von Braun in the Rainbow

[Monte Davis]

> b) --- why would the mere characterization of the review
> as insufferable discomfit Monte so greatly...

First, that word "insufferable" suggested condescension, which was confirmed
by Rich's bland "I realize Dyson is a physicist by trade and his opinions
may be clouded..." In other words, those physicists are just shallow suckers
for technical virtu and can't be expected to have our fine sensibilities.
After that, any "disavowal of ad hominem scorn" rings kinda hollow.

Second, WvB is a hot button for me because I've spent the last few years
trying to understand the history of rocketry, space programs, and changing
attitudes toward space since the 1950s. That entailed learning a lot about
von Braun, and thinking about the changes in his reputation. I concluded
that the prevailing view today (basically, "how did that evil Nazi ever pull
the wool over our eyes?") is every bit as partial and inadequate as the the
benign, confidence-inspiring Dr. Space peddled by the Disney Tomorrowland
shows, and later by NASA PR. I can't count the number of articles I've read
in recent years implying that the Mittelwerk-Dora story has only recently
emerged from secret files somewhere. That's bullshit; as I've noted here
before, and as GR fans ought to know better than most (TRP isn't *that*
special a researcher), all the salient facts were available in 1945 or soon
after, and were part of the conventional wisdom about WWII in Europe and the
UK from the early 1950s on. 

So the real question -- a much more complicated and interesting one, IMHO --
is how and why we in the US collectively, willingly pulled the wool over
*our own* eyes. What was the mental mechanism that let us keep the "bad
Wernher" partitioned off (with a few safe, court-jester jabs from Tom Lehrer
and Mort Sahl) for so long, while he was helping us develop our own
holocaust machinery, and then rediscover him? Or let us award his teammate
Arthur Rudolph a fistful of medals and honorary doctorates in the 1950s and
1960s, and then "discover" in 1982 that he'd been WvB's lieutenant at the
Mittelwerk ("oh...gee... THAT Arthur Rudolph?!?!"), and hound him out of the
US?

The point (as Neufeld makes clear in the biography) is *not* that WvB wasn't
deeply implicated in an evil enterprise; of course he was. The point is that
those mental mechanisms -- the ways the US found it comfortable and
convenient to think about WvB in the 1950s and 1960s -- are disturbingly
similar to those WvB and his peers lived by at Peenemunde. It does not
excuse anything WvB did to recognize that there's abundant bad faith and bad
conscience to go around.

[review]

Third: for me, all this ties into GR because the book devotes a lot of
effort (obviously in Pokler's story, less obviously in a lot of other ways)
to the many avenues of attraction that pulled people into a Peenemunde, and
the many modes of rationalization that could sustain them there. In that
breathtaking vault from Slothrop's dissolution and the launching of rocket
00000 to Richard M. Zhlubb's 1973, it's implicitly asking: OK, now you've
had the funhouse ride through 1945: did you learn *anything*?

I couldn't agree more with Robin that "when you close the book, you're left
with The Bomb."