WWII

America’s Unsavory WWII Alliances Depicted in Dezenhall Book, “The Devil Inside”

by Christine Hall on August 22, 2011

in Odds & Ends

When you’re in a pinch, sometimes you make a deal with the Devil.  In the early years after America’s entry into World War II, America was in a pinch when stalking Nazi U-boats that posed a real, ongoing threat to America’s East Coast port operations and merchant ships.  In his latest novel, “The Devil Himself, ” crisis communications guru Eric Dezenhall weaves a tale around around the historically true wartime partnership between the American government and mob bosses aimed at combating this Nazi threat.  It’s a story told by a young political operative serving in the Reagan Administration in 1982 and by the young man’s “uncle,” notorious Jewish mobster Meyer Lansky, in lengthy vignettes of the past.

In fact, the story is mostly told from Lansky’s point of view and depicts a patriotic, shrewd businessman who loves America, deplores Nazis (for obvious reasons), and engages in straight dealing (for the most part) with his Italian mobster brethren.  If you’re going to have a mobster on your team, this is the one to have.  I’m not sure what to make of that loving portrayal, since Lansky was no doubt involved in some dastardly and bloody deeds, especially in his hey-day, the Prohibition Era.  Which is not to say that diminishes any aid he provided to this country during wartime.

I also don’t have any great pearls of wisdom concerning a central theme of the book.  The uneasy alliance between reputation-wary government officials and Jewish and Italian organized crime bosses eventually leads the narrator to conclude that “everybody gets screwed ” in such partnerships.  Politicians don’t want the bad PR that comes with public exposure of these shady alliances and any rewards that flow to bad guys doing good deeds.  In fact, the chief government operative in the Dezenhall story, Charles R. Haffenden, winds up, not recognized for any success in crafting the unlikely and arguably successful partnership, but dispatched to the South Pacific and gravely injured at Iwo Jima.

From a policy perspective, it’s interesting to consider in the context of other such uneasy alliances the US has made throughout the years.  From a strategic, cost/benefit perspective, it’s an interesting bit of analysis from one of the great communications wizards of our times.  From an historical perspective, the book portrays yet another facet of a war and an era brimming with so many compelling and poignant personal stories.

Twenty Years have Passed: The Fall of the Berlin Wall

by Fred Smith on November 9, 2009 · 3 comments

in Culture, Features, International, Zeitgeist

On November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall came crashing down. Today marks the twentieth anniversary of that great day – one of the greatest in the history of human freedom. Communism in Germany finally collapsed, setting off a domino effect that would reach Moscow within two years. Families torn apart for nearly three decades came together in tearful, happy reunions as the world watched. The Cold War was finally, mercifully, ending.

Many historians cite World War I as the twentieth century’s opening act. Sixteen million souls died in that war over nothing. Two of the nations it toppled became the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. Communist and fascist governments would combine to kill more than one hundred million people over the next seven decades. Those needless deaths are the twentieth century’s legacy, every bit as much as the transistor or rock ‘n roll.

The fall of the Berlin Wall was that short, bloody century’s coda.

November 9, 1989 was also the start of something better. It was a nation’s way of saying that it was ready to move on to better times. To a new world defined not by oppression, ideology, and servitude, but by freedom. Sweet, precious, fragile freedom. Seeing the footage on the news was like witnessing something being born. The hope and potential that surround every birth were glimmering in people’s eyes. It was beautiful.

What Berlin’s people did on that day also inspired half a continent to send the same message to their leaders. What a noble achievement. How worthy of commemoration, now that twenty years have passed.

What a shame, then, that this milestone has been treated more like a millstone by the media. Reporters more concerned with today’s news cycle are giving at best perfunctory attention to a day that showed us all that is good about humanity.

To partially right that wrong, CEI has produced a short video commemorating what the Berlin Wall’s fall symbolizes. I hope you will watch it and enjoy it. Of course, it is hard to convey in a few short minutes what the people living in that Wall’s shadow went through for 29 long years.

So put yourself in their shoes. Think what they thought. Look right in the eyes of those separated families as they try to catch glimpses of each other over that wall. And the people who risked their lives escaping. And the soldier carrying back the body of someone who didn’t make it. What was going through his mind as he carried out his grisly task? That might give you an idea of what the Berlin Wall meant.

We all need to remember the Berlin Wall. We need to say to each other, “Never again.” And we have to mean it.