In Henry Kissinger’s Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech he noted, “More than the achievement of peace, the [Peace Prize] symbolizes the quest for peace,” which is fair to note, given that Kissinger was receiving the award in 1973 for negotiating peace in Vietnam, where “peace” wouldn’t be achieved for another two years.Kissinger’s co-peace prize winner and Vietnamese counterpart in peace talks, Le Duc Tho, declined his award on the very grounds that peace had not yet been achieved in Southeast Asia. “In these circumstances,” the New York Times reported Tho as saying, “it is impossible for me to accept” the prize.Tho’s rejection of the prize put both Kissinger and the Norwegian Nobel Prize committee in an awkward position, as there was a palpable lack of symmetry coupled with heaps of controversy. How could you award a prize for peace when one half of the negotiating parties said peace did not yet exist? Kissinger himself sent a proxy to the award ceremony. And while the peace prize had never been declined before—nor since—a Nobel Prize had gone intentionally unclaimed once before, by another French-speaking Marxist: the existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre.style="float:left; margin:0 15px 0 0">
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Sartre was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1964, but declined it because, basically, he declined all awards. The New York Times reported that Sartre “took time out from a luncheon in a Paris bistro to issue his refusal,” in which the Times paraphrased the French philosopher as saying, “a writer must not accept official awards, because to do so would add the influence of an institution that honored his work to the power of his pen. That is not fair to the reader, he said.”That might seem like a pretty abstract reason to turn your back on one of literature’s highest honors, but there was more, which pointed ahead to the Kissinger-Tho dust-up and the on-going ire directed at 2009-winner and then-commander-in-chief of two wars, Barack Obama.The 1999 class="caps">BBC series “Human, All Too Human” has href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2F9Wk3WtUU">footage of Sartre explaining why rejected the prize, saying, “Because I was politically involved, the bourgeois establishment wanted to cover up ‘my past errors’…They ‘pardoned’ me and said I deserved it.”Sartre had a long and dubious political history: supporting but not joining the French Communist Party until the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, then moving towards the radical left and the French Maoists, who he also didn’t officially join. Sartre was not a joiner, but he hung around long enough to be controversial. He also was not one to be apologized for or on behalf of. And his refusal to join any group for fear of being labeled included becoming a Nobel laureate.“My sympathies for the Venezuelan revolutionists commit only myself,” Sartre wrote in a letter explaining why he declined the Nobel Prize, “while if Jean-Paul Sartre the Nobel laureate champions the Venezuelan resistance, he also commits the entire Nobel Prize as an institution.”Given the red-faced, red-state outrage that hangs around Barack Obama for even meeting Bill Ayers, it actually reads as pretty considerate of Sartre not to drag the Swedes along with him.The letter, published in the French newspaper Le Monde in 1964 and later in the New York Review of Books, is pretty reverent for someone doing such a punk-rock gesture. He is careful to state that this opinion is his own, and that he has a “great deal of respect and admiration for several of the laureates whom I have the honor to know.” He even says nice things about the Swedish public, and acknowledges that he tried to get out of the award before it was publicly announced and that he certainly never wanted to cause such a controversy.While touring the Nobel Museum, my docent mentioned that Sartre, decades later, tried to see if he couldn’t maybe at least get the prize money, then just $53,000, but it had already been reinvested back into the Nobel fund. Information on how and why he did this is curiously lacking.Other years would-be laureates have been coerced into not picking up their award by such notorious governments as the href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_von_Ossietzky#1935_Nobel_Peace_Prize">Nazis and the href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Pasternak#Nobel_Prize">Soviet Union, but so far only Sartre and Tho have rejected prizes of their own volition. In a way, they’re in even more exclusive company than those who have won Nobel Prizes and accepted them.Both the Nobel Prize in literature and the Nobel Peace Prize invite a certain amount of controversy, just due to the nebulous art of evaluating “the most outstanding work in an ideal direction” in literature, or who has “done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses,” in the case of the latter. And if you follow any of the fields closely enough, href="http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/explainer/2012/10/who_is_the_least_deserving_winner_of_a_nobel_prize_.html">controversies abound in medicine, chemistry, and economics too.Each controversy sheds light on what a strange institution the Nobel Prize really is, a thing that only matters because it gets attention but of course it gets attention, because it matters. In a way, awards that mean less may as well be taken, which is why nobody much cares when someone takes or doesn’t take a Grammy, unless said group has the audacity to be a Canadian indie rock band that someone with a Twitter account href="http://whoisarcadefire.tumblr.com/">hasn’t heard of . But both Sartre’s and Tho’s rejection of their awards speaks to the fact that Nobel Prize—even only aspirationally as Dr. Kissinger said—means something more than just a chance to deface something in a cafe. Likewise their actions indicate that sometimes the most meaningful awards are the ones you don’t take.
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With a face like Jean-Paul Sartre’s, who needs a prize?
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