Revisiting Wartime Reticence
According to the do's and don'ts of journalistic objectivity, reporters immerse themselves in a given area, or "beat," then talk to people of all different ideological stances within a field, and synthesize these varying, often antagonistic viewpoints into their news stories. They generally strive to balance various versions of the facts. Their own beliefs, inasmuch as is possible, are to be left off to the side, no matter how strongly one's conscience, or Charlie Rose, asks for a public airing.
Bernard Weinraub was a beat reporter at the New York Times for about 40 years, spending time in Vietnam, Northern Ireland, Baghdad, and Washington, D.C., before retiring in 2005. This newfound liberty has freed him up to get mighty subjective, and his current vehicle is "The Accomplices," his pull-no-punches excoriation of the Roosevelt administration's reluctance to shelter Eastern European Jews both before and during World War II.
Unsurprisingly, Mr. Weinraub's skills as a wordsmith and as a political analyst are more apparent than as a dramatist. Most scenes depict two well-spoken men locking horns over an issue and then parting ways, setting the stage for the next articulate confrontation. Like any good journalist, though, Mr. Weintraub has unearthed a fascinating and underreported story and, with the help of director Ian Morgan, molded it into a sobering race against time. If "The Accomplices" existed on the page rather than on the stage, it would qualify as a good read, albeit one that might benefit from an editor's red pen.
Set between 1940 and 1944, the story wastes no time introducing its hero and villain. First we meet Hillel Kook, aka Peter Bergson (Daniel Sauli), as he arrives in America. Bergson, who had been jailed by the British while living in Palestine, makes no attempt to hide his intentions in coming to America. He aims to create nothing less than a "Jewish army" to head back to Europe and destroy the Nazis.
In the far corner (and the very next scene): the patrician Breckenridge Long (Robert Hogan), FDR's assistant secretary of state. Polls indicate that 85% of Americans oppose the increase of any immigration quotas, and Long has been entrusted to keep the doors shut tight. "We're not here to bring in every shopkeeper in Eastern Europe," he explains to an aghast Rabbi Stephen Wise (David Margulies), chairman of the World Jewish Congress, who uses his prominence to selectively (and often ineffectually) lobby for the safety of individual groups of imperiled Jews overseas.
News of Nazi atrocities reaches the broader public only fitfully — Mr. Weinraub reports that the government withheld information about the Final Solution for three weeks before releasing it. But as the knowledge of the depth of the killings becomes unavoidable, Bergson changes his tactics to demand full-fledged American involvement in rescuing as many Jews as possible.
Wise's policy of amelioration and incremental change holds no water with the impetuous young man ("Not drawing attention to ourselves means doing nothing"), and soon Bergson is leading a phalanx of Orthodox rabbis to march on the White House. Along the way, he enlists such historical figures as the screenwriter Ben Hecht (a delightfully hammy Jon DeVries) and Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr. (Mark Zimmerman) in his seemingly quixotic crusade.
Mr. Weinraub's writing is at its sharpest when he depicts the ambiguities of Bergson's and Wise's differing approaches toward similar goals. He receives ample support from Mr. Sauli, who conveys the impulsive Bergson with a blend of puppyish charm and uncompromising zeal, and from Mr. Margulies, an old pro who endows Wise's shifts in consciousness with more depth than the script provides. And Andrew Polk supplies a wry gallows humor as Samuel Merlin, a member of the group that became known as the "Bergson Group."
Not every character is so fortunate, however, and nowhere is this more noticeable than in Long, who undoubtedly grappled with a murkier calculus than merely mollifying Congress or indulging his own nativism. The juxtaposition of Long's insidious politicking and old-boy's-club clannishness is troweled on rather thick: "What we're instructing all consulates is to postpone and postpone and postpone the granting of all visas," he orders a group of subordinates (sentiments pulled almost verbatim from an actual intradepartment memo he sent in 1940). "All right, boys, let's hear it. Go Tigers! Go! Go Tigers! Go!" Those are not the Flying Tigers he is referring to but the football team at Princeton, his alma mater. While giving equal validity to Long's and Bergson's points of view certainly wouldn't be the answer, this sort of hatchet job has the undesired effect of rendering Mr. Weinraub's larger message suspect.
Messrs. Weinraub and Morgan also come up short with the female roles. A romance between Bergson and Betty (Zoe Lister-Jones), a young-ballerina-turned-partisan, fails to personalize either character, and Catherine Curtin's role as Long's principled secretary remains little more than a contrivance to add a moral counterbalance on Capitol Hill.
The phrase "Never again" resurfaces in the wake of each appalling new case of genocide, and each time the world — what is left of it — struggles to comprehend how "Never again" has given way to "Yet again" yet again. Until that question can be answered (the vengeance-crazed protagonists of Greek tragedy come as close as any to doing so), the next best thing is to remember the lone men and women who did everything within their power to expose the atrocities and demand an end to them.
Peter Bergson was such a man. An estimated 200,000 Jews were ultimately extricated from Europe in the war's final years, and his efforts are viewed as a major force behind this. "The Accomplices," even when it falls short of its ambitious aims, serves as a tough-minded examination of what such individuals are up against, how they prevail (and at what cost), and why they matter.
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