| s-102
| 'But don't Americans know that Sadat was a Nazi?' the librarian says. |
| s-103
| Well, yes, well-informed people do have this information in their files. |
| s-104
| The New York Times is sure to have it, but the Times as I see it is a government within a government It has a state department of its own, and its high councils have probably decided that it would be impolitic at this moment to call attention to Sadat's admiration for Hitler. |
| s-105
| I tell the lady that I have sent a copy of a eulogy of Hitler written by Sadat in 1953 to Sydney Gruson of the Times and also to Katharine Graham of The Washington Post. |
| s-106
| 'Will they print it?' she asked. |
| s-107
| 'Difficult to guess,' I tell her. |
| s-108
| 'The Times ought to be stronger in politics than it is in literature, but who knows. |
| s-109
| Of course it must do financial news and sports well enough. |
| s-110
| If it covered ball games as badly as it reviews books, the fans would storm it like the Bastille. |
| s-111
| Book readers evidently haven't got the passionate intensity of sports fans.' |
| s-112
| What disturbs is whether Americans understand the world at all, whether they are a match for the Russians the Sadats are in themselves comparatively unimportant. |
| s-113
| To dissident Russian writers like Lev Navrozov, the Americans can never be a match for the Russians. |
| s-114
| He quotes from Dostoevski's The House of the Dead a conversation between the writer and a brutal murderer, one of those criminals who fascinated him. |
| s-115
| I haven't the book handy, so I paraphrase. |
| s-116
| 'Why are you so kind to me?' Dostoevski asks. |
| s-117
| And the murderer, speaking to one of the geniuses of the nineteenth century, answers, 'Because you are so simple that one can not help feeling sorry for you.' |
| s-118
| Even when he robbed Dostoevski, he pitied him as one might 'a little cherub-like child.' |
| s-119
| Navrozov, exceedingly intelligent but, to a Westerner, curiously deformed (how could an independent intellectual in the Soviet Union escape deformity?), sees us, the Americans, as children at whom the Stalins smile through their mustachios. |
| s-120
| Perhaps there is a certain Vautrin-admiring romanticism in this. |