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PARTISAN REVIEW
the memory of a recording I heard as a Jesuit novice. One day during my
two-year Jesuit novitiate, the novice master, Fr. Murphy, chose to play for us
the recording of a long lecture by Robert]. Lifton, MD, the psychologist who
treated American soldiers who had been captured and subjected to brain–
washing by the Chinese Communists. "Brainwashing," now a familiar word
in English, is a direct translation of the Chinese
xi lIao,
"wash brain."
Brainwashing showed godless conU11unism at its most godless and this pre–
sumably was why Fr. Murphy chose to play the Lifton tapes for us. What he
failed to notice, however, was how astonishingly some of the techniques of
Chinese ConU11Unist brainwashing resembled those of aJesuit novitiate.Jesuit
novices were £i'ee to walk out whenever we wanted to and were never sub–
jected to physical torture or true verbal abuse. Nonetheless, there were close
Chinese ConUllUnist analogues to a number of practices.
I was not shocked to notice that the Chinese Communists had, as it
seemed to me at the time, borrowed so much from us. What they had bor–
rowed was psychologically valid . The tragedy was only that they had used
them in a malign cause. And yet, the isomorphism stayed with me. A
washed brain is a washed brain even if you have helped wash it yourself.
My third vignette takes place in
1965.
President Kennedy had been
assassinated. President Johnson had begun a colossal escalation of the
Vietnam War. I had taken my Jesuit vows of poverty, chastity, and obedi–
ence, and for the past year had been living in Rome studying philosophy
and residing at II Palazzo del GesLl, a historic Jesuit institution where one
may view, among other objects of interest, the death masks of every Jesui t
general back to St. Ignatius. Each morning, in my cassock, I would walk
across Piazza Venezia on my way to class at the Pontifical Gregorian
University, and now there were anti-American placards pasted to some of
the walls along the way. "Gill
Ie IIwlli aa Vietllalll!"
one of them read: "Hands
off Vietnam!"
Tillie
magazine, at this point, three years before the Tet offen–
sive, was still stoutly defending the war, treating it as a kind of reenactment
of the Korean War. But clearly Europe was turning against it. The recre–
ation room in Palazzo del GesLl was Ii ttered wi th newspapers and magazines
in several European languages, but on this they all seemed to agree.
One day a haughty Milanese priest--said to be a poet, said to know Fellini,
and said to have had women-threw down his newspaper in the recreation
room and snarled:
"Allclic til alfellai qllesti Illassacri!"
"You too defend these mas–
sacres." He had never spoken to me before and would never speak to me again.
He belonged to a class ofJesui ts who never spoke to Americans.
Three years later, in
1969,
now only a year away £i'om leaving the Jesuits,
I was back in the United States, sent by the order to study the Hebrew Bible
at Harvard University. In the spring of that year, a group led by radical Harvard
students occupied the dean's office; the universi ty cal led in the police, who sur-
