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PARTISAN REVIEW
as Eamonn de Valera, the president of the Republic. O'Brien's interpre–
tation of a bizarre episode is of great interest. When Hitler committed
suicide in late April
1945,
de Valera in full regalia and on foot made his
way to the German embassy in Dublin to pay his condolences on the
occasion of the death of a fellow head of state.
According to common wisdom, at the time, De Valera was acting in
accordance with strict protocol. O'Brien states that he acted out of
clever political calculation. A presidential election was around the cor–
ner and de Valera assumed that annoying the British would do him a lot
of good with the Irish electorate. He was not a fascist, he knew little and
cared less about the subject; he had come down hard during the war on
the IRA which wanted to turn Ireland into an anti-British base with the
help of the Nazis. But de Valera also knew instinctively (and probably
shared) the worldview of the overwhelming majority of his compatriots;
their horizon did not extend beyond Britain, and Britain had been the
enemy since time immemorial.
This kind of attitude provides the key to an understanding of virtu–
ally all fervent nationalist movements, and especially those of small
countries.
(It
was true even with regard to the widely educated and most
cosmopolitan among them such as Nehru .) In their hearts they all
remained single-issue, provincial politicians. They all had a traditional
arch enemy (some, like Poland or India, had two), and they all sub–
scribed one way or another to Wolfe Tone's famous dictum, at the time
of the French Revolution, that the hour of their arch enemy's difficulty
was the hour of their opportunity.
Ireland joined the United Nations relatively late and remained neu–
tral in the Cold War; and on some occasions had kept a safe distance
from United States policies. Thus it came as no surprise that Ham–
marskjold, the then-secretary general of the UN, would ask the Irish
government for O'Brien (who had previously represented his country in
the General Assembly) to be seconded to his office as a political adviser.
In this capacity O'Brien was preoccupied with the Katanga crisis and
Patrice Lumumba (about whom he later wrote a play) . At the time it
seemed a major tragedy, largely the fault of the European colonial pow–
ers . Decades later it seems no more than one of the first in a chain of
African tragedies-largely the doing of generations of African leaders.
After a few years as an international civil servant he was invited by
Nkrumah of Ghana to become Vice Chancellor of the University of
Ghana. He thought very highly of this African leader, but was gradually
estranged by his megalomania, his intellectual pretensions and duplicity,
which eventually led to O'Brien's dismissal. There followed for a little
