"The Not So Good War": Robert Ludlum's World War II

Looking back on the profusion of bestselling spy thrillers set during World War II in the 1970s it has seemed to some, myself included, plausible that the popularity of World War II as a setting for such thrillers was that it seemed a less fraught period in which, in contrast with a period where in the wake of the Vietnam War, Watergate, the Frank Church hearings, détente, and much, much else, and any pretense of there being a consensus about the goodness of the West's security states against villainous Soviets was rather less tenable than it had seemed some years earlier, people could still broadly agree on who were the "good guys" and "bad guys." (Certainly this seems to well describe Ken Follett's blockbuster The Eye of the Needle, with its good guy Britons vs. bad guys Nazis plot, all as those more enduring novels then set in the present, like John le Carre's Karla trilogy, or Graham Greene's The Human Factor, tended to take a more jaundiced view of the West's relations with the developing world.)

Still, looking at Robert Ludlum's use of World War II in his books one gets something other than a flight into patriotic simplicities--his plots typically having American business in bed with the Nazis. Thus did it go in The Scarlatti Inheritance, where a scion of an American industrial dynasty used his family's fortune to bankroll the National Socialist Party at an early stage of its development. Ludlum set the first part of his later The Gemini Contenders during the war--but then ties that legacy in with the very present political struggles between a power-mad and militaristic Army officer and his liberal brother, while in The Rhinemann Exchange, Ludlum's only novel set entirely during World War II, American industry made a Faustian pact with its German counterparts. (U.S. industry needed to deliver a gyroscope to the Army for its bombers, which it did not have but which the Germans did have; while the Germans needed diamonds for their missile program, to which the Americans had superior access; and each sought to trade what they had for what they needed, with all that implied about America's own elite in even those romanticized times.) One could also see it all tied together in what is in many ways the high-water mark of Robert Ludlum's more intensely Anti-Establishment work, The Chancellor Manuscript, where his protagonist Peter Chancellor, nearing the end of grad school and about to embark on a career as a professor of history, sees his career derailed by the machinations of the country's "secret government" Inver Brass precisely because they do not want his dissertation's investigation into the financing of the Nazis, and what it said about "a number of the most honored industrial names in America"--an investigation to which he was drawn, Chancellor's own thoughts tell us, because of the infuriating "parallels with the present" of that episode with the present at the height of the Vietnam War (1968) that made it all too clear how "Nothing had changed . . . the lies of forty years ago still exist[ing]" and leaving him with the duty of telling the story, something he did even after his academic career was quashed. At the suggestion of the Inver Brass functionary whose job it was to prevent Chancellor's revelations as history he proceeded to a career as a novelist in which he told the truth in the guise of fiction--a metafictional touch that, perhaps playfully, perhaps not entirely so, invites us to wonder how much of what we are reading is history as the members of that secret government itself begin to contend with one another over possession of the files of J. Edgar Hoover. The past thus appears no different from the very fraught present--and indeed a reminder that far from the discontents of the moment being exceptional and passing, the Establishment was always rotten, and its agents in the moment working to elide memory itself where it was an obstacle to their objects.