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Epilogue
- NYU Press
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Epilogue Expressions of sympathy poured into 2510 Rivers Road NW. Although Everett’s obituary in the Atlanta Journal, based on information provided by his son-in-law, Kil Townsend, stressed his role in the Malmedy controversy ,1 it was a matter ignored by the friends and acquaintances who offered condolences to Mary. But the traits of character they chose to remember —a deeply ingrained selflessness and a need to serve those who needed him—were not inconsistent with his epic struggle to save his Malmedy boys. Everett’s long pro bono efforts on behalf of Christian higher education for African Americans was recognized by the Methodist bishop Arthur J. Moore, who remembered him as “God’s good man,” an assessment shared by the small Presbyterian congregations in the mountains of northern Georgia, where he and Mary had built a vacation retreat in their later years together: Mr. Everett was vitally interested in the extension of the Kingdom of God in these beautiful mountains, which he loved so well. He was directly responsible for the lovely electric lamps which adorn both sanctuaries of the Hemphill Memorial and Wiley Churches. The pews in the Clayton church are there because of his efforts. Large contributions of cash which he secured from different sources were received by the Wiley church. . . . He loved God and had a great heart. He was a free, indomitable spirit—full of conviction, love and fellowship.2 He had, of course, cultivated powerful men, too, a practice that had served him well in his confrontation with army justice. Jim Davis, who had likely come to regard Everett as a bothersome presence and who may have resented his conversion to Eisenhower Republicanism, reacted to his death with a perfunctory telegram of sympathy, but a moving handwritten letter came from the “Swamp Fox,” Georgia Congressman Carl Vinson, and his wife, Kate: 224 We loved Willis and know full well that we will never again have the joy of such a friend as he. He was truly one of the sweetest, gentlest, kindest, best men it has ever been our privilege to know, and we have known fine men all over the world. He was the soul of chivalry in an age when many do not even know what that is, the very heart of goodness and generosity.3 Gratitude from those who had the most reason to express it is not reflected in the many letters of sympathy preserved by the family. Peiper outlived Everett by fifteen years, but they were not the tranquil years of the gallant soldier ausser Dienst. His notorious past destroyed his brief career with Porsche and, later, with Volkswagen, and it drove him into bitter self-imposed exile in France. In December 1975, he addressed a letter to Mary in which he outlined his plan to write a book on the Malmedy incident and requested assistance in the form of relevant papers and photographs.4 But, in July 1976, he was killed in a firebomb attack on his home by persons unknown, overcome by smoke while attempting to salvage personal possessions and papers, some of which were likely related to the book, which he planned to dedicate to Everett.5 It would have been a dedication amply deserved. Without Everett, Peiper would probably have died on the gallows at Landsberg thirty years earlier, and so would many of his comrades. It is this that lends to Everett’s persona an element of the tragic. Had he dedicated ten years of his life to the rescue of United States citizens convicted of a street gang mass murder under circumstances comparable to those surrounding the Malmedy case, he might have become a figure of popular veneration in his own country, as he was, for a time, in West Germany. Hollywood might have seen fit to produce “One Angry Man,” starring Henry Fonda or, perhaps, Jimmy Stewart.6 But he had worked for the freedom of former members of the Nazi SS who had been found guilty (as some of them undoubtedly were) of killing defenseless GIs. Those GIs had been murdered by men who, for most Americans, embodied the evil that the United States had fought and sacrificed to destroy. Everett’s crusade was tainted by the associations of those he saved. And it was tainted, too, by his own anti-Semitism. Yet, that antiSemitism had been tangential to the primary forces that motivated Everett’s assault on the Malmedy verdicts: the conviction that even a...