Finding Peace in Strength

By Hugh Sidey

There is a melancholy echo these days for Richard Helms, former head of the CIA, as he trudges to the Pentagon and pulls up a chair in the somber interior of Room 3E333. He and ten other members of the President's Commission on Strategic Forces have been asked to design the free world's nuclear deterrent for the rest of this century. Helms' entire adult life has been given to studying and acting against forces that would quell freedom. The problem probably cannot be solved for more than a few years at a time, a fact that Helms accepts but many Americans find hard to digest.

As Helms nears 70, his belief that strength brings peace, that vigilance thwarts aggression, is undimmed. And so he is back in public service, alarmed at the rising number of people in the free world who accept without question Soviet declarations of peace, who grow flaccid out of fear of Soviet strength. The cycle repeats itself.

Fifty years ago this Sunday, Jan. 30, 1933, when Helms was a Williams College sophomore getting ready for exams he heard that Adolf Hitler had become dictator of Germany. Two years later, in the fall of 1935, Helms was a United Press reporter in Berlin, hunched forward in his seat in the Kroll Opera House watching Hitler rant against the Versailles Treaty. "I noticed that Hitler had become rather pale," Helms recalls. "He was passing a handkerchief back and forth between his hands underneath the lectern." Suddenly Helms understood. "At this moment," Hitler shouted, "German troops are crossing the Rhine bridges and occupying the Rhineland!" His mesmerized audience cheered wildly. Helms, then 23, was stunned. The world shrugged.

In the summer of 1936, Helms covered America's greatest hero, Charles Lindbergh, who became frightened by German air might after Hermann Goering showed him the huge air force he was building. That September, Helms was in Nuremberg at the Nazi Party Congress, where uniformed ranks roared their devotion to Hitler and flights of new bombers thundered endlessly overhead. In all his subsequent years in and around power, Helms has never seen anything quite like it.

Helms rode in the car behind Hitler in a motorcade through Nuremberg, where the frenzy spilled down every street. At the Burg, a medieval castle, Hitler came out on the battlement for one of his rare interviews. Helms was seized by conflicting emotions. He looked down on Hitler, who was smaller than Helms had thought. Hitler's handshake was firm. But his personality was not hypnotic. His eyes possessed no power, as the myths had it. Hitler's skin was coarse and his mustache slightly gray. His bottom teeth were goldplated, which made Helms suspect they were false. Hitler's smile was humorless but his manner was pleasant enough. What was it about this plain man that had brought him so far, Helms wondered as Hitler talked of his hatred of Bolshevism, of the value of the party congress. Later, Helms would write: "No imagination could make anything godlike out of the ordinary mortal who chatted on that day. The striking things were the ready intelligence, the understanding of German psychology, the complete assuredness." But the sad fact was that Helms was only one of a small group of journalists and diplomats who understood the Nazi menace when there might have been time to stop Hitler.

There is no Hitler in today's world, in Helms' view. The adversary is many men, many nations arid many systems. The measures of strength are economic as much as military. But the basic challenge, believes Helms, remains unchanged: how to preserve freedom while preventing war. The world failed with Hitler. It has succeeded for nearly four decades since World War II, largely through U.S. strength and resolve. Now doubt assails us again.

So each day Helms makes his way to Room 3E333 carrying with him the memories of what started just half a century ago next week in Germany, when Hitler rose to power and weary nations turned away from danger and refused the burden of leadership. Helms is trying to make sure it does not happen again. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.