Tag Archives: History

****Catherine of Aragon: Henry’s Spanish Queen

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English history, Catherine of Aragon, Henry VIII

Book Cover and Matching Lamp (photo: author)

By Giles Tremlett – An excellent, well researched and highly readable biography that breathes life into the woman Henry was married to for 24 years—longer than all his other wives put together. As The Guardian says, “Catherine of Aragon tends to get shuffled into the Prologue, something to be rushed through as quickly as possible. You can’t help feeling, along with Henry himself, that things would be so much pacier if only Spanish Catherine would hurry up and cede her place to that home-grown minx, Anne Boleyn.”

But Catherine stuck it out, refusing to be divorced from Henry and finally dying, abandoned and isolated from court—though still much-loved by the common people. Her death freed Henry of Anne, as well, and only 19 weeks later Anne of the Waspish Tongue was beheaded. Neither woman produced a male heir, a persistent frustration for Henry.

Catherine was well prepared to be a staunch defender of the Catholic principles that underlay her opposition to the divorce, even though she feared she and her daughter Mary might themselves be executed. She had powerful parents, Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, to serve as role models. Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, was her nephew to whom she sent pleas for support. Catherine’s ultimate decision not to goad Charles into war was “possibly as important as any other she made,” says Tremlett.

The impact of Catherine and Henry’s marriage still reverberates. She petitioned the Pope for aid, and his support, albeit tardy, led to Henry’s assertion of his authority over the church, the schism with Rome, and formation of the Church of England. In her five-year reign, Catherine’s daughter Mary (“Bloody Mary”) attempted to restore the Church, perpetuating the religious crisis, and it was left to Anne Boleyn’s daughter Elizabeth I to complete the Reformation.

Tremlett’s descriptions of the political to-and-fro, court life for insiders and outsiders, and the place of women in Tudor society create living, breathing—and unforgettable—characters at this massive historical turning point.

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“The Gatekeepers” Redux

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Gaza, Israel, Palestinians, Middle East conflict

(photo: c2.staticflickr.com)

Fred Kaplan’s important Slate article this week about Israeli leaders’ apparent inability to think strategically about its worsening situation—at home and in the world—included a reference to the superb documentary of 2013, The Gatekeepers, originally reviewed here 3-18-13. That review is, alas, increasingly relevant, and here it is.

Saw the amazing documentary, The Gatekeepers, yesterday. It reviews the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict through the eyes and words of all six surviving directors of Shin Bet, the Israeli security agency. Old footage of the Six-Day War in 1968—after which Israel annexed the West Bank, the Golan Heights, and Gaza—and subsequent events—the bus bombings, the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, the intifadas, pinpoint bombings of Palestinian targets, meetings brokered by President Clinton—all roll on hopelessly toward the present stalemate.

To a man, these former spy chiefs, who have studied the Israeli security situation closer than anyone else, believe the hardline strategy has been a mistake, that fighting when Israel should have been working for peace has made the country less safe, not more. Continued saber-rattling takes its toll on every one of them, and their childhood dreams of a peaceful Israel have turned into a nightmare for everyone, Israeli and Palestinian alike. As one said, “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.” This line from the New York Times review is especially apt. “It is hard to imagine a movie about the Middle East that could be more timely, more painfully urgent, more challenging to conventional wisdom on all sides of the conflict.”

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Amen.

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amen, Costa-Gavras, Vatican, NaziCosta-Gavras’s 2002 movie about the role of The Vatican in World War II (you can watch it here) was certain to be controversial, as opinions are strongly felt, relevant information is still secreted in Vatican archives, and the movie is based on a controversial play, The Deputy, by an erratic German playwright, Rolf Hochhuth. (The movie promotion, like this poster, offended many, as well.)

Most interesting is the portrayal of an SS officer hired to help “control vermin” at military bases—typhus was a big problem—using deadly Zyklon B gas. At a concentration camp, he witnesses the gas being used against people and is so horrified, he makes many efforts to bring religious leaders’ attention to the carnage, believing that if they would only speak out, the horror will stop. He befriends a (fictional) young Jesuit who joins his crusade and takes these concerns all the way to Pope Pius XII.

In real life, and improbably, such an SS officer did exist. Kurt Gerstein was thrown out of the Nazi party in the 1930s, yet allowed to join the SS in 1941 and, because of his engineering and medical education, soon became head of the Technical Disinfection Services. In custody after the war, he wrote lengthy testimony about the death camps that became prominent evidence in subsequent war crimes trials, including at Nuremberg. Gerstein died in French custody in 1945, reportedly by suicide. His story is included in Europe Central, a National Book Award-winning novel by William T. Vollman.

Throughout the period, the Pope’s pronouncements were consistently anti-war, but vague. In the movie, he doesn’t speak out about the Jews, specifically, for a number of reasons (explored in an interesting article by Jewish historians here): The Vatican’s neutrality (the Allies and the Nazis both criticized it for favoring the other side); fear that Church properties in Germany would be seized, or The Vatican itself invaded; and concern that opposition to Germany would give support to the atheistic Soviets, with communism deemed the greater long-term threat to the Church. When this issue came up during a visit to Auschwitz and Birkenau, an American Catholic defended the Church, saying rather heatedly that the Pope couldn’t speak out, or “the nuns and priests would be next.”

People's Palace, Bucharest, Palace of the Parliament, Romania

Parliament, Bucharest (photo: 1.bp.blogspot.com)

Despite all this, many individual clergy and religious moved to protect threatened individuals, and the Pope himself quietly urged Catholic churches, convents, and other facilities to take in Jews, and the movie includes this. Amen. makes for interesting viewing, and perhaps we will never know the full story.

As a side-note, I learned about this movie when visiting Romania last year. Because filming inside The Vatican was not allowed, the movie Vatican was the enormous, surreally empty “People’s Palace” in Bucharest.

****Spycraft

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Desmond Llewelyn, Q, James Bond, Spycraft

Desmond Llewelyn as “Q” (photo: wikimedia.org)

By Robert Wallace, H. Keith Melton, and Henry Robert Schlesinger. Foreword by George Tenet, narration by David Drummond. The digitization and miniaturization everywhere in our daily lives has affected tradecraft in the espionage world, too—and sometimes began there before entering the consumer market. Initially, the CIA tried to heavily censor Spycraft: The Secret History of the CIA’s Spytechs, from Communism to Al-Qaeda, but eventually ended up making almost no changes. The book details the history of the Agency’s Office of Technical Services—the department that, since World War II, has come up with all the dead drops, audio surveillance techniques, secret inks, espionage gear, and so on needed by field agents. Q, in other words.

Co-authored by a former OTS director, Spycraft begins with a review of cases involving some of the most notorious and significant, mostly Soviet, spies run by the CIA, then turns to a detailed review of various spycraft essentials and what makes them work—or not—in the field. The history of the Soviet spies, most of whom were discovered and executed, provides an appreciation for the steady improvements in technology, though it’s pretty much a mug’s game, because improvements in detection soon follow. The challenge is to remain one step ahead. I didn’t come away with a satisfactory answer to the key question: with all this amazing technology, how come the CIA has missed the big plays? 9/11, Iraq’s true WMD situation, the Arab Spring?

For anyone writing spy and espionage fiction, Spycraft summarizes innumerable backstory issues and technical details that must be right! But beyond these specifics, the choice of what OTS worked on and how the technical officers solved problems reveals the dilemmas faced by field agents. Other readers may simply be amazed at the scope and persistence of this clandestine effort. (Amazon reader rating: 4.5 stars.)

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*****His Excellency: George Washington

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George Washington

General George Washington at Trenton by John Trumbull

By Joseph J. Ellis–Historical figures go in and out of fashion like men’s wide lapels, and I must have had my little exposure to George Washington during one of his dreary periods, because, well, yawn. This book was a revelation. It presents Washington in a balanced light, including his flaws, though the author is obviously a fan. With two Pulitzers to his credit (for Founding Brothers and American Sphinx, a biography of Thomas Jefferson), Ellis knows his early American history. I had a timely trip to nearby Monmouth Battlefield—where “Molly Pitcher” pitched in—which made the Revolutionary War period of Washington’s career come further alive.

Because mammoth biographies of Washington already exist, and his papers and letters have been preserved and cataloged, “The great American patriarch sits squarely in front of us: vulnerable, exposed, even talkative at last.” Thus Ellis’s purposes were to create a biography of modest size (275 pages), not another in an “endless row of verbal coffins,” and to put Washington in clearer context with respect to revolutionary ideology, social and economic forces, the political and military strategic options of 1776, slavery, and the fate of the Indians. The result is an eminently readable story that I expect will provide every reader with new insights about the supremely human Father of our country.

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History is Personal

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Edwards, Wilson County

Edwards graveyard, Wilson County, Tenn. (photo: author)

A trip to the New York Public Library’s Milstein Division this week with three friends was a chance to catch up on the progress we’re making with our family genealogies. Each of us has made surprising discoveries—a grandfather who, as a baby, was left at the doorstep of a foundling hospital; Tennessee Civil War veterans who lived the agonizing struggle of “brother against brother”; the ancestor who lived next door to the real-life House of the Seven Gables in Salem, Massachusetts, and was a member of the Salem Grand Jury two decades before the witch trials; the family grave markers revealing sons who died within days of each other in the 1918 influenza outbreak. I even know the names and a bit of the history of the ships that brought some of my ancestors to America in 1633 and the early 1900’s (Griffin, Kaiser Wilhelm II, and Amerika).

All writers can find inspiration in history, says a recent blog on the Writer magazine website by Hillary Casavant. From my own experience, looking at lives reduced to a few lines transcribed from some 180-year-old deed book, or the estate inventory that includes not only “a cowe and hoggs,” but also salt, pepper, and a coffee pot makes you think about what was valuable in a person’s life generations ago. (As a measure of changing living standards, my household has four coffee-pots and three tea-pots. No cowe or hoggs, though.)

These shards of insight prompt the thought, “I’d like to know the story behind that.” Just such an impulse set a writing colleague on a path to research one of her ancestors, born in the late 1800’s—the first woman to serve as a probation officer in the London criminal courts. Information is scattered, and she has the challenge of writing a fictionalized history. Another writer friend is compiling a set of essays on her family’s history that is closer to a conventional memoir, but viewed through a psychological lens—a thoughtful analysis of how a father’s treatment of his sons echoes through the family generations later.

Writers use history in many different ways to “make it real.” From my recent reading, additional examples are Robert Harris’s An Officer and A Spy, a novelization of the infamous Dreyfus case, in which all the players are known, and the mystery The Cold, Cold Ground by Adrian McKinty, which uses the hunger strikes in Northern Ireland’s HM Prison Maze not only as a backdrop but weaves it into the actions and motivations of the fictional characters. Movies plow this ground endlessly. I really enjoyed The Monuments Men, which, although it prompted inevitable historical quibbles, stayed closer to real experience than the more highly fictionalized The Train, the 1964 Burt Lancaster/Paul Scofield movie on the same theme, which I saw again on TV last night. (Illustrating how far from real life Hollywood must sometimes stray, Wikipedia reports that Lancaster injured his knee playing golf, and to explain his limp, the movie added a scene in which he is shot while crossing a pedestrian bridge. Also, the executions of a couple of characters occurred because the actors had other “contractual obligations.”)

Casavant provides links to websites that can provide historical inspiration, including the

lists of history facts in Mental Floss, a blog of noteworthy letters, and the Library of Congress’s 14.5 million photo and graphic archive. To her suggestions, I’d add that one’s own family history, the unique combinations of external events and internal dynamics that made them who they were, can also be a rich resource. In a sense, it’s a recasting of the much-abused advice to writers to “write what you know.” Or, as George Packer has said (his ancestors lived adjacent to mine on Hurricane Creek in Wilson County, Tennessee, BTW), “History, any history, confers meaning on a life.”

Strike Up the Band!

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The papers, original scores, and more written by George and Ira Gershwin are being made available to music scholars, performers, audiences, and students through The Gershwin Initiative at the University of Michigan. A “listening gallery” is at the U-M website link. The school will create new, definitive scores for the brothers’ many compositions, which include Porgy and Bess, Rhapsody in Blue, and An American in Paris.

The Gershwins were pivotal in developing what is now called The Great American Songbook, recently brought to a broader (or renewed) audience by Michael Feinstein, who is not only an entertainer, but relentless in his effort to preserve this era of musical history and an avid supporter of the next generation of vocal talent. No surprise, one of Feinstein’s early jobs was as assistant to Ira Gershwin, which inspired his recent book, The Gershwins and Me.

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***** An Officer and a Spy

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Emile Zola, DreyfusBy Robert Harris (read by David Rintoul) –This novelization of the infamous Dreyfus affair in turn-of-the-20th Century Paris starts slowly, then builds powerfully. French Army Officer Alfred Dreyfus, a Jew, was sentenced to life imprisonment on aptly named Devil’s Island on flimsy and trumped-up evidence that he was a spy. As the book’s narrator, Lt. Col. Georges Picquart, gradually discovers, a spy remains in the French military command and, if so, he begins to suspect and then believe that Dreyfus is innocent.

As in the present day, it isn’t so much the original crime—in this case, convicting an innocent man—that creates all the problems, it’s the cover-up. The book is full of real-life characters of the time with whom I was passingly familiar—Georges Clemenceau, Émile Zola (J’Accuse!), Picquart, who rose to be Minister of War after Dreyfus’s release, and of course, Dreyfus. Learning how they out-maneuvered the army’s top generals is riveting, even though you know they ultimately succeed. Alphonse Bertillon, the originator of concepts of scientific policing reappears, with some dubious handwriting analyses; his contributions were explored more fully in The Crimes of Paris, which I read last year.

Louis Begley’s New York Times review would have had the book provide more context about French society at the time, though some of his examples are to me pretty clear: the high position of the army in society and “the extraordinary wave of virulent anti-Semitism that had washed over France since the 1880s.”

The Dreyfus case still resonates today, not least because of the resurgence of anti-Semitism in Europe from both the left and right wings and the growing Muslim communities. Coincidentally last weekend, I attended a reading and discussion of a new play by McCarter Theatre’s Emily Mann, Hoodwinked, about the shootings at Ft. Hood and the friction between tolerance and intolerance within radical Islam and outside it. Looking back on Dreyfus, it’s easy to see where the players went wrong out of prejudice, self-interest, and absolutism. We see events in our own time through these same distorting lenses and, therefore, unclearly.

***** The Civil War of 1812

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War of 1812

Naval Engagement off Kingston: H.M.S. “Royal George” pursued by Commodore Chauncey in U.S.S. “Oneida,” November 9, 1812.

It’s probably hard for any reasonably well-informed American to know less about the War of 1812 than I did when starting an audio-read of Alan Taylor’s 2010 The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, & Indian Allies.(Taylor just won his second Pulitzer Prize for history for a new book.) The extent of my knowledge was irritation that the British burned the National Archives, making my genealogical researches more speculative and numerous trips to Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, where I’d visited Fort George (British) and Fort Niagara (American), on the shore of Lake Ontario, and barely separated by the Niagara River. There, I’d heard a bit about Canadian heroes Sir Isaac Brock and Laura Secord. Despite growing up near Detroit, I escaped unscathed by information about the role of that city and the Michigan territory in the war or the legendary naval battles on the Great Lakes.

This book was remarkable in making this conflict so interesting and relevant. Taylor describes it as a “civil war” for several reasons. For one, Irish immigrants fought on both sides and the British claimed these former nationals as their own; for another, the uncertain allegiances of the northern New Englanders and Canadians alike, with allegiances to the new nation not as firmly fixed as we might think and much trade and movement across the weak border. Within the United States, Federalists (leaning toward Britain) and Republicans (anti-British) were at odds throughout, maneuvering against each other, thwarting efforts to recruit and equip an adequate army. Militarily, both sides made disastrous tactical mistakes and miscalculations. For example, the Americans thought the Canadians would welcome being “freed” from the oppressor Britain, but for the ordinary citizen of Upper Canada, the side to choose was the one most likely to end the war soonest.

Especially intriguing was Britain’s calculated use of Indians to terrify ill-trained American soldiers, who had such fear of the natives they would flee an impending battle rather than engage. And, while the conflict is often described as “a draw,” in Taylor’s analysis, the losers were the Indians, because the peace did not secure their lands, and the British no longer supported them against American expansion and territorial expropriation. A fascinating read.

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A Failed Censorship Attempt

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Afghanistan war, military, Mike Martin, Intimate War

(photo: Hurst Publishers)

The UK Ministry of Defence has been trying to stop publication of a book it requested on the British Army’s 13-year campaign in Afghanistan’s Helmand province. The MoD commissioned captain Mike Martin of the Territorial Army to write the book, entitled An Intimate War – An Oral History of the Helmand Conflict 1978-2012, but does not like its conclusions. It therefore held up publication for almost a year, under a policy governing books and articles by serving military personnel.

The ongoing dispute  prompted captain Martin to resign from the Army, and the book will be published soon. In the U.S., it’s available from Amazon for pre-order, coming Friday, April 18.

According to an account in The Guardian, “the book presents a bleak picture of British and American involvement, claiming that troops failed to grasp that it was primarily a tribal civil war.” As a result, Martin says, the troops “often made the conflict worse, rather than better. This was usually as a result of the Helmandis manipulating our ignorance.” Involvement in Afghanistan has cost the Britain 448 deaths, many of which occurred in Helmand province, a Taliban stronghold and one of the country’s major poppy-growing regions.

Martin’s book argues that the Taliban were not the “main drivers of violence,” but rather that the conflict was driven by the personal motivations of Helmandi individuals, including local politicians  and tribal chiefs. This made the conflict akin to a civil war  between clans, “rather than a clash between the ‘good’ government of Afghanistan and the ‘bad’ Taliban,” says The Daily Mail.

Martin wrote the book as part of his PhD work for Oxford University and was one of a very few British soldiers who speaks Pashtu fluently. The book was the result of six years of research, involving 150 interviews conducted in Pashtu, and it begins with the problems the Soviets faced in Afghanistan in the 1970’s.

The Daily Mail story says “his criticism of intelligence blunders and the failure of commanders to understand the conflict is said to have embarrassed officials.” Although the Ministry opposes the book, Major General Andrew Kennett, who commanded Martin’s unit, said: “I think he has done the Army a great service by writing this,” and General Sir David Richards, the recently retired head of the Armed Forces, who commanded international forces in Afghanistan between 2006-07, said, “I sincerely wish it had been available to me when I was ISAF Commander in Afghanistan.”

Martin plans to donate proceeds from the book to military charities.

Three years ago, the Ministry of Defence bought up and destroyed all copies of a book by Sunday Times journalist Toby Harnden: Dead Men Risen: The Welsh Guards and the Real Story of Britain’s War in Afghanistan. Harnden’s award-winning book also was about the British deployment to Helmand, and after deletion of 50 words, it was reprinted.

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