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The Right Coast
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The Charming Kurt WaldheimMaimon Schwarzschild

By Thomas A. Smith

Bruce Kesler writes about Kurt Waldheim:

Whether a war criminal or a willing accomplice of war criminals, Waldheim skated away from judgement for 40-years, with the complicity of and support from those who found him useful to their immediate ends.

His death shouldn t be allowed to pass without reflecting on other and current complicities [with] tyrants and terrorists…

I knew Waldheim slightly – or at least I saw him a good deal.  As a college kid in New York in the late 60s and early 70s, I had a press pass at the United Nations.  I was just out of high school, and had more or less expected the spirit of Eleanor Roosevelt.  Instead, it was my first look, close up, at political mob mentality – and at political evil.  The UN was already a hot-house of anti-Americanism and anti-semitism.  The UN seemed to be a petri dish for these hatreds despite the fact that many, if not most, of the  member governments were more or less reasonable, or at least not insane, in their own capitals.  When Yasser Arafat appeared at the UN in 1972, all but openly threatening – or promising – massacre, he got a gleeful, malevolently ecstatic reception.  I felt I understood a little, now, what a Nuremberg Rally must have been like.

In the midst of all this, Kurt Waldheim gave the impression of being a civilised man.  He was a constant presence around the UN as Austrian ambassador – campaigning, in fact, to be Secretary General.  He had a sardonic smile, a ready laugh, and an elegant mittel-European manner.  I was once showing my mother around the Delegates’ Lounge: Waldheim was there, and they shook hands: he was perfectly charming, of course.

In later years, when Waldheim’s Nazi past became known, I felt like an utter fool for having been around the man and not having thought to ask the obvious question (and to go out and do some research): What had an Austrian man of his age – and obvious officer class – been doing during the war?

I was just a kid, and I wasn’t the only one who didn’t ask.  Perhaps the Russians, or others, had asked: perhaps he was being blackmailed.  We’ll probably never know.  But he fit in at the UN, better than I realised at the time.   It was a pressure cooker for evil.  Waldheim had been there before.