climax of a career unparalleled in history, he had subdued nine nations, defied and humiliated the greatest powers of Europe, and created a social and economic system that subjected scores of millions to his will in all basic features of social, political, economic and cultural life.

Sixty-five million Germans yielded to the blandishments and magnetism of this slender man of medium height, whose fervor and demagogy swept everything before him with outstretched arms as the savior and regenerator of the Fatherland.

Austria, with 7,000,000 inhabitants, succumbed helplessly to his invasion. More than 2,000,000 Germans in the Sudeten country were added to his domain when he threatened to invade Czechoslovakia, and 10,000,000 Czechs and Slovaks were tied to his chariot wheel, their nation stripped of its defenses, their State destroyed, while all of Central Europe trembled before what appeared to be the irresistible advance of the goose-stepping Nazi hordes of his adopted country.

For more than six years after his advent to power in January, 1933, there seemed to be no one who would dare to challenge Hitler’s progress from victory to victory until he met resistance from Poland, backed by the Anglo-French alliance.

Shortly after his dismemberment and subjugation of Czechoslovakia, Hitler was reported to have said, “My time is short.” His blow against Poland and challenge to France and England less than a year later were taken as indications that he had sensed that time was against him, that he had unleashed forces of hatred and opposition throughout the world that might eventually destroy him.

Those who had hoped that success at home and extension of his power abroad would make him more circumspect had abandoned that hope when, in violation of his promise to respect the integrity of Czechoslovakia, he marched on Prague and reduced that nation to a German protectorate.

The worldwide condemnation of his methods was fed by the system of terrorism he had established at home and in the countries he had conquered, the jailing of scores of thousands in prisons and concentration camps, the secret murder of opponents and those suspected of opposition, the ruthless destruction of the Jews and the persecution of the Catholic and Protestant Churches in his drive for nazification of the nation.

The deteriorating social, political and economic conditions, as they developed in post-war Germany, supplied the springboard for Hitler’s leap to power in 1933.

But an understanding of Hitler’s conduct has been sought by students of the man in the study of his youth and family history.

Many who watched Hitler from the time when he first made his appearance on the political scene noticed his megalomania, his gambler’s readiness to take risks, his habit of wild exaggeration and inability to grasp the full implications of things he said and did. It was this failure to measure the significance of his words and deeds that was considered responsible for the coolness he displayed at critical moments after violent outbursts of thought and temper, although on occasions he was reported to fall into tears and hysterics.

At the same time, however, he possessed an uncanny shrewdness in his estimate of the psychology of masses and individuals, and developed to a fine degree the art of swaying their emotions. The success he achieved in this field enhanced his contempt for the people, whom he called a “flock of sheep and blockheads,” a “mixture of stupidity and cowardice.”

This contempt for the people and his unbounded capacity for hatred, which found expression in his merciless treatment of opponents and persecution of the Jews, according to psychologists who have studied the man’s career closely, emanated in Hitler from the frustrations of his youth.

Hitler was born in an inn at Braynau, Austria, close to the German frontier, April 20, 1889. His father was Alois Schickelgruber, a peasant who later entered the customs service. His third wife, who was also his niece and ward and twenty years younger than her husband, was the future dictator’s mother.

Hitler had no love for his father and resented his insistence that he prepare for the Government service. At the age of 14, after his father’s death, Hitler went to live with his mother at Linz. There he stayed until he was 19, pampered by his mother, who catered to his habit of idling.

Upon her death he found himself alone, quite unprepared for the battle of life. He betook himself to Vienna, where he was denied admission to the Academy of Arts.

From 1909 to the outbreak of the First World War, Hitler led a wretched existence. For awhile, he lived in a “flophouse.” He spent nights on park benches. He earned a precarious living by painting picture postcards and doing minor carpenter work.

Nevertheless, he considered himself to be an artist of talent and yearned passionately to make an impression, to know everything, to master the world.

His greatest passion was for politics. A shy and beaten youth, Hitler would become transformed as soon as conversation turned on matters political. His tongue would loosen and a torrent of words would rush from his lips. Jeered at by acquaintances, he wept.

The one thing that gave him hope was the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Considering himself a German, he felt superior to those around him. For the Slavs he felt contempt. For the Jews he felt hatred. As for the workers, he believed them to be not much better.

Long before he had dreamed of achieving power he had developed the principles that nations were destined to hate, oppose and destroy one another; that the law of history was the struggle for survival between peoples; that the Germans were chosen by destiny to rule over others, and that the great mass of the people were mediocrities destined to be dominated by a higher social type.

In 1913, Hitler left for Munich, where he barely managed to earn his keep.

Then came the war. It lifted Hitler into a state of exaltation.

Accepted in the German Army, he felt a sense of great things to come. At the front, where he served as a dispatch carrier, he was friendless. His services were recognized by his superiors, however, and he was rewarded with the Iron Cross.

He was gassed, and the end of the war found him in a hospital in Pomerania. He viewed with pain the collapse of the German Empire. Enraged at the revolutionists, bitter at the Kaiser and Field Marshal von Hindenburg because of their failure to suppress the revolution, he felt that his day would come.

Though officially demobilized, he remained in the service of the Reichswehr. His work was in the political intelligence division. In those days the Reichswehr had already begun to dream of revenge. Many officers and former officers attached themselves to various conspiratory “free corps” organizations, formed for political purposes and the spreading of terrorism.

Hitler acted as a spy for these “free corps” bands. He established relations with influential military circles both inside and outside the Reichswehr.

In 1919 Hitler was assigned to keep an eye on a little band calling itself the German Labor party. This party developed ultimately into the German National Socialist party, the organization forged by Hitler as the instrument for the achievement of power.

By force of eloquence, ruthless methods and daring ideas, Hitler forged ahead in the movement founded by the little band, stirring audiences with the promise of new power and greatness to come.

He was treated as a circus performer but persevered.

His strategy was based on a simple principle: to obtain the support of powerful elements in the army, industry and finance and to buttress that with support among the masses. He addressed himself first to the middle classes and managed to obtain some assistance from elements among the workers disappointed in the revolution.

He also put forward his slogans of extreme nationalism and racism. Believing the mission of national and social regeneration was to be realized by what he called a vigorous minority, a desperate elite, he gathered around him a group of intellectuals, officers, former officers, penurious students and ambitious youths without prospects in the Germany of that time.

Army generals, active and retired, regarded him with suspicion because of his lowly origin and demagogic appeals to the middle classes. They joined him openly after he had made an impression and showed that his chances of success were not to be minimized.

On Nov. 8, 1923, in Munich, in what became known as “the beer-cellar Putsch,” Hitler forced his way into an assembly of high-ranking Bavarian generals, Ministers, Government officials and politicians in Munich City Hall and fired a shot into the air, announcing that his revolution had begun. He called for a march on Berlin. Those present were taken aback. They had made him promise that he would not use violence that might endanger their own positions. They promptly proclaimed Hitler a traitor to the State.

There followed a skirmish next day between several thousand of Hitler’s followers and the police and troops. The police fired and thousands of Nazis scattered in all directions.

Hitler was caught and tried for treason. The sentence was five years’ imprisonment in a fortress. He served only a few months and was paroled, returning to political activity.

It seemed as if Hitler’s cause was irretrievably lost. Hitler appeared to go into retirement. He was at work on “Mein Kampf,” begun in prison, but continued quietly to rebuild his shattered group.

Within the next seven years he obtained a huge following, which came to number 3,000,000. His army consisted of the Storm Troops, who wore brown shirts, and the Black Guards, representing more carefully picked formations, wearing black shirts. These troops attacked Jews, broke up meetings of the opposition, staged street brawls with Communists and republicans, beat up leaders of other parties and, in general, conducted a reign of terror with which the authorities found it increasingly difficult to cope.

An atmosphere of disorder was created with the intent of feeding popular demand for a “strong hand.” All this was staged with tremendous dramatic effect by the able propaganda organization directed by Dr. Joseph Goebbels.

With a positive genius for political strategy, Hitler amalgamated the support of the most powerful elements, the army and industrialists, with the enthusiasm and blind approval of his masses.

But it was not until 1930 that Hitler emerged definitely as a mighty political power in Germany. In the elections that fall, he received 6,000,000 votes and captured 107 seats.

It was one of the greatest upsets in the turbulent history of the struggling German Republic. The factor that gave his movement this great impetus was the economic crisis that broke over the world in 1929 and struck Germany with particular severity.

The crisis fed with unprecedented force the extremist elements on the right and on the left. The armies of Hitlerism and communism made it increasingly difficult for the democratic republic to function.

Outmaneuvering opponents and allies, exercising ruthless brutality, Hitler became Chancellor on Jan. 30, 1933, with the proviso that new Reichstag elections were to be called so he could seek the approval of the electorate.

The Reichstag was dissolved and the Nazis unleashed a flood of propaganda eclipsing anything that had gone before, terrorizing the electorate and crippling the campaign activities of other parties.

One of the most shocking events in the history of the Nazi regime came on the evening of Feb. 27, 1933, a week before the elections, when the Reichstag building suddenly went up in flames. The fire, it was determined, was of incendiary origin. Hitler announced that Communists were the incendiaries. Masses of people believed him.

The burning of the Reichstag produced a profound impression. Indeed, in the elections he won his greatest victory, but with only 43 percent of the votes cast.

After the election Hitler proceeded at full steam toward establishment of his dictatorship. Decrees vested the Government with dictatorial power. Hitler then proceeded to destroy the last vestiges of opposition.

There were mass arrests of Socialists, Communists, liberals, Catholics and others, many of whom were taken to concentration camps, where they were maltreated in brutal fashion.

At the same time, a wave of anti-Semitic outrages spread. Decrees depriving Jews of civil rights, of property and the right to work in various professions were issued. These found expression later in even severer form in the Nuremberg laws.

One of the most shocking episodes of the early period of the Hitler regime was the burning of the books of outstanding German and foreign authors in the streets and public squares of leading cities. The spectacle served to emphasize the divorce of Nazi Germany from Western civilization.

On Dec. 1, 1933, a decree proclaimed the “unity of the Nazi party and the State,” meaning that all labor organizations, youth organizations, universities, schools, parties and individuals had lost their identity and were merged, so far as the Nazis were concerned, in the State.

But his position was not yet entirely secure, not even in his own party, where the so-called left wing, led by Captain Ernst Roehm, leader of the Storm Troopers, regarded themselves as the real force that carried the Nazi party to victory.

On June 30, 1934 and the following day, under Hitler’s personal direction, Roehm and his associates were murdered.

The nation was treated to another surprise on Aug. 2, 1934. President von Hindenburg died on his estate in Prussia. Within a space of a few hours, Hitler announced that he had taken over the powers of President in addition to those of Chancellor and proclaimed himself Fuehrer. He won an overwhelming victory in a plebiscite soon after.

From that moment Hitler embarked upon his bold program in the domain of internal and foreign affairs, a program that made Germany once more a great military power, leading to reoccupation and militarization of the Rhineland, the annexation of Austria, the occupation of Czechoslovakia, the seizure of Memel, Danzig and the Polish Corridor, the destruction of Poland, the seizure of Denmark and Norway, the conquest of Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg, France and the Balkans, the invasion of Russia, and the long domination of the European Continent by Nazi Germany.

It all ended, however, in the confirmation of Napoleon’s dictum: “Empires die of indigestion.”

With the fall of Hitler’s empire under the blows of Allied arms, Germany fell to the lowest estate experienced by any nation in modern times.

That was Hitler’s contribution to the history of the “master race.”

EVA PERÓN

May 7, 1919–July 26, 1952

BUENOS AIRES—Señora Doña Maria Eva Duarte de Perón, wife of President Juan D. Perón, who had made herself one of the most powerful women in the history of Argentina and of the New World, died tonight at 8:25 o’clock. She had long been ill.

According to the Argentine Who’s Who, she was 30 years old. [Biographical material not currently published in Argentina gave Señora Perón’s age as 33, her date of birth May 17, 1919.]

The people of Argentina, who had been celebrating masses for the recovery of the First Lady, who was called “the spiritual chief of the nation,” were well prepared for the event. During the course of the day the Sub-Secretariat of Information had issued three bulletins in rapid succession that clearly indicated the end was near.

President Perón, who was at her bedside when she died, had been staying nearly all week close to his wife in the Presidential Residence.

Señora Perón was operated upon last November for cancer. Her last public appearance was on June 4, when, looking extremely pale and worn, she attended the ceremony at which General Perón was inaugurated to succeed himself as President—largely through her help.

At the bedside when she died were, besides President Perón, a dozen of her relatives and close political friends. They included her mother, Señora Juana Ibarguren de Duarte; three sisters, and her brother.

Throughout Argentina, Perónista groups had tried to outdo each other in paying homage to the First Lady. The eloquence of the oratory in the Congress was typified in a speech by a Senator who said Señora Perón not only combined the best virtues of Catherine the Great of Russia, Queen Elizabeth I of England, Joan of Arc and Isabella of Spain, but had also multiplied these virtues in herself to the infinite.

Earlier a law had been adopted calling for the erection of a huge bronze marble statue of Señora Perón in the center of this city and replicas of it in all provincial and territorial capitals. The powerful General Confederation of Labor decreed that the 6,000,000 trade union members give up their wages on Aug. 22 to help finance this project. This decree was conservatively estimated to yield more than $1,250,000, and business and agricultural interests were also to be tapped for donations.

Aug. 22 was to be known as Renunciation Day, because on that date in 1951 Señora Perón announced that she would not be a candidate for Vice President in the year’s elections.

In reference to this event, the role played by the Argentine Army has rarely been mentioned. It is commonly understood that the Army chiefs could not countenance a possibility of a woman becoming Commander in Chief of the armed forces. The Army leaders confronted President Perón on this point with unaccustomed unanimity, and Señora Perón’s announcement that she was not a candidate followed.

Nevertheless Señora Perón not only maintained but increased the tremendous power she had acquired in state affairs. Her influence did not abate during the course of her illness and she dictated appointments from her sickbed.

Ambitious, ruthless, untiring, clever and strikingly beautiful, Maria Eva Duarte de Perón had in large measure many of the qualities needed to lift her in a dozen short years from obscurity to fame, wealth and power on the unpredictable currents of Argentine political life.

The child of a poor village landowner who had been separated from his first wife, she rose meteorically through a brief radio and motion picture career to become the first lady of her land and one of the most influential women in the Western hemisphere.

Señora Perón’s ascent and her important role in governmental affairs and propaganda were all the more remarkable for the contrast that they presented to the conservative social traditions of Latin America, where women previously were seldom seen, and never heard, in public life.

No less than her husband, Señora Perón was a controversial figure. To her supporters, among whom were the many recipients of her highly publicized charities, she approached the stature of a dazzling goddess. She was “la dama de la esperanza,” the lady of hope.

For her opponents, political and social, however, there were not words strong enough to express their dislike and envy of this blonde upstart, who seemed to have virtually taken over the country.

The controversial aspect of the role of Señora Perón was by no means limited to Argentina. She became a truly international figure, a worldwide topic of conversation and invariably a subject of conjecture.

Countless anecdotes—factual as well as apocryphal—pointed this up. The inevitably humorless way in which she lent herself to the promulgation of absolute Perónismo was never better illustrated than on the day she had to undergo minor surgery.

One of the Buenos Aires newspapers owned outright by the Government ran a front-page box, allegedly describing the moment that she was being wheeled into the operating room.

“Before they put me to sleep,” she was quoted as having said, “if I do not awake—Viva Perón!”

She was born May 7, 1919, in Los Toldos, a village of Buenos Aires province, youngest of five children of Juan Duarte and Juana Ibarguren. Her father died while she was still a child, and her mother moved to the near-by town of Junin and opened a boarding house.

After two years of high school, still in her mid-teens, the slim blonde girl went to Buenos Aires on her own to seek an acting career. Through characteristic persistence, she was able to land a permanent job with Radio Belgrano, a major station, after several fruitless excursions into both radio and motion pictures.

It was in 1943 that she met at a studio party Col. Juan D. Perón, a 49-year-old widower who was Under-Secretary of the War Ministry and a rising figure on the political scene. Both evidently were impressed, for a close association resulted, and they were married secretly in October, 1945.

Even before her marriage, Evita, as she preferred to be known, began to broaden her interests to suit those of her future husband. While he was becoming the champion of the “decamisados,” originally the shirtless, and later the shirtsleeved ones, as Minister of Labor, she helped organize a radio employee’s union and undertook her first campaigns for the underprivileged.

When Colonel Perón was forced to resign from the Government in October, 1945, Señorita Duarte was dismissed from her radio post. Within a week, however, he had returned to power, and four months later he was elected President and took Señora Perón, then 26, to the executive mansion as his wife.

She set up offices in the Ministry of Labor and Social Welfare, there holding daily audiences and distributing food, medicine and money to petitioners.

Although Señora Perón insisted repeatedly that she was interested only in social work, political observers began to credit her with influence in Government affairs that was second only to her husband’s if indeed that.

In 1947 Señora Perón made a tour of Europe that was considered highly significant politically. She was feted with great enthusiasm in Madrid and decorated by Generalissimo Francisco Franco. In Rome she had an audience with Pope Pius XII, and was the subject of several leftist demonstrations. She was received by President Vincent Auriol in Paris, but canceled plans to visit England.

One of Señora Perón’s several legislative triumphs was won in September, 1947, when a bill giving women the right to vote in Argentina was approved.

Early in 1951 the Peróns started a high-pressure campaign to have themselves drafted as a husband and wife team to run the country. By late August they had “agreed” to “accept” the nominations for President and Vice President of the Perónista party.

After taking four days to make up her mind, Evita told a demonstration audience of 250,000 in Plaza Moreno that she and her husband would “do what the people want.” Then on the last day of the month, she changed her mind and declined the nomination.

In a choked voice on the same broadcast on which she had announced her decision, Señora Perón said she had hoped history would say: “There was a woman alongside General Perón who took to him the hopes and needs of the people to satisfy them, and her name was Evita.”

JOSEPH STALIN

December 18, 1878–March 5, 1953

By Harrison E. Salisbury

MOSCOW—Premier Joseph Stalin died yesterday in the Kremlin at the age of 73, it was announced officially this morning. He had been in power 29 years.

[He was actually 74. Baptismal and school records discovered decades later showed that the birth year given in his official biography was incorrect.]

The announcement was made in the name of the Central Committee of the Communist party, the Council of Ministers and the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet.

Calling on the Soviet people to rally firmly around the party and the Government, the announcement asked them to display unity and the highest political vigilance “in the struggle against internal and external foes.”

His death brought to an end the career of one of the great figures of modern times—a man whose name stands second to none as the organizer and builder of the great state structure the world knows as the Soviet Union.

The Soviet leader began his life in the simple mountain village of Gori deep in poverty-stricken Georgia. He rose to head the greatest Russian state that has ever existed.

His death from general circulatory and respiratory deficiency occurred just short of four days after he had been stricken with a brain hemorrhage in his Kremlin apartment.

A medical certificate revealed that in the last hours Mr. Stalin’s condition grew worse rapidly, with heavy and sharp circulatory and heart collapses. His breathing grew superficial and sharply irregular. His pulse rate rose to 140 to 150 a minute and at 9:50 P.M., “because of a growing circulatory and respiratory insufficiency, J. V. Stalin died.”

Pravda appeared this morning with broad black borders around its front page, which was devoted entirely to Mr. Stalin. The layout included a large photograph of the Premier, the announcement by the Government, the medical bulletin and the announcement of the formation of a funeral commission headed by Nikita S. Khrushchev, secretary of the Central Committee of the party. [No announcement was made of a successor.]

The announcement of Mr. Stalin’s death was made to the Soviet people by radio early this morning. The announcement was early enough so that persons going to work had heard the news before leaving their homes.

This correspondent circled the Kremlin several times during the evening and early morning. The great red flag flew as usual over the Supreme Soviet Presidium building behind Lenin’s Tomb. The city was quiet and sleeping, and in Red Square all was serene.

Throngs of Muscovites made their way to Red Square this morning and stood in silent tribute to their lost leader.

The Hall of Columns, where Mr. Stalin’s body will lie in state so that millions of Soviet citizens can throng past the bier and pay their last respects, is one of the most beautiful buildings in Moscow and one of the architectural jewels of Europe.

A great forty-foot portrait of Mr. Stalin in his gray generalissimo’s uniform was erected today on the front of the building. It was framed in heavy gilt.

Joseph Stalin became the most important figure in the political direction of one-third of the people of the world. He was one of a group of hard revolutionaries that established the first important Marxist state and, as its dictator, he carried forward its socialization and industrialization with vigor and ruthlessness.

During the Second World War, Stalin personally led his country’s vast armed forces to victory. When Germany was defeated, he pushed his country’s frontiers to their greatest extent and fostered the creation of a buffer belt of Marxist-oriented satellite states from Korea across Eurasia to the Baltic Sea. Probably no other man ever exercised so much influence over so wide a region.

In the late nineteen-forties, when an alarmed world saw no end to the rapid advance of the Soviet Union and her satellites, there was a hasty and frightened grouping of forces to form a battle line against the Marxist advance, with the United States the keystone in the arch of non-Marxist states.

Stalin took and kept the power in his country through a mixture of character, guile and good luck. He outlasted his country’s intellectuals, if indeed, he did not contrive to have them shot, and he wore down the theoreticians and dreamers. He could exercise great charm when he wanted to. President Harry Truman once said in an unguarded moment:

“I like old Joe. Joe is a decent fellow, but he is a prisoner of the Politburo.”

Leon Trotsky, Stalin’s brilliant and defeated adversary, regarded him as an intellectual nonentity who personified “the spirit of mediocrity” that impregnated the Soviet bureaucracy. Lenin, who valued Stalin highly as a party stalwart, characterized him as “crude” and “rough” and as a “cook who will prepare only peppery dishes.”

But those who survived the purges hailed Stalin as a supreme genius.

His role as Russia’s leader in the war brought him the admiration and high praise of Allied leaders, including President [Franklin D.] Roosevelt and [British Prime Minister] Winston Churchill.

When most of the Government machinery and the diplomatic corps were moved to Kuibyshev in December, 1941, in expectation of the imminent capture of Moscow, Stalin remained in the Kremlin to direct the operations that finally hurled the Nazi hordes from the frontyard of the capital.

With the turn of the tide against the Germans, Stalin proclaimed himself marshal of the Soviet Union and later generalissimo. He was portrayed in the Soviet and foreign press as the supreme commander responsible for overall strategy. To what extent this was true will have to be determined by the future historian, but that his role in the conduct of the war was paramount is undeniable.

Long before he dreamed of becoming the supreme autocrat of Russia, he had displayed the steel in his character as a political prisoner under the Czarist regime. A fellow prisoner gave an illustration of Stalin’s grit. This was in 1909, in the prison at Baku. In punishment [for] rioting by the prisoners, the authorities ordered that they be marched in single file between two lines of soldiers who proceeded to shower blows upon them with rifle butts. With head high, a book under his arm, Stalin walked the gantlet without a whimper, his face and head bleeding, his eyes flashing defiance.

Joseph Vissarionovich Djugashvili, later to become famous under his revolutionary name of Joseph Stalin, was born in the Georgian village of Gori Dec. 21, 1879.

His father was an impoverished and drunken shoemaker who made him sullen and resentful by regular beatings. His mother, Ekaterina, a peasant’s daughter, was a woman of singular sweetness, patience and strength of character who exercised great influence on her son. She called him Soso (Little Joe) and lived to see him dictator of the world’s largest empire.

When he was six or seven, young Stalin contracted smallpox, which left him pock-marked for life. Through the efforts of his mother, he entered a church school at nine. He was remembered there as a bright, self-assertive boy who loved argument and who flew into a fury with those who did not agree with him.

His revolutionary apprenticeship was served as an organizer of the Tiflis transportation workers. He helped stage street demonstrations and distribute revolutionary leaflets.

In April, 1899, he received his first baptism of fire at a demonstration he helped organize in the heart of the city. The demonstration was drowned in blood by Cossacks, and he went into hiding for a year to escape the police.

In April, 1902, he was arrested and lodged in the Batum prison, from which he was transferred to Kutais. While in prison he learned of the meeting in London, in 1903, of the second congress of the Russian Social Democratic party, at which the party split into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, extremists and moderates, an event that subsequently determined the course of the Russian Revolution.

Stalin allied himself with Nikolai Lenin, leader of the Bolsheviks. Trotsky was against Lenin, although in 1917, after the revolution, he joined Lenin and became his principal lieutenant in the October Revolution and in the establishment of the Soviet regime.

On July 9, 1903, while in prison in Kutais, Stalin was sentenced to three years of exile to Siberia. There he received his first letter from Lenin in response to one concerning Bolshevist policy and tactics. Determined to escape, Stalin made his way safely to Irkutsk at the end of the year. From there he proceeded to Baku, in the Caucasus, where he experienced his second baptism of fire as leader of a strike of oil workers, part of a wave of strikes that was the harbinger of the Revolution of 1905.

Shortly after the outbreak of a general strike, which was the key element in that revolution, Stalin met Lenin for the first time at a party conference in Tammerfors, Finland.

Stalin was repeatedly imprisoned and exiled, and repeatedly escaped unbowed, each time resuming his revolutionary activity and his communications with Lenin. After 20 years of revolutionary activity, Stalin, exiled in Siberia once again, found himself at a dead end.

Then came the news of the First World War in 1914, the war that Lenin predicted would bring the downfall of the Russian autocracy and world revolution.

Stalin was transferred to Atchinsk, on the Trans-Siberian Railway, and it was there he first received word of the revolution of March 12, 1917. Almost the very first act of the Provisional Revolutionary Government was to order the release of all political prisoners. Among the many thousands who profited by this decree, signed by Alexander Kerensky, head of the Provisional Government, was Joseph Stalin.

It was not until April 16, 1917, that Lenin arrived in Petrograd after his famous journey in a sealed car provided by the German General Staff. The journey led across Germany to Stockholm and through Finland. A month later Trotsky arrived from America.

Trotsky lost no time in associating himself with Lenin in his demand for the overthrow of the Provisional Government, conclusion of an immediate peace, a sweeping Socialist program and advocacy of world revolution.

In the October Revolution Stalin took a relatively modest part. The minutes of the Central Committee of the party for Oct. 23, two days before the coup d’etat, show clearly that Lenin and Trotsky took the lead in demanding approval of the uprising.

During the civil war after the Bolshevik revolution, Stalin and Trotsky were at loggerheads. Repeatedly Trotsky called him to order, and on various occasions Lenin had to intervene to make peace between them.

Already during Lenin’s illness, which lasted about two years, Stalin began preparing for his leadership of the party and of the Government. This he ultimately achieved by utilizing his new position as General Secretary of the party in building a party machine loyal to him.

After Lenin’s death, authority was vested by the party in the hands of a triumvirate, consisting of Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev. In the bitter factional polemics that ensued, Stalin, regarded as the spokesman for the center, played the left against the right and vice versa and eventually defeated both, as well as Trotsky.

In 1936, during the period of purges, Stalin proclaimed a new Constitution for Russia, with promises of universal secret suffrage and freedom of the press, speech and assembly. It was interpreted to maintain the dictatorship and to stabilize the revolution.

Not since the days of Peter the Great, who sought to westernize Russia by force, had the country witnessed so violent a transformation.

In 1929 Stalin began predicting a second world war and avowed that his purpose was to keep Russia clear of the conflict. Despite this policy, with the advent of Hitler to power he joined in collective security measures. He abruptly abandoned his advocacy of collective security in 1939, when he about-faced and signed a mutual nonaggression pact with Nazi Germany.

It led to World War II, into which Russia later was drawn by Hitler’s attack on her. This onslaught forged a Soviet alliance with the West, an alliance that ultimately enlarged the Soviet sphere.

The press prepared the Soviet public on Stalin’s 69th anniversary for the grim reality that years had left their impress even on “the teacher and inspirer of the world proletariat.” Pictures were published showing that his hair had whitened.

When he turned 70, his anniversary was celebrated in grand fashion. It was the first occasion in which Stalin had permitted public participation in his private life; hence little was known about his personal affairs.

He married twice. His first wife was Ekaterina Svanidze, who died after a long illness in 1907. They had a son, Jacob, whose fate has been unknown since he became a German prisoner during World War II.

In 1919 the Premier married Nadya Alliluyeva, the 17-year-old daughter of his old revolutionary crony, Sergei Alliluyev. She died in 1932 under mysterious circumstances. They had two children. The son, Vassily, is now a lieutenant-general in the Soviet Air Force. All that became known of the daughter was her name, Svetlana, and her intellectual interests.

POPE JOHN XXIII

November 25, 1881–June 3, 1963

ROME—Pope John XXIII, champion of world peace and a tireless fighter for the union of all Christian churches, died in the Vatican tonight while Cardinals and other prelates and several of his relatives prayed around his sickbed. He was 81 years old.

John XXIII was the 261st Pope to sit on the throne that was first occupied by the Apostle Peter. In the four years, seven months and six days of his reign he conquered the hearts of people throughout the world. Few other Popes before him were so universally admired.

The Pope’s death came at 7:49 P.M. (2:49 P.M. Eastern daylight time). After a long struggle the Pope developed peritonitis, brought on by a stomach tumor.

In his last words, addressed to the assembled Cardinals and prelates around his sickbed, the Pope said:

“Ut unum sint.” They are Latin words meaning “That they may be one.” The words were originally spoken by Jesus after the Last Supper.

Those around the bedside included the Pope’s three brothers—Giuseppe, Alfredo and Zaverio Roncalli—and his widowed sister, Assunta.

Mass for the Pope was said at an altar in an adjoining room while male nurses at the Pope’s bedside prepared him to receive the sacrament of extreme unction and absolution. This rite is performed in much the same way as it would be for any layman, except that the Pope does not receive absolution for carnal sins.

While the Pope’s sister and his personal secretary, Msgr. Loris Capovilla, sobbed aloud, everyone present recited prayers. Cardinal Fernando Cento, the Grand Penitentiary, bent over the Pope. Then he straightened and said to the assembled company: “Vere Papa mortuus est” (“In truth the Pope is dead”).

—Arnaldo Cortesi

Pope John XXIII saw himself first and always as a simple priest. In his first speech after he became Patriarch of Venice in 1953 he said:

“I come from humble origins.… Providence moved me from my native village and made me travel the roads of the world in the east and the west, bringing me in contact with people of different religions and different ideologies, into contact with acute and threatening social problems, and preserved in me the calm and equilibrium of investigation and appraisal.”

In this role Pope John set himself to preserve the simple parish virtues of the Roman Catholic Church in a world menaced by atheistic Communism, which exploited militant racism and petty nationalism and tribal discord such as shook Africa in the early years of his reign.

A great event in the reign of Pope John began on Oct. 11, 1962, when he opened the 21st Ecumenical Council in the Vatican amid scenes of great pomp and splendor. In opening the assembly, the Pope called for the “visible unity in truth of all the followers of Christ.” Such councils are convened by Popes to provide advice on matters of great religious importance. The first Ecumenical Council was convened in 325. The latest one before the 1962 Council was in 1869–70.

On April 10, 1963, Pope John issued his encyclical “Pacem in Terris” (“Peace on Earth”), and few communications from a Pope have had as much impact on the world.

In an obvious allusion to Communism, Pope John declared that great historical movements could not be identified simply with philosophical teachings that may have been false. The movements that arise from these teachings, he said, can come to “contain elements that are positive and deserving of approval.” In moving words, the Pope pleaded for universal peace, and “Pacem in Terris” was acclaimed by people of many faiths and beliefs.

Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli became the 261st Supreme Pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church in 1958. A short, stout man of 76, he had white hair and was slightly bent with age. He had a large hawk nose, a bright smile and eyes keen with study and contemplation. His easy and natural amiability had endeared him to all sorts and conditions of men. He liked a good dinner and was believed to be the first Pope to smoke cigarettes.

He was born Nov. 25, 1881, in a cold and uncomfortable 200-year-old house of thick gray stone in the Lombardy village of Sotto il Monte, five miles from Bergamo.

Angelo Roncalli’s father, Giovanni Roncalli, was a landless sharecropper. Eventually he saved enough money to buy the farm that he worked. In later years the future Pope John wrote of his childhood:

“We were poor but happy. We did not realize that we lacked anything, and, in truth, we didn’t. Ours was a dignified and happy poverty.”

Since the fifteenth century, the family had worshiped God in the region’s village churches, such as the one in Sotto il Monte, where Angelo was baptized late at night on the day he was born. On that night the village was shaken by a storm and the priest had grumbled mildly at being kept out of bed, but the Roncallis believed in prompt baptism, just in case. Angelo was the third child in a family of thirteen children.

When he was 11, Angelo entered the seminary at Bergamo; he said some years later that he had never wanted to be anything but a priest. He won a scholarship for study at the Seminario Romano in Rome, sometimes called the Apollinaire.

He was ordained a priest on Aug. 10, 1904, in the church of Santa Maria in Rome, and celebrated his first mass the next day in St. Peter’s Basilica.

Bergamo, a magnet to Angelo Roncalli for many years, drew him to his first task after he became a priest secretary to the new bishop, Giacomo Radini-Tedeschi.

Because Bergamo was near Milan, it was natural that Don Angelo should have many occasions to go there, particularly to visit the famous Ambrosiana Library. Msgr. Achille Ratti, who was to become Pope Pius XI, was then prefect of the library and he formed a good opinion of the young priest.

In 1925 the Pope named Msgr. Roncalli an Archbishop, charged with protecting the interests of the small Roman Catholic minority in Bulgaria. In 1935 he became Apostolic Delegate to Turkey and Greece and took up residence in Istanbul.

Toward the end of World War II, Archbishop Roncalli was named Papal Nuncio in Paris and head of the Vatican diplomatic mission to the victorious Government of Brig. Gen. Charles de Gaulle.

It was a delicate task. He did what he could to mitigate the fury of the avenging de Gaulle forces and of the Communists against the partisans of the defeated Vichy Government. He also aided the hundreds of German Roman Catholic divinity students who were military prisoners of war in France.

About the same time, he was approached by Franz von Papen, German Ambassador to Turkey, who later wrote that while Msgr. Roncalli “could see no alternative to a German defeat,” he “forwarded to the Vatican my pleas that the Allies should realize the difference between the Hitler regime and the German people.”

On Jan. 12, 1953, at the age of 71, Msgr. Roncalli was elevated to the College of Cardinals by Pope Pius XII and was named Patriarch of Venice. He soon became a familiar figure as he went about the canals in a police launch. He never used a gondola. He said that he was a modern prelate and that the gondola was old-fashioned.

Pius died on Oct. 9, 1958, and 19 days later, on the 11th or 12th ballot, the College of Cardinals elected Cardinal Roncalli as his successor. On Nov. 4, 1958, he was crowned Pope in impressive ceremonies at St. Peter’s.

Pius XII had been a lean, intense man with an air of great asceticism who once told of having seen a vision of Jesus by his bedside. His successor entered briskly into possession of the papacy, moved the furniture about and changed a good many customs, including the custom that the Pope eats alone. Pope John usually ate with members of his immediate administrative household, and the atmosphere was somewhat less ethereal than it had been under his predecessor.

On the day after Christmas in the first year of his reign, Pope John visited the prisoners in Rome’s Regina Coeli prison.

“Since you could not come to me, I came to you,” he told them. He recalled to the men that a member of his family had once been under arrest for poaching.

When he ascended the throne of St. Peter, Pope John indicated that an attempt to heal the rift begun in 1054 between the Eastern Catholic Church and the Roman Catholic Church would be one of his aims.

The Vatican reacted cautiously in 1960 to the presidential candidacy of Senator John F. Kennedy, the second Roman Catholic, after Gov. Alfred E. Smith of New York, to receive the nomination of a major party. The Vatican refrained from making any reference to Senator Kennedy’s religion. Spokesmen let it be known that under no circumstances would the Vatican attempt to bring pressure of any kind on Catholics to vote for Senator Kennedy or on Mr. Kennedy himself should he be elected.

The constant menace of nuclear warfare distressed Pope John, who appealed to nations to put aside the means of nuclear war. He also took great interest in scientific development, such as the penetration of space.

During his reign the Vatican’s relations with some Communist countries showed signs of improving. In April, 1963, he sent a representative to Poland and Hungary to try to pave the way for an accord.

Vatican officials stressed that the Pontiff was not easing his anti-Communist position. They said he was merely trying to make conditions less oppressive for Roman Catholics living behind the Iron Curtain.

On Aug. 7, 1960, in a radio allocution from Castel Gandolfo, his summer residence, the Pope made this plea to Christ for intercession to save the world from physical and moral destruction:

“Divine Redeemer, who for the life of the world does daily on our altars offer to the eternal Father the sacrifice of the body and blood, protect the human race from the dangers of death!”

Two and one-half months after his coronation, Pope John elevated 23 Cardinals, and in March, 1960, he created eight more. This latter group included the first Negro Cardinal, the first Filipino and the first Japanese.

Pope John had a keen sense of togetherness with his staff, and one of his first acts as Pope was to give Vatican workers a substantial pay raise.

He handled the bulk of his daily business in his office in the library overlooking St. Peter’s Square. On his desk was a crucifix and a picture of the Madonna. On a separate table was a white telephone, Extension 101. The phone was for outgoing calls. Nobody telephones directly to the Pope.

After a brief rest after lunch, Pope John often took a short walk in the Vatican gardens. He sometimes watched a television program for a few minutes in the evening and usually returned to his desk for work before retiring.

The Pontiff’s daily routine illustrated the fact that he retained all the simplicity of life of his predecessor, but not all of the austerity.

WINSTON CHURCHILL

November 30, 1874–January 24, 1965

By Anthony Lewis

LONDON—Sir Winston Churchill is dead.

The great figure who embodied man’s will to resist tyranny passed into history this morning at his home. He was 90 years old.

His old friend and physician, Lord Moran, gave the news to the world after informing Queen Elizabeth II and Prime Minister Harold Wilson.

The announcement was read at 8:35 A.M. to members of the press standing in the rain at the entrance to Hyde Park Gate, the small street south of Kensington Gardens where Sir Winston had lived for so long.

Lord Moran had come to the house at 7:18. A few minutes earlier Sir Winston’s son, Randolph, had driven up. Also there at the end were Lady Churchill and their daughter, Sarah, and Randolph’s son, Winston.

Another daughter, Mary, Mrs. Christopher Soames, also survives Sir Winston. Other survivors are 10 grandchildren and three great-grandchildren, the last born just two days ago.

The world had been watching and waiting since Jan. 15, when it was announced that Sir Winston had suffered a stroke. Medical experts said that only phenomenal tenacity and spirit of life could enable a man of 90 to hold off death so long in these circumstances.

But then those were the qualities that had made Winston Churchill a historical figure in his lifetime. His pluck in rallying Britain to victory in World War II saved not only this country but, in all likelihood, free nations everywhere.

Sir Winston will be given a state funeral, the first commoner so to be honored since the death of William Ewart Gladstone in 1898. The body will lie in state in Westminster Hall for several days. Services will be held in St. Paul’s Cathedral.

Today was the anniversary of the death of Sir Winston’s father, Lord Randolph Churchill, a somewhat eccentric Tory politician. He died in 1894.

For virtually everyone in Great Britain, Sir Winston’s death will be a wrenching personal loss and a symbolic break with a past whose glories seem already faded.

For the world, too, it is the end of an age.

Sir Winston will always be remembered as the great war leader who defied Hitler. But he was more than that, a personality larger than life, an extraordinary man in language and character as well as war and politics.

He was the linchpin of the Grand Alliance of 26 nations that vanquished the Axis powers in 1945 after nearly six years of war. For him as for his countrymen his finest hour came in 1940 when Britain stood alone, beleaguered at sea and in the air.

He employed all his skill as an orator to rally British pride and courage, and all his ability as a statesman to get arms and sustenance from abroad. With almost all of Europe under or about to fall under the Nazi jackboot, it was Sir Winston who flung this challenge at the enemy:

“We shall not flag, or fail. We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God’s good time, the new world, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.”

As the late President John F. Kennedy said in 1963, in conferring upon Sir Winston an honorary citizenship of the United States, “He mobilized the English language and sent it into battle.”

Quite apart from his fame as a world statesman and global strategist, he won distinction as an artist and fame as a historian, notably of Great Britain, and author. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1953. A special citation paid tribute to his oratory.

In 1953, Queen Elizabeth II, the last of the six British sovereigns he served, conferred upon him the highest order of chivalry that can come to a commoner: Knight Companion of the Order of the Garter.

Sir Winston’s paramount place in history lay in providing the leadership and ensuring the cohesion of the three great wartime allies—Britain, the Soviet Union and the United States. He was a warm friend of Franklin D. Roosevelt and a tactfully candid collaborator with Josef Stalin.

He was constantly on the go—to Washington, to Moscow, to the various fronts and to the conferences of the Big Three at Teheran, Yalta and finally Potsdam.

It was in the middle of this postwar conference in 1945 that he learned that the British people had turned out his Government at the polls. As leader of the Opposition for the next six years he fought Socialism at home and Communism abroad; in 1951 he became Prime Minister a second time.

His was among the first voices to warn of the dangers of Soviet expansionist exploitation of the peace, as it had been among the first to cry out against the hidden danger of Hitlerism.

On March 5, 1946, he delivered his famous speech at Fulton, Mo. Although he spoke no longer as head of a government, his words were flashed around the world.

Introduced by President Harry S. Truman, he said: “From Stettin on the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of central and eastern Europe—Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia—all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere and are all subject in one form or another not only to Soviet influence but to a very high, and in many cases increasing, measure of control from Moscow.”

Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill was born on Nov. 30, 1874, at Blenheim Palace, built for his illustrious ancestor the first Duke of Marlborough. His father, who had a distinguished political career, was the third son of the seventh Duke of Marlborough. His mother was the former Jennie Jerome of New York.

Winston was an undersized, emotional child. He adored his brilliant father, who, however, was convinced by his son’s school failures that the boy was retarded. The child saw little of his mother and became deeply attached to his nurse, Mrs. Everest. When he became one of the greatest figures of his age, Mrs. Everest’s picture was over his desk.

After attendance at a small private school, where he was brutally caned, Winston was sent to Harrow. He twice failed his entrance examinations to the Royal Military College at Sandhurst and was finally admitted to the “cavalry class,” a sort of scholastic back door for young gentlemen wealthy enough to provide their own horses.

After graduating in 1894, he became a lieutenant in the Fourth (Queen’s Own) Hussars. There being no active service at the moment, he went to Cuba as a war correspondent, without giving up his commission.

In 1897–98 he fought in India and the Sudan as a war correspondent-officer, a dual role then permitted. Returning to England, he found he lacked the Latin or Greek required for Oxford, and decided to enter politics forthwith. But he was badly defeated in a hopeless race for the House of Commons.

In 1899, not yet 25, he took the field in his fifth campaign, in South Africa. Captured and interned by Boers, he managed to escape in a characteristic burst of skill and good luck; the Boers offered a reward for his capture, saying he had a “small, hardly noticeable mustache, talks through his nose and cannot pronounce the letter S properly.”

Back again in England, Sir Winston stood again for Parliament and this time was elected, taking his seat on Jan. 23, 1901. Thus began a stormy tenure that saw him switch parties twice, from Conservatives to Liberals and back again; serve in Cabinet posts of increasing importance; and play a central role in a succession of crises, from the labor strife of the 1910’s through World War I, the postwar demobilization and the Irish civil war.

As First Lord of the Admiralty in World War I, he became a strong and controversial advocate for naval action in the Mediterranean. The resulting British-French expedition to the Dardanelles ended catastrophically at the battle of Gallipoli, in 1915–16. But by that time Churchill had already resigned from the Government, serving at his own request as an infantry officer in France.

In the 1920’s, after his return to Parliament, he developed serious differences with his fellow Conservative Stanley Baldwin, the bland, pipe-smoking Prime Minister, who believed that the British people wanted peace at almost any price. Churchill believed that the nation should be aroused to the dangers of a second world war.

In the Churchill of the early 1930’s, portly, middle-aged and at times pugnacious, dignity joined with youthful high spirits to make the figure the world was to know in World War II.

Sir Winston lived handsomely in the international world of fashion and politics. He smoked expensive cigars and drank the best brandy. He knew many of the world’s most interesting people.

In 1937, the first coalition Government of Neville Chamberlain came to power, but pacifist sentiment was strong and Churchill was not asked to join the Cabinet.

At 6 P.M. Sept. 3, 1939, seven hours and 45 minutes after Britain had declared war on Germany, a wireless flash told British men-of-war in all parts of the world:

“Winston is back.”

Churchill was made First Lord of the Admiralty, his post in 1914 at the outbreak of the World War I.

On May 10, 1940, Germany invaded the Netherlands and Belgium and the distraught Neville Chamberlain resigned as Prime Minister. King George VI invited Churchill to form a new Government.

In his memoirs Churchill wrote:

“I was conscious of a profound sense of relief. At last I had authority to give direction over the whole scene.”

Churchill, who was then 65, possessed a capacity for work seldom equaled. He drove his associates with memorandums that crackled. It was usually: “Pray let me know by 4 P.M. today on one sheet of paper…”

On May 11 the formation of his National Coalition Government was announced, and on May 13 he told Parliament grimly that “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.”

Britain had not been in such peril since the Spanish Armada. A French military leader predicted that Britain was going to have her “neck wrung like a chicken.” Later, Churchill remarked: “Some neck. Some chicken!”

On June 18, when it had become apparent that France was capitulating to the German invaders, Churchill broadcast a message of courage and defiance. His concluding sentence will be long remembered:

“Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour.’”

Not long afterward, the Germans launched their long-expected air attack against Britain. It was anyone’s bet whether Britain’s air force could stave off defeat, but by the end of October it was clear that it had done so.

Meanwhile, Churchill sought to convince the United States that its interests demanded that it join Britain in the war. Toward this end he was greatly aided by the presence of President Roosevelt, a cultivated, European-minded statesman and a strong Anglophile.

When the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, ensured the entrance of the United States on Britain’s side, Churchill’s relief was great. As he wrote later, “Being saturated and satiated with emotion and sensation, I went to bed and slept the sleep of the saved and thankful.”

Still, reversals throughout 1941 stirred Parliamentary opposition to the Prime Minister. On Jan. 27, 1942, a three-day secret debate began in the House of Commons. The House finally voted confidence in the Government by 461 to 1.

President Roosevelt sent Churchill his congratulations. “It is fun to be in the same decade with you,” the President cabled.

As the tide of battle turned in favor of the Allies, Churchill met several times with his Big Three counterparts—President Roosevelt and Premier Stalin, notably at Teheran and Yalta—to clarify war aims and plan a postwar world order.

On May 7, 1945, the Prime Minister proclaimed the end of European hostilities in a broadcast to the British people. But just a few weeks later his coalition Government broke up, and the Tories were defeated in the national election. Six years later, with Labor clinging to a tenuous majority, Churchill forced an election and was returned to power as Prime Minister, but with a majority of only 16 seats.

Long sick of war and its horrors, Sir Winston would have liked to crown his career with the creation of a structure for durable and lasting world peace. But a succession of conferences of great powers fell considerably short of his hopes. On April 2, 1955, he called upon Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace and received her permission to submit his resignation as Prime Minister.

He retained his seat in the House of Commons until just prior to last October’s general election, when he announced, nearing 90, that he would not stand again. Having been elected uninterruptedly since 1924, he had become the “Father of the House of Commons.”

Apart from his political and literary gifts, Churchill was widely known as an enthusiastic amateur painter. His touch on canvas was softer than that of Hitler, who also had sought relaxation at the easel. Hitler, who had once striven to be an architect, tended to hold to a hard drawn line. Sir Winston liked the soft touch of the French impressionists. For several years his paintings were reproduced as Christmas cards.

HO CHI MINH

May 19, 1890–September 2, 1969

HONG KONG—President Ho Chi Minh of North Vietnam died yesterday morning in Hanoi at the age of 79.

A Hanoi radio report said he succumbed after a heart attack.

[Vietnamese leaders later asserted that they falsified the date of Ho’s death. A statement said that because the death—on Sept. 2—fell on Vietnam’s National Day, the party leadership announced that he died a day later “to prevent the date of Uncle Ho’s death from coinciding with a day of great national rejoicing.”

—The Associated Press

By Alden Whitman

Among 20th-century statesmen, Ho Chi Minh was remarkable for the tenacity and patience with which he pursued his goal of Vietnamese independence and for his success in blending Communism with nationalism.

From his youth Ho espoused freedom for the French colony of Vietnam. He persevered through years when his chances of success were so minuscule as to seem ridiculous. Ultimately, he organized the defeat of the French in 1954 in the historic battle of Dienbienphu, which occurred nine years after he was named President of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam.

After the supposed temporary division of Vietnam at the 17th parallel by the Geneva Agreement of 1954, and after that division became hardened by United States support of Ngo Dinh Diem in the South, Ho led his countrymen in the North against the onslaughts of American military might.

Ho was also an inspiration for the National Liberation Front, or Vietcong, which operated in South Vietnam in the long, bloody and costly conflict against the Saigon regime and its American allies.

In the war, Ho maintained an exquisite balance in his relations with the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China, Communist countries that were his principal suppliers of war goods.

To the 19 million people north of the 17th parallel and to millions below it, the small, frail figure of Ho, with its long ascetic face, straggly goatee and luminous eyes, was that of a patriarch, the George Washington of his nation.

He was universally called “Uncle Ho.” His popularity was such that it was generally conceded that Vietnam would have been unified under his leadership had the countrywide elections pledged at Geneva taken place. As it was, major segments of South Vietnam were effectively controlled by the National Liberation Front despite the presence of hundreds of thousands of American troops.

Intelligent, resourceful and dedicated, Ho created a favorable impression on many who dealt with him, among them Harry Ashmore of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions and former editor of The Arkansas Gazette.

“Ho was a courtly, urbane, highly sophisticated man with a gentle manner and without personal venom,” Mr. Ashmore recalled after a visit in 1967. At the meeting Ho wore his characteristic high-necked white pajama type of garment and rubber sandals.

Ho reminded Mr. Ashmore that he had once visited the United States. “I think I know the American people,” Ho said, “and I don’t understand how they can support their involvement in this war. Is the Statue of Liberty standing on her head?”

Ho was an enormously pragmatic Communist, a doer rather than a theoretician. And like Mao Tse-tung, a fellow Communist leader, Ho composed poetry, some of it quite affecting. One poem, written when he was a prisoner of the Chinese Nationalists, is called “Autumn Night” and includes this passage:

Innocent, I have now endured a whole year in prison.

Using my tears for ink, I turn my

thoughts into verses.

Ho’s rise to power and world eminence was not a fully documented story, in part because he used a dozen aliases, of which Ho Chi Minh (which can be translated as Ho, the Shedder of Light) was but one. Another reason was his reluctance to disclose biographical information

The most reliable evidence indicates he was born May 19, 1890, in Kimlien, a village in central Vietnam. It is generally accepted that his birth name was Nguyen Tat Thanh.

His father was only slightly better off than the area’s rice peasants, but he passed examinations that gave him a job in the imperial administration just when the French rule was beginning.

An ardent nationalist, Ho’s father joined anti-French secret societies. Young Ho got his first underground experience as his father’s messenger in the anti-French network. Shortly, the father lost his Government job and became a traditional healer. Ho’s mother was believed to have been of peasant origin.

Ho attended the village school and high school at the Lycee Quoc-Hoc in the old imperial capital of Hue. He then decided to go to Europe. As a step toward that goal, he went to a trade school in Saigon, where he learned the duties of a kitchen boy and pastry cook’s helper, skills in demand by Europeans of that day.

He signed aboard a ship as a kitchen boy. In his travels, he visited Marseilles and ports in Africa and North America. Explaining the significance of these voyages for Ho’s education as a revolutionary, the late Bernard Fall, an American authority of Vietnam, wrote in “The Two Vietnams”:

“His contacts with the white colonizers on their home grounds shattered any of his illusions as to their ‘superiority,’ and his association with sailors from Brittany, Cornwall and the Frisian Islands—as illiterate and superstitious as the most backward Vietnamese rice farmer—did the rest.”

With the advent of World War I, Ho went to live in London, where he worked as a cook’s helper under Escoffier, the master chef, at the Carlton Hotel. Sometime during the war, Ho journeyed to the United States, and around 1918 he returned to France and lived in the Montmartre section of Paris.

At the Versailles Peace Conference of 1919 Ho emerged as a self-appointed spokesman for his native land. Seeing the possibility of Vietnam’s independence, Ho, dressed in a hired black suit and bowler hat, traveled to the Palace of Versailles to present his case. He was not received, although he offered a program for Vietnam that included basic freedoms and equality between the French rulers and the native population.

When the Versailles Conference failed to settle colonial issues, Ho’s faith was transferred to Socialist action. He became a founding member of the French Communist party because he believed that the Communists were willing to promote national liberation.

With that decision, Ho’s career took a turn. For one thing, he became the French party’s resident expert on colonial affairs. He also gravitated to Moscow, then the nerve center of world Communism. He went there first in 1922 for the Fourth Comintern Congress, where he met Lenin and became a member of the Comintern’s Southeast Asia Bureau.

Moscow was his base for years. He attended the University of the Toilers of the East, receiving training in Marxism and the techniques of agitation and propaganda.

In 1925 Ho was dispatched to Canton, China, to help Chiang Kai-shek, then in Communist favor as an heir of Sun Yat-sen. Once in Canton, Ho set about spreading the spirit of revolution in the Far East. He organized Vietnamese refugees into the Vietnam Revolutionary Youth Association and set up the League of Oppressed Peoples of Asia, which became the South Seas Communist party, the forerunner of various national Communist groups, including his Indochinese Communist party of 1930.

In July, 1927, when Chiang turned on his Communist allies, Ho fled to Moscow. He later traveled among Vietnamese exiles and published newspapers that were smuggled over the border into Vietnam.

In 1930, Ho helped organize the Indochinese Communist party, which became the Vietnamese Communist party and later the Vietnamese Workers party. In that year, a peasant rebellion erupted in Vietnam, which the Communists backed.

Ho was back in China in 1938 as a communications operator with Mao Tse-tung’s Eighth Route Army. Subsequently, he found his way south and entered Vietnam in 1940 for the first time in 30 years. The timing was ideal. The Japanese had taken control of the Indochinese Peninsula, and the French administrators agreed to cooperate with the Japanese. With great daring and imagination, Ho took advantage of World War II to piece together a coalition of Vietnamese nationalists and Communists into what was called the Vietminh, or Independence Front.

The Vietminh created a 10,000-man guerrilla force that battled the Japanese in the jungles. Ho’s actions projected him onto the world scene as the leading Vietnamese nationalist and an ally of the United States against the Japanese.

In 1942 Ho was sent to Kunming. He was arrested there by Chiang Kai-shek’s men and jailed until September, 1943.

On his release, according to Mr. Fall, he helped form a large Vietnamese freedom group. One result was that in 1944 Ho accepted a portfolio in the Provisional Republican Government of Vietnam. Ho’s Vietminh took over Hanoi in 1945, and it was in this period that he took the name Ho Chi Minh.

With the end of World War II, Ho proclaimed the independence of Vietnam, but it took nine years for his declaration to become an effective fact. Under the Big Three Agreement at Potsdam, the Chinese Nationalists occupied Hanoi and northern Vietnam. The French arrived to reclaim Saigon and the country’s southern portion. Ho’s nationalist coalition was strained under pressure of these events.

Forming a new guerrilla force around the Vietminh, Ho and his colleagues dealt summarily with dissidents unwilling to fight for independence. As the Chinese withdrew from the north and the French advanced from the south, Ho negotiated with the French to save his nationalist regime.

In 1946 Ho agreed to let the Democratic Republic of Vietnam become a part of the French Union as a free state within the Indochina federation. The French recognized Ho as chief of state and promised a plebiscite in the South on the question of a unified Vietnam under Ho.

By the start of 1947, the agreement had broken down, and Ho’s men were fighting the French Army. The Vietminh guerrillas held the jungles and villages, the French the cities. For seven years the war raged as Ho’s forces gathered strength.

On May 8, 1954, the French forces were decisively defeated at Dienbienphu. The Indochina war ended officially in July at a cost to the French of 172,000 casualties and to the Vietminh of perhaps three times that many.

The cease-fire accord was signed in Geneva July 21, 1954. By that time the United States, fearful of Communist expansion in Asia, was involved in Vietnam on the French side.

The Geneva Accord divided Vietnam at the 17th parallel, creating a North and a South Vietnam. It removed the French administration and provided for all-Vietnam elections in 1956.

But the United States declined to sign the Geneva Accord, and South Vietnam refused to hold the elections. The United States built up its military mission in Saigon to counter continued guerrilla activity of the National Liberation Front.

Beginning in 1964, thousands of American troops were poured into South Vietnam to battle the Vietcong and then bomb North Vietnam. The halt of American bombing in 1968 finally led to the peace negotiations in Paris, but fighting in South Vietnam continued.

Throughout, Ho was confident of victory. Even in early 1967 he told Mr. Ashmore, “We have been fighting for our independence for more than 25 years, and of course we cherish peace, but we will never surrender our independence to purchase a peace with the United States or any party.”