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“Everybody Knew”/”Nobody Knew”
You’ve read the conventional wisdom, and it usually has some truth in it. “Until December 7, 1941, nobody knew that America would get dragged into World War II.” “The A-bombing of Nagasaki was cruel and unnecessary—everybody knew the Japanese were ready to surrender after Hiroshima.” “On October 4, 1957, the Soviets stunned the world. Nobody knew they were on the brink of launching the Earth’s first artificial moon.”
You’ve read the confident cynics, too. “Everybody knew John F. Kennedy was having extramarital affairs.” “Everyone knew the reason Nixon ‘killed’ Apollo was that he was jealous of JFK’s role in starting it.” And of course, “Everybody in Hollywood knew about Harvey Weinstein. They had to know.”
Let me address the most trivial one first because I saw the truth up close: Weinstein’s Miramax was a (very) small New York company that bought and distributed rock concert films. That’s how most people first met Harvey and his brother Bob, who named their company after their parents, Miriam and Max. In the Eighties it branched out, cheaply buying the US rights to foreign films that, then and now, had little chance of entering the US market. They shrewdly got maximum publicity at minimum expense, never taking a genuinely controversial stand, and parlayed that marketing ability into making lots of money and getting acquired by the Walt Disney Company. Those are the basic facts.
Harvey, arrogant and defensive to begin with, became a detested tyrant early on. Everyone who worked with him admitted his skill and freely admitted they hated him. We encountered him dozens of times, at AFI screenings in LA., and at festivals like Cannes and Sundance. At the 2002 Oscars, Robin Williams joked, “I see we have a nominee this year called ‘Monsters, Inc’, a documentary about the Weinstein brothers,” and the audience roared. He was a bully, physically loathsome and hated throughout the industry. I knew dozens of Miramax people who were fired by him or quit. A number were in protracted lawsuits against him. And yet, none of them—not one, man or woman—told the stories we heard in 2017, even privately. Because we didn’t know.
When the stories came out, there was a horrifying glee all over town that somebody brought him down, but we were as shocked as anyone else how it happened. Why didn’t we know? Basically, because we weren’t actresses, especially European ones. Weinstein was right to make foreign film festivals his happy hunting ground. He got sloppy and disgusting—everything about him is—and he got caught.
Roll back the clock. In 1940 magazine articles and subsequent history books, it was clear that the European war wasn’t going to be as brief as initially hoped. But it was also clear that the US was staying neutral, not getting dragged in like we were in 1917. We learned our lesson with WWI. This time we were going to let the dictators fight this one out. In his re-election campaign, FDR swore up and down that we were staying out of it. The news writers were unanimous because it was obvious what Americans wanted.
Yet the same writers, ten years later, were just as firm in insisting that once FDR won an unprecedented third term, of course we knew we were in it up to our necks. The German Navy was already attacking US-UK shipping in 1941. Well before Pearl Harbor, the Atlantic pact and other ‘foreign entanglements’ made America’s neutrality in name only, and everyone knew it. Auto plants started converting for war. Few expected Japan to strike the first blow against us, but few expected us to skate through 1942 at peace. What happened to convert “everyone knows we’re staying out” to “everyone knows we’re getting in”? It’s reasonable to deduce that the pro-FDR press did its best to help him out, tacitly believing that the 1940 electorate needed to be lied to.
How about the best-kept secret of World War II, the atomic bomb? It was certainly a shock to the world in August 1945. But weirdly, it seems to fall somewhere in the “everyone knew/nobody knew” spectrum. When Alfred Hitchcock was planning the Ingrid Bergman-Cary Grant movie, Notorious, he made inquiries whether uranium could be used as a weapon. He was told no, told to take it out of the script, and there was a (probably exaggerated) plan to place Hitch under surveillance. My father-in-law, who had some scientific knowledge, used to recount a story about meeting a former classmate from City College during the war, who was working for an Eastman chemical plant in Tennessee. After hearing about what few fragments his friend knew, he said casually, “Sounds like you’re making an atomic bomb down there.” “The Nazi radio has been throwing out hints that Germany has ready an explosive more devastating than anything yet dreamed of (there was talk a while back about an “atom-smashing” element capable of destroying whole cities).—from Danton Walker‘s syndicated column carried in the Philadelphia Inquirer, September 11, 1944.
But the king of all Manhattan Project leaks happened on March 13, 1944, in the pages of the Cleveland Press. Weary homeward commuters read the headline, “Forbidden City—Uncle Sam’s Mystery Town Directed by ‘2nd Einstein’” In several jaw-dropping paragraphs, they learned about Los Alamos, a giant top secret Army installation doing secret work involving explosions and death rays, directed by Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, already listed before the war in Who’s Who as one of America’s top nuclear scientists. It would not have taken a Nazi version of Sherlock Holmes to figure out what Oppenheimer and the Army were doing. There were details that were off, and conjecture that proved wrong, but by WWII standards, this was a breathtaking breach of security.
How did it happen? There was a fearsome mechanism to deal with the press and press censorship, which was mostly voluntary anyway. But the reporter, John Raper, didn’t apply for credentials, wasn’t doing an assigned story, and didn’t approach the front gate. He was on vacation in New Mexico and fell into talking with excessively loose-lipped plant workers having a drink after work. He wrote up his story in total ignorance of what it meant, and the Cleveland Press staff that vetted it for wartime censorship requirements were too ill-informed to realize that physicists had become a key national strategic asset. Los Alamos was stunned at the leak and managed to quash the routine circulation of the story on the Associated Press wire.
Even after the war ended, when Life Magazine did a now-it-can-be-told story about the Manhattan Project, one of the artist illustrations of the story shows a ball-like bomb on top of the Trinity tower. Accurate—far too accurate for General Groves, because all the stories approved for publication described the already obsolete Hiroshima bomb’s design, basically a gun that fired a U235 ‘bullet’ into a U235 target at the end of a gun barrel. But Trinity, the prototype of the Nagasaki bomb and nearly all the nuclear weapons to follow, was triggered by implosion, The simple fact that the bomb was spherical, trivial as it sounds now, was such an important clue to the way it worked that implosion would continue to be the bomb project’s biggest secret for another half-dozen years or so. Yet by August 1945, somehow someone knew the right shape, indicating that somebody talked, probably an eager GI workman who had no idea he was betraying a secret. The Army was never able to find out who. The Russians, like the Germans in the 1944 Cleveland case, didn’t even notice the article. Then again, the Russians already had a great deal of spy information; they didn’t need Life Magazine.
I’ve mentioned other cases in the “Everybody knew”/”Nobody Knew” spectrum. Maybe we’ll do more. Maybe you have some, too.
Published in General
I warned y’all about men who wear sandals . . . but you didn’t listen! You didn’t listen!!
I never know the things that everybody knows. In the off-chance that I’ve heard the thing that everybody knows, I never believe it until it’s passed from speculation into history, and not always then.
Thanks, @hankrhody! That’s how I would describe myself! I’m fascinated at how people are in-the-know, at least to some degree. I think I’m always the last to find out, including the gossip in our neighborhood.
I think I know now more often than I used to know. Part of that, I think, is simply being a bit jaded and sometimes assuming the worst; some of it is wisdom; and some of it is keeping up on the conspiracies–oops–the news of the day. I remember arguing in the long past with my Zen teacher who was becoming increasingly annoyed with my tracking current events. She wanted to know why I did it, since it often got my ire up. I explained that I felt a responsibility as an American citizen to know what was going on in the world or at least in this country; she didn’t get it. I know a lot of people nowadays who prefer to cover their eyes and ears. In some respects, I don’t blame them.
Speaking of the things everyone knows, there is a series of Canadian one-man plays called the Wingfield Series. The main character is Walt Wingfield, a retired CEO of a stockbrokerage firm who has bought a farm in the country and retired from the rat race. In about the fifth or sixth or seventh play, he discusses levels of secrecy in town:
Having grown up in a very small town, this is true. The problem with #3, is that since nobody talks about it, the knowledge doesn’t get passed along very easily. Instead, awareness has to hit like a lightning bolt from the blue.
That is why it’s the highest level of secrecy.
Sputnik was a complete surprise to the American public and the vast majority of people in government. Yet, it (and America’s Project Vanguard, with @richardeaston‘s dad as a key project leader) were both announced well in advance as part of the International Geophysical Year, 1957-58, and radio frequencies for Sputnik were published in the west months ahead of the launch. These giveaways went largely unnoticed, because nobody believed the Soviets could actually do it.
I have this policy against believing communists.
I’m thinking there’s another couple factors at play: the expectation that someone’s behavior will have consequences, and the nature of the surroundings.
In the Weinstein example, if anyone did know, it’s not like that’s a tactic that’s never been used on actresses looking to get famous before (not saying it’s common, but I don’t believe it’s never happened). Similarly, because of that, even if someone else knew, they might be less likely to bring it forward because they might get hit with fallout.
Basically, the tragedy of the commons except with gossip.
The Russians liked to pretend they didn’t have a nuclear program before hearing about Hiroshima. They pretend the Americans forced them into it.
The Americans pretend the Soviets stole the bomb because they didn’t know how to do it themselves. Not so. Spying helped them, no doubt about it, but the biggest challenge of the bomb program wasn’t the detonation mechanism, but the sheer overwhelming scale of building an entire chemical processing industry from scratch.
So in a way, both enemy sides had some reason to agree on some of the same lies. A Baptists-and-bootlegger coalition.
I probably posted this before, but my father corrects some of the erroneous statements about Vanguard in his part of this clip. https://youtu.be/HS72o86aeZo
Freddie Mercury was getting all the chicks too!
They always do. Going by the photos he posts on Facebook, one of my cousins is always surrounded by hot girls, but . . . uh . . .
There’s a wonderful Jeeves and Wooster tone to that sentence.
Certain things didn’t show up in the old days–say, 50 years or more. A more sizable town might have a doctor known for being willing to perform abortions, but nobody mentioned it in public, even if they’d heard the rumor. Wife beating was rare, but less rare than we probably think, and seldom spoken of. Sometimes people were tight-lipped out of kindness; neighbors and friends who didn’t gossip about abandoned families, a past prison sentence, or a suspiciously rapid marriage were pure gold if you had them.
Hey, he liked to go out every night, loved to sing and dance, and dressed much flashier than we do.
Jeffrey Epstein, being linked to both Clinton and Trump (and perhaps other elite Republicans as well) makes me wonder whether the demonstrations (most recently and recurrently in poor old Portland, OR) are just the wilder lashings-out of a justifiably angry Normal America fed up with the behavior of what we’ve taken to calling the Elites, with minor (if violent) disagreements as to the root causes.
My gut reaction to the abundant footage available of the demonstrators is, I’m ashamed to admit, supercilious disgust. They’re so…stupid.
With their tiresome slogans (consisting mostly of “F*** YOU!”) repulsive appearance and general, depressing air of self-indulgence, ignorance and uselessness…
They may be —rather conveniently—wrong in their analysis, but are they wrong to be angry?
Don’t fall for the media’s attempts to link Epstein with Trump. That’s deflection. The only connection seems to be that he once hitched a ride back to NY on Epstein’s plane when Epstein wasn’t aboard. And that he threw Epstein out of one of his clubs when Epstein was hitting on a young woman.
I don’t think anger is automatically wrong. Much depends on the object of that anger.
What is the object of these brown-shirts’ anger?
And then of course, how that anger manifests itself. Anger can be channeled productively.
I know. I think Trump was, at most, marginally friendly with Epstein because Epstein was one of the players in Palm Beach. Though it’s a little hard to understand why. I don’t even understand where Epstein got (earned?) so much money?
The logic of creating wedge issues to divide the voting public into Us and Them when an election looms is grasp-able, but what about the conspiracy-theorist’s assertion that we are all being deliberately encouraged to loathe one another so the elite can continue to screw us…is that plausible? Are people really that clever?
I think what is possible is simpler than it looks. The elite wants to keep its power, so it demonizes the Right/Trump/Trump supporters. If we are monsters on the Right, which the Left elite/politicians/media all say, the loathing is pretty clear-cut: the Left hates us, and we “hate” the Left for hating us. It’s been going on for years and has reached a new high with the election of Trump and his commitment to drain the swamp–the domain of all those on the Left.
I am beginning to believe that the conspiracy theorists are a little closer to the truth than I will comfortably admit.
Okay, Pizzagate was crazy. The idea of a high-powered Democratic Party Pedo ring? Nuts, right?
Right?
No, but some think they are.
Wasn’t that also the theory about Jon Benet Ramsay?
But you see we have to look after the EU’s interests first. No matter how contradictory and hypocritical their interests are.
The lawyer for one of Epstein’s victims has said that Trump was the only one of the big shots in Palm Beach who spoke with him and gave him help when he filed his lawsuit.
Which reminds me of something else rather timely in light of accusations against Trump. When Trump invested and bought Mar a Largo in Palm Beach he refused to join the biggest private clubs on the island because they would not admit Jews and blacks. When he set up Mar a Largo in the early 90s he admitted everyone. I was living in South Florida at the time and this was widely known. Trump could not stand the Palm Beach establishment and enjoyed having the “wrong” people as his club members.
I would believe there was a breakdown in command and control and Shia pilots flew their planes to Iran.
Yep.
Here’s a nice article about it from 2015.
And here’s one from 1997.
But today, “everybody knows” that President Trump is a racist. Just ask your friends on the left.
They are eunuchs.
Homosexuals are not eunuchs. If they were, social conservatives wouldn’t waste their time endlessly posting about them.
They are moral eunuchs.