Tom Lehrer Satirized the National Security State From the Inside
The Cold War comedian and rumored Jell-O shot inventor had a lesser known side as an NSA operative.
Almost every American schoolkid has heard the song: "There's antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium." Set to a tune from The Pirates of Penzance, Tom Lehrer's cheery musical trip through the periodic table is a staple of middle school chemistry class. Along with his Harvard fight song, it's the most famous work by Lehrer, who died on Saturday at age 97.
But fewer people know about Lehrer's dark satires about Cold War national security politics, songs that nervously laughed at the threat of a nuclear holocaust. And fewer still know that Lehrer was drawing on his experience in America's most shadowy spy agency.
Lehrer's comedic career took off in the 1950s, in between his military service and his mathematics studies at Harvard. Then, suddenly, he retreated from the public eye, refusing all publicity—except for an occasional sarcastic take about how pointless everything is. "Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize," he quipped after Kissinger won the prize in 1973. "I don't want to satirize George Bush and his puppeteers, I want to vaporize them," Lehrer declared in 2003.
Yet his fan base continued to thrive. In 2020, Lehrer released all of his work to the public domain, swearing off any royalties forever. His lyrics, always delivered in a campy show-tunes style, touch on sexual fetishes, drugs, religion, death, army life, academia, and the insanity of the Cold War that he had been called up to fight.
"Every great war produces its great hit songs…It occurred to me that if any songs are going to come out of World War III, we'd better start writing them now. I have one here," Lehrer said in the introduction to "So Long Mom," a song by a nuclear bomber pilot promising to see his mother "when the war is over, an hour and a half from now."
An even more nihilistic variation on the same theme, "We Will All Go Together When We Go," promises the end of all suffering, because "if the bomb that drops on you/gets your friends and neighbors too/there'll be nobody left behind to grieve."
Some of Lehrer's songs touch on a very specific anxiety of the early Cold War, the sense of whiplash from watching (West) Germany transform from an enemy into an ally. "Once all the Germans were warlike and mean/But that couldn't happen again/We taught them a lesson in 1918/And they've hardly bothered us since then…Heil—uh, hail, the Wehrmacht—I mean the Bundeswehr," he sang in "Multilateral Force Lullaby."
There was a rumor that Wernher von Braun, the ex-Nazi rocket scientist turned NASA manager, sued Lehrer for singing that von Braun was "a man whose allegiance is ruled by expedience" and should receive some credit for "the widows and cripples in old London town who owe their large pensions to Wernher von Braun." Lehrer later clarified that the lawsuit never happened.
Other Lehrer songs are evergreen satires of the U.S. government. "Send the Marines," written in 1965, could easily be a commentary of the regime change addiction that has only gotten worse since the Cold War ended.
For might makes right
And till they've seen the light
They've got to be protected
All their rights respected
Till somebody we like can be elected!
And the song "Who's Next?" covers the proliferation of nuclear weapons technology around the world, which seemed to slow down after the 1970s but is now terrifyingly relevant again. Lehrer got it right that South Africa and Israel would build the bomb; he predicted incorrectly that Indonesia and Egypt would also try to nuclearize. The jury's still out on Alabama.
Given the frequent nuclear themes in his songs, many had assumed that Lehrer's military service had to do with nuclear weapons, especially because he spent time at Los Alamos National Laboratory. But Lehrer revealed in a 1994 interview that he had actually been drafted into the National Security Agency (NSA), the shadowy electronic eavesdropping organization that Edward Snowden blew the whistle on decades later.
At the time Lehrer worked there, the very existence of the NSA was classified information. (NSA stands for "No Such Agency," he joked to his former Harvard classmate Jeremy Bernstein, who wrote about the quip in Quantum Profiles.) While the NSA values mathematicians for their codebreaking skills, Lehrer was not exactly the model intelligence officer.
When he learned that alcohol would be banned at his base's Christmas party, Lehrer and a friend mixed vodka into gelatin to get drunk on the sly. The event is often considered the invention of the Jell-O shot, though Lehrer himself laughed off the idea that he should get all the credit.
"The Army has carried the American democratic ideal to its logical conclusion in the sense that not only do they prohibit discrimination on the grounds of race, creed, and color, but also on the grounds of ability," Lehrer said in the introduction to "It Makes a Fellow Proud to Be a Soldier," his proposed new U.S. Army anthem.
Perhaps his most deranged parody of government policy, however, had nothing to do with war or politics. In the 1950s, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service decided to control rodent and bird populations by dropping strychnine-laced grains around the Northeast. Lehrer cast the federal wildlife agent as a cheerful serial killer in "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park."
We'll murder them all
Amid laughter and merriment
Except for the few
We take home to experiment
My pulse will be quickening
With each drop of strychnine
We feed to a pigeon
Nothing scared Tom Lehrer more than someone from the government who wanted to fix the world. He knew—because he was one, reluctantly.