Samantha Power - A Problem from Hell

Lemkin’s enemies and disappointments were piling up. He was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1950, 1951, 1952, 1958, and 1959. 44But journalists had stopped calling. And the “multilateral moment” where the UN and international law held promise had passed. Lemkin lived off small donations from Jewish and Eastern European émigré groups. He had begun a fourvolume history of genocide. The first volume, which he had nearly completed, would be entitled “An Introduction into the Study of Genocide” ; the second would cover genocide in antiquity; the third would focus on genocide in the Middle Ages; and the fourth would take readers through genocide in modern times. But if Lemkin saw the indispensable service to humanity such a collection would supply, American publishers foresaw only dim sales. The president of the John Day Company informed him that the company had concluded they could not “successfully sell a book about the history of genocide, whether condensed or at length.” 45Charles Pearce of Duell, Sloan and Pearce replied to his inquiry by stating, “It would not be possible for us to find a large enough audience of buyers for a book of this nature,” and a Simon and Schuster reviewer described it as a “very dubious commercial risk.” 46Lemkin next tried to market a full-length autobiography, claiming confidently in the introduction that “this book will be interesting because it shows how a private individual almost single handedly can succeed in imposing a moral law on the world and how he can stir world conscience to this end.” But for this book, to be called “The Totally Unofficial Man,” after the New York Times description, he received similarly dejecting feedback.

Accused of fighting the whole world, Lemkin used to insist, “I am not fighting the whole world. But only against an infinitely small part of the world, which arrogates to itself the right to speak for the whole world. What you call the whole world is really on my side.” If American critics of the genocide convention actually believed they had the American people on their side, he argued, they would freely admit that they opposed the genocide treaty and permit the measure to come before the full Senate for debate.

On August 28, 1959, after a quarter-century battle to ban genocide, Lemkin collapsed and died of a heart attack in the public relations office of Milton H. Blow on Park Avenue, his blazer leaking papers at the seams. His one-room apartment on West 112th Street in Manhattan was left overflowing with memos prepared for foreign ministers and ambassadors, as well as some 500 books, each read, reread, and emphatically underlined. He had published eleven books, most of them on international law but one volume of art criticism and another on rose cultivation. At the time of his death, he was fifty-nine and penniless. A New York Times editorial two days later observed:

Diplomats of this and other nations who used to feel a certain concern when they saw the slightly stooped figure of Dr. Raphael Lemkin approaching them in the corridors of the United Nations need not be uneasy anymore. They will not have to think up explanations for a failure to ratify the genocide convention for which Dr. Lemkin worked so patiently and so unselfishly for a decade and a half…Death in action was his final argument—a final word to our own State Department, which has feared that an agreement not to kill would infringe upon our sovereignty. 47

Lemkin had coined the word “genocide.” He had helped draft a treaty designed to outlaw it. And he had seen the law rejected by the world’s most powerful nation. Seven people attended Lemkin’s funeral. 48

“Successors”

After Lemkin’s death, the genocide convention languished unattended in the United States until the mid-1960s. Bruno Bitker, a Milwaukee international lawyer, sparked a second wave of interest when he urged William Proxmire, the wiry senator from Wisconsin, to take up the cause of the genocide ban. Nearly seventy countries had by then ratified the law, and Proxmire could not grasp what could be slowing the U.S. Senate. 49

Unlike Lemkin, Proxmire had led a privileged life, graduating from Yale, receiving two master’s degrees from Harvard, and marrying Elsie Rockefeller, a great-granddaughter of oil baron William A. Rockefeller, the brother and partner of John D. Rockefeller. But like Lemkin, Proxmire was a loner who had a habit of breaking with convention. Reared in a staunch Republican family in Illinois, he declared himself a Democrat in the late 1940s and moved to Wisconsin, home of the iconoclastic populist Robert La Follette and a state that columnist Mary McGrory likened to “a portly Teutonic old lady, full of beer and cheese, with a weakness for wild men and underdogs.” 50

When he lost the race for Wisconsin governor in 1952, 1954, and 1956, Proxmire turned up at Milwaukee factories the next morning to pass out “We lost, but…” cards to groggy workers. 51In 1957, when he ran for the late Joseph McCarthy’s Senate seat, instead of distancing himself from prior races, Proxmire embraced the “three-time loser” label. “Let my opponent have the support of the man who has never proposed to a girl and lost,” Proxmire declared in one radio broadcast. “I’ll take the losers…If all those who have ever lost in business, love, sports or politics will vote for me as one who knows what it is to lose and fight back, I will be glad to give my opponent the support of all those lucky voters who have never lost anything.” 52

If Proxmire intended to pick a loser on the legislative front, he could not have done any better then the genocide convention. Ever since Eisenhower had struck his 1953 deal with Senator Bricker agreeing to drop the pact from consideration, nobody in the Senate had cared to rein-troduce the measure. On January 11, 1967, Proxmire stood up on the Senate floor to deliver his first genocide speech. He casually announced his intention to begin a campaign that would not cease until the United States had ratified the pact. To a largely uninterested, deserted Senate chamber, he declared: “The Senate’s failure to act has become a national shame…I serve notice today that from now on I intend to speak day after day in this body to remind the Senate of our failure to act and of the necessity for prompt action.” 53

Proxmire’s speech-a-day approach to ratification was one of many rituals he observed in the Senate. He made a point (and a show) of never missing a roll call vote during his twenty-two years in the Senate, tallying more than 10, 000 consecutively. A renowned skinflint, he became famous nationally for crusading against porkbarrel projects and passing out the monthly Golden Fleece Awards to government agencies for waste in spending. The first award in 1975 went to the National Science Foundation for funding a $84, 000 study on “why people fall in love.” Later recipients were “honored” for a $27, 000 project to determine why inmates want to escape from prison; a $25, 000 grant to learn why people cheat, lie, and act rudely on Virginia tennis courts; and a $500, 000 grant to research why monkeys, rats, and humans clench their jaws. The award infuriated many of Proxmire’s colleagues in the Senate, who deemed it a publicity stunt designed to earn Proxmire kudos at their expense. 54

Although Proxmire alienated some colleagues by “fleecing” them, a few joined him in fighting for the genocide convention. Claiborne Pell, a fellow Democrat from Rhode Island, was one who endorsed Proxmire’s pursuit. 55Pell’s father, Herbert C. Pell, had served during World War II as U.S. representative to the War Crimes Commission, which the Allies established in 1943 to investigate allegations of Nazi atrocities. The elder Pell had hardly been able to get senior officials in the Roosevelt administration to return his calls. In late 1944 he was informed that the war crimes office would close for budgetary reasons. The Roosevelt team rejected Pell’s offer to pay his secretary and the office rent out of his own pocket, reversing the decision only when Pell publicized the office’s closing. When the younger Pell spoke publicly on behalf of the genocide convention decades later, he recalled those years in which he watched his father come to terms with the outside world’s disregard for Nazi brutality: