Friends + Interlocutors,

The other day I came across a long letter I had sent to Professor Stephen Graubard in 1992. At the time he was the editor of Daedalus, the journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, published in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The letter contained some dramatic pronouncements which in retrospect I find curious. It made me wonder how I had first made contact with him. 

A year earlier I had sent my World War II essay to the poet and novelist Charles Bukowski in Los Angeles. I found his address in the L.A. telephone book at the main branch of the Miami public library. I can’t think of two individuals more different than Bukowski and Graubard. Bukowski replied, “A fine work. But where can you place it? I can think of no journal with the courage to publish it…. Thank you very much, very, for allowing me to read your work….” More on Bukowski later.  

Returning to the Graubard correspondence. He sent me a friendly letter…”I find your Unauthorized World Situation Report immensely interesting. However, it is just not something that we could publish in Daedalus.” As an afterthought, he added a P.S. on the second page, “I do not wish you to read this letter suggesting that I agree with what you have said….” Graubard's reply was somewhat amazing in view of the fact that I was an unsolicited unknown and he was a Harvard-educated professor and a world-renowned scholar. I mean, that he took the time to reply in detail.

Concurrently, I sent Situation Report to Bukowski. His reply was also upbeat, but without qualification. “Please forgive my taking so long to respond to the manuscript you sent me. That is, THE UNAUTHORIZED WORLD SITUATION REPORT. You are a very brave soul to take on the liars and the manipulators as you have. I would even go so far as to say that you have written yourself into a dangerous situation. There are too many of the entrenched who would be more than infuriated that you have blown the cover from their game. Be careful. And again, congratulations on your courage.”

Publication of Situation Report was postponed until self-published it in 2005. In the meantime, I stayed in touch with Professor Graubard. Our correspondence verges on being voluminous. This was back when people wrote actual letters sent through the post office. We exchanged views and made book recommendations to each other. He did not lecture me. Graubard disagreed with or was skeptical of my overall outlook.  

My general thesis of the 20th century is that English diplomacy had destroyed the world and that Whitehall then handed the torch to Washington which took up where England left off, only to re-ruin the world. Graubard was a Churchill devotee and an Anglophile, so we agreed to disagree. He had never heard of Francis Neilson's The Churchill Legend. He promised to look it up at Harvard’s Widener Library.

Remember what Frank Harris proclaimed in the run-up to World War I, that Anglo-Saxon combativeness was the greatest danger in the world today. This was certainly true in the waning years of the self-destructive British Empire, but now in the final days of the self-destructing American Empire, the so-called Anglo-Saxons in America and England have vacated the driver’s seat, and hence are no longer the greatest danger to the West. What’s left of the Anglo-Saxons is at best a silent partner or front organization. Graubard and I did not delve into the wide-ranging subject of Zionism and the Jews.

All this is by way of an introduction to my satire “Baron Münchausen: The Final Chapter”. Professor Graubard had favorable things to say about it. ”I have read your ‘Baron Münchausen’, and find it utterly delightful”. Again, surprising, in view of its radical alternative historical narrative it presents, starting in the late 18th Century. He inquired if I knew the “Fable of the Bees” by De Mandeville. I confess I didn’t, and still don’t. I will send the Münchausen item in my next missive.

Patrick

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