Tom Rider's Reviews

Andrew Cooper. The Oil Kings; How the U.S., Iran, and Saudi Arabia Changed the Balance of Power in the Middle East. Simon & Schuster, 2011.
Andrew Cooper has taken on the complicated task of describing oil diplomacy during the Nixon and Ford administrations from 1969 to 1977. His leading characters are Henry Kissinger, National Security Advisor and Secretary of State and Mohammad Rezi Pahlavi, Shah of Iran from 1944 until deposed by the Iranian revolution in 1979.

Former Vice-President, Richard Nixon made a trip to Iran in 1967. With little in common, he and the Shah took a liking to each other. His conversations with the Shah convinced him that secular, authoritarian regimes like Iran’s were essential to the stability of the region. Hence Iran should not be pressured into adopting Western notions of democracy and human rights. Those views, according to Cooper, would govern the Nixon Administration’s policies toward Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf States during his Presidencies.

Henry Kissinger was also a strong advocate for a commitment to Iran. Together Iran and the U.S. would be the guardians of the Persian Gulf and its oil resources. In the first few months of Nixon’s presidency, the Shah made a state visit to the U.S. In a discussion of the Iran’s role in America’s energy future, both Nixon and Kissinger gave the Shah a verbal commitment, a “blank check,” agreeing to his unilaterally raising oil prices, which both parties acknowledged were bargain-basement. The Shah would, in turn, use his petrol-dollars to buy U.S. military equipment and technical assistance. He also had ambitious plans for Iran’s social and economic transformation, the so-called “White Revolution,” to be financed with those revenues.

The Shah was a ‘big spender.’ Some in the Nixon Administration were concerned about his indulging himself in military hardware for which his country seemed to have no use. And could ill-afford.

The Shah also wished a continuation of the joint support for the Iraqi Kurds who were in revolt against Sunni Arab domination and Saddam Hussein’s authoritarian regime. “Continued” because the American Central Intelligence Agency had been supporting the Kurd’s resistance with arms channeled through Iran.

Augmenting his commitments, Iran would continue to maintain unofficial but good relations with Israel. It took no part in the Egyptian/ Syrian attack on Israel in October 1973. It continued to supply Israel with its oil during the Arab oil embargo that followed.

Cooper does an amazingly good job of relating oil politics in the Middle East to the turmoil within the Nixon Administration resulting from the Watergate burglary in 1972 and Nixon’s forced resignation that first year of his second term.

The Shah was an early believer in “peek oil.” Middle Eastern oil resources were finite. Western industrial economies should pursue other sources of energy, but that would not happen as long as petroleum remained so cheap. He contended that the price of oil should be allowed to rise to the point that it equaled the price of other forms of energy. Moreover, oil prices should reflect the rising cost of the goods and services that Iran bought from the U.S. and its other trading partners. Cooper makes the Shah out to be a reasonable man and looking ahead.

President Ford had a different view of oil prices. He blamed the troubled American economy in the 1970s on the “oil shock.” Oil producers must hold the line on prices in view of the harm that “unreasonable” increases would cause to industrial economies. (Oil prices, in terms of real dollars, remained around $20.00 per barrel throughout the period from 1969 to 1977.)

Ford invoked the threat of the Communist parties winning control of European democracies as reason for keeping oil prices low. Cooper makes Ford into a “cold war warrior,” not capable of the foreign policy successes of the Nixon Administration and Henry Kissinger’s ‘realism.’ Kissinger, in response, was critical of the Ford Administration’s shifting our allegiance away from secular Moslem rulers like Mohammad Rezi Pahlavi and toward a dependence on conservative regimes, particularly the Saudis.

The Oil Kings does not illuminate the recent “Arab spring” or our renewed efforts to isolate Iran. It would take several additional volumes to cover the thirty-five years since 1977. But Andrew Cooper is the man to make the effort, if this book is any indication of the quality of his investigative journalism.

David Edgerton. Britain’s War Machine; Weapons, Resources, and Experts in the Second World War. Oxford, 2011.

This is revisionist history at its best. David Edgerton’s Britain’s War Machine argues that, contrary to most accounts, Britain was not unprepared when war came in 1939. Winston Churchill claimed that Britain ‘stood alone’ after the fall of France in May-June of 1940. But while the dominant power opposing Adolf Hitler, the UK was supported by a dozen Allies including the Commonwealth countries – Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. By 1940 Britain was also beginning to receive a vast amount of munitions and armaments from the U.S., Latin America, and India. It controlled oil refineries in Iran and Burma, though Burma was lost in 1942.

True, Britain lost its trade with occupied Europe. And Germany blocked Britain from getting timber and iron ore from neutral Sweden. Edgerton argues, however, that Britain’s ability to obtain supplies from non-European countries far surpassed Germany’s tapping of conquered European resources.

By some measures and at times, Britain was outdistancing German war production. Britain’s rearmament and the huge conversion from peacetime to a war economy had been going on since 1935. In fact Labor and Liberal MPs accused the Conservatives, then in power, of pursuing “unilateral rearmament.”

Early on the British believed that they would win the war. Churchill’s “give us the tools and we shall finish the job” was an optimism that remained surprisingly true of those who ran Britain’s war effort. While Churchill’s leadership has come under criticism, there is no question that his rhetoric helped sustain British morale.

Edgerton argues that Britain was by no means the “junior partner” in the Anglo-American alliance that fought the war on the Western front. We Americans were making no significant contribution to the troops on the ground until 1944. Of course the production of our industries was several times that of the Brits’. But their technology was on par with that of the US. Among other technological achievements, Britain was responsible for the early development of radio detection (radar) and machines for the mass production of bombers and airplane engines.

The British navy dominated the Atlantic, despite a formidable challenge from the German U-Boat menace. (See my review of Michael Gannon’s Black May.) With an overwhelming advantage in terms of battleships when the war began, Britain concentrated on building destroyers, cruisers, and corvette for convoy duty and had won the Battle of the Atlantic by the end of1943. The German navy never again challenged its supremacy.

Military ships got smaller; in contrast Britain’s bombers became bigger and more powerful. Controversy surrounds their deployment by the Royal Air Force’s Bomber Command. Air Marshall Arthur Harris argued that the best way to destroy the German will to fight on would be to destroy working-class housing in German cities. Area bombing could be done at night, which cut down on the number of bombers shot down by Germany’s increasingly effective anti-aircraft guns. Harris claimed after the war that the war would have ended in 1943 and the Normandy landings avoided had Eisenhower accepted his version of strategic bombing. Harris’s critics, including American strategists, argued that his area bombing was a misallocation of resources that could have gone to other more productive wartime uses.

The alternative strategy of precision bombing wasn’t very effective either. Harris agued, with considerable truth, that intelligence about how the German war economy operated was insufficient. And there were conflicts within the precision bombing school. Some advocated going after transportation and oil production. Others, aircraft production or specific industries that provided crucial parts, for example, ball-bearing factories.

What is most surprising is Edgerton’s argument that Germany did not initiate the strategic bombing of cities. Yes, Warsaw and Rotterdam were heavily bombed, but they were in war zones. Hitler only allowed the Blitz of London by the Luftwaffe in September 1940, after an RAF raid on Berlin.

What about the years of ‘Appeasement’ before the war? Allowing Adolf Hitler to annex the Sudetenland, Edgerton argues, and Britain’s rearming should be thought of as two sides of a consistent policy. Maybe this crisis would have been an opportunity to have a showdown with the Germans, but not when considering Britain’s ability to defeat the Wehrmacht in Eastern Europe. Surprisingly Edgerton doesn’t suggest that the mistake was to allow a British-Russian alliance to slip through Britain’s fingers.

Edgerton makes it clear that he believes Russia to have been the major opponent of Nazi Germany. The Russian contribution to Germany’s defeat was not acknowledged during the Cold War but has been since the fall of the Soviet Union. Edgerton is trying to accomplish that same reassessment in the case of Britain.

Thor Hanson. Feathers; The Evolution of a Natural Miracle. Basic Books, 2011.

The evolution of bird feathers is not well documented. Feathers rarely fossilize, only their impressions and under unusual circumstances. Moreover the predominant argument that birds evolved from theropods – carnivorous dinosaurs that had short forearms and walked or ran on their hind legs – has been reconsidered. Thor Hanson argues that theropods did indeed have feathers and skeletal similarities to modern birds, and the pattern of evolution of feathers would have occurred in roughly the same pattern in birds and theropods. But birds and theropods took a separate path in the evolutionary process.

The evolution of the feather became less speculative with the discovery of many well-preserved species of ancient birds in the Yixian Formulation in the Chinese province of Liaoning (Manchuria). The fossils have been studied by the Chinese paleontologist, Xing Xu.

Bird feathers are classified into down feathers, semi-plumes, contour feathers, and fight feathers. They are composed of an insoluble protein, keratin, as are hair, hoofs, fingernails, and rhinoceros hide, etc. Feathers emerge out of follicles, and at the early stages, they are enclosed by a protective sheath, recapulating a phylogenetic development. The follicles occur on only certain portions of the body – combs, feet, waddles, and beaks have no follicles.

These “naked” bird parts allow birds to cool off. Birds generate heat when the fly. They have higher metabolic rates generally than do mammals but no sweat glands. They do pant, however, and when they get too hot they do the sensible thing; they find a shady place to perch and cool off.

How to feathers keep birds warm on frosty mornings? Hanson describes how each of the four kinds of feathers contributes to heat retention. We know well the good insulating qualities of down feathers. But they would become a soggy mess in a cold and rainy day were it not for the contour feathers which provide a water-proof covering.

There are two different explanations for how feathers repeal water. One is that the close-together touch points of the feather vane support water droplets and hence keep birds dry. Another is that these feather touch points trap air forming air pockets that repel water.

Hanson likes to dangle alternative hypotheses like the above before the reader and evaluate their strengths and weaknesses. There are also two explanations for the beginning of flight. The ground-up hypothesis argues that at some point ancient birds began to use their wings to cover ground more quickly. The modern analogy might be the way that domestic chickens run. They can fly short distances but mostly run on two legs assisted by flapping their wings. Some birds can even use their flapping wings to ascend slopes. The trouble with ground-up is that there is not a good set of incremental adoptive stages.

The drop-down advocates contend that theirs is a better incremental explanation. Feathers came in handy when an animal wanted to get from one tree branch to another. But how did they get to those branches in the first place? Also, feathers with their complex structures and diversity of forms, seem over qualified for the gliding job. Animals with membranes can do the same, for example bats and flying squirrels.

Having recently consumed holiday turkey, it is timely to talk about sexual dimorphism in plumage and feather display. Male turkeys have more brightly colored feathers. Those colors evolved to facilitate competition in mate selection. Male turkeys do a lot of displaying and certainly turkey figurines are always in display. The better looking these feather display, so the argument goes, the healthier the male and the more likely that he will be selected by the female. Thus sexual selection becomes the means whereby evolution takes place. But there are limits to the advantage of the most brightly colored feathers; they are easier to spot by hawk-eyed predators. And turkeys, we also know from experience, make good feasts.

Steve Wick. The Long Night; William L. Shirer and the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.
William Shirer was a renowned American journalist covering Europe in the 1920s and 30s. He began his career as a correspondent for the Chicago Tribune, went on to the Universal News Service, owned by William Randolph Hearst. When that wire service folded in 1937, he was hired by Edward R. Morrow to work for the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), and together they pioneered direct, eyewitness
broadcasts from Europe’s five major capital cities, London, Paris, Berlin, Vienna, and Rome. Steve Wick’s biography concentrates on his years covering events in National Socialist Germany from 1934 until he left Germany in December 1940.

Shirer was from Iowa and got a degree in 1925 from Coe College in Cedar Rapids. Like many a college graduate, he hitched a ride on a freighter bound for Europe. He managed to get his job in the Paris bureau of the Chicago Tribune and was soon sent to Vienna to open a bureau. From Vienna he traveled on assignments around Europe, to India, Afghanistan, and the Middle East, traveling on the Orient Express.

There were complaints about Shirer’s reporting from the Tribune’s conservative readership, which got him fired in 1933. Then as now journalists had to subject themselves to a form of censorship imposed by media owners to avoid being fired.

Working as a journalist in Berlin was a hard life. There were many anxieties and the ever-present dread of a visit from the Gestapo. Shirer had married a Viennese woman and they had a daughter. Most of the time, the family was parked in Geneva. But as the skies over Europe darkened, their safety was also a concern.

Shirer was around for most of the big events associated with the early years of National Socialism, the Olympics in 1936, the Nuremberg Nazi Party rallies, the negotiations at Bad Godesberg and then Munich. There Adolf Hitler and the British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain negotiated an accord over the border areas of Czechoslovakia, and famously preserved “peace in our time.” His big break came with his coverage of the Anschluss, the German occupation of Austria. The Germans would not let him broadcast from Vienna, so at Morrow’s suggestion, he flew to London and broadcast the first eyewitness account of the Austrian crisis.

Shirer and Morrow convinced CBS that regularly scheduled, direct broadcasts from Europe could attract radio audiences, in Shirer’s case, most commonly from a studio in Berlin. Thus: “Hello America. This is Berlin Calling.”

He made dramatic radio broadcasts covering Hitler’s conquest of Poland, then Denmark and Norway, Belgium, Holland, and the eyewitness account of the French surrender at Compiègne, another scoop. In most of these trips he was the “guest” of the Ministry of Propaganda. The Germans used foreign correspondents for their own purposes.

In an “Author’s Note” Wicks discusses the issue of self-censorship. Shirer’s career hinged upon not provoking the German censors. By the fall of 1940 Shirer’s broadcasts consisted mostly of headlines from German newspapers and watered-down versions of German communiqués. He grew increasingly critical of ordinary Germans for their willingness to accept the lies they were being fed by the Ministry of Propaganda. He wondered about himself.

Censorship explains the absence of any mention in his broadcasts of German moves against Jews in Germany and in the conquered territories. Or does it? Wicks notes that Shirer also seemed little interested in the fate of the Jews in his diary and private correspondence.

He was, in a sense, working for Joseph Goebbels and the Wehrmacht. He was invited report on the German “preparations” for the invasion of Britain in 1940. Shirer noticed that there were no ships in French and Belgium channel ports capable of transporting a German army of invasion. He realized that he and his fellow foreign correspondents were being hoodwinked into hyping a non-existent invasion and refused to make the broadcast. It wasn’t hard for Germans to discern Shirer’s “bad attitude.” His family had made it safely to the US; he decided it was time to leave and joined them for Christmas in 1940.

In 1941 he published his famous Berlin Diary and continued to do commentaries on CBS. The book sold well but his writing career did not prosper until publication of his monumental The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich in 1960. He lived to be 93 and died almost forgotten, that voice from Berlin. Thanks to Steve Wicks for reminding us of this extraordinary American journalist.

Bettany Hughes. The Hemlock Cup; Socrates, Athens, and the Search for the Good Life. Knopf, 2011.

This is a wonderful book. Bettany Hughes explores what is known about the Athenian philosopher, Socrates, who was condemned to death by a jury of 400 fellow Athenians in 399 BC. The execution was self-administered. He drank a cup of hemlock in the presence of his fans.

Hughes has punched a few holes in my admiration for all things Greek. Athenian democracy by the time of Socrates execution was no longer the magnificent experiment that we have come to regard as the birth of our own treasured political system. Athens, that gleaming fifth-century BC marble city of our twenty-first-century imagination, Hughes compares to the present-day Calcutta.

Socrates was, we would all probably agree, a ‘royal pain.’ Hughes describes him as a gadfly, loud-mouthed, a braggart, arrogant, a pedophile, ugly and pot-bellied in a world that admired and produced many a beautiful male body. These are just a few of the descriptions that we gather from Plato and other contemporary and near-contemporary Greek sources. Still one of the ‘hinges’ recognized in Western philosophy is ‘pre-Socratic;’ Socrates and his followers mark a turning point.

The charges brought against him were probably true if viewed from the perspective of his time. He was said to have not duly acknowledged the Athenian gods and the hundreds of religious cults that encrusted them. He promoted new ones and new ways of viewing the recognized gods and their relationship to mortals. He corrupted the youth in that he encouraged them to doubt what they had learned.

The ‘Socratic method’ was a conversational style. Socrates asked questions and then asked more questions of those who responded until at some point, the subject had become better understood and that understanding now based on more solid intellectual ground. Conversation could approach, though never achieve, total clarity. Though Hughes does not argue this, the contemporary world would be uncomfortable with Socrates’ relativism. Every man should strive to be as good as he possibly can given the circumstances. But ‘strive,’ possibly can,’ ‘given the circumstances’ are all relative terms.

Socrates seems to have been subject to trances. In those trances he became rigid and not cognizant of his surroundings, staring blankly into space. He maintained that these were moments of revelation, a kind of divine conversation with a personal, private god, his daimonion –demon. Such a claim unnerved Athenians.

He challenged the pride with which the Athens celebrated their prosperity, their collective and individual ambitions. He was critical of their confidence in words, in persuasive speech and its perpetrators.

Hughes makes the Greek Symposium come to life. We become familiar with Socrates’ favorite Athenian haunt, the Agora. It was not just an open market but a vibrant quarter of the city full of craftsmen, merchants, and philosophers. We travel around the Athens’s Aegean empire, following Socrates and his military career during the Peloponnesian War that stretched endlessly from 431 to 404 BC.

We also journey through the collective mind of the city. Athenians, generally on the loosing side of their long struggle with Sparta and its allies, became less confident, threatened.

The junta of thirty tyrants imposed on Athens by the victorious Spartans had no legitimacy in the eyes of the city’s citizen, and it failed to maintain law and order. By the time of Socrates’ trial there were back-street massacres, political opponents bludgeoned to death by violent gangs, women raped, houses looted.

If Plato’s account of Socrates’ trial is to be believed, he was arrogant, arguing that he should be honored by his native city rather than condemned. His friends suggested that he bribe the officials in charge of his incarceration and flee. But that would invalidate his philosophical positions about life. And it would have meant permanent exile. He drank the bitter cup.

Socrates’ execution seems disassociated from his life, a search for both physical and intellectual pleasure. Bettany Hughes gives the reader a good measure of its delight. She also helps us understand the ironies surrounding his death.

Alexander Geppert. Fleeting Cities: Imperial Expositions in Fin-de-Siècle Europe. Palgrave Macmillan. 2010.

There were hundreds of expositions, exhibitions, and world’s fairs held in Europe and America in nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The origin of these “fleeting cities” is generally traced to the Crystal Palace Exhibition in London in 1851. Though I suppose you could go back to the medieval trade fairs with their display of the consumer goods of the day, food, and entertainers. The late twenty-century successors to these expositions are the theme parks, no longer fleeting, such as Epcot, which opened in Orlando in 1982.

The Berliner Gewerbeausstellung in 1896 was the only one of the five that Alexander Geppert chose to analyze that wasn’t in Paris and London. And one of the major arguments made for its promoters was that it would signify Berlin as a peer to the two world capitals.

It celebrates Germany’s industrial and colonial achievement. The creation of the German colonial empire after 1871 came late in the European acquisition of colonies. Industrial Germany, however, had overtaken France by the 1890s and was challenging England.

On the one hand the Berliner Gewerbeausstellung represented Germany’s colonies as the village indigene, with both village handcrafts displayed and the villagers themselves dressed in traditional costumes. But it also celebrated their growing integration into the European industrial economy, their entrance into modernity. These colonials were trotted out as representing the ‘international’ –globalization we would tag it these days. But in fact the Berlin exhibition was an attempt to sell the empire to a recently expanded electorate.

Yes, Berlin was becoming a major industrial city, but there was also a large section of the exhibition grounds devoted to Alt-Berlin, 120 structures that replicated mostly mid-seventeenth-century German architecture. And the staff of the Alt-Berlin also dressed up in period costumes. Does this not sound more and more like our Epcot?

Frequently the locations of previous exhibitions were reused. Such was the case with the Exposition Universelle in 1900. Champ de Mars, in Paris, had been the site of an earlier fair in 1889. Generally speaking, each fair had a clou, a feature that became a symbol of the whole fair. The Eiffel Tower had functioned as a clou for the 1889 fair. There it remained, 300 meters tall, still dominating the site. Those planning the 1900 exhibition were not enthusiastic about reusing the structure as the centerpiece of the fair.

The Eiffel Tower only just managed to survive and become a tourist attraction, but generally most structures built for these exhibitions were meant to be torn down. They were ‘fleeting cities,’ and beginning the day after the fair closed buildings and grounds would have little use.

These fairs generated infrastructure development; railroads and later subways were constructed to carry the millions of fair goers. On the other hand the presence of an already developed infrastructure often determined their location.

The Franco-British Exhibition of 1908, outside of London, followed by a few years what was considered to be a great diplomatic achievement, the Entente cordiale between France and Britain. However, contrary to its claim to be a celebration of peace, prosperity, and internationalism, the 1908 exhibition represented a drawing of lines across Europe.

These expositions attracted both domestic and international tourists and are associated with a democratization of tourism in the latter third of the nineteenth century. They were advertised as a trip around the world in a day and for the smallish price of admission.

Both the British-Empire Exhibition of 1924-1925 in London and the Exposition Coloniale Internationale in Paris in 1931 show signs of what Geppert calls “exhibition fatigue.” They had grown bigger in size and attendance, and in many ways more complex, but definitely standardized and repetitious. They were becoming ‘old hat.’

One of my family’s treasured keepsakes is a small tumbler of cut glass with my maternal grandmother’s maiden name engraved on it. She purchased it at the Chicago World’s Fair (The World’s Columbian Exposition) in 1893. A young teenager she most likely took a train from her home in southeastern Iowa to the ‘White City.’

John Dower. Embracing Defeat; Japan in the Wake of World War II. W.W. Norton, 2010, paper.
On August 15, 1945 Emperor Hirohito announced Japan’s capitulation via Japanese radio. Two weeks later the Supreme Command Allied Powers began an occupation that would last until April 1952. Most of officials who administered occupied Japan were American. There were never more than 3200 of them, plus an occupying military force. John Dower argues that while the end result of our occupation was a post-war Japan of remarkable vitality, the means where by that was accomplished were flawed.

When General Douglas MacArthur was fired during the Korean War, he left Tokyo to Japanese acclaim. But for the seven years of his administration, this hero reigned as a paternalistic dictator, or in terms of Japanese history an all-powerful shogun.

Japan was destitute. The bombing of Japanese cities had created millions of homeless. Japan’s industrial economy was shattered as was its transportation system. Cut off from its traditional sources of food and its merchant marine sunk, starvation now stalked the land. In 1946 the inflation rate was 539% and still 256% in 1949. There were 6.5 million Japanese soldiers and civilians stranded in East, Southeast, and Pacific Asia. Most families had a father, son, or brother either missing or dead. Many Japanese civilians suffered from what was called the kyodatsu condition – despair and exhaustion.

The Potsdam Declaration had determined that the American occupying force should destroy the basis of Japan’s militarism, ultra-nationalism, and feudal elements and build the basis for a democratic future. With this mandate the American occupation introduced a “revolution from above.” One of earliest reforms was MacArthur’s proclamation of universal suffrage before the first postwar election in April 1947.

The end of the military dictatorship produced what John Dower calls a “new social space,” characterized by openness, and personal freedom. It provoked a flourishing of literature and film, and a public that relished this new ‘brightness.’ It also gave rise to a rambunctious mixture of overlapping subcultures, including all-pervasive black markets, and panpan – prostitution – intended to service American servicemen, oversexed the Japanese thought.

One of the most remarkable amongst the many interesting stories in Embracing Defeat was the drafting of a new constitution for Japan. Several Japanese attempts had failed, and characteristically MacArthur made the unilateral decision to appoint a drafting committee drawn from civilian talent then serving in the army of occupation. MacArthur gave the committee a week to finish its work. The proceedings of this ‘constitutional convention’ were in English as was the final document followed by a “translation marathon.”

What do you tell the dead when you lose a war? Dower compares the ‘community of remorse’ to that of the ancient Greek tribute to its fallen heroes. Victors can comfort their grieving by claiming that the outcome of the war – the good war – is partial recompense. The vanquished must celebrate less glorious outcomes.

Surprisingly one trope was that the war dead represented a ‘sacrificial atonement for the crimes of the nation.’ But this sacrifice could not be praised. Censorship by the occupation forces excluded this and a long list of other topics. Among them: criticism of SCAP and the occupation forces; criticism of Great Britain, or Russia; criticism of pre-war Allied behavior toward Japan; fraternization of Allied personnel with Japanese women; and the divine descent of the emperor.

Dower is hugely interested in the fate of Emperor Hirohito. General MacArthur protected the throne, reasoning that after its ‘dry cleaning’, the institution of the Emperor would become a rallying point for post-war Japan. The trouble was that the Emperor had participated in the planning and execution of Japan’s ‘Great East Asia War,’ including the attack on Pearl Harbor. And General Eisenhower had told MacArthur to include an investigation of the Emperor’s role with his possible inclusion in the Tokyo trials of Japanese war criminals.

MacArthur basically ignored that command. He chose instead to bring to trial a selection of the war-time Imperial Cabinet and the army leadership. Tōjō Hideki became perhaps the most notorious war criminal to be tried. He did not implicate his Emperor.

The general responsible for the Bataan Death March escaped a trial. He had made himself useful to the Nationalist Chinese in their war with the Chinese Communists. Indeed the “loss of China” and the Cold War cast a shadow over the trials and the American occupation in many ways. Americans in Japan came to appreciate Japan as a potential ally against Mao’s China and the Stalin’s Russia.

The book has only a brief mention of one of the most remarkable creations of the occupation. The economic planners, mostly Japanese, decided to foster a cutting-edge economy. Stagnant for the first decade or so after the war, Japanese manufacturing took off. An envious America and Europe eventually talked about “Japan as Number One.” Japan became a wealthy economy with a lot of consumer confidence and with a more equitable distribution of that wealth than was true of the victors’ economies.

Michael Fried. The Moment of Caravaggio. Princeton University Press. 2010.
Michael Fried is an art historian teaching at Johns Hopkins. His book, beautifully produced and lavishly illustrated, was published last year by Princeton University Press. It is intended to address colleagues and students in his field and is difficult reading. But as he walks us through Michelangelo da Caravaggio’s art, he points out things to the non-expert that would go unnoticed yet are rich in their implications.

Caravaggio, Fried contends, depicts in novel ways the watchful absorption of his characters in the action depicted in the paintings. They are characters; their faces and body language reveal their emotions and responses. Often they appear to be apprehensive, whether they are watching someone cheating in cards, or the betrayal of the Savior, or the beheading of John the Baptist. Often they have their backs to us and we become the back row of a crowd, ourselves as voyeurs. Others look out beyond the picture’s surface, as though they are about to address us.

Caravaggio painted many gallery paintings; Fried calls them “homeless” art. They were not intended for any particular location. Rather they were commissioned to be given as gifts or to commemorate some event. ‘Radical naturalism’ was much favored by the Roman art-buying world in the decade before and after 1600, and Caravaggio was their favorite.

Self portraits were popular with artists, and one of Caravaggio’s earlier paintings, Boy Bitten by a Lizard, is a self portrait. It is one of his ‘mirror portraits’ executed with a mirror held at a right angle to the canvas and reflecting the painter. As with any mirrored image, they are reversed. Looking carefully at his paintings, you can observe how he ignored the brush and palette and corrected the left-handedness.

Taken from stories in the Bible or classical mythology, Caravaggio’s paintings depict a lot of violence. He liked beheadings. Sometimes the viewers both inside and out of the frame witness the beheading, but often it is the gory trophy itself on a plate or swinging from its bloodied hair.

Fried has an elaborate scholarly explanation for this violence. But he also points out that Caravaggio lived in an age of street violence. He was himself a brawler. Violent scenes were an opportunity to depict strong emotional states. Caravaggio had to leave Rome quickly in 1608 after having been part in a fatal brawl. Had he been caught by Papal officials, he would have been subject to the extreme penalty – decapitation.

Caravaggio journeyed to Naples, Malta, and Sicily gaining commissions but also checking out their brawling scenes. In 1609 his face was badly slashed. He was able to return to Rome with the promise of a papal pardon thanks to the intervention of powerful Roman friends and customers. He died at the age 39 of a fever while on his way..

I liked David with the Head of Goliath, David’s pensive face as he holds the giant’s head. Death of the Virgin, with its beautiful drapery and faces of mourning. Crowning with Thorns, with the puzzling pacificity of the Christ figure. The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew, with the murderer about to thrust his dagger into the apostle. The Taking of Christ with Judas bestowing his kiss. Supper at Emmaus. All these paintings attest to Caravaggio’s attention to the moment.

Fried has convinced us of Caravaggio’s intentionality. So what is implied by the odd way Christ has clasped his hands in The Taking of Christ?

The next time I visit New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, I intend to walk through the galleries containing its paintings by Michelangelo da Caravaggio and his contemporaries. It will be like seeing them for the first time.