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OBITUARY: Ernest van den Haag, R.I.P - Obituary
National Review, April 22, 2002
Ernest van den Haag died on Thursday, March 21, after three weeks in a nursing home where he progressively lost consciousness, in the end not even recognizing his old friend John O'Sullivan, who traveled to New Jersey to see him, and bid goodbye, as we all knew it would be at that point, Ernest having reached the age of 87, succumbing now to the myriad attenuations of old age.
He had been an associate of National Review for 45 years. He was not a member of the staff, but rather a consultant and occasional contributor. He was a scholar who worked at home and in the libraries, and taught law and sociology at New York University, New York Law School, and the New School for Social Research. For many years, he maintained a private practice in psychoanalytical counseling.
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He was most awfully learned. One time, at a long lunch, he told me about his travails as a young Dutchman in Italy, whisked off by the Fascists to prison, where he spent the next two years. After his release, he made his way to France and studied at the Sorbonne, but when the Nazis came in, he was put in a concentration camp. He managed to escape to Portugal, eventually boarding a ship to New York, where he arrived not speaking a word of English.
I remember asking him whether there was any other language he didn't speak. He gave his little smile, and declined to answer the question. He was never modest about his attainments, and was surprised whenever they were, however indirectly, called into question. One of our anti- Communist committees asked him, in 1962, to travel to Katanga to evaluate the situation there when we suspected that Moise Tshombe was being elbowed out by leftist forces in the Congo, from which Katanga had seceded. Ernest returned to New York with on-the-scene information and met with the press. One reporter asked whether it was true that Tshombe had stacked an arsenal next to a hospital in order to deceive attackers. Van den Haag said no, he had looked into that charge and it was not true. The reporter asked, "But can we believe you?" Van den Haag said he was accustomed to being believed, and puffed on his little cigar.
The brand was Myanmar, a dry Dutch cigar about the size of his thumb, and he carried two with him until the awful day a few years ago when, bowing to the medical evidence, he gave up smoking. That was a great deprivation, the sense of taste being so strong in him, though he cared not at all for wine. For decades it was a standing jest among his friends that any invitation by Ernest van den Haag to go out for lunch -- his favorite meal -- meant to go to a restaurant of finished French cuisine, and to pay the bill. Ernest's contribution to the lunch was his own company, and his analysis of public problems, always acute and reflective.
He did not write many books, though he began with the massive Fabric of Society with Professor Ralph Ross, a textbook of sorts that comprehended psychology and sociology, economics and politics. A few months after I had been introduced to him -- he was lunching with Professor Sidney Hook and called me over to remark on an essay I had written about the shortcomings of Dwight Macdonald -- he phoned to invite me to lunch a few weeks later and told me that I had the option of remaining half ignorant or of learning about the profundities of life, in which case I could read his textbook.
His special skill was the crisp essay, in which he distilled his thought and analysis with precisionist care. His extemporaneous skills were displayed in brief and simple sentences that built on one another with quite devastating effect. In my book on the television show Firing Line, I gave an example. The subject of the hour was capital punishment, the opponent of it the dean of the New York Law School, Professor Donald Shapiro, who contended that capital punishment does not deter, as witness the concurrence of capital punishment and murder in Victorian England. Mr. Shapiro went on at some length making his point, while Ernest sat there with stern bemusement. Finally he spoke up.
Here are ten sentences of arresting lucidity:
May I point out that murderers are the people who have not been deterred, so this discussion is a little bit irrelevant. I would never maintain that everybody is deterred. The second point I would like to make, about Dr. Johnson [that's Dr. Samuel Johnson, whom Mr. Shapiro had cited], is that he made a mistake, which does not justify Professor Shapiro's making the same mistake. You see, the deterrent effect of the death penalty, including the hanging of a pickpocket, does not mean that the crime will be eliminated. It means merely that the rate at which it is committed will be diminished. Now, if Dr. Johnson had shown that in two equally sized crowds the one in which the pickpocket was hanged showed no less activity in picking pockets than the other, he might have made a point.
But even there I'm not convinced, because, you see, a professional pickpocket would have known, in those days, that if apprehended, he would be hanged. So we did not expect him to be deterred. What we really mean by deterrence is that we want to deter new entrants into the profession. Those who are already entering the profession, knowing that they run the risk of being hanged, are not likely to be surprised seeing someone else being hanged, and are not therefore likely to be deterred by it. What we do hope to do by hanging (or whatever the form of execution is) is to deter those not already committed to their criminal profession. That is, we make that profession so costly that we decrease the number of entrants.
