Robert Ludlum's The Chancellor Manuscript revolves around the pursuit of J. Edgar Hoover's secret files by competing members of America's "secret government," Inver Brass--and Peter Chancellor's haplessly finding himself in the middle of that deadly contest. However, Chancellor's first encounter with Inver Brass was over a quite different document, an actual "Chancellor Manuscript"--his doctoral dissertation. The reason why Inver Brass took an interest in such a seemingly mundane matter was its subject, Chancellor's historical research into the causes of World War II having revealed the role of American business in the building up of the Nazis, without which they would never have been in a position to pursue their war of aggression. ("The multinational corporations," the "colossi of international finance," a category that included "A number of the most honored industrial names in America" "could not feed the Nazi wolf pack fast enough," as they "conveniently overlooked," "obscured," "tolerated, ultimately accepted" the "wolf pack's objectives and methods" for the sake of "the swiftly rising lines on profit-and-loss charts.") The folks at Inver Brass meant to see that the dissertation was not accepted--and the findings not published--and Chancellor denied his academic career with all to which it might lead, for they saw it as part of their function "to protect men and institutions from the moral indictments borne of hindsight," and the more in as they were certain that "what was anathema today" had been "right forty years ago."
The kind of self-serving elite rationale that holds that what is good for the rich and powerful is good for the country, and that next to their notion of "order" and "stability" such little things as equality under the law, the responsibility that goes with power, the principles of democracy and historical truth count for nothing--ever preached to us by their lackeys in government, media, the Academy and elsewhere--we are little surprised to find out what those folks really are when the novel's real game begins, and these figures who think themselves the "best and brightest" quickly prove a pack of vile villains in what has long seemed to me the culmination of Ludlum's pre-shoot 'em up efforts, and perhaps his strongest work (Trevayne its only real competition). This seems to me the more the case given the specific revelations implied in the discussion. We may be a long way from when young Mr. Chancellor was making his investigation (1968), and today revelations about American businessmen being in bed with the Nazis are, for many, old news, with even worse than Ludlum hinted at long and well and even minutely established in the historiography. Indeed, we now know that such "honored industrial names" not only built up the Nazi war machine but went on producing critical material for it in Germany and German-occupied Europe even after the U.S. and Germany declared war on each other, sometimes with German-furnished slave labor, and selling even American-based production to Germany through third countries, practically until V-E Day--and that not only short-term profit but a powerful ideological sympathy was frequently operative (all as, of course, the government again and again looked the other way and never showed much interest in holding even outright law-breaking to real account).
However, the tendency in the history most likely to reach beyond the limited audience of intellectuals interested in such things remains to downplay all that in favor of more patriotic, "We're all doing our part!" "Greatest Generation" stuff. Indeed, in thinking about the rise of Hitler the tendency in the more popular historiography is to sideline the role of not just American business but business generally in Nazism's rise, brushing aside the reality that German business played the decisive role in putting Hitler in power for the sake of getting a government that would crush the left, break organized labor, and thus not only safeguard Property but boost Profitability by holding down wages and social outlays as it poured money into the only kind of "Big Government" their kind wholeheartedly approve, the military-industrial complex; and the fact that Hitler meant to and did deliver what they wanted; such that however much German businessmen grumbled the fact remained that German business did very, very well out of the arrangement all the way through the war as it benefited from the massive war spending and looting of occupied countries (exemplified by the data on how much more, and more modern, industrial capital German business had at war's end, and the way in which, thanks to its being allowed to hold onto it, it enabled Germany's post-war economic miracle).
Consistent with this the tendency is to rely on Cold Warrior fever dreams about the Madness of Crowds in the Age of Totalitarianism (by way of such as Hannah Arendt), theories about an unhappy sort of German "exceptionalism" (via figures like William Shirer and Daniel Goldhagen), and the dark side of the Great Man of history theory (through people like Allan Bullock), to explain the Third Reich, all as, with far rightist views increasingly mainstream, we are told that Nazism was unavoidable riposte to, or somehow even extension of, the Bolshevik Revolution (by way of a Timothy Snyder's historiography, or an Alice Weidel demonstrating the real intellectual caliber of the "highly educated" international elite from which this "populist" derives with her exceedingly transparent lie that Hitler "was a Communist").* Anything, it seems, will do but the obvious, the logical, the factually grounded, for such is not only the way intellectual life runs in our era, with its embrace of the contempt for hard fact and economic interest that Arendt was so quick to chalk up to the "totalitarians," the more in as the facts are so inconvenient for those who flatter themselves that they are the best and brightest of today.
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