Umbrella into Cutlass

Every time you blow up a British arsenal, or wreck a British jail, or send a British railroad train skyhigh, or rob a British bank, or let go with your guns and bombs at the British betrayers and invaders of your homeland, the Jews of America make a little holiday in their hearts. Not all the Jews, of course. . . .

Those words, addressed "to the Terrorists of Palestine," first appeared in full-page ads in the New York Herald Tribune and other U.S. papers last month. The ad asked millions for "medical relief and humanitarian aid." It concluded: "Hang on, brave friends, our money is on its way."

The American who wrote the ad made front pages on two continents. The British Government protested officially. Britons called it an incentive to murder. U.S. Zionists attacked it. Last week, in the midst of other duties, Harry Truman implored U.S. citizens to shush inflammatory Palestine talk of all kinds "in the interests of this country, of world peace, and of humanity." But it might take more than the President of the U.S. to shush Ben Hecht.

Ego y. Herd-Loneliness. At 53, stocky Ben Hecht could look down the rungs of a long, golden ladder. He had left Racine, Wis. in his teens with the idea of becoming a violinist. He became a boy-wonder newspaperman (Chicago Daily News) instead. In 1921 he wrote an involved but honest novel, Erik Dorn, but soon found his real bent in writing plays (like The Front Page, co-authored with Charles MacArthur) and dashing off lush Hollywood scripts for $5,000 a week. "I was always able to make large sums of money without giving money any thought," Hecht says. But an internal hunger (Hecht calls it "creative egoism") kept gnawing at him. He had a look at himself in A Guide for the Bedevilled, a handbook of Hechtian philosophy written in 1944:

"God knows what the Ego is--and so do I. The Ego is a ferocity for identification that exists in all of us. Deeper than our lusts and all our other good and bad hungers, is this obsession we have, to be Some One. . . . We clamor to acquire a meaning, to participate, however humbly, in the world of ideas and events; to hold opinions that will make us significant. . . to lift ourselves out of a herd-loneliness that eternally engulfs us."

In 1931, when Hecht's ego compelled him to write A Jew in Love, a gargoylized caricature of a Jewish publisher, Hecht was called antiSemitic. But Hecht says: "I lived 40 years in my country without encountering anti-Semitism or concerning myself even remotely with its existence." Then, one day, a luncheon companion asked Hecht, "Do you mind talking about Jews?"

"It had never occurred to me that my friend regarded me as a Jew," Hecht says. "I sat up."

Sandwiches v. Tommy Guns. The official Zionist movement was not stormy enough for Hecht. He preferred the Hebrew Committee of National Liberation, headed by blue-eyed Palestinian Peter Bergson. In the U.S., the Hebrew Committee is backstopped by something called the American League for a Free Palestine, of which Hecht became cochairman.

League pamphlets slash viciously at the Zionists. One shows a Jewish boy on his knees saying "I want to live." That, says the pamphlet, is "the submissive Jewish Agency way." On another page stands a youth with a Tommy gun: "The fighting Hebrew resistance way!" Hecht on official Zionists: "They gabble . . . they want a sanctuary where the Jews of Europe can all stand on a rock and eat philanthropy-fish till the Messiah arrives. . . . Jewish wealth and respectability are fearlessly rushing sandwiches. . . ."

But the Zionist organs charge that all this talk has not put any refugees ashore in Palestine. The Zionist resistance movement, Haganah, claims that dozens of its ships have reached Palestine waters (where 30 have been seized by the British), whereas only one league-supported ship, referred to in Hecht's press releases as the Ben Hecht, ever got far enough to be seized.

Haganah sponsors hurl their own hot words at Hecht in full-page ads: "There are new playboys in America; they play with Jewish blood. The thrills of Hollywood are no longer sharp enough. They need lustier excitement, bolder showmanship. . . . They egg on the mad children of the Irgun: the distant whiff of bombs is headier than a cocktail. . . ."

A Feeling of Power. Hecht has no feeling that Palestine is the land for him. At his comfortable riverside estate at Nyack, on the Hudson, where a Hollywood "Oscar" is used as a doorstop, he lay on a couch and told Correspondent Evelyn Webber of the London Evening Standard how it felt to be a vicarious terrorist. As the Standard reported it: "I just talk. Arouse and excite the reader, and make him fighting mad. . . . Writing propaganda is like falling in love with yourself and the veiled wonders in your own brain. While I write I grow mystic. A feeling of great power comes over me."

The Standard commented: "Near obscene terms . . . power lusts." Hecht came close to an apology--for him. He sent a "Letter to the People of Britain," later published as another fund-inviting ad in U.S. papers. The "Letter" began: "The

English are, with cavil, the nicest enemies the Jews ever have had. . . ."

Hecht has been interested in psychiatry for many years. Sometimes he thinks, as he wrote in A Guide for the Bedevilled, that the psychoanalysts might remove his real enemy, antiSemitism, from the world altogether, "if there were enough of these fascinating doctors to go around--say one to every anti-Semite. And who knows but that the time may come when half the world will be lying on couches reciting its dreams and early pot-troubles to the other half. . . ."

But that would be a long way in the future. And the future? "The future," he has written, "is an enemy marching. . . . I go out to meet it--with a cutlass in my hand."

More important to Ben Hecht than a cutlass, however, was his Aunt Chasha's umbrella. Once when he was six, Tante Chasha crashed her umbrella down on the head of a theater manager who had asked her to apologize. Outside in the street she told young Ben with a sunny smile: "Remember what I tell you. That's "the right way to apologize." Ben never forgot.

The Palestine terrorists whom Ben Hecht admires lack the atomic bomb. However, the scientifically inclined among them have been working on a person-to-person substitute which may have a great and grisly future. Last week they sent exploding cream-colored envelopes to Ernie Bevin, Anthony Eden and other prominent Britons. Nobody was hurt--largely because of the British Government's long experience with unfriendly mail. But the packet was ingenious. Within an inner envelope, marked "Private and Confidential," were 1) a cardboard folder containing enough powdered gelignite to kill the opener, 2) a pencil-sized battery, and 3) a detonating system supposed to work when the envelope was slit with a metal letter opener or when the expectant reader opened the folder. The gadget lacked, of course, any enclosed note of apology.

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