Seen & Heard: Vol. 14

Movie Review: Nuremberg – This 2025 historical drama is now on Netflix. It’s about the war crime trials of German leaders that were held at the end of World War II in the German city of Nuremberg. The movie stars Russell Crowe as Hermann Goring, who ranked just behind Hitler in the Nazi hierarchy, and Rami Malek as a US Army psychiatrist assigned to assess Goring and the dozen other defendants for their competency to stand trial, their risk of suicide, and to covertly obtain information about their defense strategy. In supporting roles are John Slattery as the warden of the jail in which the defendants are held, and Michael Shannon, as US Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, who was the lead American prosecutor. At first, I had a hard time separating what I thought were the dramatic liberties that had been taken with the story, but in my subsequent reading, I was surprised to learn the movie hewed closely to what actually happened. Even with my (unfounded) skepticism, it was an excellent film, especially Crowe’s performance. Knowing now that it was mostly accurate made my memory of the film that much better. Although not completely clear from the movie, after the war, the psychiatrist, Douglas Kelley, published a book, 22 Cells in Nuremberg: A Psychiatrist Examines Nazi Criminals. His conclusion: there was nothing unique about the Nazi defendants. They were all mediocre, narcissistic men, who latched on to a charismatic leader (Hitler) to advance their own standing, and were willing to say or do anything to stay in the good graces of that leader. Kelley argued that these types of men exist in every society, even in America, and that the same thing could happen here. Published in 1947, his downbeat message was not what Americans wanted to hear and the book was poorly received, although looking back from today, it seems remarkably prescient. 

YouTube Author Interview: America’s Bookclub: Historian Beverly Gage – Hosted by philanthropist David Rubenstein and produced by CSPAN, America’s Bookclub features Rubenstein interviewing American historians about the books they have written. A recent edition featured Beverly Gage, a professor of history at Yale, who won the Pulitzer Prize for biography for her 2022 book G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century. Gage explained that her field is 20th century American history and that Hoover’s career, which began under President Calvin Coolidge and ended under Richard Nixon, spanned much of that period and was deeply involved in the Cold War which was a dominant circumstance of that era. She talked much about Hoover and her writing process. She also said her next big biography will be of Ronald Reagan, not because there are a lack of Reagan biographies, but because the Cold War was also dominant throughout his political life, including the end of the Cold War, so his biography would allow her to tell the full story of that conflict. Because writing a big biography takes a decade or more, she fit in a shorter project in honor of the US 250th birthday. That book, This Land is Your Land, describes visits to 13 historical sites in America ranging from Independence Hall in Pennsylvania to Disneyland in California. Here’s a link to the interview: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MycpJL6uUQ&t=1988s

Newspaper Article: “70s Oil Shocks Altered Global Finance. Will This One?” New York Times, March 29, 2026. In my recent book chronicling the history of Lowell, I repeat the oft used phrase that in Lowell, the Great Depression came early and stayed late. I usually set 1978 as the pivot point when things changed, but more likely it was a year or two later. An event that extended the city’s economic plight was the twin oil shocks of the 1970s. The first happened in 1973-74 in the aftermath of the Six Day War; the second in 1978-79 with the Iranian Revolution. I was in high school during that earlier episode (Bishop Guertin in Nashua) and recall having Christmas vacation extended a week and then having all Mondays off in January and February, all to conserve heating oil. In the later oil crisis, there was gas rationing – if your license plate ended in an even number, you would only get gas on an even numbered day of the week and vice versa for odd numbers. I also recall spending the summer of 1978 at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, for ROTC training camp, and worrying about access to gasoline during my 750 mile drive back to Lowell that August. It turned out not to be an issue but it was a cause for concern. The article cited above reviews both of those crises and their consequences. Besides squeezing the US with oil shortages, the embargos also fueled further inflation that wracked the US economy in that decade which forced the incredibly high interest rates (18% home mortgages) of the early 1980s that were needed to tame inflation. But the oil shortages also strengthened the US dollar as the world’s currency which caused billions to flow to oil exporters in the Middle East. That countries like Saudi Arabia are now central to global finance is a direct result of those oil shocks of the 1970s. The article also invites readers to speculate how the global system of finance and commerce might be fundamentally reordered if the current war drags on.