Letters
Vol. 20 No. 20 · 15 October 1998
From Constance Blackwell
At first it seemed to me, as an American in Britain, that English people apologised all the time. ‘Sorry, how stupid of me.’ Were these the people who almost owned the earth and were first-rate pirates in the 16th century? Yet none of the people saying sorry or that they had been stupid either appeared sorry by American standards or stupid by any other. Could it be, I began to wonder, that people apologised in order to continue doing what they wanted to do? That they did not have to put on a mask of rectitude about everything all the time, but knew they were not perfect – and neither was anyone else.
What I like about this country is that inside each Englishman a Roundhead and a Cavalier are living side by side, if sometimes acrimoniously. Law is taken very seriously, yet so is enjoyment, and no one thinks anything is wrong with that. In the States, alas, we had no Restoration. (It is true that some Puritans found the religious tone of Massachusetts under John Winthrop too much: his son, John Winthrop Jr, founded Connecticut to get away.) The members of the early communities had to be right all the time because they had to pretend that they had been saved by God. They could not even vote in town elections unless they were members of their church; and to be members of their church they had to swear in church that they had been saved. This notion of being right because you are saved still informs American life. We had never lost a war until Vietnam and that caused a national nervous breakdown. We never said we were sorry to the Vietnamese but have become paralysed in foreign policy because we are afraid we may be wrong again. No sane German, Englishman or Japanese would ever say that their country had always been right. But it is just as unlikely for an American to say that their country had been wrong as for them to say they themselves had been wrong. It would be close to admitting that they were, well, almost damned.
American Presidents are caught up in this myth. So here is poor Clinton, caught doing something rather silly, but he never thought simply to say: ‘Oh, that was stupid. I lost my head – I was a foolish middle-aged man. Sorry. Now let’s deal with the global economy.’ No, he had to deny that he had done anything that wasn’t right. When it was discovered that he had lied, he had to get his lawyers to say that, given certain legal definitions of the term ‘sex’, he had not lied. And when he had finally to admit to having lied, who did he confess to? A gathering of religious leaders. Might it not be better if Americans were to learn the English meaning of the word ‘sorry’?
Constance Blackwell
Centre for Intellectual History, London NW1
Vol. 20 No. 21 · 29 October 1998
From L.J. Olivier
The hostility shown towards President Clinton in the British media, not to mention the American, has been so savage that one can almost believe Hillary Clinton’s suggestion of a right-wing conspiracy. Edward Luttwak (LRB, 1 October) provides an other striking example of this biased commentary. He condemns Clinton’s inaugural address because it proposed specific programmes to help the poor and under privileged rather than some grand, windy project, and goes on to suggest that this amounted to a ‘brief for the defence long before Monica Lewinsky was in the news’ – a curious interpretation of a perfectly rational political decision. Clinton is blamed for using legal arguments to defend himself against a legal cross-examin ation by the Starr tribunal. He is blamed for following the advice of his military Chiefs of Staff and using Cruise missiles against targets in Sudan and Afghanistan, rather than embarking on a hazardous commando exercise. He is even called to account for the fact that the Republican majority in Congress voted down his tobacco legislation.
Luttwak claims that the Starr investigations into ‘Filegate’, ‘Travelgate’ and Whitewater contain material far more damaging to Clinton than the Lewinsky affair, but says that Starr was under immense pressure to publish the Lewinsky findings first. Pressure from whom? And should an in dependent judge succumb to ‘pressure’? Starr is ‘inexorable’ in his search for truth, though having failed to turn up one iota of damaging evidence against Clinton, he was about to throw in the towel when the Lewinsky story surfaced. The Republicans, in their desire to bring down a President who has routed them twice at the polls and who has at least tried to bring in some legislation to improve the lot of the underprivileged, now claim that a casual affair is a high crime justifying impeachment.
L.J. Olivier
Burnham Overy Staithe, Norfolk
Vol. 20 No. 23 · 26 November 1998
From Stuart Semmel
Constance Blackwell’s attempt to treat Bill Clinton’s weaselling prevarications as emblematic of an American inability ‘to learn the English meaning of the word "sorry"’ (Letters, 15 October) is no more convincing than the assertion that Jonathan Aitken’s handling of the truth is a key to the English character.
Stuart Semmel
University of Pennsylvania
Vol. 21 No. 1 · 7 January 1999
From Ludovic Kennedy
Constance Blackwell (Letters, 15 October 1998) says: 'It is just as unlikely for an American to say that their country had been wrong as for them to say that they themselves had been wrong.' In no field is this truer than that of miscarriages of criminal justice. In this country we do attempt to rectify miscarriages, though often twenty years too late, and to this end have established the Criminal Cases Review Commission, which as a court of last resort has already had some stunning successes. In America no such corrective institution exists. Recently two American professors, Hugo Bedau (who teaches philosophy at Tufts) and Michael Radelet (sociology at Florida), published a horrifying book called In Spite of Innocence in which they list four hundred cases since 1900 of executed Americans who they claim were wrongly convicted; apart from Sacco and Vanzetti, for whose convictions Governor Dukakis of Massachusetts granted partial amends, no court has disturbed any of those guilty verdicts.
A good example of this reluctance to admit and then apologise for past mistakes is the case of Richard Hauptmann, electrocuted in 1936 for the kidnapping and murder of the infant son of Charles Lindbergh, the transatlantic flyer. Although he was found to be in possession of marked Lindbergh ransom bills, there was not a scrap of evidence against Hauptmann for kidnapping and murder that was not false or faked. All America had been shocked by the crime, for Lindbergh was their number one hero, with the result that politicians, lawyers, police and the general public were only too ready to discount the lies that passed as evidence in order to find a scapegoat.
My book on the case, The Airman and the Carpenter, was published in the US and Britain in 1985, and the majority of reviews granted that I had made a convincing case for Hauptmann's innocence. 'Gripping and horrifying', the New York Times called it, and Bedau and Radelet included Hauptmann's name in their survey of the four hundred innocent.
The film rights were bought by Barbara Broccoli (daughter of the producer of the James Bond films), who commissioned William Nicholson (author of the brilliant Shadowlands and the television play Life Story about the discovery of DNA) to write a screenplay based on the book. It was offered to and turned down by every major company in Hollywood, not for lack of merits, which were considerable, but because none of them wished to be associated with the widespread corruption of the case and the reluctance of the American legal system to correct it. It was, however, snapped up by the independent American network production company Home Box Office and screened, with the Irish actor Stephen Rea as Hauptmann and Isabella Rossellini as Mrs Hauptmann, under the title Crime of the Century, which was the name given to it by the press at the time. Once more the majority of critics found that the Governor and legislature of New Jersey had a case to answer; and once again they did nothing.
The latest development in this long-running epic is a book called Lindbergh by A. Scott Berg, a comprehensive account of the airman's life. Berg tells us that though he would have liked to show Hauptmann's innocence, he found what he called the weight of evidence against him; in other words, he accepted uncritically the received wisdom that found Hauptmann guilty at the trial and still finds him so today. When I reviewed the book, I posed several questions that Berg had failed to address and which cast doubt on Hauptmann's guilt. One was the ludicrous prosecution evidence that one rail from the kidnap ladder had come from Hauptmann's attic: this meant that Hauptmann, never short of lumber in his garage, climbed up the cleats of his linen cupboard (the only way to reach the attic) with chisel and saw, then prised up and stole a plank from his landlord's flooring, before spending hours planing it down to make it fit. Another was Berg's failure to comment on photographs which show that the ticks against Hauptmann's name on the time sheet of a Manhattan apartment block, which prove him to have been working full time on the day of the kidnapping, had been blotted out by the New York City police. Nor does he have any answer to the question why, if Hauptmann was guilty, he found himself unable to accept an offer by the New Jersey Governor and Attorney-General to spare his life in return for a full confession of the part he had played in the crime, however small; and an offer from the New York Evening Journal for his wife, who would otherwise be left destitute, to receive $90,000 after his execution in return for a similar confession.
Berg's English publishers have stated that the film director Steven Spielberg has bought the film rights of Lindbergh; and I guess that what will concern him most is the principal evidence that led to Hauptmann's conviction: that of Colonel Lindbergh who, having been assured by the head of the New Jersey state police that there was no doubt that Hauptmann was the right man, swore on oath that two words he had heard Hauptmann utter in the New York District-Attorney's office – 'Hey, Doc' or 'Hey, Doctor' – were the same words uttered by the same voice which he had heard in a Bronx cemetery in the dark at a distance of some eighty to a hundred yards, two and a half years before, a claim the New York Times pronounced impossible. And as if that were not enough, when asked by prosecuting counsel if he believed that Hauptmann was guilty of the kidnapping (a question which would never have been allowed in a British court of law) he replied firmly: 'I do.' Later the journalist Adela Rogers St John canvassed the trial jury, who told her that Lindbergh's evidence had been a determining factor in reaching their verdict.
I have written to Mr Spielberg to ask whether, in the scenes that concern Lindbergh's evidence at Hauptmann's trial, he intends to follow the received wisdom or, having seen Crime of the Century and read The Airman and the Carpenter, he may prefer the version of events given by those of us who have studied the case in depth and conclude that even on the balance of probabilities the case for Hauptmann's innocence is overwhelming. In short, will Mr Spielberg, like the feeble Mr Berg, be yet another American who cannot bring himself to admit error or, contrariwise, prove to be the shining exception to the rule?
Ludovic Kennedy
Avebury, Wiltshire
