Great Britain: Billets-Doux from Bertie

The third Earl Russell, whose grandfather was a Victorian Prime Minister, often acts as if he had inherited the job along with the family title. Since the Cuban crisis erupted last month, Bertrand Russell (family motto: Che Sara Sara) has been cabling, writing and calling world statesmen with such vim and volubility that the government in Whitehall has had trouble getting a word in edgewise.

From his home in the bleak Welsh town of Penrhyndeudraeth, the philosopher-peer sent Moscow a plea for moderation that prompted Khrushchev’s first reaction to the U.S. Cuban blockade, hinting that a summit might be useful. Later, when Moscow backed down. Russell had extravagant praise for Khrushchev’s “sanity and magnanimity.” Kennedy’s first billet-doux from Bertie labeled the blockade “a threat to human survival,” and drew a curt snub. Undismayed, the peacemaker of Penrhyndeudraeth churned out more letters.

“Philosophizing Wolf.” Though he is one of the world’s most eminent logicians, Bertie Russell has achieved ever wider cold war fame as one of its most illogical eminences. A wispy, white-maned aristocrat who, like a fictional intellectual once described by Novelist Aldous Huxley, resembles “an extinct saurian.” Russell is a brooding, old-fashioned agnostic who for most of his life has been torn between his view that the human race is irredeemably wicked and his conviction that he can save it. At one time he was so critical of Communism that Soviet propaganda labeled him “a philosophizing wolf.” As late as 1948 he declared that “anything is better than submission” to Communist dictatorship, even advocated dropping nuclear bombs on the Soviet Union if it refused international control of the atom.

In the past five years, however, Nobel Prizewinner (1950) Russell has become ever more deeply convinced that Britain should scrap its nuclear armaments and let the Communists take over the country, if necessary, rather than risk annihilation of the human race. As founder of Britain’s “better Red than dead” Campaign for ‘Nuclear Disarmament and later of an even more militant group called the Committee of 100. Russell denounces the U.S. as a nation of trigger-happy imperialists, but had only soft words for Russia’s recent rocket rattling. Despite, or because of, the fact that two of his four wives have been Americans. Russell has conducted a long love-hate affair with the U.S.; he is still bitter about his court-ordered dismissal from a New York City College professorship in 1940, after clerics and local politicos accused him of preaching sexual promiscuity.

Beatnik Boy Scouts. Though Russell at 90 commands the special brand of affectionate awe that the English reserve for all eccentric aristocrats and antic nonagenarians, his neutral-to-Nikita stand revealed to many what Economist Maynard Keynes once called “Bertie’s ludicrously incompatible views” of man’s fate. Unilateralism, which has often been defended in Britain as a kind of beatnik Boy Scout movement that helps channel youthful idealism, has also been badly tarnished in recent weeks.

One blow to the disarmers was the disclosure that at the height of the war scare, two of their leading drum beaters fled to Ireland. More damaging to the movement is a growing awareness in Britain that the ban-the-bomb campaign is deeply infiltrated by Communists. But among the saurian intellectuals who are Britain’s most clamorous neutralists, Bertie Russell has, if anything, gained in stature. More in sorrow than in anger, Britain’s Foreign Secretary Lord Home said pointedly last week: “I have great respect for intellectuals, but I must say I’m moved to found some chairs of horse sense in some of our universities.”