Ханна Арендт - Hannah Arendt - The Last Interview and Other Conversations

National security is a new word in the American vocabulary, and this, I think, you should know. National security is really, if I may already interpret a bit, a translation of “ raison d’état. ” And “ raison d’état ,” this whole notion of reason of state, never played any role in this country. This is a new import. National security now covers everything, and it covers, as you may know from the interrogation of Mr. Ehrlichman, [†] Arendt is alluding to the testimony of John D. Ehrlichman, President Nixon’s adviser on domestic affairs, before the Senate Watergate Committee. all kinds of crimes. For instance, the president has a perfect right… the king can do no wrong; that is, he is like a monarch in a republic. He’s above the law, and his justification is always that whatever he does, he does for the sake of national security.

ERRERA:In your view, in what way are these implications of raison d’état , what you call the intrusion of criminality into the political domain, specific to our time? Is this, indeed, specific to our time?

ARENDT:This is propre à notre époque … I really think so. Just as the stateless business is propre à notre époque , and repeats itself again and again under different aspects and in different countries and in different colors. But if we come to these general questions, what is also propre à notre époque is the massive intrusion of criminality into political processes. And by this I mean something which by far transcends those crimes always justified, rightly or wrongly, by raison d’état , because these are always the exceptions to the rule, whereas here we are confronted suddenly with a style of politics which by itself is criminal.

Here it’s by no means the exception to the rule. It is not that they say, because we are in such a special emergency, we have to bug everybody and sundry, including the president himself. But they think that bugging belongs to the normal political process. And similarly, they don’t say, we will burglar once, break in the office of the psychiatrist once [‡] The reference is to the burglary of psychiatrist Dr. Lewis Fielding’s office by a covert White House special investigations unit, referred to as “the plumbers,” who hoped to find material to discredit Daniel Ellsberg, the former military analyst who had leaked the Pentagon Papers. and then never again, by no means. They say, this is absolutely legitimate, to break in.

So this whole business of national security comes of course from the reason-of-state business. The national-security business is a direct European import. Of course, the Germans and the French and the Italians recognize it as entirely justified, because they have always lived under this. But this was precisely the European heritage with which the American Revolution intended to break.

ERRERA:In your essay on the Pentagon Papers [§] “Lying in Politics: Reflections on the Pentagon Papers,” New York Review of Books , November 18, 1971, 30–39. you describe the psychology of those you call the “professional problem-solvers,” who at the time were the advisers to the American government, and you say: “Their distinction lies in that they were problem-solvers as well, hence they were not just intelligent but prided themselves on being ‘rational,’ and they were indeed to a rather frightening degree above ‘sentimentality’ and in love with ‘theory,’ the world of sheer mental effort…”

ARENDT:May I interrupt you here? I think that’s enough. I have a very good example, precisely from these Pentagon Papers, of this scientific mentality, which finally overwhelms all other insights. You know about the “domino theory,” which was the official theory throughout the Cold War from 1950 till about 1969, shortly after the Pentagon Papers. The fact is that very few of the very sophisticated intellectuals who wrote the Pentagon Papers believed in this theory. There are only, I think, two or three guys, pretty high up in the administration, but not exactly very intelligent ones—Mr. Rostow and General Taylor [‖] Walt Whitman Rostow, who served as special assistant for National Security Affairs to Lyndon Johnson from 1964 to 1968, and General Maxwell D. Taylor, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Kennedy from 1962 to 1964 and ambassador to South Vietnam for a year thereafter. (not the most intelligent boy…)—who really believed it. That is, they didn’t believe in it, but in everything they did they acted on this assumption. And this not because they were liars, or because they wanted to please their superiors—these people really were all right in this respect—but because this gave them a framework within which they could work. And they took this framework even though they knew—and every intelligence report and every factual analysis proved it to them every morning—that these assumptions were simply factually wrong. They took it because they didn’t have any other framework.

ERRERA:Our century seems to me to be dominated by the persistence of a mode of thinking based on historical determinism.

ARENDT:Yes, and I think there are very good reasons for this belief in historical necessity. The trouble with this whole business, and it is really an open question, is the following: We don’t know the future, everybody acts into the future, and nobody knows what he is doing, because the future is being done. Action is a “we” and not an “I.” Only where I am the only one, if I were the only one, could I foretell what’s going to happen, from what I am doing. Now this makes it look as though what actually happens is entirely contingent, and contingency is indeed one of the biggest factors in all history. Nobody knows what is going to happen simply because so much depends on an enormous amount of variables; in other words, on simple hasard. On the other hand, if you look back on history retrospectively, then you can—even though all this was contingent—you can tell a story that makes sense. How is that possible? That is a real problem for every philosophy of history. How is it possible that in retrospect it always looks as though it couldn’t have happened otherwise? All the variables have disappeared, and reality has such an overwhelming impact upon us that we cannot be bothered with what is actually an infinite variety of possibilities.

ERRERA:But if our contemporaries cling fast to determinist ways of thinking, in spite of this being refuted by history, do you think it’s because they’re afraid of freedom?

ARENDT: Ja. Sure. And rightly so. Only they don’t say it. If they did, one could immediately start a debate. If they would only say it. They are afraid, they are afraid to be afraid. That is one of the main personal motivations. They are afraid of freedom.

ERRERA:Can you imagine a minister in Europe, seeing his policy about to fail, commissioning a team of experts from outside the government to produce a study whose aim would be to find out how…

ARENDT:It was not extérieur de l’administration. They were taken from everywhere and also from…

ERRERA:True, but people from outside the government were involved too. So can you imagine a European minister in the same situation commissioning a study of that kind to find out how it all happened?

ARENDT:Of course not.

ERRERA:Why not?

ARENDT:Because of reason of state, you know. He would have felt that… He would have immediately started to cover up. The McNamara attitude—you know, I quoted this… [a] Arendt is referring to the epigraph she chose for “Lying in Politics,” which was the following quote from Robert S. McNamara: “The picture of the world’s greatest superpower killing or seriously injuring a thousand non-combatants a week, while trying to pound a tiny backward nation into submission on an issue whose merits are hotly disputed, is not a pretty one.” McNamara said “It’s not a very nice picture, what we are doing there; what the hell is going on here?” This is an American attitude. This shows you that things were still all right, even if they went wrong. But they were still all right because there was still McNamara who wanted to learn from it.