Where Do We Go From Here?

Six months after World War II ended, I worked my way to Europe from San Francisco as a deckhand on the Swedish ship, Canada, intending to study at the Sorbonne on the G. I. Bill. Arriving too late to attend the summer session at the University, I began writing articles for a Swedish newspaper in Gothenburg. The stories I learned in Sweden which intrigued me most concerned the disappearance of Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who had saved the lives of many Jews in Hungary from the Nazis by issuing them Swedish passports. After the Russians entered Budapest in 1945, Wallenberg was never seen again and searches for what happened to him proved fruitless. After a wonderful summer in Scandinavia, I drifted south, across a Germany, devastated by war and occupied by the victors. Late in September of 1947, I met Dennis Clarke, MGM''s news editor in Europe, who became my mentor in investigative journalism. He helped me to write articles about the crisis in Palestine and the murder of Count Bernadotte by Jewish terrorists. While in London, I interviewed the Russian Prince Obelensky and my conversations with him gave me a greater understanding of the causes of the Bolshevik Revolution and the financing of Lenin and company by non-Russian outsiders. Before I left Europe after covering the critical elections of 1948 in Italy, I no longer believed the Germans alone were the cause of World War II. There had been too, dark and evil forces that led to the tragic war for Europe, which the victors had chosen to ignore. In the years that followed my return to the United States, I would periodically, when I was bored with the business world, escape to faraway places as a freelance journalist. It was Auden who noted, "Man needs escape as he needs food and deep sleep." After my marriage in Sweden in 1959, I produced films for European television with my partner Richard Friedman. During my twenty-five years of marriage, we had nine children, all but two were born in Europe or