Tom Lehrer just passed away at the age of 97. I associate him with “New Math” and “Werner von Braun,” but Matthew Petti of Reason says he’s best known for his periodic table song and his Harvard fight song:
Lehrer’s comedic career took off in the 1950s, in between his military service and his mathematics studies at Harvard. Then, suddenly, he retreated from the public eye, refusing all publicity—except for an occasional sarcastic take about how pointless everything is. “Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize,” he quipped after Kissinger won the prize in 1973. “I don’t want to satirize George Bush and his puppeteers, I want to vaporize them,” Lehrer declared in 2003.
[…]
“Every great war produces its great hit songs…It occurred to me that if any songs are going to come out of World War III, we’d better start writing them now. I have one here,” Lehrer said in the introduction to “So Long Mom,” a song by a nuclear bomber pilot promising to see his mother “when the war is over, an hour and a half from now.”
An even more nihilistic variation on the same theme, “We Will All Go Together When We Go,” promises the end of all suffering, because “if the bomb that drops on you/gets your friends and neighbors too/there’ll be nobody left behind to grieve.”
Some of Lehrer’s songs touch on a very specific anxiety of the early Cold War, the sense of whiplash from watching (West) Germany transform from an enemy into an ally. “Once all the Germans were warlike and mean/But that couldn’t happen again/We taught them a lesson in 1918/And they’ve hardly bothered us since then…Heil—uh, hail, the Wehrmacht—I mean the Bundeswehr,” he sang in “Multilateral Force Lullaby.”
There was a rumor that Wernher von Braun, the ex-Nazi rocket scientist turned NASA manager, sued Lehrer for singing that von Braun was “a man whose allegiance is ruled by expedience” and should receive some credit for “the widows and cripples in old London town who owe their large pensions to Wernher von Braun.” Lehrer later clarified that the lawsuit never happened.
[…]
Given the frequent nuclear themes in his songs, many had assumed that Lehrer’s military service had to do with nuclear weapons, especially because he spent time at Los Alamos National Laboratory. But Lehrer revealed in a 1994 interview that he had actually been drafted into the National Security Agency (NSA), the shadowy electronic eavesdropping organization that Edward Snowden blew the whistle on decades later.
At the time Lehrer worked there, the very existence of the NSA was classified information. (NSA stands for “No Such Agency,” he joked to his former Harvard classmate Jeremy Bernstein, who wrote about the quip in Quantum Profiles.) While the NSA values mathematicians for their codebreaking skills, Lehrer was not exactly the model intelligence officer.
When he learned that alcohol would be banned at his base’s Christmas party, Lehrer and a friend mixed vodka into gelatin to get drunk on the sly. The event is often considered the invention of the Jell-O shot, though Lehrer himself laughed off the idea that he should get all the credit.
“The Army has carried the American democratic ideal to its logical conclusion in the sense that not only do they prohibit discrimination on the grounds of race, creed, and color, but also on the grounds of ability,” Lehrer said in the introduction to “It Makes a Fellow Proud to Be a Soldier,” his proposed new U.S. Army anthem.
I don’t think it was ever possible to be drafted into the NSA. Rather, Lehrer was probably in the then Army Security Agency (merged into Inscom in 1976), which was under the operational control of the NSA.
To paraphrase Winston Churchill, who I don’t like much but he did have a felicitous turn of phrase, “America is the most evil nation that has ever existed, except for all the others.”
“…the widows and cripples in old London town who owe their large pensions to Wernher von Braun.”
Germany didn’t bomb British cities until Churchill initiated a bombing campaign on German cities. Churchill did this precisely to provoke that German response. His motive was that he wanted to kill off growing support in the UK for a “negotiated peace” with Germany, and he believed German strikes on British civilians would accomplish his goal.
Lehrer probably would have thought this was a clever strategy that morally justified the price paid by “cripples in old London town.”
For one thing, if Tom Lehrer were an honest man, he would have dedicated “Who’s Next?” to the dude who buried the early efforts at limiting proliferation: Churchill.