Kristian Williams’ recent article on “Sacrificing Others: Watchmen, Fail-Safe, and Eichmann in Jerusalem” is a worthy read but it does require some suspension of belief concerning the narrative logic of Watchmen.
Right at the outset, Williams ask his readers:
“Why are our reactions to these characters so different?”
The characters in question are Ozymandias from Watchmen and the President of the United States in Fail-Safe. Williams suggests that the answer lies in
“…their different attitudes toward that responsibility. The President is uncertain, reluctant. He looks for alternatives; he asks for a reprieve. Ozymandias is perfectly confident, perfectly clear. He is entirely resolute, unwavering in his agenda.”
“…the President, unlike Veidt, does not feel that it makes him good. He has not, in other words, lost his sense of humanity, and when it comes to questions of character that sense may be more important than mere morals.”
In this I’m afraid Williams is quite wrong. The reason we judge Ozymandias is because the nuclear holocaust in Watchmen is imminent but not inevitable—an existential threat which our world still lives under. In contrast, the nuclear holocaust in Fail-Safe is a virtual certainty requiring decisive action (possibly within minutes). Ozymandias’ response to the threat of nuclear war therefore mirrors the policy of preemption which characterized the disastrous wars of the Bush administration. This is anathema to liberals of Moore’s ilk but sweet music to all others.
More importantly, our antipathy for Ozymandias is made absolute by the nature of superhero narratives. These are narrative which contain palpable gods where none exist in reality. This is a decisive flaw and shatters any suppositions that the world of superheroes mirrors our own; for there are always alternatives to human action in such comics. This is something which Jeet Heer alluded to in his dissent concerning Watchmen‘s canonical status some years back.
The destruction of humanity is not a certainty when a god (albeit a fickle one) is on your side. This results in the (apparent) narrative confusion which underpins the central plot of Watchmen where the smartest man on earth—with presumably the best intentions—arranges for the departure of the single person who can prevent the destruction of mankind. As Williams indicates, it is Ozymandias’ actions which trigger the departure of Dr. Manhattan and hence the possibility of a nuclear conflagration. Like Prometheus he has seized the mantle of the gods for man, and his fate is just as inevitable. The deck, in a sense, has been stacked against Ozymandias.
One possible apology for Ozymandias’ seemingly illogical actions would be to propose true far sightedness on his part. He is afterall still a man and of limited years. Foreseeing the departure of that solitary god at some point in the distant future (well beyond his own lifespan), he preempts this departure to fashion a final solution to the nuclear problem. He foresees no other human being capable of this act of calculation. It is not manifestly true that “he wants at least as badly to be the one who saves [the world].”
Williams seeking to magnify Ozymandias’ hubris further suggests that
“…he leaves the remaining Watchmen alive, though they also know his secret. His brilliance requires admirers. They are no less likely to reveal the truth than his servants were, but they do not share in the victory… He leaves them alive, because he has proven himself superior, and they have accepted it.”
But I feel this is in error. Ozymandias leaves them alive eventually because Dr. Manhattan intervenes quite decisively to save them. It is impossible to say what he would have done following his defeat of them and the customary (for such genre pieces) explanations concluded. He certainly had no compunction about murdering the Comedian and assorted other obstacles who were similarly helpless and “did not share in his victory.” No one doubts Ozymandias’ arrogance but this is always overseen by cold arithmetic. One might say that the very name he has chosen for himself suggests an awareness of his own human frailty. When Williams states that:
“Moore, by invoking Shelley, recalls both meanings. Veidt’s works, which we witness directly in the chapter following, are indeed dreadful. And the peace they produce, Moore’s allusion suggests, cannot last.”
…he fails to mention that it is not only Moore who chooses this name but Veidt himself. And surely the smartest man in the world would be quite familiar with the various readings of Shelley’s poem. This might be a case of authorial failure—the choice of a name at odds with a character’s behavior throughout Watchmen. If taken in context, however, it suggests both vanity and doubt on the part of Veidt. Is it so hard to believe that Veidt would choose a name for himself which would call into question the very edifice which he has built? Or is he the megalomaniacal pulp villain proposed by Heer in his dissent?
* * *
There is another problem with elevating the morality of the protagonists of Fail-Safe over those in Watchmen. The comic posits a world controlled by self-centered failures if not madmen. Fail-Safe, on the other hand, attributes the destruction of humanity to human error, not human intention. In fact, it elevates—for quite obvious reasons—the President of the United States to a bastion of morality.
In contrast, an examination of the respective attitudes of Kennedy and Khrushchev to this same question would suggest considerable doubt as to the balance of morality and concern for the fate of mankind. All will be familiar with the standard narrative of Kennedy’s finest hour but at least one other version of events suggests a man willing to play “roulette with nuclear war”:
“Premier Khrushchev told President Kennedy in a message today he would withdraw offensive weapons from Cuba if the United States withdrew its rockets from Turkey.”
These were Jupiter missiles with nuclear warheads…These were obsolete missiles, already slated for withdrawal, to be replaced by far more lethal and effectively invulnerable Polaris submarines. Kennedy recognized that he would be in an “insupportable position if this becomes [Khrushchev’s] proposal”, both because the Turkish missiles were useless and were being withdrawn anyway, and because “it’s gonna – to any man at the United Nations or any other rational man, it will look like a very fair trade.”
“The two most crucial questions about the missile crisis are how it began, and how it ended. It began with Kennedy’s terrorist attack against Cuba, with a threat of invasion in October 1962. It ended with the president’s rejection of Russian offers that would seem fair to a rational person, but were unthinkable because they would undermine the fundamental principle that the US has the unilateral right to deploy nuclear missiles anywhere…”
One might say that it is the author of Fail-Safe who is deluded as to the true nature of man and of his elected leaders; and that it is Ozymandias who represents the true calculus of nuclear poker. As Chomsky relates in a recent interview:
“The Kennedy planners were making very dangerous choices and pursuing policies which they thought had a good chance of leading to nuclear war, and they knew that Britain would be wiped out. The U.S. wouldn’t, because Russia’s missiles couldn’t reach there but Britain would be wiped out…right at that time a senior American adviser said in an internal discussion that the British shouldn’t be told, that the U.S. can’t trust the British.”
If we find Ozymandias obviously evil, it is because we recognize ourselves in him. And if the President of the United States in Fail-Safe seems less reprehensible, it is because he represents nothing less than a righteous wish-giving pixie in a fairy tale.
I follow this critique of Kristian’s piece, though I read the feeling about the President in Fail-Safe not being one of associating him with a superior morality, but one of pity in a situation where there are no good decisions. In other words, it is the least bad decision in a bad moral system.
I guess, it is possible to feel pity for Ozymandias, too (I know I do -esp. when he looks to Dr. Manhattan for affirmation), but in his case, his plan is built on a lie, while the president in Fail-Safe (as far I recall) discloses the plan. The sacrifice is known to the public and he will be judged. Ozymandias places himself above by acting unilaterally and (ostensibly) with impunity.
The Cuban Missile Crisis is a great point of comparison and you are right about the narrative of those events that makes Kennedy into a hero for playing chicken with the lives of our entire planet, but I also think that since the President in the novel goes unnamed there is point where there is a rupture in the comparison. I think it would not be out of line to say that in the same situation Kennedy would have preemptively nuked the Ruskies – thus making the unnamed president different in my eyes, regardless of other similarities. Both Fail-Safe and Watchmen describe mass death leading to disarmament, which highlights their position as fantasies. A president agreeing to nuking NYC to show the USSR his good faith seems as likely to me as a teleporting a fake giant alien squid psychic bomb into New York. In other words, Fail-Safe has more in common with a comic book than real life.
I also think that taken within its 1980s context (as I suggested in my comment on Kristian’s piece), a nuclear exchange certainly felt inevitable (and within the world of the Watchmen, Comedian felt the same way, Dr. Manhattan or no), and I think that feeling is important to Ozymandias’s motives. It is certainly a concern of all the minor characters in the work.
As for Ozy’s name, I don’t recall, but doesn’t he at least claim to take it from the Greek name of Ramesses II? Is there anything to indicate that the poem exists within the narrative world of Watchmen, b/c I think his choice of it suggests that it doesn’t. Or am I missing something?
I think Suat’s point is maybe that Fail-Safe presents a president who is overly symapthetic given what we know about the presidents we’ve actually had. The President as tortured but ultimately honest and virtuous wise man making difficult choices is a fairly popular meme — Obama gets a lot of mileage out of it, as did Kennedy and Clinton. One of the things I like about Ozymandias is that he’s really a critique of that; he suggests that the wise, powerful deciders are self-deluded thugs.
Basically the argument is not that the Fail-Safe president is Kennedy, but that he is not in ways that are deceptive about the presidency’s fairly consistent imperial thuggishness, whoever is actually in the white house.
That inevitality of a nuclear exchange is in fact stressed by Dr.Manhattan’s existence, that the “superman” is an american did not change the fact that he was under scrutinny because of his detachtment to human mundane life. All those years being god and not ending cold war by defusing all nuclear weapons with a snap of his fingers? Nah, he went along, playing the scientist rol being loyal to those who happened to endorse him in the first place; Dr.Manhattan is a detached god who by providence happened to be american, not russian and Ozzy acted acordingly. I think Dr. Manhattan represents the pov of the universe not caring for human emotions and Ozzy excluding him is a quirky way of assuming responsability for humankinds own actions. And if he is somekind of God, his effect futhers the believe of one nations ideal to be the rigth one and leaving no place to consider the other, its a fine motive for being fanatical enough to prefer obliterate your enemies and yourself instead of considering each other alone.
“arranges for the departure of the single person who can prevent the destruction of mankind -”
The way i recall the books I believe we’re told not even Manhattan can stop all the bombs. I don’t have a copy of Watchmen on hand but I found a link that says “It was calculated that Jon could stop “only” 99% of the Soviet missiles and not all of them. However Adrian says that it’s because he can’t “Be everywhere at once.””
Manhattan also has a line “I don’t think there is a god. If there is it isn’t me.” so there’s at least a flaw with the “palpable gods” reading of Watchmen.
When I first read Watchmen I saw Veidt as “truly far sighted” as you suggest he can be read, I get that there’s a lot of readings to undermine this however Veidt essentially can be read as having a “super smart” superpower if the reader so chooses. The character’s initial inspiration was superhero Peter Canon who Wikipedia says has the powers of :
“Mind over matter (the art of activating and harnessing that unused portion of the brain)
Low level telekinesis
Psychic control over animals
Ability to ignore pain
Clairvoyance”
You can see how this inspiration filtered into the character.
My main point is just that there’s a lot of different ways to read Veidt’s actions.
It’s worth remembering that Jon is actually quite passive before he becomes Dr. Manhattan. He wants to be a Watchmaker like his dad, then he changes his career because his dad tells him to. Rather than reading him as the viewpoint of the world, I think it’s pretty easy to read his indifferent state as a metaphor for his particular personality.
From the point of view of Manhattan, Ozy gets rid of him because this was the inevitable fate assigned him (an already existing slice of 4D space-time). Neither Manhattan nor Ozy can do anything different. Obviously Ozy feels like he has an intrinsic motivation (that getting rid of Manhattan is more likely to save folks than leaving him around), but perhaps this is because Manhattan’s “presence” doesn’t dictate his actions. He is present when Blake kills his pregnant Vietnamese lover, but he doesn’t save her. The same, of course, could easily be true of his presence on Earth. Ozy thus tries to take matters “into his own hands.”
I agree with Suat on this one, though. I don’t think Ozy is quite the bastard Kristian depicts him as, and the reasons for our sympathies with the President over him, if they exist, aren’t exactly as Kristian limns them.
What happened to the captcha?
Dumped the captcha because it wasn’t working well. We haven’t been inundated with spam, so so far so good….
Suat,
Thanks for a thoughtful reply. And sorry to be slow joining in here, but (as I mentioned before), I’m on the road and only intermittently near a computer.
I think we have a genuine difference of opinion, but I think we agree on more than you think. And I think you’ve made a couple of mistakes that make my position seem weaker than it is.
So I’m going to try to clarify a few things:
1- The inevitability of nuclear war:
I trust that Veidt believes the war to be inevitable. Even I don’t think he’s such a prick that he would deliberately create the threat just so that he could defeat it.
However, Moore hints with the Black Freighter reference that Veidt is mistaken in this view. (And really, is there another reason for the Black Freighter stuff to even be in this story?) Also, Watchmen was written after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which in the real world notably didn’t trigger a nuclear holocaust; so he may further be hinting that the crisis in the book will resolve itself without resulting in human extinction.
Unfortunately for Veidt, the justification for his action doesn’t just depend on his thinking nuclear war is inevitable; it must really be inevitable.
2- Goodbye, Manhattan:
I also agree that it is possible to attribute Veidt’s neutralization of Dr. Manhattan to genuine far-sightedness, foreseeing Jon’s eventual departure. I mean, really, Jon doesn’t prove himself particularly reliable, all told.
But even that comes back around to narcissism on Veidt’s part: he’s convinced that *only he* can save the world. And I stand by my feeling that secretly (perhaps subconsciously) he *wants* that to be true, and he wants to prove it.
3- Sparing the heroes:
I don’t buy that’s it’s Jon’s intervention that saves them, since Veidt could have killed Rorschach and Nite Owl, were he so inclined, before Jon showed up. In fact, it’s not Veidt who does kill Rorshach. He seems content to assume that the word of a smelly psychopath won’t stand against that of a super-genius philanthropist. Likewise, Veidt only decides to kill the Comedian when he starts blabbing to Moloch. All of which only begs the question, again, as to why he kills his servants.
4- “Ozymandias”:
The point about Veidt picking the name for himself is a good one, but it’s possible to absorb that into my reading as well. After all, Veidt is explicit about wanting to go further than his heroes and achieve what they failed to achieve. I don’t think he’d be shy about tempting fate.
5- Relative moralities:
I’m more than happy to agree that, politically, Watchmen is more realistic than Fail-Safe. I don’t think it follows, however, that Ozymandias is morally better than the President.
I don’t think it’s a flaw in Fail-Safe that the President is unrealistically decent. Instead, it’s part of its polemical logic to assume the best intentions of people within the system and still show things going terribly awry.
In contrast, it’s the point of Watchmen to show that super-powered people would likely behave in atrocious ways, in part by reminding us that super-powerful people already do.
So yeah, by the narrative logic of each book, the President is bound to come out looking better than Ozymandias. The thing I’m trying to get at, though, is why he actually seems better.
My conclusion is that it is not because his actions are better (they’re largely equivalent) or because he achieves better outcomes (he doesn’t; in fact, worse), but because he experiences guilt and grief in a way Ozymandias does not. And I argue, it’s not that the President has a better morality than Ozymandias, but that he has a better character.
It’s been awhile since I read the Watchmen, but I’m positive that there was a piece of supportive text included in there that actually suggested that Doctor Manhattan’s presence – and especially his relationship with the United States – actually increased the likelihood of nuclear conflagration.
If I remember it correctly the text stated that having him on their side allowed the United States to push the Soviet Union around by making the likely consequences of open warfare seeming dramatically more one-sided than they would have been had he never existed.
His presence essentially served as a constant threat and humiliation and there was only so long that it would be tolerated. When Ozymandias orchestrated Manhattan’s self-imposed exile he didn’t remove the only man who could prevent an immanent apocalypse, he removed the most inflammatory element in the situation.
If he’d left it at that he would have created a situation that at least allowed the world the opportunity to sort its problems out for itself – or alternatively to destroy itself of its own volition.
Instead, he continued with his plan to secure a temporary peace through a very expensive confidence game by playing on humanity’s lower instincts.
How long can the threat of an immanent alien apocalypse really maintain the fragile peace implied by the work’s ending? A generation? Two? What happens when the threat fails to appear and people once again realize that their national interests don’t really align? And that they don’t actually understand the perspective of people from the other side of the world in a culture that developed radically differently from their own?
I’m of the opinion that the president in Fail-Safe is more moral and human because of intent rather than a sense of guilt or even compassion. Ozymandias usurped responsibility for humanity to gamble that he could fool us into behaving the way he wanted by inventing a bogeyman, and he did it without any discernible concern for what would happen when the fear of the bogeyman eventually waned.
The unnamed president by contrast sought a negotiated settlement of a very real and undeniably imminent disaster that allowed both sides in the conflict to live with the results. He recognized that the system was horrifically flawed, but he wasn’t willing to toss it aside unilaterally on a gamble. Further his good faith handling of the situation laid the groundwork for a potential deescalation of the Cold War and a negotiated disarmament.
Ozy pushes Manhattan off planet to speed up nuclear conflict so that he can control it and frame it for his own purposes. In general, Manhattan’s contributes to Soviet desperation and increases the danger, but in the short term, Jon’s removal speeds things up (Soviets emboldened to invade Afghanistan). Kristian’s point is backed up by the text in that Ozy assumes the war is inevitable (and so speeds it up), but there is never any guarantee that this is necessarily true. The Black Freighter sequence suggests otherwise (where the sailor kills the people in his home town, assuming that they will be killed by the pirates…but we learn this was never in the cards. Instead he kills them for nothing…Or, conversely, his death-dealing was “fated” anyway, like Ozy’s, as the book implies via Manhattan).