Former Town Supervisor Jim Dougherty will speak at the next Friday Night Dialogues about his quest to publish a book by his late wife, Nancy, that depicts “an astonishing journey into the heart of Nazi evil.”
Alfred A. Knopf released the new weighty historical biography — “The Hangman and his Wife: the Life and Death of Reinhard Heydrich” — last month. You might say that’s not surprising, given how this Island is chock full of talented people. But you would be missing an unexpected and deeply moving backstory.
Nancy Dougherty passed away in 2013 after a decade-long battle with Alzheimer’s disease. Moreover, some critical editing and a brilliant foreword were supplied by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, renowned New York Times literary critic, now also deceased.
So it was up to Jim Dougherty to complete the mission of bringing his wife’s magnum opus to the world. He’ll share the experience at the Shelter Island Public Library on July 1 at 7 PM.
An unlikely path to publication
“Friends in the publishing business were skeptical,” Dougherty said. “But I knew what I had.”
Nancy, a Radcliffe undergraduate with a master’s degree and Ph.D. from UC Berkeley, was a profound thinker. For three decades, she’d poured herself into researching and writing a biography of Heydrich, notorious head of the Nazi SS.
In 1973, Jim had served as her ‘sort of bodyguard’ on a trip to interview Heydrich’s wife, Lina, who absconded to a remote island in the Baltic Sea after the war. He didn’t need to speak German, as Nancy did fluently, to realize that the heated overheard conversations were rife with important historical revelations.
Fast forward 40 years to another conversation — this time at a party hosted by Carole and Richard Baron on Shelter Island. Dougherty mentioned Nancy’s work to Lehmann-Haupt, a fellow dinner guest.
As fate would have it, Lehmann-Haupt’s formative experience as a teen in post-war Berlin with his father made him uniquely disposed to learn more about Nancy’s manuscript. So he signed a contract with Jim in 2014 to do some final editing and a foreword.
He largely completed the assignment before his untimely death in 2018. Then, with the help of Vicky Wilson, a VP at Knopf, Dougherty carried the project across the finish line.
About Nancy Dougherty’s book
Knopf describes Nancy Dougherty’s book as “an astonishing journey into the heart of Nazi evil: a portrait of one of the darkest figures of Hitler’s Nazi elite.” Heydrich — designer and executor of the Holocaust — was chief of the Reich Main Security, including the Gestapo.
Dougherty’s unique approach to Heydrich’s biography hinged on the recognition that the man called the Hangman of the Gestapo and Butcher of Prague had a domestic life with a wife whose voice could lend amplitude to the historical record.
Her biography of this ruthlessly efficient killer is interwoven with commentary by Heydrich’s wife.
“We follow Heydrich’s meteoric rise through the Nazi high command — from SS major to colonel to brigadier general before he was 30, deputy to Heinrich Himmler, expanding the SS, the Gestapo, and developing the Reich’s plans for ‘the Jewish solution.'”
“And throughout,” Knopf says, “we hear the voice of Lina Heydrich, who was by his side until his death at the age of 38, living inside the Nazi inner circles as she waltzed with Rudolf Hess, feuded with Hermann Göring, and drank vintage wine with Albert Speer.”
Manuscript by ‘a woman of substance’
Jim Dougherty says Nancy was an independent young intellectual when they met in San Francisco in 1967.
“Never a militant feminist, she was a quietly persistent woman of substance who led with an almost innocent quality that simply won you over.”
Stricken with early-onset Alzheimer’s in her 50s, Nancy had to shelve her work, and Jim began his caregiving odyssey “with never a moment’s regret,” he said.
Yet her unpublished manuscript haunted him. Thanks to his efforts, the reading public has a riveting, 650-page biography that masterfully furthers insight into its diabolical subject.
When asked how he could devote nine long years to publishing the book, Dougherty answered, “How could I not?”
Register for Friday Night Dialogues
To register for Friday Night Dialogues, use the library’s online calendar. Questions? Contact Jocelyn Ozolins at jozolins@silibrary.org or 631-749-0042.
All library programs are free to the public; however, donations are gratefully accepted.
Next up: Join Shelter Island Library Director Terry Lucas and Mara Zonderman of the Westhampton Free Library, on Friday, July 8 at 7 PM for a discussion on censorship in its many forms.
Bonnie Berman Stockwell is a trustee of the Shelter Island Public Library.
