The Eatherly Case
Burning Conscience.
by Claude Eatherly and Gunther Anders.
Monthly Review Press. 139 pp. $4.00.
The Hiroshima Pilot.
by William Bradford Huie.
Putnam. 318 pp. $5.95.
Dark Star.
by Ronnie Dugger.
World. 254 pp. $5.95.
Claude Eatherly was the reconnaissance pilot who on August 6, 1945 ordered the message sent to the plane carrying the atom bomb that weather conditions made Hiroshima a satisfactory target. (The following summer at Bikini, Eatherly, while piloting a plane into a mushroom cloud in order to acquire scientific information, was over-exposed, along with the other crew members, to the radioactivity. The next year Eatherly's wife suffered the miscarriage of an abnormal foetus and he was discovered to produce an unusually large number of abnormal sperm. Subsequently they had two more normal children.) Most of the crew members of the planes directly involved in bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki seem to have been affected by this operation little more than they would have been by an ordinary bombing raid. Eatherly subsequently broke down: attempted suicide, periods of insanity, divorce, forgery, armed robbery. On January 3, 1957, the Veterans Administration increased his service-connected mental disability to 100 per cent and has not withdrawn this rating since. He came to believe, and some, though by no means all, of those who know him personally or professionally (as well as millions who have only read about him) also believe, that his breakdown was essentially connected with his participation in the bombing of Hiroshima. By various anti-war, anti-bomb, or anti-American groups he has been used as a genuine symbol—by some of their adversaries as a fraudulent symbol—of an ordinary man innocently guilty of a social crime and wrecked by that inexpiable, little-understood guilt. Indeed, because of the theories and publicity occasioned by his troubles, he has remained to the world at large almost unseen—almost unseeable—behind the symbolic facades flim-flamming him about on every side. Here is a man whom the chances of history have made worth knowing about. He is, at the very least, interesting.
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But if you find that he is more than interesting and decide really to contemplate him, you are in for trouble. No truth without facts: but what are the facts about Eatherly? A vast amount of journalism and speculation has been written about him, none of it wholly satisfactory even factually. No truth without philosophy: so, what is your philosophy? To make up your mind about Eatherly, you have to know what you think about some of the most important and pressing matters of our age. The obvious problem is Hiroshima and all it has come to stand for: limitless war, American military ideals and practices, dehumanized and unimaginable killing, collective and individual guilt for hideous acts of warfare, war crimes. But no less important are the questions of how to use publicity-manufactured pseudo-legends in furthering a worthy cause (or, granted the nature of propaganda in our century, whether to use them at all) and of the relation of psychiatry to the law (especially the plea not guilty by reason of insanity, and even, God help us, how to distinguish sanity from insanity). After you have mounted these ramparts, you are within sporting range of what is the source of value?, whither mankind?, and other such mastodons. This being a book review and not my Summa, I am going after smaller game, particularly the difficulties of writing well about a subject as highly charged as this one.
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Three Eatherly books have been published in the United States, each somewhat less bad than the one before it. The first, published in Germany in 1961 and in this country in 1962, is Burning Conscience: “The case of the Hiroshima pilot, Claude Eatherly, told in his letters to Gunther Anders, with a postscript for American readers by Anders, Preface by Bertrand Russell, Foreword by Robert Jungk” (Jungk is a German journalist who has written two books about Hiroshima and several articles about Eatherly). Less than a third of the text consists of letters by Eatherly; the rest are by Anders. Anders, a moral philospher, has elsewhere written well about the larger problems of nuclear weaponry; but in this little book most of what he says is subject to the charge of special pleading. Knowing nothing of Eatherly beyond the highly unreliable reports that appeared in the mass magazines and Eatherly's even more unreliable statements in their correspondence, Anders erects Eatherly into the archetypal martyr of our age. Jungk is no better. Russell is worse, if only because his prose is succinct and forceful. The five sentences about Eatherly in Russell's preface are all untrue: they are founded on inaccurate and un-inspected information, and they express, not the truth about Eatherly as they pretend to, but some prejudices of Russell's. Here is one I think perfectly wrong. He is referring to Eatherly's crimes (the legal-psychiatric term for which is “bizarre”); according to some lawyers and psychiatrists, and above all according to Anders, these self-defeating crimes of Eatherly's were committed in order to compel society to punish him for his greater crime at Hiroshima and even, in a way, to force society to recognize that Hiroshima was a crime. Russell: “The steps that he took to awaken men's consciences to our present insanity were, perhaps, not always the wisest that could have been taken, but they were actuated by motives which deserve the admiration of all who are capable of feelings of humanity.” It goes without saying that, in Russell's view as in Anders's, Eatherly was never insane but had been the victim of an elaborate plot by “The Establishment” (Russell's term, in an article in the New Statesman) to shut him up, buy him off, discredit his word. (Neither Huie nor Dugger doubts that Eatherly has been out of his mind from time to time, nor, according to them, does Eatherly himself.) It does not go without saying, but it is hardly astonishing to learn, that neither Anders nor any of the others who spread the martyr-cum-conspiracy theory took the trouble to inquire directly into the plain facts of the matter; at the time of the biggest hoopla, none of them had even met Eatherly. Anders, in other writings, floating free in the vast inane of ethical metaphysics, has formulated some of the most terrible and therefore most unwelcome dilemmas with which modern man is afflicted. Even in Burning Conscience he makes such arresting statements as these (from an open letter to President Kennedy on Eatherly's case), contrasting the Eatherly of his imagining to Eichmann: “To be blameless in private life is child's play, custom replaces conscience to a great extent. It is, on the contrary, in front of the sweet terror of the powers that make us conform and co-function where real independence and real civil courage are required.” On the whole, however, this book is valuable primarily as evidence, as symptom.
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In 1964, William Bradford Huie, a successful journalist and popular fictioneer, published The Hiroshima Pilot, written in good part in reaction to the excesses of the pseudo-legend. If Russell and Anders have a lordly, cloudy impatience which makes them gullible in accepting prejudiced testimony so long as it fleshes out their preexisting theories, Huie announces a skepticism about witnesses and a regard for “hard” facts which may distort the truth but which at least, since he is industrious, makes a version of it approachable. Take the use of the somewhat misleading term, “The Hiroshima Pilot.” To the world at large, this means the pilot of the plane that dropped the atom bomb. Both Anders and Huie know better: Anders used the term out of impatience to get to the larger moral issues; Huie uses it, as he informs the reader he told Eatherly, in the cynical knowledge that the truth about Eartherly-the-man hardly has a chance, being complex and un-heroic, against the world-wide pseudo-legend about Eatherly-the-symbol. But Huie himself falls into an error as serious as Anders's though less obvious. He seems to operate on the principle that about all a journalist need do is collect the facts and set them down on paper in order for the truth about even a subject as complicated as Eatherly to reveal itself. Anders was demonstrably wrong about Eatherly, though right, in my opinion, about the vaster issues involved in Hiroshima. Huie is, in my opinion, wrong about Hiroshima (he sees dropping the atom bomb as an act no different in kind from any other act performed by an American soldier in the course of duty in that just war justly fought) and is so zealous to make a case against Eatherly-the-symbol that he needlessly damages Eatherly-the-man (both the man in history and the man in the reader's imagination) by discrediting him as a witness almost entirely. When Eatherly is not lying out of mental confusion as to what is what, Huie implies, he is lying out of low self-interest, for the reason any criminal lies. Perhaps. But, to this reader at least, Huie's case stands unproved. His is a case for the prosecution, and in a dirty trial at that. For example, he says he paid five hundred dollars for letters giving him access to Eatherly's service records; he uses a piece of evidence so obtained to convict Eatherly of an early dishonesty; but Ronnie Dugger in his later book demonstrates how Huie, by not having dug out all the relevant facts in this episode, gives a false impression of Eatherly's dishonesty on that occasion (he cheated on an Air Force classroom written test, but in such a “bizarre” way as almost to ensure detection—this was after Hiroshima and Bikini). I agree with some of the practical moral principles on which Huie operates, especially with his hostility to the wholesale imputation of fancy motives to a man in Eatherly's circumstance; but he is so cynical, and so zealous just to win, that finally his book is valuable chiefly for such facts as it adduces.
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In 1967, Ronnie Dugger, a liberal journalist, published Dark Star: “Hiroshima reconsidered in the life of Claude Eatherly.” Dugger is far less gullible than Anders without being as cruel as Huie, and his view of Hiroshima, of Eatherly, and of Eatherly's connection with Hiroshima is far more complex than either Anders's or Huie's. In addition, Dugger makes it clear in his criticism of Huie's book that he knows facts do not speak for themselves but are selected and arranged according to the writer's philosophy and prejudices. (The two books offer many complementary instances of suppression and emphasis determined by the authors' theses.) However, despite his sophistication, Dugger has written a book unworthy of its subject, partly because of his sentimental-liberal philosophy and partly because of the slovenly writing, which is to be found all the way from muddy sentences to the shambly structure of the whole book. (It is a sadness to learn that Dugger has appeared in many of the best magazines that publish journalism in America.) Dugger's book has the virtue of correcting some of Huie's excesses and distortions, and to too great a degree exists in order to correct them; and though some of Dugger's views on the larger issues strike me as flabby (“I certainly would not contend that he has not been ill, but in these times who's well? Is an atomic bomb pilot well?”), a lot of them are pretty good, though usually fuzzed up. The chief value of Dark Star is to give some sense of Eatherly-the-man: Dugger knows him as a friend of sorts; he has and communicates a fellow-feeling for him; he kind of likes him for himself.
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The crucial problem is how to interpret certain of Eatherly's “bizarre” anti-social actions—holding up stores with an obviously toy pistol, for instance, and taking “we're out of money” for an answer—and his espousing of the world-peace cause.
For Anders and others who do not know Eatherly, the anti-social behavior is a surreptitious, unsuccessful, yet admirable way of asking society to punish him for his great crime—officially mislabeled the act of a hero—in participating in the bombing of Hiroshima. Once he came to understand this by having it explained to him, he could begin genuinely to purge himself of, or at least to control, his guilt by taking honest social action and asking forgiveness from those he had helped to injure.
To this pretty saint's legend of ethical martyrdom and self-sacrificing devotion to human welfare, Huie brings the indigenous muckraker's corrosive attention. In his view, Eatherly is an ordinary criminal and occasional schizophrenic, sick only if and as any other man like him can be considered sick. His vanity was inflated by his success as an Air Force pilot, then deflated by the ordinary life to which he reluctantly returned after the war. Once he learned that he could beat the criminal rap and also gain a great deal of attention by committing “bizarre” crimes, he took to this way of gratifying his ego. (Dugger pretty well, though not entirely, refutes this charge of Huie's.) He is an unfortunate, pretty crummy fellow, vain and venal, whose troubles are connected with Hiroshima only in the fantasies of some lawyers, psychiatrists, and philosophers and those who believe them.
Dugger, knowing Eatherly quite well, cannot buy all that bright nobility with which Anders festoons Eatherly's dark places; liking Eatherly, he cannot buy the muck which Huie dumps in them either. Finally, Dugger sees Eatherly in the conventionally liberal fashion, as a victim of society pretty much like you and me, different from us largely because of the high visibility of his troubles. Dugger accepts the dominant legal and psychiatric view of Eatherly's antisocial behavior, and he thinks Eatherly has benefited from the by and large decent treatment he has received from officialdom. Moreover, he takes Eatherly's spurts of involvement in the cause of world peace as being a sloppy mixture of which vanity and genuine concern are the main ingredients.
Clearly, Dugger comes out ahead of the other two, but not as far as he should have, because of his sentimental thesis: We are all slobs together. Maybe. But a writer who really believes this thesis cannot maintain it consistently without his book itself degenerating into another instance of slobbery, as Dark Star does.
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Surely it is ill to violate a man's mystery as extensively as Anders did. Yet, in good part because of that violation, Eatherly has a sort of half-assed mission in life now and gets along better than formerly.
Surely it is ill to undercut a man as contemptuously as Huie did. Yet, there is a profound sense in which Huie's holding Eatherly responsible for his actions (for example, blaming him, as the other two do not, for failing to support his children) shows a real respect for him, for his mystery.
Surely it is ill to exonerate a man from his special guilt by implicating him in the general slobbery as Dugger did, by excuse-making. Yet Dugger likes him, treats him like a guy he likes, and one comes to feel that that is the sort of forgiveness Claude Eatherly most deserves and most needs.
