Every historian, every reporter, every researcher knows the feeling when, at long last, he comes upon the long-missing clue that explains everything--Richard Nixon's downfall, Bill Clinton's impeachment, Orval Faubus' long slide from the height of power in Arkansas into a welcome irrelevance.
The same feeling can rise to literature when a Robert Penn Warren writes a book like All the King's Men and has his protagonist, Jack Burden, muse about the inescapable nature of truth and how it comes to light despite man's best efforts to conceal it: "For nothing is lost, nothing is ever lost. There is always the clue, the canceled check, the smear of lipstick, the footprint in the canna bed, the condom on the park path, the twitch in the old wound, the baby shoes dipped in bronze, the taint in the blood stream. And all times are one time, and all those dead in the past never lived before our definition gives them life, and out of the shadow their eyes implore us."
It can be just a detail that betrays the guilty, but it is a telling detail. And the detail may have a longer life in historical memory than the mere mortals it exposes: the blue dress, the signature on a death warrant, the look on the abashed faces of the Japanese diplomats assigned the job of telling Washington negotiations were futile even as the Zeros were already on their way to Pearl Harbor . . . . Each of us of a certain age will doubtless have already accumulated a long lifetime's worth of such images, which can pop up for good reason or none at all. There's no telling what all is up there in the mind's attic, piled one atop the other like stray pieces of lumber left over from some uncompleted project.
But somewhere there is always the once overlooked detail that completes the puzzle. Now such a detail has been found by one Taner Akcam, a Turkish historian whose base is Clark University in Worcester, Mass., which is a fir piece from Turkey. Akcam now has refuted Turkey's years and years of denying its complicity in the slaughter of its Armenian population by uncovering an original telegram about the genocide trials that the deniers have claimed to have been lost to history.
Taner Akcam has searched around the world for the one piece of evidence that ties the Turks to this great crime, and he's found it.
What's more, he calls that bloody deed what it was: genocide, or the murder of a whole people.
Editorial on 05/01/2017