Editor's Letter

Gods and Monsters

What started last October as one of General Augusto Pinochet's frequent jaunts to London—the former Chilean dictator shopped for a new Burberry, visited his old chum Margaret Thatcher, had tea at the Savoy—has ended in a controversy that continues to rage around the world. As I write, the 83-year-old general is under house arrest, in the Surrey countryside, awaiting extradition to Spain, where he has been charged with genocide, torture, and terrorism. This exercise in justice across borders is virtually without precedent in modem history; a former head of state facing trial in another country for crimes committed while he was in office. As Judy Bachrach reports in her compelling dispatch on page 126, "The Dictator and the Dead," it seems clear from available evidence that Pinochet must have at the very least known about the thousands of bloody crimes that were carried out in his name in the 1970s by his feared secret police. Perhaps best remembered here in the U.S. is the 1976 car bombing that killed the general's political opponent, Orlando Letelier, and left a young American, Ronni Moffitt, dead. But Pinochet's arrest by the British and impending prosecution by a Spanish court raise the prospect of similar scenarios. Humanrights violations are often in the eyes of the beholder. Could George Bush, for instance, be grabbed in another country and turned over to a third for the murder of innocents during U.S. bombings of Iraq in 1991? Or could Bill Clinton be held accountable for civilian deaths in the air strikes against Serbia?

Until the ramifications of Pinochet's arrest unfold, former heads of state might be well advised to stick close to home. In the case of American ex-presidents—Republican ones, anyway—the obvious choice for God's waiting room is Palm Springs, California, the Big Room of Hollywood's biggest stars in the 30s, 40s, and 50s. Great weather, dry air, vault-of-heaven skies; it doesn't get much better. Dwight Eisenhower loved its emerald-green golf courses, Gerald and Betty Ford are back-nine regulars there (not least because Mrs. Ford's legendary rehabilitation center is nearby in the Coachella Valley), and the Bushes have been frequent visitors to Sunnylands, the sleek, historic compound of Lee and Walter Annenberg. Palm Springs, that time capsule of mid-century high modernism, is buzzing again, drawing a new generation of hipsters to its perfect climate and dazzling glass boxes. As Bob Colacello writes in his tour d'horizon on page 192, "What Art Deco did for Miami Beach in the 1980s, modernism is doing for Palm Springs today."

In a desert kingdom many time zones away, the recent death of a reigning head of state, Jordan's King Hussein, is the poignant backdrop for Leslie Bennetts's profile of his beautiful, American-born wife, Queen Noor, on page 172. Perhaps grief led the former Lisa Halaby to drop her public mask a little and give Bennetts a hint of the struggles she has faced over two decades as queen of an Islamic country in which she was often at social and political odds with her native land. Her courage and dignity as mourner in chief for her adopted nation are impressive indeed.

GRAYDON CARTER