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whom he portrayed as a symbol of everything that was bad about Nazism; he was mean, nasty, vicious, a cliché of evil. Like many books and movies produced by Jews since the war, I think it was a perfectly understandable bias that, consciously or unconsciously, Jews felt would ensure that the world would never forget the Holocaust and, not coincidentally, would increase sympathy and financial support for Israel. Indirectly Shaw was saying that all Germans were responsible for the Holocaust, which I didn’t agree with. Much to his irritation, I changed the plot entirely so that at the beginning of the story my character believed that Hitler was a positive force because he gave Germans a sense of purpose. But as the story developed, he gradually became disenchanted and struggled to turn his back on these beliefs. Like many Germans, Christian had been misled by Hitler’s propaganda and believed he would bring a lasting peace to Europe by conquering it—the same rationalization that Napoleon had employed by saying he wanted to unify Europe to bring peace. I thought the story should demonstrate that there are no inherently “bad” people in the world, but that they can easily be misled.

I’m uncomfortable with generalizations about anything because they are rarely accurate. At the time, we were just coming out of the McCarthy era, when many people’s lives had been ruined because so many Americans accepted the myth that every Communist—or anyone who’d ever had a drink with one—was the devil incarnate, while overlooking the malignancy of Joe McCarthy, who was a greater menace than the people he targeted.

In The Young Lions I wanted to show that there were positive aspects to Germans, as there are to all people. Depending on your point of view, there are positive and negative elements in everyone. Hitler propagated the myth that the Germans were a superior race and the Jews inferior, but accepting the reverse of this is equally wrong; there are bad Jews and Germans, and decent Jews and Germans. I decided to play Christian Diestl as an illustration of one element of the human character—that is, how, because of their need to keep their myths alive, people will go to enormous lengths to ignore the negative aspects of their beliefs.

It happens all the time. I’ve watched parents tell television interviewers how proud they were of their son who died in Vietnam because he had been fighting to defend freedom, his country and American ideals, when I am sure they must have known in their hearts what a foolish war it was and that their son’s life had been squandered for nothing. Memories and myths were all they had to cling to; they couldn’t admit that their son was dead because of the senseless and destructive policies of Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara and the rest of the “Best and the Brightest.”

In Christian Diestl I also wanted to show how people like Johnson and McNamara often have such a misguided sense of righteousness and idealism that they sincerely believe that what is inherently immoral or wrong is justifiable, will commit terrible acts to achieve their goals, and then find it easy to rationalize their actions. The perpetrators of the CIA program in Vietnam called Operation Phoenix were responsible for torturing and assassinating hundreds of people. I was once told by a CIA man who was closely associated with the program that if someone’s name was put into a computer identifying him as a member of the Vietcong, it was sent out to various assassination squads and the person was killed; yet a lot of these weren’t really in the Vietcong, and their names were listed by mistake or because someone had a grudge against them. The CIA man said he had complained about this to a top official of the agency and was told, “Look, innocent people get killed in all wars. If we get one right out of four, it’s okay. The rest just have to be sacrificed; this is a war.” This leader was a devout Catholic who had become conditioned to do his job without any pangs of conscience, but how different was he from Heydrich or Himmler?

People can be conditioned