Mysteries of the Philosophers: Bertrand Russell vs. Harry Truman

In 1920, Bertrand Russell went to Beijing University to lecture on philosophy for a year. While there, he became very ill with pneumonia, and the Japanese media reported that he had died. In 1948, Russell was flying to Trondheim, Norway, when his plane crashed in Hommelvik. About half of the passengers survived, and Russell was among them.

Taken separately, these events do not suggest a plot, conceived by the American government, to exterminate Mr. Russell, but together they suggest the beginnings of a sinister pattern. When we add to this Mr. Russell's controversial, one might even say subversive, views on sexual morality, it seems not unlikely that President Truman, who was running for his second term in 1948, and who was well known to prefer his sexuality strictly unsubverted, took it upon himself to arrange the demise of a philosopher who threatened everything the Truman Reelection Committee stood for.

I leave you to contemplate the facts and come to your own conclusions, but whatever you consider to have been the government's role in Bertrand Russell's near-fatal episodes, we can all be glad that he succumbed to neither of them and lived to a ripe old ninety-seven.