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348 THIS DIFFICULT INDIVIDUAL
He said that this remedy "would relieve the American government
of an embarrassment that has persisted for over a decade." 3
On April 1, 1958, the Justice Department announced that the
treason charge against Pound might be dropped, this being the
only condition of surrender which Pound would accept. Indirectly,
Ezra had informed the authorities that if the charges were
quashed, he would be willing to leave the country and return to
Italy. He offered no alternative, and would accept none.
It may seem odd that a lone individual, without funds, without
organized political support, and without an effective group behind
him, should be able to dictate his terms to the most powerful
government in the world. By the simple method of tenaciously
outlasting them, he forced them to accept his terms.
This David and Goliath story has considerable historical overtones.
The regime that imprisoned Ezra in 1945 was dying in
1958. Eisenhower had been called in as the last Pro-Consul of a
government that had no future, nowhere to go. It had not been
repudiated at the polls, because it was such a strange animal that,
like the Loch Ness monster, the inhabitants preferred to stare at
it rather than to attack it. Its raison d'être, the preservation of
Soviet Russia from the military menace of Germany, had been
fulfilled in 1945. During the years that Ezra was in jail, the men
who had imprisoned him were desperately seeking some reason to
go on living. There was none. If they defected to Russia, as some
of them did, they would be even more out of place there than
they were in America. An American traitor would still be regarded
as a traitor, and rightly so, even if he chose to live in Moscow.
The Justice Department officials agreed with Pound's contention
that it would be impossible to give him a fair trial fifteen years
after the committing of the "offense", nor would it be possible to
overcome the public conviction that he was guilty, an impression
that had been built up by a steady barrage of such terms as "the
mad traitor" and other epithets that the free press had used to
describe Pound during his imprisonment. Therefore, Pound's terms
were not so unreasonable as they might sound to someone who
was unfamiliar with the case. He was willing to sail away and
leave the liberals in control of the American people, who perhaps
deserved them. What more could be asked? His powerful voice