3A and Bernard Baruch

Bernard Baruch with JFK

The Three Armageddons of Enniscorty Sweeny is so damned slippery. “It is slippery, General, slippery,” Austro said modestly.

There will probably never be a consensus about it—how it works, what it does, what it says. The book overloads the mind. It arrests thought. It does so deliberately, aggressively. That is why serious Lafferty readers should think hard about it rather than settle for confusion as an endpoint. Aggressive Lafferty is interesting Lafferty. Most of Lafferty’s best contemporary readers have recognized the novella’s strange power as a piece of art, though no one has done much with it. Read a lot of Lafferty, and you know it is important. What has been done has been wrong. It is a hard thing to know that an interpretation is wrong rather than unsound or in bad taste. Most interpretation doesn’t work on the right-wrong track. Most people who opine on books are poisoners, not throat cutters. But it can be wrong about 3A in the way Coleridge was wrong that Shakespeare never revised his plays; wrong in the way Tory critics were wrong who thought Keats just had bad grammar. Thinking 3A is politically innocent is wrong. A few people now seem to recognize this. Maybe only a little. There are “progressive” ideas in it about race. In that sense, Lafferty’s book about the dangers of consensus reality succeeded: there has been little consensus about 3A, and almost no one says anything insightful about it.

So where to start? Probably by spending time with the book’s alternate-history timeline, particularly with the role Bernard Baruch plays in Lafferty’s alternative 20th-century. The timeline is a grad course on what Lafferty loves and hates. I have been thinking about the timeline on and off for a few months because of how brazenly it omits the Jewish Holocaust and then uses Bernard Baruch. After mentioning Baruch briefly in an online comment this week, it seems to me worth laying out why Baruch matters. If you want to think about how 3A plays its cards like Bob Hamman, look at how Lafferty sets up the first black president, Harold Standpipe, early in the novella and then uses the goodwill earned to insulate his later move. That is what the old ladies at the bridge table call a sound bridge player.

I will say a little about Bernard Baruch, then show how I think Lafferty uses him in The Three Armageddons. If the book is ever discussed well, any minimal test for an adequate interpretation will need to explain why the American president during the Holocaust-that-never-happened affair was Jewish and why he was one Jew in particular, then connect that to the reparations issue that becomes important. I believe that Lafferty is being exceptionally pissy here, implying that Baruch was a corrupting influence behind both the Democrats and the Republicans.

Bernard Mannes Baruch (1870–1965) was an influential American financier and statesman who served for decades as an informal but powerful advisor to multiple U.S. presidents. He is exactly the kind of figure for whom the term éminence grise exists. After making a killing on the New York Stock Exchange, he left Wall Street during World War I to help direct the nation’s economic mobilization as chairman of the War Industries Board. He later advised Franklin D. Roosevelt during World War II, contributing to the acceleration of war production and to policy formation both at home and abroad. After the war, Baruch remained at the center of geopolitics, representing the United States on the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission. The Cold War? Baruch coined the term in 1947.

Baruch had a nickname: “the Park Bench Statesman.” He got it because he often conducted his consultations not in offices or formal meetings, but seated on a bench in Lafayette Park across from the White House. There he met informally with officials, politicians, and presidents, turning the park bench itself into a symbol of his role as a trusted elder counselor operating outside the machinery of formal power. More than one commemorative bench has been dedicated in his honor, and he is the Baruch in Baruch College.