Reports about the Paris terror strikes were circulating when I entered the theater to watch Bridge of Spies, an account of the captured Soviet spy who was exchanged for downed U.S. spy pilot Gary Powers in 1962 in Berlin. In real life, the Soviet spy, a sleeper agent based in New York, was evidently not terribly effective. But the film, which stresses 1950s fears of atomic war, dramatizes him as a perceived thief of nuclear secrets.
The spy’s appointed legal counsel was an Irish Catholic New York lawyer who helped prosecute Nazi war criminals at Nuremburg, played by Tom Hanks. He later negotiates with the Soviets for the spy’s exchange with Powers, whose U-2 surveillance aircraft was shot down by the Soviets in 1960. Unfortunately, the film doesn’t delve into the diplomatic drama of that shoot-down. The Eisenhower administration, having assumed that Powers and his aircraft were obliterated, claimed it was a weather observation plane. Khrushchev then masterfully unveiled the surviving debris plus the pilot himself, striving with much bluster to upstage his Paris summit with Ike, DeGaulle and Britain’s MacMillan. Unintimidated, DeGaulle disdainfully countered that a Soviet satellite routinely surveilled France. After Khrushchev’s threats and antics, DeGaulle assured Ike that France stood with America, prompting Ike’s admiration. What would DeGaulle say of today’s threats to France?
Not focusing on great statesmen but on the Tom Hanks hero, the film climaxes in divided Berlin, with Hanks overseeing the successful exchange of the prisoners between east and west on a searchlight soaked bridge. The Berlin Wall is going up, with East Berliners frantically trying to escape westward. Hanks also negotiates the release of an American student arrested for trying to help his East Berlin girlfriend to flee.
The film evocatively recalls the depths of the Cold War, with divided Germany and Berlin, much of it, at least in the east, still in ruble from WWII, at its center. I recalled that former West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, a key Cold War leader, died this week, age 96. Covertly the grandson of a Jew, he served as a conscripted artillery officer for the Third Reich. This irony, and the destruction and division of his country, instilled in Schmidt, a respectful but non observant Lutheran, a shrewd political pragmatism.
Schmidt became Chancellor when his predecessor’s top aide was exposed as a Soviet spy. Deeply committed to alliance with America, he divided his own party by supporting the placement of U.S. intermediate range nuclear missiles in Europe. He also controversially supported the proposed Neutron Bomb, a device that would have irradiated invading Soviet troops and tanks while sparing German infrastructure. Schmidt felt betrayed when President Carter abruptly cancelled the project with only 20 minutes advance notification to Schmidt. Upon Reagan’s election, Schmidt rushed to Washington for an unprecedented meeting with Reagan before his inauguration.
Displaced by Helmut Kohl in 1982, Schmidt remained an active and outspoken elder statesman until the end, his chain smoking evidently not shortening his near century of life. Self-confident and vain, wearing platform shoes when meeting taller American presidents, Schmidt exuded irreverent authority. His longtime friend Henry Kissinger had expressed hope not to outlive Schmidt, as he did not want to live in a world without the German’s wisdom.
Schmidt took strong measures against terrorism, especially the Baader-Meinhof Gang, one of numerous Marxist terror groups, sometimes supported and trained by Soviet proxies like Libyan madman Muammar Kaddafi, that plagued Western Europe in the 1970s. The 1977 hijacking of a Lufthansa flight, in collaboration with Palestinian terrorists, resulted in a successful West German police liberation of the plane in Somalia.
Now Western Europe is threatened by a new generation of terror, also backed by a sinister global spiritual ideology, that will likely persist for decades. Leaders like Schmidt in the 1970s faced down Soviet strategic intimidation and Marxist terrorism by cleaving to the Western alliance.
Today’s terror threat is not linked to a global superpower like the Soviet Union but is, as in Paris, more lethal and suicidal, rooted in centuries old global jihad. Will today’s Western leaders and societies, with little memory of the Cold War, much less WWII, demonstrate similar fortitude and perseverance?
In Bridge of Spies, Tom Hanks from a Berlin train witnesses fleeing East Germans machine gunned by East German guards. He contrasts this bleak scene with tranquil streets and children playfully jumping fences in New York. The line between liberty and tyranny, order and anarchy, is often fine, sustained by vigilance and farsighted courage.
May the response to the horror in Paris summon plenty of both for many trying days ahead.
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