Alphabetical site index (text)  | |
http://slate.msn.com/code/breakfast/breakfast.asp?Show=4/12/00&idMessage=508 0&idBio=160
Joel Achenbach is a reporter for the Washington Post, where he also writes "Rough Draft," a thrice-weekly online column. Marjorie Williams writes a weekly opinion column for the Washington Post Op-Ed page and is a contributing writer at Talk magazine. From: Marjorie Williams Dear Joel, About Elián: Don't you hate grown-ups who pretend, when it's convenient for them, that children's wishes are all-important? Giving a child too much power is one of the worst things you can do to him/her, and it's doubly destructive when you're manipulating the child at the same time. Picture Elián's Miami relatives three years down the road, in the unlikely event they win custody of him: No you can't go to the park today, Goddammit. Because I said so! But my favorite story today is historian Deborah E. Lipstadt's total victory, in a British court, over Hitler apologist David Irving. Although she is American, Irving, who is a Brit, sued her there because England's libel laws are so much more favorable to the plaintiff than ours. He claimed that she erred in calling him a "Holocaust denier," which is what he plainly is; the judge wasn't buying it. This is a real victory for plain truth. Earlier in Irving's career, his archival research in Germany earned him some genuine regard as a military historian. My father was his editor at the Viking Press (I teased him to his dying day about having written, in the flap copy for Hitler's War, that it would "stand athwart the annals" of somethingorother), and always claimed that if you told David Irving that you had just been shot and were bleeding to death, he would reply, "Hmmm, yes, well, as I was saying, Himmler then said to Goebbels ..." Every year, when my parents went to London, they had to endure the dread ritual of Dinner at the Irvings: "We are girding loins for dinner with David Irving," my father wrote home in November '76. "Do hope he doesn't bring out X-rays of Hitler's skull until dessert." It was always hot in the Irvings' flat, where they were served (this is my mother now) "the same horrible thing -- German champagne well-laced with Campari." And while Irving was bending my father's ear, Mrs. Irving would lead my mother to the kitchen for unsought confidences about the Irving connubial life. "David is as strange as ever," my mother wrote. "All he is really interested in is his Book(s), so that he looks at Alan as a kind of extension of his Hitler book, and just puts him under glass and gazes at him fondly. I do believe Alan could spit in his face and he would just say, 'Oh, yes, jolly good,' and go on gazing." Even then, when Irving was regarded as respectable and had not yet flatly denied the reality of the Final Solution, my father always sounded a little defensive about publishing him. Ron Rosenbaum has a great op-ed in today's Wall Street Journal about the fallacy of fellow historians who praise Irving's fact-gathering while disowning his conclusions. Research and conclusion are ultimately inseparable, Rosenbaum argues, "Can one praise a fact gatherer who somehow has failed to find the facts of mass murder behind Hitler's pattern of denial?" Regretfully, Marjorie | |
David Irving comments: The actual words printed by The Viking Press on the flap copy of their edition of Hitler's War are: "By no means exculpated, but assuredly de-demonized, David Irving's Hitler stand athwart the annals of Nazi Germany and World War II from this time forward." The dinner party narrated above was November 8, 1976. The ingredients, my diary relates, cost £18.93 (the diary also shows I received a letter from a William Casey that day: now, that name rings a bell). That German champagne: the drink was actually a pink sekt, I believe. Mrs Williams (whose daughter seems to belong to a pink sect) appeared to enjoy it. As for that flap copy: who is being demonized now... | |
write to David Irving |
Introduction
by this Website: 
Williams
came under fire from the usual New York circles for
having published the book, but remained a staunch
supporter until the end of his life two or three
years ago. In the late 1970s Mr Irving presented
Williams with a silver salver, engraved at Harrods
with words in honour of Williams' bravery; no fool
he, the editor kept it at his home rather than on
display in his Madison Avenue office (on the wall
of which was a wanly-framed typed rejection note,
in which he had rejected a certain manuscript,
stating: "I am not sure if many people have ever
heard of Mr Shirer, and I do not think there is any
demand for a book on the rise and fall of the Third
Reich.") Yes, we all make mistakes. When visiting
Princeton, Mr Irving would always call on the
Williams family. Once when he did so, he blundered
in just as the family's daughter, evidently the
Marjorie who is the poison-pen writer below, was
about to be formally proposed to by her then
fiancé. Music lover Alan Williams treated
him to a gramophone performance of the entire
Wagner opera "Rienzi", which he had learned was
Hitler's favourite. Now see the spin which a
daughter can put on her father's associations, once
he is no longer there to defend himself.