"The theory: a Haganah agent woos the Dulles sister, thereby getting the goods on the Dulles brothers and their dealings with the nazis, and personal enrichment from the stolen wealth of jews.
As a result, Rockefeller negotiates with Israel, agreeing that the US will recognize that state, in return for the aforementioned dirt remaining buried.
It's a work of fiction claiming to be built largely from factual sources..."
Their vile enterprise
The documented double-dealing of one of America's most powerful families in the mid-20th century is at the heart of this brilliantly inventive tale
Michael Fellman, Vancouver Sun
Published: Saturday, November 10, 2007
In the spring of 1864, General William T. Sherman, the new Union commander of the western theatre, took a long slow train ride with his superior, Ulysses S. Grant, who was on his way east to take over command of the entire army. No one recorded their conversation, but from later correspondence you can piece together much of what they must have discussed in candidly ruthless language they could have shared with no one else, certainly not the American public. Grant intended to launch an all-out campaign into Virginia, whatever the costs, and Sherman was to do likewise through Georgia. So brutal would be the human costs that the main issue would be whether Northern morale and political resolve would collapse before that of the Confederacy.
Ever since completing my Sherman biography (Citizen Sherman: A Life of William Tecumseh Sherman, 1995), I have thought of writing a one-act play imagining that high-stakes conversation. Only by crossing the great divide from the canons of historical proof to historical fiction might I recreate what I surmise to have been the most likely truth about this exchange.
Brendan Howley, an investigative reporter and novelist, told me in a recent interview that when confronting a similar issue in his new book, The Witness Tree (co-written with John Loftus), he took to heart what the historian Arnold Toynbee once said: "A thousand years from now, under mountains of evidence to choose from, a historian will only be able to write a good novel." Howley decided that that is "the gold standard of proof." In other words, verisimilitude, rather than factuality, would have to suffice.
As a historian, I feel queasy about this standard, even though I know that when interpreting complex and contradictory evidence, all historians put things together in narratives for which they are responsible -- they're writing their versions of the story. Yet historians cannot make up unrecorded evidence, however likely it might seem as an approximation of what was said or done.
So, I was curious to tease out "fact" from invention after reading this historical/spy novel. Espionage is the greyest area for any reconstruction, as spies lie and conceal and distort and withhold their evidence, while the states that keep the records bury them in classified secrecy, sometimes forever.
The Witness Tree concerns the especially cloaked history of the Dulles family, American power brokers extraordinaire. They were one of the most influential and oddest American families of the mid-20th century. John Foster Dulles, in later life Dwight D. Eisenhower's virulently anti-communist secretary of state, was for most of his long life an incredibly powerful Wall Street banker who specialized in organizing U.S. financial ties with Germany, both before and during the Nazi period. His younger brother, Allen, also a lawyer, was deeply involved in U.S. espionage during the war and went on to become the head of the CIA from 1953 to 1962.
According to Howley in our interview, both men were "absolutely immoral" graspers of money and influence, "traitors" involved up to their eyeballs in trading with the fascist enemy Americans were supposed to be fighting. They were central players in an underground "rat line" that included the Vatican and members of the Nazi regime who exported themselves and huge amounts of looted Jewish and European wealth at the end of the Second World War.
Several historians and investigative reporters have revealed parts of the Dulles's penchant for double-dealing, but none has been able to construct the whole story of their vile enterprise. Perhaps, given the scattered and often still classified nature of wartime espionage records, no one ever will.
As a former U.S. intelligence officer, John Loftus long had access to classified materials that he cannot publish as a whole. Loftus met Howley at a conference concerning the dirty war of American spies. Howley recalls that Loftus asked him, "How do you dramatize s--- like this?"
The result is this brilliantly inventive historical fiction.
The Dulles brothers' story, twisted and corrupt, lacked a compelling narrative thrust. To remedy this problem, Howley and Loftus chose to tell the story through the life of their younger sister, Eleanor, an appealing and powerful woman who was also the family rebel. In a social milieu that included anti-Semitism as a matter of course, Eleanor married a Jewish linguist, who unfortunately committee suicide early in their marriage. While her brothers were rock-ribbed Republicans, Eleanor, a socialist economist, was one of the founding creators of the New Deal Social Security Administration. During the war, she went into the economic branch of the State Department and was a major figure in the postwar economic reconstruction of Germany. Clearly, she opposed everything her brothers stood for, although she never broke from them.
That's where the invention and the drama set in.
Hewing closely to the historical record, Howley and Loftus demonstrate how John Foster Dulles, starting as early as the First World War, put German and U.S. industrialists and financiers together in joint venture corporations established across the globe -- indeed, we are witness to the invention of economic globalization.
The rise of Nazism mattered not a whit to this highly profitable program and the Dulles law firm increased its huge fortune greasing these now fascist wheels.
After the war began but before the Americans entered it, Howley and Loftus write, Dulles continued this liaison work openly, as did other American industrialists, including the Rockefeller family, who increased Standard Oil refining capacity in Latin America to fuel the German navy battling America's British allies.
After Pearl Harbor, Allen went off to Berne, Switzerland, the Nazi laundering site, ostensibly to gather intelligence. Although he failed to report on the Holocaust, Allen set up a network of SS informants who enriched him while transferring assets out of Germany once it began to lose the war, shifting them, with Vatican connivance, to Latin America and elsewhere.
As it happens, the U.S. Treasury Department tapped Allen's phone lines (he was working for the Office of Strategic Services, a rival intelligence branch) and discovered his corruption.
After the war, according to this novelistic reconstruction and her own rather opaque memoirs, Eleanor fell deeply in love with Misha, a Haganah agent whose organization (predecessor of Israel's army) had found out about those incriminating intercepts. With subtle blackmail, he urged her to help them. Eleanor stole the files from the basement of the State Department, the novel goes, and turned them over to the Haganah. She then blackmailed Allen while Misha confronted Nelson Rockefeller with this evidence.
In return for Haganah silence, in a meeting that Howley and Loftus assure us actually did take place, though the documents remain classified, Rockefeller promised that the Americans would support the partition of Palestine -- which is to say, the founding of Israel. However, he wouldn't allow German bankers to be put on trial at Nuremberg nor have Wall Street double-dealers like the Dulles brothers be brought to justice.
The United States did support partition, and so did 15 Catholic countries in Latin America -- knuckling under to pressure from John Foster Dulles, as the story goes here.
Eleanor had redeemed the Dulles family. Israel was born via espionage and blackmail.
This provocative novel is a rattling good read, sensitive to complex characters and dramatic, ironic times. At the same time, it makes inferential but sweeping historical claims: The war on fascism was compromised from the start; the modern American Empire was founded on corruption.
How ought readers to measure their response to such conclusions? Howley and Loftus write in a postscript: "This is a novel, but much of what you have read is based on known fact -- although the most intriguing elements are still classified." This book is thus written on a convincing but very slippery slope carpeted by still-classified archival elements interwoven with novelistic creativity.
In our interview, Howley said that almost all of the facsimile typescripts of classified documents that provide much of the "evidence" in this book were his inventions, based on composites of actual documents. But they appear to be authentic, and thus the reader may assume that these are "known fact," rather than imaginative deductions.
Eyebrows ought to be raised.
More generally -- and this is a criticism I might make of any historical work -- there is something unnecessarily reductionist about the political argument of the book. On the phone, Howley confirmed that he believes this espionage blackmail is the underlying and sufficient explanation for the birth of Israel.
But such huge events are almost infinitely complex -- they're what historians call "over-determined." Many players with crosscutting agendas lead to the founding and destruction of states.
It seems certain to me that while a coverup by corrupt American power players may well have played some role, other factors contributed to this momentous decision. The Witness Tree sacrifices the messy chaos of history in service of a dramatic narrative.
The usual explanation for the birth of Israel is that five months after partition, Clark Clifford, a close adviser to Harry Truman, convinced the president that the Holocaust and the cause of humanity demanded the immediate recognition of Israel. Truman agreed with Clifford, despite the eloquent counter-argument put up by secretary of state George C. Marshall, the powerful former head of the American war effort, that U.S. strategic and oil interests demanded that Washington back the Arab cause and block Israel.
It must be noted that the U.S. recognized Israel 10 minutes after David Ben-Gurion declared independence, beating the Soviet Union by eight minutes. This was an early and weird Cold War event.
Another factor, far less dramatic than either the Truman conversion or the blackmail version, is that none of the Western countries, including Canada, wanted to absorb the huge number of Jewish survivors then rotting in displaced persons' camps. Nor could Jews return to places like Poland, where pogroms were well under way. In a way, Israel was nothing more than a convenient dumping ground. And the Israelis were prepared to go to any extreme to survive in this last corner of the globe where they might build a country.
Therefore, I'm unconvinced by the denouement of this novel, although it is doubtless natural enough for investigators of espionage to claim a great deal for their turf when coming to a conclusion.
Eleanor Dulles's key role as midwife to Israel remains, as nearly as I can discern, a rather improbable romance.
This splendid historical novel raises many profound questions about truth and fiction while it constructs a sophisticated and cynical picture of the peculiarly American combinations of innocence and corruption, idealism and greed.
Michael Fellman is an American historian and cultural critic in Vancouver.
THE WITNESS TREE
BY BRENDAN HOWLEY and JOHN LOFTUS
Random House Canada,
441 pages ($34.95)
http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/stor ... 321b67&p=1
Book here: http://www.amazon.com/Witness-Tree-Bren ... 454&sr=8-1
# Hardcover: 464 pages
# Publisher: Random House Canada (October 9, 2007)
# Language: English
# ISBN-10: 0679310819
# ISBN-13: 978-0679310815
Listed in UK as 'Eleanor', Author 'Howley':
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Eleanor-Howley/ ... 29&sr=11-1
