K2_ Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain - Ed Viesturs [87]
Bitterly stung by the report, Wiessner resigned from the AAC. The most chilling (and, in retrospect, comically absurd) episode in the backlash against Wiessner came only a few months after he was released from the hospital. Wiessner never publicly spoke about this confrontation until 1984, when he told a writer about it.
One day [in early 1940] my secretary in my New York office told me that two men from the FBI had come by. I went down to the FBI office and met two very nice young chaps—they were both Yale graduates. We sat down and talked. They wanted to know my whole history, and they had the funniest questions. Such as, “You go skiing often in Stowe in the winter, do you not? That’s very near Canada, isn’t it? Can you get easily over the border?” I said, “Yes. It’s quite a distance to walk, but I’m in Canada very often anyway because I have a business in Toronto.” And they laughed.
I wasn’t very keen on Roosevelt then. And so they said, “You don’t like the president? You made some remarks about him.” I said, “Well, I wasn’t the only one. There are very many people who feel that way!” They laughed again.
They asked about some of my friends. We sat there half an hour, then we just talked pleasantly. On the way out I said, “Now look, fellows, I was pretty open to you. I have my definite suspicions. Would you tell me the names of the men who put you up to this?” They said, “Naturally we can’t do that.” So I said, “Let me ask this question: was it some climbers from the AAC?” They nodded. They said, “Don’t worry about it. You know who we had here yesterday? We had Ezio Pinza, the famous opera singer. It was the same thing, a little jealousy from his competitors. They complained that he was a Mussolini follower.”
If Wiessner’s story is true—and it seems too bizarre for him to have made it up—it leaves ambiguous the question of whether his AAC detractors simply wanted to harass him or genuinely believed he was a Nazi spy.
Sadly, the criticisms leveled in the AAC report, full of innuendos attributing Wiessner’s “mistakes” to his “Teutonic” style of climbing and leadership, became the received wisdom about the 1939 expedition. Kauffman and Putnam rescued from oblivion the memorandum Edward Groth, the American consul in India, had sent to the State Department. It is full of aspersions based on ethnic prejudices. For instance:
With his German background, also owing to the fact that he possesses a large share of German bluntness … it is not remarkable that there should have been a clash of temperaments. Wiessner is undoubtedly an excellent climber and a good leader, but like every German, he is very forceful in giving commands and totally unaware that the abrupt, blunt manner in which the order may have been given might have wounded the feelings of his associates, who in this instance, being Americans, naturally have a different attitude and outlook in matters of this sort.
At its worst, the second-guessing took the form of outright condemnation. In Abode of Snow, a widely read history of Himalayan climbing, the British writer Kenneth Mason gave an utterly garbled summary of the events on K2 in 1939, concluding, “It is difficult to record in temperate language the folly of this enterprise.”
For the most part, Wiessner ignored these criticisms and got on with his life. In 1955, however, he published a very small book about the expedition in German, titled K2: Tragödien und Sieg am Zweithöchsten Berg der Erde (K2: Tragedy and Victory on the Second-Highest Mountain in the World). Miriam Underhill, Robert Underhill’s wife, the finest American woman climber of her day and the editor of Appalachia, persuaded Wiessner to allow the publication of an English translation of the part