Free The Pledge by Howard Fast

McGregor:
    â€œBruce, I have to put it to you flatly. There is absolutely no way in the world that we can publish your piece.”
    After a moment of silence, Bruce said, “Just like that.”
    â€œAh, no. No. You’re no neophyte. You’re in there with the best, and this is one hell of an article. It’s an earthshaker.”
    â€œBut you can’t publish it. So you feel free to lay it on,” Bruce said sourly.
    â€œThat’s not called for.”
    â€œNo? Tell me why. Maybe I should be grateful.”
    â€œBruce, for Christ’s sake, get off your indignation and come back to the world we live in. We’ve just wound up the biggest, goddamned awfulest war in the history of the human race. We killed the monster, and now we look at what he left behind. Have you read the reports about the killing camps, the abattoirs, the gas ovens? Do you know what the figures are that they’re putting together — that Hitler coldbloodedly murdered six million Jews? It’s not something the mind can encompass, because there is no precedent. It almost makes you sick to be a member of the same race. And now, when we’re stiffening up against a Soviet takeover of the whole Continent, you want me to print something that accuses the British, our number one ally, of an action almost as inhuman, as unbelievable.”
    â€œJack, you’re missing the point,” Bruce argued. “Nowhere in what I’ve written do I accuse the British of engineering this famine, because I have no proof that they did. But I have plenty of proof that they never lifted a hand to stop it. I saw the rice, thousands of sacks of rice, and I interviewed the dealers. It’s all in there. I write that the common belief around Calcutta was that the British had done it, but I specify that I have no proof that I could go into court with. But this is not simply an accusation thrown at the British — it’s the whole world indifferent to the death of millions.”
    â€œThe war was at its highest point. How could you expect the nations to drop —”
    â€œJack, don’t give me that. It wouldn’t have made a particle of difference in the war effort if those starving people were fed.”
    â€œYou’re not hearing me, Bruce.”
    â€œI hear you. I sent you a story that was a clear, clean beat. No newspaper, no magazine touched it. It’s good, decent professional work, and now you tell me that you won’t print it.”
    â€œWhat did the Trib say?”
    â€œIt’s fifteen thousand words. It’s not a newspaper piece, it’s a magazine piece. You know that.”
    He walked uptown from that lunch meeting at “21.” It was a fine fall day, a sweet day, not too cold and not too warm, one of those very special days that New York is blessed with occasionally. It was a sort of benediction on a world finally at peace, a world with all possible futures achievable, a world not yet actually aware of the atom bomb. Bruce couldn’t remain depressed. Prudence had moved out of their one-bedroom apartment in a brownstone on East Seventy-sixth Street, leaving it for him, furnishings intact. Very decent of her, he thought, recalling a conversation with a psychiatrist about “Jewish guilt.” He didn’t think it measured up to white Protestant New England guilt. He could think of Prudence very objectively, and that bothered him. Had he ever loved her? Like everything else during this war, relationships had changed; but if the word love defined something else, he didn’t know what that might be. Should he have doubts about Sally Pringle? But why? She pleased him, she excited him — or did she? Now, as he walked up Madison Avenue, he wondered why, when he started a train of thought, it would end up either confused or shattering some belief that he had accepted as the rock and foundation of his existence. Somewhere, all the rocks and foundations had