In December 2009, I interviewed Héctor Timerman, the second of Jacobo Timerman’s three sons. Hector was 22 when his father was imprisoned by the Argentine military junta in 1977. Today he is Argentina’s ambassador to the United States. His country’s embassy is in one of Washington’s most elegant buildings. In an understated upstairs waiting room, an elderly woman dressed in a white uniform and slippers brings me coffee on a sterling silver platter which holding a porcelain cup, a sterling silver milk pitcher, and a small silver spoon. Above and behind me are portraits of Argentina’s 50 previous ambassadors and of famous men of letters. Soon the wall will display the portrait of Héctor Timerman, the second Jewish Argentine ambassador to the United States.

Timerman tells me about his essay, “Torture: A Family Affair,” which concerns the effects of torture on families and was recently published by Human Rights Watch. Every day that went by with the family unable to secure Jacobo Timerman’s release, he says, meant another day of despair over whether their father might disappear or suffer more electric shock.

I ask the ambassador to describe his father. With some reservation he tells me that his father had a strong character and that it was difficult to convince him that he was wrong. “At some point,” he says, “you’d stop arguing with him because you realized you would not change his mind.” But he also tells me that his father was a tender person, who had the uncanny ability to listen, understand, and empathize. The ambassador says that though his father never imposed ideas on his sons, he shared with them his abiding belief in universal human rights. He tells me that he had always admired his father’s efforts, through La Opinión, the newspaper he published, to highlight the junta’s abuses, murders, and acts of anti-Semitism.

When I ask him why the Argentine Jewish community remembers Timerman rather bitterly, he says that his father was an outspoken critic of the regime and that the Jewish community feared this would bring about reprisals. His father, he says, strongly disapproved of those Jews who stayed quiet in order not to draw the regime’s wrath. His father felt ashamed of them. I ask him, as others had asked his father more than 30 years ago, if there is anti-Semitism in Argentina. He bristles at the question, as if angry that people could still ask this of his country, and then answers with the care and caution of a diplomat: the Church, the military, and the aristocracy were the institutions that manifested the most virulent form of anti-Semitism during the dictatorship. But Argentina as a nation, he says, has never been anti-Semitic; its people are not by nature anti-Semites.

I am as confounded as Robert Hill was back in 1976. According to Rabbi Roberto Graetz, who used to bring gefilte fish and challah to Timerman when he was in prison, Argentina has a long and well-documented history of anti-Semitism; several generations of army officers were trained and modeled after the German army, and during the Dirty War the Catholic Church was a prominent agent of anti-Semitism. How to explain the 1992 bombing of the Israeli Embassy and the 1994 bombing that destroyed the Jewish community center, leaving more than 100 dead and three times as many injured? How to explain the May 2009 clash between anti-Semites and Jews during a ceremony celebrating Israel’s independence day?

Héctor Timerman calibrates his remarks in the same way that his father did in the ’70s: anti-Semitism as a broad social phenomenon doesn’t really exist, Argentina itself is not anti-Semitic, no country is anti-Semitic. These statements contradict what Héctor Timerman told a U.S. Embassy official at the time of his father’s arrest. A State Department summary of the meeting describes Héctor Timerman saying “somewhat excitedly” that the current climate in Argentina was like that of Germany “just before Hitler’s Putsch” and that his father was arrested because of anti-Semitism. I can only guess at why Ambassador Timerman today insists on the distinction; his future, like his father’s, would be put at risk if he were to honestly answer the questions that I put to him. He is lying to me out of self-interest, and to protect his country. Or perhaps his opinions are simply a reflection of his social position. He is, in many ways, the man that his father wanted to become—a fully integrated member of the Argentine ruling elite.

The Timerman family, with the help of a lawyer, Alejo Ramos Padilla, has pursued justice in Jacobo’s case by prosecuting those involved in his illegal imprisonment and torture. “It doesn’t matter if they wear a uniform, a cassock, or a tie,” says Ramos Padilla. “We will bring them to justice.” In 2004, the family’s efforts led to the first successful conviction of a Catholic priest, Christian Von Wernich, of crimes against humanity. Some in Argentina say that Héctor Timerman is vengeful. “Maybe they are right,” he responds, “but I’m seeking my revenge through the legal process, through the tribunals.”

Bitterly, Héctor Timerman tells me about others who have made accusations against his father. Tomás Eloy Martínez, a professor and former journalist, has suggested that Jacobo Timerman was never tortured and that he betrayed other journalists. I had heard such rumors in Argentina. Héctor Timerman tells me about General Ramón Camps’s book, El Caso Timerman, Punto Final. Camps, who died in 1994 from cancer, claimed to have tortured 5,000 individuals, including Timerman. The police chief of Buenos Aires during the junta, Camps was sentenced during the presidency of Raúl Alfonsín but then pardoned by his successor, Carlos Menem. He was a zealous military hardliner who went after leftists with special gusto. Camps could not stand the fact that, of the thousands he had tortured, Timerman had survived to write about it. In 1983, he wrote a torturer’s testimony in response to Prisoner without a Name.

“The torturer is believed,” Héctor Timerman tells me incredulously. We both pause at the bizarreness of this idea. I think how absurd it is that a publisher would take on such a book. But then I remember that not all Argentineans disagreed with Camps. The junta instilled in the people of Argentina a moral code so strict and certain that it pitted neighbor against neighbor. Graetz, who today serves a congregation in California, told me, “When I preached against the military regime the members of my congregation would walk out. Then when I returned years later to Argentina, these same members would ask me why, if I was such a proponent of human rights, I hadn’t told them what was going on. And I would remind them that years earlier they had walked out.”

***

And what about Timerman? How should we remember him? Is it possible to believe that the four books Timerman wrote after being tortured contain valid points about politics, human rights, and Jewish identity that should compel our attention, even after we know the truth about the man and his flaws? In these books Timerman is angry and quarrels with the world. He attacks his own community, he attacks Israel, he criticizes Chile and Cuba. In 1991, he went silent.

I initially set out to write a commemoration of Timerman on the 10th anniversary of his death because he inspired me as a graduate student in Latin American studies. But what I found was not the noble Jew I remembered fighting for human rights and against anti-Semitism, but a deeply flawed human being who knew how to pull the heartstrings of those who still believe that human rights are an essential human concern. For me he remains a figure as tragic as the saddest of the great German Jewish thinkers—described so eloquently in Amos Elon’s The Pity of it All—who felt more patriotic than the Germans themselves, yet were never truly accepted as members of the society that eventually killed them. Timerman let himself believe that his embrace of Argentina would allow him a special place in the junta. What then could have been going through his mind as he was accused of being a dirty Jew? He never really tells us, but it surely stung.

The fact that Timerman was a Jew meant that he was less. That knowledge, through electric shock, beatings, threats, and humiliation, led him to write four books in anger—anger at his own deception and downfall, at the world for not understanding Jews, at the open Jewish grave he wrote of carrying in his heart. His four post-torture books reveal a disassociation characteristic of traumatized victims, disassociation between the tortured man and the brilliant journalist to whom this was not supposed to happen. That schism, now reversed, created Timerman’s personal tragedy: his inability to see himself as a potential victim of the junta because he was so close to it; his inability to understand how the junta had so abruptly and irrevocably ruined him by first corrupting his own moral sense and then brutally torturing him. The undercurrent of torment and guilt that runs through his testimony about human rights abuses throughout the world derives from recognizing that he was misguided, even naïve, in his sense of belonging. When throughout his testimony he accuses the Argentine Jewish community of trying to remain “faceless,” of being complicit in its silence, he is really criticizing himself. Deep down, Timerman was a member of the Argentine Jewish community that he condemned. For all his brilliance and power, he, like so many before him, misread the signals, avoided the facts, participated in the game of “it is but it isn’t,” and, in the end, was tortured as a judio de mierda.

Bridget Kevane is a professor of Latin American studies at Montana State University.

In a now-declassified document titled “Conversation with Jacobo Timerman,” Robert C. Hill, the U.S. ambassador to Argentina from 1974 to 1977, wrote to his superiors in the State Department about a lunch he had with the influential Argentine publisher in September 1976, six months after the military coup that toppled the government of Isabel Peron. Timerman, the owner of the daily newspaper La Opinión who later became a well-known symbol of resistance to Argentina’s brutal military dictatorship and a human rights advocate, was often consulted by the ambassador about political developments in the country and about the situation of its Jewish community. Hill’s memo consists of four points. The first two, on the country’s politics, are brief; the second two, on its anti-Semitism, are longer:

On Sept. 20 I lunched with the owner of La Opinion, Jacobo Timerman. Surprisingly, when I raised the question of anti-Semitism in Argentina, Timerman replied that there was no such problem here, and that concern over this largely imaginary problem results from the overraction [sic] of Jewish organizations in the United States. He went on to say that he thought indeed this accounted for a good deal of the international concern over the question of Human Rights in Argentina. If, he said, it could once be demonstrated that there was no problem of anti-Semitism in Argentina, we would see a simultaneous cooling abroad in other human rights problems since Jewish organizations would then lose interest.

Hill is baffled by Timerman’s attempt “to explain away anti-Semitism in Argentina.” He writes: “Possibly the problem has been somewhat overblown by some organizations that are quite naturally concerned. To suggest that it really is no problem, however, simply flies in the face of history and of the concrete facts…. The machine-gunning of Jewish stores and the bombing of the synagogue and Jewish civic centers may not indicate the beginning of a pogrom, but they certainly do indicate that there is a problem.”

November 2009 marked the 10th anniversary of Timerman’s death. Prisoner without a Name, Cell without a Number, his 1981 memoir of being arrested, tortured, put under house arrest, stripped of his Argentine citizenship, and exiled to Israel by the Argentine military junta because he was a Jew. El caso Timerman, the Timerman case, became a symbol of Argentine human rights abuses in the late ’70s and early ’80s and a grim reminder to Jews around the world that they are never safe. His story can be seen as a heartbreaking tale of failed assimilation, of a Jewish immigrant who aspires to and achieves acceptance in a gentile nation that eventually turns on him. That was the story that I believed when I read his testimony as a graduate student in the late ’80s. But as I began researching this complex man and his legacy, an even more unsettling narrative revealed itself, with broad implications for a moment in which anti-Semitic violence has reached levels not seen since the end of World War II and in which some Jewish communal leaders and intellectuals have responded by publicly distancing themselves from Israel and the organized Jewish community for reasons that are often phrased in the language of human rights, personal conscience, or national interest.

Though the U.S. ambassador and Jewish communities in the United States were persistent in their investigation of the existence, level, and depth of Argentine anti-Semitism, Timerman in his many consultations with U.S. officials played an active yet subtle game that did not provide any clear answers to what in retrospect seems a simple question. When the State Department compared the Argentine junta to the Chilean dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, Timerman’s newspaper ran an article staunchly defending the junta. The piece argued that unlike the Pinochet dictatorship, which lacked noble goals, Argentina’s junta aimed for “the reimplantation of an authentically representative, republic[an], and federalist democracy in Argentina.”

January 26, 1977, marked the beginning of a change in Timerman’s position. Suspecting that his arrest was imminent as he spoke again with Ambassador Hill, he did not retract his claim that there was no anti-Semitism in Argentina. Yet he admitted that some members of the military were strongly anti-Semitic, especially those hardliners who had been heavily influenced by the Germans during World War II. Timerman ended by saying that the current situation in the military was fragmented because Gen. Jorge Videla, whom he considered a moderate, lacked the power to control other generals. “It is entirely possible,” he said, “that none of the military sense the strong international, and particularly American, reaction against what are seen as anti-Semitic incidents in Argentina.”

This account echoed Timerman’s statements from September 1976, in which he had told Hill that if the Americans would just stop overreacting, stop being so loud and concerned about anti-Semitism, the issue would disappear. Timerman’s position was in line with the public stance of Jewish communal organizations like the Delegation of Argentine-Israeli Association. In June 1977, several months after Timerman’s arrest, the president of DAIA, Nehemias Resnizky, whose own son would later be kidnapped, told the Argentine Jewish community that though Argentina was not an anti-Semitic country nor was there any official anti-Semitism, there were “powerful economic groups who always make the ritual offerings of the Jewish minorities as a scapegoat” for other national problems.

On March 31, 1977, 15 days before his arrest, Timerman, together with his son, Héctor, and Mario Diament, the managing editor of La Opinión, met with Michael O’Brien, press officer of the United States Information Service. At the meeting, Timerman passed along his thanks to President Carter for his strong human rights stance, but asked that the U.S. not punish Argentina for its poor human rights record, as that would lessen its ability to transition to democracy. Timerman then told O’Brien that he knew the government was “preparing to denounce him as a communist and a ‘voice of subversion’” and that it would be taking some “drastic action” toward him in the following months. He wryly concluded, in O’Brien’s account, that if “he were to be killed by leftists it would merit only a small story in [the] U.S. press. But if right-wing para-military did him in, it would be front page news for weeks.” Neither happened. Instead, Timerman was arrested in the early morning hours of April 15, 1977, and Hill sent a cable the same day:

Jacobo Timerman and Enrique Jara, publisher and chief editor respectively of “La Opinion”, were taken from their homes by an armed group of individuals in civilian clothes in the early morning hours of April 15. The individuals reportedly identified themselves to family members as “officers,” but families believe this may be a phony lead. Timerman and Jara were instructed to take along with them cigarettes, food and clothing. There has been no statement from the government concerning this action, and we have no confirmation at this point as to who has them or where. There is a presumption among press sources, however, that the detention, if indeed they have been detained by govt forces, may be related to the ongoing investigation of the financial empire of David Graiver.

2. Further developments will follow.
Hill

Timerman expected his arrest and believed his incarceration would be short. When the junta arrested him they cited his alleged connections to David Graiver, an Argentine-Jewish financier accused of managing tens of millions of dollars of ransom money collected by the Montoneros, a Peronist left-wing guerrilla group. Timerman admitted that Graiver held a 45 percent share in La Opinión but denied any knowledge of money laundering for the Montoneros. Though he knew he would be linked to Graiver’s financial scandal, he was confident the charges would be cleared up quickly. When he was encouraged to leave the country, both by his son Héctor Timerman and by Mario Diament, he refused. In separate interviews, Timerman’s son and Diament told me they’d heard Timerman say he would never give the anti-Semitic hardliners in power the satisfaction of seeing a Jew run. Héctor Timerman, now Argentina’s ambassador in Washington, D.C., recently wrote an essay in which he described the conversation. He wrote that his father “didn’t want the anti-Semites in power to portray him as a cowardly Jew. He said he wanted to be like the heroic people of Masada, who chose to keep fighting and then to commit suicide rather than be captured.”

Though the military claimed to have arrested Timerman because of the Graiver scandal, U.S. Jewish organizations saw the Timerman case as a modern-day Dreyfus affair. In November 1977, the Anti-Defamation League published a report stating that Jews had been targeted by the junta at higher rates than other members of the population, that they were subjected to crueler methods of torture than non-Jews, and that they were frequently interrogated “about communal affairs and bizarre issues such as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and alleged Jewish plans to create a second Zionist state in Argentina.” The ADL report went on to state that “the Timerman case has had a shattering effect upon the entire Jewish community. The Jewish masses have lost a champion and a voice. Under Timerman’s direction, La Opinión, one of Buenos Aires’s leading dailies, did battle with Argentine anti-Semitism and championed the cause of Zionism and Israel. Now, Timerman is silenced and humbled, and his paper is controlled and run by the army.”

In August 1977, four months after his arrest, Timerman was interviewed by U.S. Congressman Benjamin Gilman. Gilman described Timerman, who greeted him in casual clothes and a sports jacket, as subdued but mentally sharp. “In fact,” Gilman recalled, “Timerman demonstrated considerable acuity, and his conversation was at times laced with bittersweet irony.” Aside from discolored skin under one of his fingernails, Timerman did not show any sign of torture. He admitted to Gilman that his interrogators never asked him about Graiver but constantly taunted him because he was a Jew, a Zionist, or, worse still, in their minds, a Marxist. He also told Gilman that the majority of his interrogations concerned a presumed world Jewish conspiracy against Argentina. His interrogators told him that Soviet Premier Aleksei Kosygin was a Jew, asked him what he knew about secret meetings between Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and the Montoneros, and sought information about a secret plan of the Elders of Zion to take over Patagonia. Timerman told Gilman he supported President Jorge Videla, and he asked the congressman to pressure the United States to back the moderates in the military regime and not the hardliners. As Gilman got ready to leave, Timerman shook his head sadly and said, “Look what happens to a man who was trying to defend the government.”

***

Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number was written in Israel one year after Timerman was expelled from Argentina and stripped of his citizenship there. In the Spanish edition’s foreword, not included in the English translation, Timerman writes that he has arrived at his final home, Israel, after surviving the Inquisition in Spain, the Cossacks in Ukraine, the Nazis in Germany, and the junta in Argentina. “We have completed our voyage,” he writes of the Timerman family. Two years later he would lash out at his new homeland for invading Lebanon, and after three years he would leave Israel, never to return.

Born in Bar, Ukraine, the 5-year-old Jacobo Timerman arrived with his parents, Nathan and Eva, and his older brother, José, in Buenos Aires in 1928. Nine years earlier, in 1919, Buenos Aires had experienced a pogrom that resulted in 800 dead and 4,000 wounded. The attackers’ mantra would have been familiar to Ukranian Jews: Haga patria, mate un judío, which, roughly translated, means, “Be a patriot, kill a Jew.” The family settled in Buenos Aires’s only Jewish neighborhood, and Nathan became a traveling textile merchant. They lived in poverty during the Great Depression, which crippled Argentina’s agricultural exports. Despite their timing, they had high hopes for their future in Buenos Aires.

Timerman’s book contains a few striking memories that suggest the deep attachment and feelings of extreme vulnerability that the writer associated with his Jewish upbringing. He recalls when, as a 10-year-old boy, he asked his mother why so many hated the Jews. “Because they don’t understand,” his mother replied. Timerman writes, “yes, my mother in good faith believed that if the anti-Semites understood us, they’d stop hating us.” When Jacobo finished school he became a young bohemian Jewish intellectual; he wrote poetry and frequented literary groups, and he became heavily involved with Hashomer Hatzair, the socialist and Zionist Jewish youth group. His early youth was linked to Jewish organizations and the establishment of the state of Israel, for which he maintained unwavering support. Roberto Graetz, a rabbi who visited Timerman while the writer was in jail, told me when I met him in Argentina last summer that journalists at La Opinión were given free rein to write anything so long as it was not critical of Israel.

Though Prisoner contains a few graphic scenes of torture, they are not the subject of his book. “For the man who’s been tortured and has survived,” Timerman writes, “this is perhaps the least important topic.” What words, he asks, could possibly describe torture? Rather than focus on the details of his torture, Timerman wrote about its causes. He sees his Jewish identity for what it had always been, an egregious thing the junta preferred eliminated, “disappeared.” His torturers, he wrote, took special pleasure in the act, not because they hoped to obtain information on the Graiver case, the legal reason for his imprisonment, but simply because he was a Jew. While applying electric shock, they chanted with a kind of wild hysteria: “Jew… Jew…. Jew…Clipped prick…. clipped prick… Jew!”

***

In The Longest War, Timerman’s scathing critique of Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, there is a conspicuous pause at the point at which he pays tribute to his father, who died unexpectedly, in 1935, when Timerman was 12 years old. “His grave is still open,” Timerman writes, “and my pain is endless. I don’t know what to do with him after so many years. Because my father was in love with his Judaism my pain is so Jewish, and because I carry inside me his Jewish grave, my heart has other open graves so that my father will not be alone. Inside of me I bear a Jewish graveyard.”

Timerman’s refusal to criticize Israel did not survive his adopted country’s decision to invade Lebanon. “For the first time,” he wrote, “Israel had attacked a neighboring country without being attacked; for the first time it had mounted a screen of provocation to justify a war. For the first time Israel brought destruction to entire cities: Tyre, Sidon, Damur, Beirut. For the first time military spokesmen had lied. For the first time the Israeli press joined them in their successful mission of lying to the public. For the first time officers and men did not know the objectives or the goals of the campaign. For the first time the actual damage inflicted on the invaded country was hidden along with the number of deaths. For the first time reservists on leave from the front demonstrated on the streets of Jerusalem because they consider themselves betrayed.”

Timerman was incensed with Israel for acting as an oppressor, not only because the wounds of his torture in his former homeland were still fresh, but because to him Israel had the unique (if unfair and impossible) duty of being a light unto the nations. “I’m angry … with us, with the Israelis, who by exploiting, oppressing, and victimizing the Palestinians have made the Jewish people lose their moral tradition, their proper place in history.”

In some sense, his treatment of Israel and the Israelis was no different than his treatment of any other object of affection or interest in his life. His childhood friend, Abrasha Rotenberg, who would later become a key financier of La Opinión, stated bluntly in an interview in 2000 that Jacobo Timerman, aside from being a man of contradictions, was a man who didn’t care even for success; his enjoyment of his own achievements was short-lived; he would grow easily bored; he would move on. Timerman, Rotenberg said, liked to create scenes in which he became the protagonist, and then he liked to tear them down.

By the time he founded La Opinión, Timerman had lived through several military coups and changes in government and he had intimate connections with almost every regime. A telling example of his strong desire to be part of Argentina’s elite was his awkward friendship with Ricardo Güiraldes’s nephew, Juan José Güiraldes. Ricardo Güiraldes wrote the famous gaucho novel Don Segundo Sombra, and his family represented the wealthy landowners of the pampas of Argentina. Güiraldes and his family were emblems of Argentine nationalism. His nephew, an Air Force brigadier, would confess to journalist Graciela Mochovsky that if he were to write a book on Timerman it would be titled Timerman the Jew. When during the interview Mochovsky asked him about anti-Semitism, Güiraldes stated that it was simply part of the Argentine national code. To value Western and Christian ideals meant to reject Judaism and Jews, and to hold suspect anyone who had or was part of communist or socialist parties or organizations.

Having Güiraldes on his side, working with him on journalistic ventures such as the newsweekly Confirmado granted Timerman full acceptance in the Argentine elite; his adopted homeland came to view him as one of its own. In fact, however, Timerman didn’t become an Argentine citizen until the 1960s. His early communist ties and immigrant status as a ruso—which means “Russian” but is also a pejorative term to designate someone an outsider—prevented him from attaining it earlier. In the end, his citizenship lasted less than 20 years.

Between his arrival as a child in Buenos Aires in 1928 and the return of Argentinean democracy in 1983, Timerman lived through the rise and fall of some two dozen presidents and military dictators. The 1976 military overthrow of Isabel Peron, Juan Peron’s third wife, brought in the most brutal dictatorship that Argentina had ever known. Its campaign of repression and terror was dubbed the “Dirty War” by the junta itself.

In its first communiqué to the country, on March 24, 1976, the junta warned the citizens that Argentina was now under military control. It suspended political parties, revoked the right to strike, imposed a curfew, instituted a death penalty, arrested officials of previous political parties involved in affairs deemed harmful to the country, dissolved the national congress, and dismantled the Supreme Court. Videla was named president, and each branch of the military—the Army, Navy, and Air Force—controlled one third of the government. Hardliners in the military described Argentine society as mortally ill and in need of the doctors of the junta to heal it. Soon the junta initiated a Proceso de la Reconstrucción Nacional—process of national reconstruction—which aimed to cleanse the nation of subversives who threatened the values of the homeland.

During the six-year Dirty War, the junta killed an estimated 30,000 people. Officially, most are not dead but missing; each is known by the noun created from the verb to disappear: un desaparecido, a disappeared. Though his newspaper initially praised the military and justified the coup, this did not grant Timerman security. He was categorized as a subversive and subject, like thousands of others, to the proceso, the social cleansing. He was arrested on April 14, 1977, and unlike other high profile prisoners, he was not released until almost a year later. His colleague at La Opinión, Enrique Jara, was released within days and absolved of any crime. Other journalists were also released quickly. Timerman was caught between competing generals of the army, navy, and air force, who used the fact of his Jewishness either to garner power or to criticize their opponents within the junta.

How could this powerful man find himself in a torture chamber while his captors chanted judio de mierda, judio de mierda—shitty Jew? Like the German Jews before the Holocaust, Timerman firmly believed that he was part of Argentine society, that he was fully assimilated, an Argentinian. But like his predecessors, he was tortured as a Jew. “The fact is that once he was made to disappear, he suffered as most Jews that disappeared did,” Graetz told me. “Jews received a double dose.”

Though el caso Timerman can be read as an example of how Jews are never safe outside Israel, that is not the lesson to be drawn from the life of Jacobo Timerman. The myth of Jacobo Timerman was largely created by us, the members of the Jewish Diaspora, the human rights organizations of the ’80s, the Jewish organizations in the United States who wanted to believe Timerman’s story and to ignore his life before he “was disappeared.” Timerman was such an apologist for Argentina’s brutal Junta that he at first denied its anti-Semitism, only to claim—after torture and exile—that he did not hide from his impending arrest because he did not want to give the military the satisfaction of seeing a Jew run.

Bridget Kevane is a professor of Latin American studies at Montana State University.

Timerman had brought out his book just as the President Ronald Reagan was assembling his new administration. The Argentinean newspaper publisher was seized upon by, or offered himself to, the left and was used to testify against Reagan’s choice for assistant secretary of state for human rights, Ernest Lefever. The left feared that Lefever would focus more on totalitarian communist regimes than the authoritarian regimes on the right that, for all their sins, at least allowed the practice of religion and travel and the owning of private property—and sided with the United States against the Soviet Union. Timerman’s testimony helped convince the Senate Foreign Relations committee to reject Lefever.

At around this time, an invitation to have lunch with Timerman went around editorial page of the Journal, where I picked it up. I’d been newspapering in the Third World for much of the past decade, and the struggle for press freedom there interested me. At the lunch, hosted by Robert Bernstein of Random House, I found myself seated between a lady and a gentleman who were having a conversation across my plate. I was trying to follow it when one of them said to the other that Timerman’s financial partner in his newspaper was David Graiver. “What?” I exclaimed. “Timerman was David Graiver’s business partner?” When she allowed again that he was, I said, “No wonder he was being tortured.”

I didn’t mean to suggest he deserved torture, which I am against. I meant that it was not surprising for authorities anywhere to be interested in a business partner of Graiver, who was one of the most notorious figures in Latin America and was being probed by American prosecutors for financial wrongdoing. When the lunch was over I went back to the newspaper and telephoned Timerman’s publisher, Alfred Knopf. I said I wanted to ask about some disturbing things I’d heard and invited Timerman to breakfast. An appointment was set up promptly for breakfast a day or two hence at the Carlyle. On the afternoon before the meeting, I mentioned to the editorial meeting, “Anybody want to join me for breakfast tomorrow with Jacobo Timerman.” Journal editor Robert Bartley’s eyebrows shot up. “You’re having breakfast with Timerman? Have you seen what Irving Kristol has just sent in?”

In fact I had not, and Bartley rushed over to his desk and returned with the foolscap of Kristol’s next column, a devastating dispatch that questioned Timerman’s bona fides on almost every level and situated the affair in the context of the global struggle with the Soviet Union. Kristol began with a reprise of the distinction between totalitarian and authoritarian regimes. “A major intellectual and propaganda campaign is now being mounted by the left and liberal-left against this distinction,” Kristol wrote. “Some of the active participants are simply human rights pundits. But there can be little doubt that the driving force behind this campaign is supplied by those who have more sophisticated political intentions.”

“They understand very well,” Kristol wrote, “that once the distinction between totalitarian and authoritarian nations is eliminated, most of our attention and energy are bound to be directed toward the latter, since in fact our State Department has more influence, however limited, on the governments of Argentina or Guatemala than on Cuba or Vietnam.” He drew a contrast between the different attitudes of human rights activists toward Timerman, on the one hand, and the Cuban democratic socialist, Huber Matos, who was held in one of Castro’s dungeons, and mistreated there, for nearly two decades.

Then he dug into Timerman himself, particularly for his failure to disclose in his book key facts. “The name David Graiver does not appear in Mr. Timerman’s book,” Kristol observed. He called it an “extraordinary omission” and stated flat out that Graiver was the “immediate cause of Mr. Timerman’s arrest and imprisonment.” He sketched Graiver’s responsibility in the collapse of two American banks, from which, Kristol wrote, investigators suspected he looted as much as $40 million. He reminded readers that even though a private plane in which Graiver was supposedly a passenger had crashed into a mountain in Mexico in August of 1976, Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau suspected that Graiver might still be alive.

It was some eight months after Graiver’s death that Argentine authorities, as Kristol put it, “disclosed that Mr. Graiver had been, among other things, the money manager for the Montoneros, the left-wing urban terrorists, who had accumulated a known $60 million in ransom money and who felt that it was a shame that so much capital should not be yielding revolutionary returns.” And, Kristol reported, it had also been disclosed that “Graiver owned a 50% interest in Mr. Timerman’s paper, La Opinion.” He pointed out that it was after those allegations were made public that Timerman was arrested, “along with members of the Graiver family.”

Kristol observed that Graiver’s own motives were unclear, since he was not particularly political. Graiver had been forced to pay ransom for a family member, and maybe his own services to the Montoneros were less than voluntary. Kristol also pointed out that there was no evidence that Timerman knew what Graiver was up to. But he argued that the absence of such evidence made Timerman’s “silence on the Graiver affair all the more inexplicable”—unless it were that Timerman was less interested in human rights and more interested in indicting the regime in Argentina and our own government in Washington.

Kristol then went into a review of Timerman’s own relations—or lack of them—with the Jewish community in Argentina. Kristol didn’t deny, indeed straightforwardly acknowledged, the problem of anti-Semitism in Argentina. But he pointed out that the man to whom Timerman dedicated his book, Rabbi Marshall Meyer, whom Kristol called “a distinguished fighter for human rights,” was building a major rabbinical seminary in Argentina. And the Jewish community, for all its serious troubles, was not fleeing the country, though it was largely keeping its distance from Timerman.

From this Kristol concluded that the Jewish community was “implicitly vindicating the Reagan administration’s prudent policy on human rights”—which involved using its influence to try to move the regime toward greater liberalization. He called the outlook “far from hopeless” and warned that were we to “write off” Argentina entirely the “more extreme right-wing elements in the Armed forces—the ones who illegally arrested and tortured Mr. Timerman—would surely take power.” And he suggested that there were those on the left who would like to see such a thing happen in order to provoke a crisis that would create for them an opportunity.

It was one powerful column. Bartley, who was nothing if not an editor who liked to stay on the edge of a story, remade that night’s editorial page and put Irving’s piece in the paper a day early. He didn’t want Timerman to get the first word in. And so it was that I personally hand-carried the edition containing Kristol’s attack on Timerman up to the Carlyle and handed it to Timerman over breakfast. After a cursory glance, Timerman tossed it aside. When I pressed him about David Graiver, he confirmed they were partners but complained about the interview. “The questions you are asking me,” he said, “these are the questions they were asking me when I was tortured.” To which Mark Falcoff, in a reprise of the Timerman case issued by Commentary magazine six months later, remarked: “Just so.”

Timerman eventually settled in Tel Aviv. A few months later, while on a visit to Israel, I had a cup of coffee with the scoundrel. Looking back, Timerman had one reaction to Kristol’s piece, which is that it had done wonders for the sale of his prison memoir. He had written a new book, attacking Israel for the war in Lebanon, and hoped that Kristol or the Journal would attack that volume, too. As I walked away from the coffee shop, I found myself marveling at how right Kristol had been—at what a magnificent newspaper columnist he was, a profound thinker and scoop artist all in one. On the great political confrontations of his time, he had x-ray vision. And I can’t help thinking how much America could use him today as a new president enters a new and equally dangerous era needing all the seichel he can get.