My latest film, “The Atomic Bowl:Football at Ground Zero—and Nuclear Peril Today” has been airing over PBS stations this past month and streaming for free (key links to watch and more here). A companion e-book is now available, and you can read more or order here. Thank you. And subscribing to this newsletter still somehow FREE.
No cartoons (oh, maybe one) or music today, as we just received very sad news this morning that my good friend, co-author and a mentor over the past four decades, Robert Jay Lifton, has died at the age of ninety-nine, at his home in Truro, MA. We had last visited him, and longtime partner Nancy Rosenblum, as we did nearly every year, this past June, and he was his sharp, profound, often witty self, although largely confined to a wheelchair.
The New York Times obituary this morning is appropriately lengthy, although it still omits much, calling him “a psychiatrist who peered into some of the darkest corners of contemporary history, including Hiroshima, the Holocaust and the Vietnam War, in search of lessons about individual and collective consciousness….He wrote, helped write or edited some two dozen books and hundreds of articles about the meanings of what The Times Literary Supplement of London called ‘the seemingly incomprehensible.’” Topping that list, perhaps, were Nazi doctors and Hiroshima (he won the National Book Award for “Death in Life”), and it was the latter which first drew us together.
We co-authored two major books, a classic on American response to the use of the atomic bomb, “Hiroshima in America: Fifty Years of Denial” and on capital punishment in our country, “Who Owns Death?” along with a dozens or more articles. I also worked for him for a couple of years long ago as executive director of his research center in NYC. Needless to say, he helped inspire my own books on the Bomb (most recently “The Beginning or the End”) and my two current PBS films, “Atomic Cover-up” and “The Atomic Bowl.”
Yet one of our strongest bonds was….baseball. He was a lifetime Dodgers fans, going back to growing up in Brooklyn, and barely shaken by the team’s move to Los Angeles. For about 20 years we attended almost every season a Dodgers vs. Mets game, at Shea Stadium or CitiField, which to his frustration his team almost always lost. Still, for many years he opened his many phone messages to me, “LaSorda here,” a reference to the longtime Dodgers manager.
Earlier this year we even exchanged views about Ry Cooder’s stunning concept album “Chavez Ravine,” on the site where the Dodgers built their stadium in L.A. after the longest Mexican-American residents had been forced out.
Of course, he kept up with current Trump World horrors. In June, the NYT featured on its home page his letter to the editor warning of what he dubbed “malignant normality.”
Falsehoods are put forward as facts of nature, both all-consuming and inevitable. Terrible events become commonplace and fuel our tendency toward psychic numbing. Combating this numbing requires witnesses….Witnessing is a necessity for recovering truth and stirring active resistance.
I will write more about Robert in days to come, but see below for an excerpt from something I posted here a couple of years back, an interview with M. Gessen. But first, I promised one cartoon, so here is the cover to a book of drawings by Robert, from his avocation (mentioned in that NYT obit) of creating comic “psycho birds.” We received a new drawing for many years marking New Year’s Day or as party invites.
From 2023:
I was pleased on Sunday to find The New Yorker online posting at the top of its site a massive Q & A that finds Masha Gesssen interviewing one of my longtime mentors and heroes, Robert Jay Lifton, at age 97. We first met exactly 40 years ago when, as the editor of Nuclear Times magazine, I coaxed him into writing a piece for us. I knew his work from his National Book Award winner on Hiroshima survivors, Death in Life, and then Nazi Doctors.
Oh, we then co-authored numerous articles and a classic book Hiroshima in America in 1995, and a few years later the acclaimed Who Owns Death?, on capital punishment in the U.S. We co-wrote pieces for more than a dozen publications, ranging from TV Guide to The New York Times. I started attending his famous Wellfleet gatherings each autumn. Remained friends and writing partners ever since—also attended several Beethoven concerts—and he is still going strong at 97, with yet another new book, Surviving Our Catastrophes, which inspired the New Yorker piece. Gessen traveled to Truro on the Cape for the interview, in the home he shares with political scientist and partner Nancy Rosenblum.
The lengthy interview touches on all sorts of vital areas. Gessen opens by asking about the meaning of several key phrases that Lifton devised and have since entered the (political or psychological) discourse, such as “psychic numbing” and “atrocity-producing situation.” They then discuss the Trump cult, his political activism, the potential apocalypse of climate change, but also his love for sports, his daily routine and why he retains his long-standing hopefulness in a dark time.
Here are a few highlights related to the subject we most share, nuclearism.
Have you seen the movie “Oppenheimer”?
Yes. I thought it was a well-made film by a gifted filmmaker. But it missed this issue of nuclearism. It missed the Bohr-Oppenheimer interaction. And worst of all, it said nothing about what happened in Hiroshima. It had just a fleeting image of his thinking about Hiroshima. My view is that his success in making the weapon was the source of his personal catastrophe. He was deeply ambivalent about his legacy. I’m very sensitive to that because that was how I got to my preoccupation with Oppenheimer: through having studied Hiroshima, having lived there for six months, and then asking myself, What happened on the other side of the bomb—the people who made it, the people who used it? They underwent a kind of numbing.
It’s also true that Oppenheimer, in relationship to the larger hydrogen bombs, became the most vociferous critic of nuclearism. That’s part of his story. The moral of Oppenheimer’s story is that we need abolition. That’s the only human solution.
By abolition, you mean destruction of all existing weapons?
Yes, and not building any new ones.
Have you been following the war in Ukraine? Do you see Putin as engaging in nuclearism?
I do. He has a constant threat of using nuclear weapons. Some feel that his very threat is all that he can do. But we can’t always be certain. I think he is aware of the danger of nuclear weapons to the human race. He has shown that awareness, and it has been expressed at times by his spokesman. But we can’t ever fully know. His emotions are so otherwise extreme.
There’s a messianic ideology in Russia. And the line used on Russian television is, “If we blow up the world, at least we will go straight to Heaven. And they will just croak.”
There’s always been that idea with nuclearism. One somehow feels that one’s own group will survive and others will die. It’s an illusion, of course, but it’s one of the many that we call forth in relation to nuclear danger.
Next term: “witnessing professional.”
I went to Hiroshima because I was already anti-nuclear. When I got there, I discovered that, seventeen years after the bomb was dropped, there had been no over-all, inclusive study of what happened to that city and to groups of people in it. I wanted to conduct a scientific study, having a protocol and asking everyone similar questions—although I altered my method by encouraging them to associate. But I also realized that I wanted to bear witness to what happened to that city. I wanted to tell the world. I wanted to give a retelling, from my standpoint, as a psychological professional, of what happened to that city. That was how I came to see myself as a witnessing professional. It was to be a form of active witness.
There were people in Hiroshima who embodied the struggle to bear witness. One of them was a historian who was at the edge of the city who said, “I looked down and saw that Hiroshima had disappeared.” That image of the city disappearing took hold in my head and became central to my life afterward. And the image that kept reverberating in my mind was, one plane, one bomb, one city. I was making clear—at least to myself at first and then, perhaps, to others—that bearing witness and taking action was something that we needed from professionals and others.
My condolences, Greg. He sounds like a lifelong advocate for peace, and I’m grateful for his influence on your work.
Greg,
Thank you for this. Lifton’s book “The Nazi Doctors” inspired to do a deep dive into the T-4 Euthanasia program, which included a visit to the T-4 center at Hadamar which in now a memorial and museum to the victims of that program. It also led me to look at the American geneticists that provided inspiration to the Nazis. He was a historian and a prophet. I was unaware of the letter which you quoted to the Times. That was a profound statement.
Sincerely,
Steve Dundas