by Ann Wroe
The body of the inventor of modern fascism, and the early mentor of Hitler, was displayed, with that of his mistress, hanging upside down in a square in Milan. General Eisenhower, the Allied commander, said, “God, what an ignoble end.” Leo Valiani was said by his friends to have disapproved of the displaying of the bodies, but otherwise seems to have had no regrets. He saw himself simply as a servant of history. He went on making history after the war. He helped to write the Italian constitution and was regarded as a founding father of the republic. But he declined to pursue a career in politics. History is what interested him more. Mr Valiani was that rarity, a historian who had made history.
Leo Valiani was an old European, using the term in a respectful and slightly awed sense, like old money. One of his books was “The End of Austria-Hungary”. Who now gets excited about the break-up of this once powerful empire whose origins date back to the 13th century? Perhaps only those, like Mr Valiani, who saw that history does repeat itself, albeit in new guises. The Austro-Hungarian empire was bedevilled by the constant demands of competing nationalities within the super-state, a problem that these days the European Union faces as it toys with federalism.
Mr Valiani had an additional interest in Austria-Hungary. He was born there, in the Adriatic seaport of Rijeka (now in Croatia), and took Italian nationality when the town was annexed by Mussolini’s Italy in 1924 and renamed Fiume. As a Jew and a communist, Mr Valiani had a natural antipathy to Europe’s new caesar. Mussolini’s only virtue, he said, was that he encouraged Italian football, which for Leo Valiani rivalled history as a worthwhile
pursuit.
He was often in trouble as an agitator and had several spells in prison in the 1920s and 1930s. When Russia signed an agreement with Germany in 1939 to divide Poland he broke with communism. But new masters, the British, were waiting in the wings.
The British had given up trying to recruit resistance workers in Germany, where any dissent was efficiently crushed. But Italy seemed less brutal, or was simply inefficient. Resistance groups operated with some success, among them Leo Valiani’s. In Mussolini’s northern Italian “state” in 1943, Mr Valiani set up a “committee of national liberation”, which claimed to be the next provisional government. It had the support of both Britain and America, whose Allen Dulles, later to be head of the CIA, was a spy operating in the region. With Mussolini dead and the Germans defeated, Mr Valiani’s committee was in a strong position to help shape Italy’s real government.
The constitution he helped to produce in 1948 runs to many thousands of words and, judged as a piece of democratic guidance, is a model of itskind. But, whatever its successes, it has not produced enduring governments. Since 1948 there have been more than 50, although their defenders point out that in many of them the members were simply reshuffled without any great change of political direction. Corruption became widespread.
The constitution’s weakness, Mr Valiani later agreed, was that it had the effect of paralysing government. He wanted a stronger presidency, and in his books and articles in Corriere della Sera was fiercely critical of the politicians who held on to the old system. He thought Italians were a bit soft. Just as they had once accepted the abuses of fascism, they were lax in dealing with the Mafia. He once argued for the return of the death penalty. Parliament took his scoldings gracefully and made him a senator for life. He never took a job in government and said his great regret was that he had never written about football.
Cyrus Vance
Cyrus Roberts Vance, a principled statesman, died on January 12th 2002, aged 84
When Cyrus Vance decided to resign in 1980 he sought to do it with a minimum of fuss, for that was his style. He wrote to his president, Jimmy Carter, that a plan to try to rescue by force 52 Americans held prisoner in the United States embassy in Tehran had been made against his judgment and that he was resigning as secretary of state, whether the mission succeeded or failed. Several days later, when the mission had failed, dismally, Mr Vance’s resignation was made public. But he was not allowed to bow out quietly. No one could remember a secretary of state, the highest post in the cabinet, resigning on a matter of principle. It took some searching to find a single precedent, William Jennings Bryan, a pacifist who had resigned as secretary of state in 1915 because he believed American policy favoured joining the war in Europe.
Mr Vance was not a pacifist. He had served in the navy in the second world war, and saw action in the Pacific. He had no liking for the revolutionary government that had taken over Iran. But he believed that some of the American prisoners might die in an attack, and that even if the mission, called Eagle Claw, were successful it would disturb an already unstable region. He was doubtful about the ability of the army to cope with conditions in a land they had no knowledge of. He had no great faith in the marvels of military technology. In 1962, when he was secretary of the army, the walkie-talkies of soldiers guarding blacks from white supremacists in the southern states failed at crucial moments. His misgivings were justified. Eagle Claw never got near the prisoners. Helicopters that were the mainstay of the mission were disabled in an unanticipated sandstorm in the Iranian desert. Eight American servicemen died and eight aircraft were lost. The mission was judged a brave one, but stupid. The embassy Americans were eventually freed as a result of painstaking negotiation, a process Mr Vance had pressed for.
Cyrus Vance was aware that, despite his exalted job, others could have a say in making and carrying out American foreign policy, particularly at times of great national stress. (The present star in the war against terrorism is the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, a man of strong words and once a champion wrestler.) At the time of Eagle Claw Mr Vance’s rival for President Carter’s ear was his hawkish national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski.
For much of his three years as secretary of state Mr Vance was uneasy as he battled with Mr Brzezinski for influence over foreign policy. Mr Vance knew that the president backed him in many ways, particularly in the view that human rights should be a pillar of American foreign policy; that was one of the reasons he had been picked for the job. But in the run-up to an election against Ronald Reagan, Mr Carter wanted to show that he could be tough with the Iranians. Mr Vance was even bothered that his office in the State Department was a mile or so from the White House, whereas Mr Brzezinski’s office was next door to the president’s. Even the great and the good exhibit human fears.
Polish-born Mr Brzezinski, a naturalised American, was clever, ambitious and ten years younger than Mr Vance. He saw him, he wrote later, as a relic of “the once dominant WASP elite” whose “values and rules were of declining relevance”. Mr Vance was indeed a WASP, born to a prosperous family in West Virginia and expensively educated. He had a successful career as a lawyer and seemingly was without political ambition. He once said,
A lot of us were raised in families where we were taught that we were very fortunate, that we were going to have a good education, and that we had the responsibility to return to thecommunity some of the benefits and blessings we had, and that there was an obligation to participate in government service at the local, state and national level.
For some 30 years various presidents, among them John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson as well as Jimmy Carter, together with international organisations, valued his WASPish talents. His departure as secretary of state did not end his service to government and the United Nations. He would be lured away from his law practice, given a working title, special this or special that, and asked to take on problems that had no solutions but could perhaps be made less menacing. So he went off to the Middle East, to the Balkans, to the Koreas, to Cyprus, and, until it broke up and created a new set of problems, to the Soviet Union. He was sceptical of any proposed American “master plan” for the world. His method was to take each problem, look at it as a lawyer would a brief, judge what could be negotiated, and draw up a contract.
Mr Vance was sometimes compared with another indefatigable American traveller, Henry Kissinger. Ph
ilip Habib, an American career diplomat who worked with many negotiators, greatly admired Mr Kissinger. His capacity “to put things together, to move, to produce the precise word at the right time, and his wit, were marvellous things to behold”. But Cyrus Vance’s “absolute, total and complete honesty” made him “probably the finest public servant I ever worked with”. Not bad for a WASP of declining relevance.
Veerappan
Koose Muniswamy Veerappan, bandit, died on October 18th 2004, aged 52
“BANDIT”, like “brigand”, has a romantic ring. To some ears it evokes fugitive outlaws – from Robin Hood to Jesse James – who have seemed nobler than the forces of law and order on their trail. It is probably how the man known throughout India simply as Veerappan would like to be remembered. That, however, would be an injustice to the 124 people he is said to have killed. Veerappan was a murderer, and a cruel one at that. An Osama-style old video shows him talking with relish of the pain inflicted on one victim before he blew his head off.
Veerappan was himself shot through the forehead when the police ambushed him and three henchmen. His proud killers posed around his corpse with broad smiles and their thumbs up, like tiger-hunters. But the applause for them was not universal. In the villages dotting the thick forest that was his stomping ground, some recalled Veerappan showering sweets on children and reports of his generosity to the poor. The families of the dozens he had killed as informers were incredulous. But some 20,000 packed the village where his funeral was held, drawn by his mystique and his fame. His distraught widow told journalists he was a good man, though her two daughters hardly knew him.
Already, treasure-hunters were scouring the forest for the fortune he was supposed to have buried in plastic bags under trees. In death as in life, Veerappan, a petty thug with a gift for public relations, spread a potent myth. In this his hunters abetted him. A 750-strong special task-force had spent 14 years and a fortune trying to catch him. To explain their failure, it helped to credit him with near-supernatural powers – “like a forest ghost”, said one.
Veerappan started his career following in his father’s footsteps as an ivory poacher in the thickly wooded hills between the Indian states of Karnataka and Tamil Nadu. He is said to have been 14 when he killed his first elephant, and to have slaughtered hundreds over the years.
As elephants became harder to find, he diversified into another endangered species: ancient sandal trees. Sandalwood, prized for its oil in soap, perfume and traditional ayurvedic medicine, is also, as incense, integral to Hindu religious ceremonies. Forty years ago the governments of Karnataka and Tamil Nadu imposed a monopoly on the ownership and felling of the trees. They restricted cultivation, trusting to their abundant wild crop.
As sandalwood prices rose, a black market flourished. Sandal trees, which take 25 to 40 years to reach maturity, were chopped down in private gardens and public parks. Veerappan was not the only bootlegger to turn abundance into shortage. But he was one of the most prolific. Eco-vandalism has a short-term commercial logic: scarcity inflates prices. In the long run, however, killing off your raw material is not a sustainable business model, and Veerappan branched out again.
His region had another money-spinning product: granite. Running a quarry was not Veerappan’s style, but he spotted a way into the business’s profits. In 1990, one of the first of many people he kidnapped was a quarry owner. This was a line of work with an inexhaustible supply of victims, and only some had to be killed to ensure the flow of ransom money.
Veerappan’s fame began to grow. So did his moustache and his ego. He would pose for photographs with his rifle and his luxuriant handlebar. He mocked the policemen and politicians who condemned him. His gang acquired more and better weapons and its numbers swelled to more than 100. He even began to present himself as some kind of freedom fighter, a Tamil nationalist – like the “Tigers” of Sri Lanka, whom he resembled only in his brutality.
His career as a kidnapper reached its zenith in 2000, when he seized Rajkumar, one of the biggest stars of the Kannada-language film industry of Karnataka. A policeman who was involved in the transaction says that Rajkumar’s release after 108 days in captivity cost 200m rupees ($4.4m) in ransom from the Karnataka state coffers. Two years later his victim was H. Nagappa, a former minister in that government, who had been one of his fiercest critics. This time the price paid was Mr Nagappa’s life.
By the time he died, however, Veerappan was a diminished figure. His gang had dwindled to a handful, and had been infiltrated by the police. He was lured into a trap, leaving his forest hideout in aphoney ambulance on his way, he thought, to have a cataract operation. Even allowing for the punctured forehead, his corpse looked old and tired. Shockingly, his lush whiskers had been drastically trimmed. As vain as he was vicious, he would have been distressed that this was the last image he left his public.
Human-rights groups criticised the police for not nabbing him alive. Among Veerappan’s boasts was that he had bribed powerful policemen and politicians in return for protection. Knowing the morals of their public servants and how long the hunt had taken, many Indians believed him, and suspected the police of deliberately silencing him. It is not just treasure-hunters who regret that he has taken his secrets to the grave.
Rosemary Verey
Rosemary Verey, an English gardener, died on May 31st 2001, aged 82
She was in the luxury goods market and her offering was English gardens. Rosemary Verey’s own garden was in a 17th-century former rectory called Barnsley House in the Cotswolds. The English climate, warm but not too warm, wet but not too wet, was ideal for the sumptuous garden she created there. But for those who did not have the good fortune to live in England, she was prepared to do her best to create something similar in less blessed countries. Many Americans set their hearts on a Verey garden. It had the kind of cachet attached to, say, Harrods (despite the loss of royal patronage) or a Rolls-Royce (though the marque is now owned by Germans), survivors in the slow decline of England’s reputation for quality merchandise. How do you make an English lawn? Sow, and mow for 500 years. Real luxury involved time and experience.
Mrs Verey spared her clients too much waiting. She said she envied perfect lawns but they were not her obsession. Her garden designs would begin to take shape in a few seasons. She created a feeling of timelessness by using styles from the past. So there were hedges of traditional roses, herbaceous borders, laburnum arches revealing statues, and formal areas of clipped boxwood. She helped to create three gardens for Prince Charles at his estate, Highgrove, not far from Barnsley House. One was a kitchen garden. Mrs Verey was particularly clever at making vegetable patches that looked far too pretty to crop. The prince said, “She makes gardening seem the easiest and most natural thing in the world.”
It was a princely compliment: “naturalness” in the artificial world of gardening is difficult to pull off. Money helped: the Verey look was a rich person’s indulgence. But that was not all. There is a bit of magic in gardening. The prince is said to talk to his plants. Mrs Verey said that plants “love to know they are being cared for”. All the same, she gave the impression of demanding that her plants behave or be banished from her Eden. You were not surprised to learn that she was the daughter of a colonel. An American visitor said at the end of a conducted tour of Barnsley House, “She is the most refined lady. We all felt humbled in her presence.”
Rosemary Verey was in the tradition of gifted women gardeners that stretches back to Bess of Hardwick, who in the 16th century created some of England’s greatest estates. They have tended to be comfortably off (Bess was the richest woman in England after Queen Elizabeth, with ample leisure and a determination to shine in a world run by men. Although mere men could be drafted in to slave with the routine work, no true woman gardener surrenders the command of her territory. Vita Sackville-West (1892–1962), who created a splendid garden at Sissinghurst Castle in Kent, wrote, “For the last 40 years of my life I have broken my back, my finger nails, and some
times my heart, in the practical pursuit of my favourite occupation.”
Mrs Verey discovered what was to become her favourite occupation relatively late in life. An early fancy was to be an economist. But she abandoned university to get married and had four children. Gradually, she recalls, she was “becoming aware of the garden and its seasons”. She took advice and started with common plants that are easy to grow. The garden today, though not large, less than three acres (1.2 hectares), conceals many unexpected exotics. What is this? It is a plant from Gethsemane on the Mount of Olives. And this? From Monet’s garden at Giverny. And that Greek-style temple? Her husband, an architect, had found it abandoned, dismantled it and rebuilt it in their garden.She wrote 17 books, some of them now classics. Lecture tours followed. Potential clients lined up. What did they want? Something like Barnsley House, they said. The gardener became the businesswoman. In “Making of a Garden” Mrs Verey wrote,
When I am invited to help with the planning of a garden I like first to walk slowly around the site, taking in where the warmest corners are likely to be, where the wind comes from, the view, the existing trees, the quality of the soil … Then it is time to go into the house and look from all the windows … I can build up a picture in my mind of the owners’ preferences … I sometimes imagine that this is where I myself will live, so it must be a place that I will enjoy, but all the time I bear in mind that it is my clients’ garden, individually designed for them, to suit their needs and their way of life.
Not everyone admired the Verey style. Even in the calming world of gardening there is what might be called landscape politics. Minimalist gardens are seen by their practitioners as reflecting modern architecture and painting. They see the simplicity of Stonehenge as a more interesting English tradition than rose hedges. Warming to their theme, they claim that minimalism is right for a world of dwindling resources. You can symbolise the universe in a few square metres.
