September 24, 2006
Little Rock Posted by Fredric Smoler at 03:45 PM EST This website notes that today is the anniversary of President Eisenhower’s decision to send the National Guard to enforce the desegregation of the schools of Little Rock, the desegregation having been ordered by the Little Rock school board, itself acting under orders from a Federal judge. But this is not quite what happened. It was Governor Orval Faubus who called out the National Guard, to obstruct the desegregation of the schools; Eisenhower then federalized the Guard and sent it back to its barracks. When mob violence threatened the nine students who had been sent to Central High School, Eisenhower sent in the 101st Airborne to protect the students. That happened on September 24, 1957, so that would be the anniversary we are today remembering. The anniversary is worth pondering for a number of reasons. First of all, there is nowadays much lamenting of the role of the courts in usurping legislative prerogatives: both Right and Left tend to speak of the imperial judiciary. So we might want to recall that the courts began their current rise to dominance, if that is what they in fact enjoy, when they had to do what legislatures refused to do, which was enforce Brown v. Board of Education. Liberals admired the courts and looked to them as the source of moral and political progress, because the courts were among the heroes of the civil rights movement, in which they arguably played the decisive role. Direct action was necessary, and certainly very brave, but after direct action moved the nation’s conscience, it was the courts that had to step up, when everyone else had failed to do so. It was a court that struck down segregation, and more remarkably, other courts that took a major role in enforcing the decision. So it was the imperial judiciary that was indispensable in erasing the greatest stain from our society. Now that the shoe is on the other foot—the courts on a number of recent occasions have struck down provisions of bills passed by liberal legislators—liberals (I’m one) sometimes lament the antidemocratic power of the courts. The paradox remains inescapable: Judicial review is an antidemocratic provision of our otherwise strikingly democratic political culture, and judicial review serially gores oxen owned by all sorts of people. September 24, 1957, is also noteworthy because it was perhaps the last time all liberals looked on the 101st Airborne with undisguised delight. The division had fought in Normandy, the Netherlands, and the Bulge, and it would soon enough fight on Hamburger Hill and in the A Shau Valley. The 101st lost over 4,000 dead in Vietnam, and it is now fighting in Iraq. Most analysts think the division has won all its battles, but the record on its masters winning our wars has been more mixed. At Little Rock, the 101st Airborne fought for liberty and won. If you watched that happen—and the fight was televised, so most people did—it is hard to have a bone-deep scorn for the political utility of the American army, or too cheap a certainty that violence is always the lamentable failure of politics. Violence is a tool of politics, and in Little Rock it was used by people who sought to maintain gross injustice. The use of political violence was defeated only by the threat and use of greater force. This sequence was not unique to Little Rock. At the time, the mobs beaten back by the paratroopers called the action a second federal invasion of Arkansas. They were right.
September 24, 2006
Bush’s Endgame II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 08:00 AM EST Wow. Talk about a rush to judgment. Bush’s presidency has more than two years to run and Joshua Zeitz thinks he bids fair to be the worst President in American history, comparing him unfavorably to James Buchanan, whose Presidency was followed six weeks later by the break up of the Union and the worst war in American history to bring it back together. That strikes me as a bit, well, Howard Deanish. Mr. Zeitz writes that not even Buchanan or Millard Fillmore (who—to paraphrase Gilbert and Sullivan—did nothing in particular and did it very well) can “compete with his record of colossal short-term failure and long-term calamity.” With Bush’s Presidency not yet 75 percent complete, it strikes me as a tad premature to bemoan the long-term calamities that resulted therefrom. Predicting the future is one thing; announcing it, as Mr. Zeitz seems to do here, quite another. As for short-term failures, Bush has certainly had his share. All Presidents do. The Iraq war has been a much tougher affair than most people thought, and its outcome is anything but certain. I wish that Bush had used his veto on such dreadful legislation as the McCain-Feingold Incumbent Protection Act. But Bush has had some successes too. One, certainly, is the American economy. Despite two body blows—the Internet bubble collapse and 9/11—the economy has been growing strongly for the last three years, tax revenues are soaring, the deficit declining, and unemployment at historic lows. If you want colossal short-term failure in managing the American economy, I would suggest a short tour of Jimmy Carter’s dismal presidency. Another major success of the Bush Presidency is, unfortunately for him, a negative success, and therefore it is far harder to credit him with it. But since 9/11 there have been no more 9/11s on American soil, contrary to the predictions of nearly everyone. If a President’s first duty is to protect the homeland, Mr. Bush has done a very good job of it, at least so far. Mr. Zeitz writes that “with the collusion of a Republican Congress, Bush will have turned a modest budget surplus into an enormous deficit.” This wins the Paul Krugman Memorial Everything-Is-Always-Bush’s-Fault School of Economic Analysis award. (1) There were a few other factors involved that had nothing to do with George Bush (see above about stock bubbles and 9/11). (2) The federal deficit is lower as a percentage of GDP than that of most other great powers (and far lower if you factor in state surpluses). (3) It has been declining since fiscal 2004. Mr. Zeitz writes, “He will have spent well over $1 trillion . . . to pursue a botched war that he initiated on the basis of bad intelligence.” Mistakes—big ones—were certainly made in conducting the Iraq War. The list of wars without big mistakes is a very short one indeed. Even the cakewalk called the Spanish-American War was a farrago of logistical failures. (Theodore Roosevelt and his Rough Riders had to run, not ride, up San Juan Hill, because the horses were still back in Tampa.) As for bad intelligence, is it really George Bush’s fault that every single major intelligence service in the world was wrong about Iraq’s WMD’s? (Let’s leave aside whether they might actually have been right, and the WMD’s are in Syria or buried in the desert somewhere.) What intelligence was he supposed to have used instead? Presidents have to act on the best intelligence they can get. Mr. Zeitz writes that President Bush “will have failed in his grand designs to dismantle the welfare state and democratize the Middle East.” Pushing for and signing a massive drug-prescription plan for the elderly under Medicare is a very strange way to dismantle the welfare state. To be sure, his attempt to reform Social Security before there is a fiscal train wreck of epic proportions (a forthcoming train wreck that is not a matter of economic prediction but of demographic and actuarial certainty) has so far failed. I would lay the blame for the failure to advance towards a solution to this impending crisis 100 percent on the Democratic minority in Congress. Bush came up with a plan; he fought hard to move public opinion on the subject. The Democratic response has been exactly one word: No. They have refused to do their job as a loyal opposition and develop alternatives. It has been a disgraceful performance. As for his failure to bring about democracy in the Middle East, I would prefer to wait a generation before making a judgment. It was a brave and bold (or reckless and foolhardy) decision to attempt to fundamentally alter the politics of the Middle East in order to dry up the wellspring of terrorism. If it works, the world, and especially the people of the Middle East, will owe a huge debt of gratitude to George Bush. If it doesn’t, then his statue will be right up there next to James Buchanan’s. As for leaving a legacy of “extreme partisan polarization,” it takes two to tango. I would invite Mr. Zeitz to give us a list of Democratic attempts to find common ground and advance the people’s business in the last five and a half years. To be sure, they have often invited the President to surrender. But he has declined to do so. I suspect the reason for this is because he won the election.
September 23, 2006
Zakhor Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 07:00 PM EST I attended Rosh Hashanah services today at the small synagogue in the small town where I grew up, and where my father still lives. Anyone who shares a passing familiarity with Jewish custom will immediately recognize that I’m not a particularly observant Jew: It’s both Rosh Hashanah and Shabbat today, and I’m sitting before my laptop, writing a post for AmericanHeritage.com. Not kosher. Still, I do try to attend the High Holiday services each year, and indeed my tallis was right where I left it last Rosh Hashanah, on top of the dresser in my father’s guest bedroom. As today’s services proceeded, I noticed just how many commemorative plaques adorn the synagogue sanctuary. Typical of American synagogue culture, virtually every tablecloth, chair, ark adornment, or wall is named in loving memory of someone. Ditto the prayer books, most of which contain commemorative inserts on their inside covers. There is even a plaque in commemoration of my mother in the community space, just downstairs from the sanctuary. All of which got me to thinking about a slim but marvelous volume, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory, by the historian Yosef Yerushalmi. The book argues that memory and history have long been central to Jewish identity, especially in the long creation and evolution of a disaporatic culture. Yerushalmi finds that Jews have used history in different ways and for different purposes throughout time, but ultimately he locates collective memory as a fundamental building block of Jewish identity. The same can be said, I think, of other religious traditions. In his landmark book Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought From Slavery to Freedom, Lawrence Levine argued that black slaves fashioned a form of Christianity that hinged on collective memories of the Book of Exodus while blurring the temporal distinction between present and past. In the early black church, slaves could understand themselves as actors in a divine (and pre-scripted drama)—a remarkably innovative use of history if ever there was one. For Catholics, the Stations of the Cross likewise offer an opportunity to reenact the Passion, or Christ’s last days on Earth. I’ve never had the privilege of attending Muslim or Buddhist religious ceremonies, but I imagine that history must play a role of some sort in both. To all those American Heritage readers celebrating the High Holidays, Shana Tova. Here’s wishing you a sweet and happy New Year.
September 23, 2006
Politicians and Eloquence and Wit Posted by Fredric Smoler at 06:00 PM EST On Tuesday, Fred Schwarz deprecated the importance of wit and eloquence in American politics. As for eloquence: “Has anyone who made a memorable speech at a convention ever been on the winning side?” As for wit: “It seems to me that wisecracks are rarely an effective way of winning votes from the American public. Adlai Stevenson, a two-time loser, was a famous wit, and in 1988 millions of people repeated or rang changes on Lloyd Bentsen’s putdown of Dan Quayle . . . and then voted for his opponents. Could this be another case of the Regular Guy Theory of Presidential Elections, under which quipsters are seen as too clever by half?” I think this overstates the case. To start at the top, Lincoln’s eloquence was beyond compare. For that matter, when I was a boy Americans still seemed to treasure Lincoln’s wit, and remembered it with advantages: Herndon’s Lincoln was long mistaken for the real one, but a great historian (David Donald) once observed that what Americans choose to believe about Lincoln itself says something interesting about our political culture. If Lincoln represents the triumph of the common man in American democracy—the rise of the rail splitter—the common man must be popularly imagined to have an almost unrivalled command of language (in eloquence Lincoln yields only to Churchill if to anyone at all). And while Lincoln was brilliant by our rhetorical standards as well as those of his own day, nineteenth-century American taste ran to what contemporaries took to be spellbinding oratory, some but not all of which is forgettable today. To again recall my boyhood, we used to memorize bits of Daniel Webster in school, and we thought he was pretty good. FDR was both eloquent and, on occasion, something of a wit (his once-famous defense of his dog Fala springs to mind). His eloquence was of inestimable political importance. Reagan retained enough regard for FDR’s fireside chats to revive them, and Reagan’s occasional flashes of humor served him in very good stead. FDR was not a regular guy, indeed about as far from being a regular guy as you could be. Other evidence? Huey Long really did run as something of a regular guy, but Huey Long was eloquent, in his own idiom, also witty, and that eloquence and wit was part of his strength, a strength so great that it briefly alarmed FDR. JFK was reputed a wit and reputed eloquent. He may not have been either as witty or as eloquent as we believed—political historians can name his speechwriters and some of his joke writers—but that does not belie importance of eloquence and wit in American politics. And JFK was not a regular guy. TV, that notoriously visual medium, plus changes in taste, are widely believed to have reduced the importance of oratory in American politics, but I am not sure that will be true forever. I am not even sure how true it has been in my lifetime. My memory of hearing Clinton, who went in for stemwinders, is that I was always surprised by how impressive he was when speaking to crowds. He reminded me of my recurring reaction to the actor Richard Dreyfus: He was always a lot better than I had remembered. And Clinton won elections.
September 23, 2006
President Bush and the Long Term Posted by Fredric Smoler at 04:45 PM EST Josh Zeitz and John Steele Gordon agree (!!?!) that George Bush is remarkably focused on the long term. Sometimes it’s hard to tell whether Bush’s actions are motivated by short-term or long-term considerations. For example, he stuck to his tax-cutting even while fighting a war he thought urgent, and which he announced would transform the world. Troops cost money, and it is widely thought that we may have lost in Iraq because of a shortage of troops. Did Bush refuse to raise taxes that might have paid for the troops his generals seem to think he needed because he was focused on the long term, meaning his Laffer curve theory of political economy? Maybe. On the other hand, it is possible that he thought his father had lost the 1992 election because he had raised taxes and otherwise alienated the hard-right portion of his base. In that case, Bush was so focused on the short term—reelection and Republican chances in successive Congressional elections—that he risked losing the war. Similarly Bush faced some very hard choices with the North Korean and Iranian pursuit of nuclear weapons. So far he has ducked those choices. Maybe this is because he is focused on what he takes to be the long term, the war in Iraq, and has been willing to subordinate other concerns in the interest of the future of his Iraq-centered plans for the Middle East (Iran could have intensified its support of its violent protégés in Iraq, and North Korea might have forced the redeployment of American combat power needed in Iraq to Northeast Asia). The other explanation is that Bush is leaving very hard choices to his successor, who will have to deal with a nuclear-armed North Korea and an Iran closer to achieving that status. North Korea and Iran really were seeking WMDs, at an alarming clip, and so far, Bush has done amazingly little to inhibit either campaign. Josh Zeitz writes that “Bush’s ambitions were to dismantle the welfare state, which for good or bad he sees as incompatible with a new economy marked by extreme job mobility . . .” and contrasts this with Clinton’s centrism and gradualism. But Bush’s announced ambitions have not been achieved, and it is worth wondering how much political capital he has been willing to invest in them, which again raises the question of how long-term Bush really has been. After all, it was Clinton who actually did dismantle a significant piece of the welfare state, when he delivered on his pledge to “end welfare as we know it.” In the long term, Bush thought that expanding the electoral base of the Republican party meant wooing Hispanic voters. When faced with a populist, anti-immigrant revolt of a portion of his existing base, he did not react as aggressively as he might have. Facing a similar problem, Clinton might have “triangulated,” reaching out across the aisle. Bush instead seems to be trying to placate the existing base while avoiding offending too grossly the Hispanic voters he is seeking. Maybe that is good politics, maybe not, but it is hard to describe it as relentlessly focused on the long term. Finally, Bush has piled up the deficits, refusing to veto spending bills as well as refusing to raise taxes. Maybe this is the action of a true believer in the Gospel According to Laffer; if the budget deficits really are self-liquidating, Bush has sustained as long-term a focus as anyone in history. On the other hand, he may (again) be simply ducking painful choices. My guess is that he is doing both: He conveniently believes that he is looking at the fiscal long term when he is in fact also focused on the political short term. That does not mean that he is a hypocrite. Hypocrites defer to expedience in spite of their principles. There are other words for people who refuse to acknowledge the clash between principles and expedience.
September 23, 2006
Feeling Nixon’s Pain Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 02:30 PM EST Fifty-four years ago today, Richard Nixon, then a U.S. Senator from California, delivered his famous “Checkers speech,” in which he delineated his family’s modest financial holdings before a national television audience and vigorously denied any impropriety in having drawn thousands of dollars from a secret slush fund set up by wealthy political supporters. The speech represented a last-ditch effort to salvage his vice-presidential nomination, which was in severe jeopardy following the New York Post’s revelations of his secret finances. Luckily for Nixon, the speech worked. Toward the conclusion of his remarks, Nixon made history by telling viewers: “One other thing I probably should tell you, because if I don’t they’ll probably be saying this about me, too. We did get something, a gift, after the election. A man down in Texas heard Pat on the radio mention the fact that our two youngsters would like to have a dog. And believe it or not, the day before we left on this campaign trip we got a message from Union Station in Baltimore, saying they had a package for us. We went down to get it. You know what it was? It was a little cocker spaniel dog in a crate that he’d sent all the way from Texas, black and white, spotted. And our little girl Tricia, the six year old, named it ‘Checkers.’ And you know, the kids, like all kids, love the dog, and I just want to say this, right now, that regardless of what they say about it, we’re gonna keep it.” At the time, many political insiders viewed Nixon’s performance as maudlin. Dwight Eisenhower, who tacitly agreed to let Nixon deliver the speech, kept a conspicuous distance from his running-mate for several days, preferring to hold off any photo ops until he could take the public’s temperature. Pat Nixon, the future first lady, was livid that her family’s modest means had been exposed for the whole nation to see and hear. But the country seemed to like what it heard. In the immediate aftermath of the Checkers speech, the National Republican Committee received only 21 negative telegrams out of a total of 4,000. Time magazine said that Nixon had “established himself as a man of integrity and courage,” while the Washington Post felt he had responded “eloquently and movingly” to the charges against him. Finally convinced that Nixon had carried the day, Ike invited his running mate to join him for a strategy session in Wheeling, West Virginia. The former general met Nixon at the airport and proclaimed, effusively, “You’re my boy!” Thus was born a great American political tradition: the confessional. It was a short road from Richard Nixon to Bill Clinton. It may be undignified to bare one’s soul in public. But the electorate can’t get enough of it.
September 23, 2006
Michael Steele Again Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 01:00 PM EST I certainly wouldn’t begrudge John Steele Gordon the right to support a candidate who shares his distinguished name. But I think he might be jumping the gun just a bit in guessing that “the fact that a black Republican has a good shot at winning a statewide race in the very blue state of Maryland is powerful evidence that the days of the Democratic party monopolizing the black vote may be over.” I haven’t seen any polls that break Michael Steele’s support down by race. He could simply be doing well in a state that elected a Republican governor the last time around. Remember that in 2000 and 2004 George Bush’s share of the black vote was abysmally low. That said, there is some movement. In Ohio, Bush won just 9 percent of the black vote in 2000, and 16 percent in 2004. Sixteen percent isn’t much to write home about, but it still represents a sizable jump. Likewise, a poll of over 1,800 black Americans conducted by the Roper Center in June 2006 revealed that 32 percent leaned Republican, and 45 percent leaned Democratic. That would suggest something much closer to parity and competition. Still, I’m a little dubious. Every election season, pundits tell us that key Democratic constituencies like Jews and African-Americans are moving into the Republican fold. In 1972 the newspapers were rife with speculation that American Jews might finally break for the GOP. But in New York City the Democrat George McGovern won a whopping 85 percent of the Jewish vote (nationally, he won about two thirds of the Jewish vote). Other than Ronald Reagan, who won as much as 40 percent of the Jewish vote in 1980, no Republican has gotten close. I suspect the same is true of African-American voters. The old New Deal electoral coalition may not be what it used to be, but it’s still got some power behind it.
September 23, 2006
Race and Electoral Politics Posted by Fredric Smoler at 11:30 AM EST John Steele Gordon, enthusiastic about a Michael Steele’s run for the Senate in Maryland, praises a Steele TV ad, which he links to, and writes that while his man may not win, “the fact that a black Republican has a good shot at winning a statewide race in the very blue state of Maryland is powerful evidence that the days of the Democratic Party monopolizing the black vote may be over.” I don’t think this is too likely, and one of the reasons for this improbability was suggested in yesterday’s Washington Post story on the race, which revealed that Steele is not only running amusing TV ads; he is also running radio ads, including: “. . . a Baltimore radio advertisement targeting African American listeners that was sponsored by the Washington-based National Black Republican Association. The ad identifies Martin Luther King Jr. as a Republican and pins the founding of the Ku Klux Klan on Democrats. One woman says: ‘Democrats passed those black codes and Jim Crow laws. Democrats started the Ku Klux Klan.’ ‘The Klan?’ her friend replies. ‘White hoods and sheets?’ First woman: ‘Democrats fought all civil rights legislation from the 1860s to the 1960s. Democrats released those vicious dogs and fire hoses on blacks.’ Second woman: ‘Seriously?’” This is good history, as far as it goes, but it does not go far enough, and voters seem to know it. This version of history omits that crucial period from 1964 through, well, just the other day. LBJ signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act thinking that he had handed the South to the Republican party for a generation, and in 1968 Nixon’s Southern Strategy suggested that LBJ had it right. There was a great inversion in the electorate: African-American voters moved wholesale into the Democratic party—where many had moved in the New Deal, in any case—and Southern white voters defected to the Republican Party, which seemed at best indifferent and often hostile to the Civil Rights movement. Is that appearance of indifference or hostility a liberal slander? In 1993 American Heritage ran an interview with Jack Kemp in which Kemp noted of the Republican Party and African-American voters that “we had a great history, and we turned aside. We should have been there with Dr. King on the streets of Atlanta and Montgomery. We should have been there with John Lewis. We should have been there on the freedom marches and bus rides. We should have been there with Rosa Parks in Montgomery, Alabama, in December of 1955. “I don’t know if you’ve read Taylor Branch’s book Parting the Waters, but he makes it very clear that the failure of the 1960 Nixon campaign to express any public or personal sympathy with the plight of Dr. King when he was in prison for demonstrating on behalf of civil rights and Coretta Scott King—who was pregnant at the time, in October of 1960—coupled with John F. Kennedy’s making one phone call for maybe 30 seconds (thanks to Harris Wofford, for whom I have high regard and respect), may have cost us that election.” It has arguably also cost the Republicans some elections since, and it may well cost Michael Steele a seat in the Senate. This is not because the Republican Party is now running national campaigns against civil rights for African-Americans, but because it was fantastically tin-eared, at best, about civil rights for decades, and because when Southern Republicans like Trent Lott reveal recidivist tendencies on race, they are hounded out of Republican leadership posts not by George Bush, but in spite of him, as a result of campaigns run by libertarian Republicans and independents in the blogosphere. And because George Bush campaigned at universities which forbade interracial dating. And because in parts of the Old South, the Republican party is still seen as pursuing the strategy that helped win Richard Nixon the White House in 1968.
September 23, 2006
Bush’s Endgame Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 10:00 AM EST John Steele Gordon’s reflections on George W. Bush raise an interesting question—in Mr. Gordon’s own words, is Bush “a President with a historical perspective, caring more about what the world will look like in fifty years than what The New York Times will say tomorrow?” Mr. Gordon answers yes, and further guesses that Bush will be “vindicated by history.” It will come as no surprise to readers that I disagree with Mr. Gordon on the second point. I think Bush is well on his way to worst-ever status. Not even James Buchanan or Millard Fillmore could compete with his record of colossal short-term failure and long-term calamity. With the collusion of a Republican Congress, Bush will have turned a modest budget surplus into an enormous deficit. He will have spent well over $1 trillion—and destroyed thousands of lives and families—to pursue a botched war that he initiated on the basis of bad intelligence. He will have failed in his grand designs to dismantle the welfare state and democratize the Middle East, and he will have left little legacy other than extreme partisan polarization. History, I suspect, will judge him accordingly. That said, I think Mr. Gordon is spot on about Bush’s long-term vision. Judging by his words and actions, Bush has boldly rejected the Clintonian model of centrism and gradualism. Bush’s ambitions were to dismantle the welfare state, which for good or bad he sees as incompatible with a new economy marked by extreme job mobility; in its place, he hoped to create a system of privatized health care accounts and privatized retirement accounts that would allow for increased individual choice but that would also have carried a great deal more individual risk. Bush also attempted to use the Iraq War as a blunt instrument to democratize an entire region, the Middle East. Whether such neoconservative projects are well-founded is a moot point. On the face of it, endeavoring to alter the political culture of an entire region is quite ambitious. Even those who revile his administration (I count myself among that crowd) should concede that George W. Bush reinvigorated the political debate by offering voters something outside of the box. In this sense, he was much like Barry Goldwater, who broke with the corporate liberal consensus of the 1950s and early 1960s to offer Americans a dramatically new kind of politics. As a voter, I’m not particularly fond of George W. Bush. But as a historian, I’m fascinated by what he attempted, and failed, to do.
September 23, 2006
George Packer and Historical Analogies Posted by Fredric Smoler at 08:30 AM EST George Packer, the author of The Assassin’s Gate: America in Iraq, just spoke at my college earlier this week, on foreign policy and the upcoming election. Packer, a staff writer at The New Yorker, was calm, careful, and painfully honest, which are qualities as rare in campus discussions of Iraq as they are in other venues. One question from the audience was admirable for its modesty and clarity. A colleague on the left, unlike my other colleagues on the left a former naval officer, asked Packer what he should say to acquaintances who described my colleague’s antiwar position as “appeasement” and made the Munich analogy. Packer’s answer was that the Munich analogy is generally used as a bludgeon, and is an attempt to shut down discussion. He advised my colleague to ask his interlocutors to leave off talking history and instead talk about the future of the United States and Iraq. In addition to being particularly skeptical about the Munich analogy, Packer seemed generally skeptical about the value of historical analogies. I think that while there is some wisdom in that, there are also a number of problems with Packer’s response. First of all, while the shortcomings of historical analogy are legion, those analogies remain invaluable: if we abandon them, we deprive ourselves of any possibility of historical perspective on current dilemmas. I once discussed this question for American Heritage with Yale’s Donald Kagan, who had just published a book analogizing the Peloponnesian War to the First World War, and the Second Punic War to the Second World War, and was quite aware of the objections to historical analogies. He conceded their shortcomings and then spoke of their practical necessity. He said, “There’s no escaping history. No matter what people say theoretically, in their daily lives they take note of the past and make judgments about the likelihood of its recurrence. The drunk husband coming home at 2:00 A.M. knows from past experience to be very, very quiet. That is the study of history in its most simple sense, and people couldn’t live from day to day without doing a fair amount of it, which reveals something about history in the larger sense: Everybody knows perfectly well that there are constants in human behavior as well as discontinuities, and if this weren’t true, our capacity to function in the world would disappear entirely.” The analogy between the dangers posed by Islamist terrorists and radical nationalist states on the one hand, and Nazi Germany in 1938 on the other, has obvious problems. The most obvious is that neither Islamists nor radical nationalist states possess the equivalent of what would become the 1939-1941 Luftwaffe and Wehrmacht, nor are they planning to invade (most of) their enemies’ home countries. Insofar as Iran, say, develops nuclear weapons, or North Korea retains them, or Pakistan fails to control or actually uses them, the analogy’s problems in one respect may diminish very fast indeed. But even under the circumstances that prevail right now, people who speak of appeasement may mean something that compels our attention. So we should ask ourselves not only why the analogy is vastly imperfect, but why it seems plausible to some people, not all of whom are villains or fools. The appeasers believed that Nazi Germany had legitimate grievances—many of them resulting from the Versailles treaty—and they had a case. They believed that many, perhaps most, people are less aggressive when their legitimate grievances are met, or even partially met, and they again had a case. They finally believed that appeasing grievances is better than war. That sounds appealing, but in the event, the appeasers made concessions that failed to appease, and got war anyway, one they fought from a position of relative weakness, at extraordinary cost. The appeasers failed to realize that Hitler could not in fact be appeased, that his demands were extreme, and that he was capable of lying about their nature, although not capable of lying with perfect consistency. Some of the people who deprecate various concessions to Islamists and radical nationalists as appeasement have the sense that the ultimate demands of those parties are also extreme. Hamas, Hezbollah, the Iranian government, and the Syrian government periodically demand the destruction of one of our allies. If we are willing to do that, Al Qaeda also demands Andalusia. Islamists demand the censorship of the European and American press—remember those Danish cartoons? Islamist demands include the maintenance or restoration of sexual regimes which range from the grindingly oppressive to the murderous. People who deprecate appeasement are often told that the highest priority is lowering tensions by achieving mutual understanding, and mutual understanding remains a commendable goal. It should probably start with understanding who our enemies are, and what they truly want of us. It is possible that we have no perdurable and implacable enemies in the Islamist and radical nationalist camps. It is also extremely unlikely. I am sure Packer knew this; I am not sure his questioner could have realized that Packer knew this, given Packer’s answer. As it happens, Packer went on to deprecate as equally unhelpful the Vietnam analogy posed by opponents of the Iraq war. I do not expect most of those who abominate the Munich analogy to drop the Vietnam one. Packer seemed to be an unusually, even peculiarly, honest man.
September 22, 2006
Michael Steele Posted by John Steele Gordon at 05:50 PM EST I may be prejudiced (I’ve got a weakness for people named Steele), but I have a feeling that Michael Steele is going to make some history this November 7th. If he wins the election for U.S. Senate in Maryland this year, he won’t be the first African-American in the Senate (although he will be the first from a Civil War-era slave state since Reconstruction), or even the only one in the Senate (Illinois’s Barack Obama is currently there). He won’t even be the first black Republican senator of modern times (Edward Brooke of Massachusetts served in the Senate from 1967 to 1979). But the fact that a black Republican has a good shot at winning a statewide race in the very blue state of Maryland is powerful evidence that the days of the Democratic Party monopolizing the black vote may be over. If they are, that is very bad news indeed for the Democrats, who are ever more reliant on the black vote to win elections, but very good for the country. Steele was elected lieutenant governor of Maryland four years ago, along with Bob Erlich. Steele thus became the first statewide black elected official in Maryland history and Erlich the first Republican governor elected in Maryland since Spiro Agnew, of less than blessed memory, in 1966. The ticket is generally thought to have won only because of the remarkably inept campaign performance of the Democratic gubernatorial candidate, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend. Steele has already been subjected to vicious insults from the oh-so-tolerant left. The Baltimore Sun wrote that his only visible qualification for office (as lieutenant governor) was the color of his skin. (Imagine what the reaction of the Baltimore Sun would have been had, say, the Wall Street Journal written that about a Democrat.) His opponent in the Senate campaign, Ben Cardin, has had to fire one of his campaign staff for referring to Steele as an “Oreo”—black on the outside, white on the inside. A picture of him, crudely Photoshopped to make him look as though he were wearing minstrel-show makeup, has been making the rounds of liberal and far-left websites on the Internet. The left, it seems, think that while whites, from Noam Chomsky to Patrick Buchanan, can have their own political opinions and still remain authentically white, blacks can’t be truly black unless they are liberal. This is what the Wall Street Journal calls the “liberal plantation”: blacks leave it at their peril. But this doesn’t seem to be working anymore. Russell Simmons, a “hip-hop mogul” and power in the Democratic Party, has endorsed him, as did the son of former congressman and head of the NAACP Kweisi Mfume, who lost to Ben Cardin in the Democratic primary last week. Steele’s reaction to all this nastiness has been a brilliant TV ad that made me want to vote for him regardless of his distinguished name. There’s still six weeks of the campaign left, and ten minutes can be a lifetime in politics, and Steele is slightly behind in some polls. But they probably don’t mean much. One close observer of Maryland politics noted that he doesn’t know anyone willing to bet money that Steele will lose. At the moment Steele seems to have what George Bush I called “the big mo.” If that is true, it will be a big story on November 8th and perhaps an even bigger one in 2008.
September 20, 2006
Does Bush Care Too Much About the Long Term? Posted by John Steele Gordon at 10:35 AM EST Max Boot, foreign affairs columnist for the Los Angeles Times and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, has an interesting column today called “The Stubbornly Hopeful President.”
In it he worries that President Bush might be focused too much on the long term. “There is a certain fatalism that can come from focusing so much on the long term. (Bush spoke repeatedly of how the world would look 50 years from now.) There is a danger that you will not make the necessary short-term adjustments to achieve results here and now.”
It is interesting, to say the least, that Bush is a President with a historical perspective, caring more about what the world will look like in fifty years than what The New York Times will say tomorrow. His predecessor in the Oval Office, of course, was frequently accused of acting in just the opposite way.
Bush increasingly reminds me of Harry Truman. Truman was endlessly vilified and belittled by intellectuals (“to err is Truman”), and when he left office he had a public approval rating that was lower than Nixon’s when he resigned in disgrace. Regardless, Truman did what he thought was right, also looking at things from a historical perspective. Today, of course, Truman is universally regarded as one of the near great Presidents.
How George Bush will be regarded 50 years from now is anyone’s guess. Mine is that he will be vindicated by history.
September 19, 2006
Barry Goldwater II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 06:10 PM EST I, too, saw the documentary on Barry Goldwater last night and, like Joshua Zeitz, recommend it heartily. It revealed him as a man of strong principles, some of which I agree with and some of which I don’t, and a most impolitic way of saying what he thought and following his principles to their logical conclusions, even when doing so was political suicide. Not exactly typical Washington behavior. It is interesting, perhaps, that William Jennings Bryan’s decisive defeat by William McKinley ushered in a generation of Republican political dominance. Except when Theodore Roosevelt split the party in 1912, Republicans owned Washington until 1932. (Woodrow Wilson, despite the advantage of incumbency and a grave foreign situation, barely won reelection in 1916.) But the rout of Barry Goldwater by Lyndon Johnson in 1964 ushered in a generation of . . . Republican political dominance. To be sure, Democrats won three of the next ten elections, but they took a majority of the popular vote only once (in 1976, and then just barely). As George Will quipped on last night’s program, “Barry Goldwater actually won the election of 1964. It just took 16 years to count the votes.”
September 19, 2006
Barry Goldwater Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 12:45 PM EST I’m glad that Fred Schwarz mentioned Barry Goldwater, if only to lump him together with other political notables who delivered resounding oratory and suffered equally resounding defeats at the polls.
Last evening I saw the new HBO documentary on Goldwater, which I highly recommend to American Heritage readers. On one hand, it was solid history: the documentary presented a thoughtful, balanced view of the great Arizona conservative, giving equal consideration to his opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (which he opposed on constitutional grounds) and his later opposition to the ban on gays in the military.
Of course, as the documentary pointed out, these were consistent positions. A champion of minimalist government, and a conservative in the true libertarian tradition, Goldwater in 1964 could not abide a strong federal government telling business owners who they had to hire and who they had to serve, just as Goldwater in 1994 could not abide a strong federal government interfering with gay citizens’ rights to free speech and free association. The documentary makes an important point—to wit, Goldwater didn’t change too much, but the political debate did. As conservatism came increasingly to be defined by strict religious moralism, there was less space left on the conventional political right, even for Barry Goldwater, the godfather of American conservatism.
Aside from its thoughtful treatment of Goldwater’s life, the documentary is strikingly beautiful in its depiction of the American West at mid-century. I always thought of Goldwater as a bespectacled, wound-up, angry extremist, but the documentary reminds us that he was also a casual, rugged Westerner, with sharply chiseled features that seemed to blend perfectly with the Arizona landscape. Viewers will enjoy seeing the terrific color footage of Goldwater as he camped and hiked throughout the West. An amateur photographer, he took stunning shots of his state’s Native American citizens; of dramatic sunsets and mountain ranges; and of the arid desert ground that then encompassed the greater part of the region.
It’s good to see Barry Goldwater getting a serious look. He was a major participant in the debate about American freedom in the twentieth century. HBO’s new documentary is a fine reminder of this, particularly for Americans of my generation, who were not yet born when he made his famous run for the Presidency in 1964.
September 19, 2006
Gag Me With a Silver Spoon Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 09:15 AM EST Amy Weaver Dorning quotes the late Gov. Ann Richards of Texas as saying her biggest fear was that her tombstone would read, “She kept a really clean house.” With an excess of honesty like that, it’s no surprise that Governor Richards served only one term. Texas’s first female governor, Miriam “Ma” Ferguson, may have felt the same way about housework, but she kept her mouth shut.
Ferguson grew up in a prosperous ranching family and attended Baylor. Her husband served as governor before her. So the Fergusons were quite well off and had plenty of household help. Yet during the 1924 Democratic primary campaign, her daughter and a campaign advisor took pictures of “Ma” putting up peaches, tending animals, and doing other farmyard chores. Her daughter recalled Mrs. Ferguson saying in later years: “Mules, chickens, cows, pigs, and a sunbonnet! You and Harry Fisher certainly made a fool of me that day!” Even her nickname was faux-folksy, formed from her initials (Miriam Amanda Ferguson—and her maiden name was Wallace, so it could even have been “Maw”). No one had ever called her “Ma” before she ran for office. This poor-mouthing helped Mrs. Ferguson win the Democratic primary and the ensuing general election, which was contested more seriously than usual in one-party Texas—though, like Richards, she did not succeed in getting reelected. As Mrs. Dorning points out, every obituary of Ann Richards repeated her 1988 convention crack about the elder George Bush having been “born with a silver foot in his mouth,” usually in the first paragraph. I don’t know what her actual tombstone will say, but that line is what most people outside of Texas will know her for. Is it better to be remembered throughout eternity for making a lame joke than for keeping a clean house? From Governor Richards’s standpoint, I guess it is.
This brings up a larger question: Has anyone who made a memorable speech at a convention ever been on the winning side? Off the top of my head, I can think of William Jennings Bryan’s “Cross of Gold” speech in 1896, Barry Goldwater’s “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice” in 1964, and Mario Cuomo’s supposedly eloquent address at the 1984 Democratic convention (which I read in the paper and shrugged off as the usual boilerplate, then was shocked to hear praised as a masterpiece of oratory—though I’m told that if you saw it live, Governor Cuomo did a great job of selling it). All were on the losing side, along with Governor Richards, and you can add John Kerry’s “Reporting for duty” to the list if you want.
I may be forgetting something obvious, but it seems to me that wisecracks are rarely an effective way of winning votes from the American public. Adlai Stevenson, a two-time loser, was a famous wit, and in 1988 millions of people repeated or rang changes on Lloyd Bentsen’s putdown of Dan Quayle (“You’re no Jack Kennedy”—another gag that has posthumously eaten a Texas politician’s entire career) and then voted for his opponents. Could this be another case of the Regular Guy Theory of Presidential Elections, under which quipsters are seen as too clever by half? Or could it be that the voters actually make their choices based on the issues? Either way, I’m sure that Senator Bentsen and Governor Richards are having a great time yucking it up in heaven, which must look a lot like Texas (though as Phil Sheridan famously pointed out, there are other parts of Texas that could serve just as well for hell, and of course Dallas-Fort Worth Airport makes a fine stand-in for purgatory).
September 17, 2006
Is Plamegate Really Settled? II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 07:00 PM EST Fred Smoler, it seems to me, is trying rather desperately to coax even the tiniest flame from the dead ashes of Plamegate. The liberal media—howling for assorted heads for the last three years—has now suddenly said, “Never mind!” like the Gilda Radner character on Saturday Night Live, and the story has disappeared. The New York Times took three days to report that Richard Armitage had been revealed as the leaker (on page 8 or so, naturally) and hasn’t touched the story since.
He writes, “As a matter of law and logic, Wilson’s op-ed piece could be a tissue of lies, and there could simultaneously be a conspiracy to intimidate future whistleblowers by outing this possible liar’s CIA-employee spouse.” Sure there could have been. So what? Is it in the least likely that the White House would have conspired with Richard Armitage, unhappy with White House policy at best and ensconced in the pathologically anti-Bush State Department? Even conspiracy buffs might doubt that.
He writes, “Also, it may be that people sought to punish Wilson by outing his wife without breaking the law as written. That would not make their actions, if they so acted, the actions of honorable men.” By that standard there is not an honorable man in American government. Politics is not played by the Marquess of Queensbury rules. And Patrick Fitzgerald was charged with uncovering crimes, not breeches of gentlemanly behavior.
He writes, “John Steele Gordon noted that Libby is under indictment for ‘lying about a crime that had never taken place.’ But that alleged lying might well be perjury and obstruction of justice, and prosecutors tend to take such things seriously. Such lying is sometimes itself a crime.” Isn’t such lying—perjury—always a crime? I also wrote that one has to wonder why a lawyer and total Washington pro such as Scooter Libby would have deliberately committed a felony—thus placing his reputation, his career, and his financial assets in mortal peril—in order to cover up something that wasn’t a crime to begin with.
September 17, 2006
Remember September 17! Posted by Fredric Smoler at 05:50 PM EST As far as American and British contemporaries could tell, September 17, 1940, was not a particularly eventful day in the Battle of Britain, but standards for what constituted eventful were pretty stiff in those days. There were heavy night attacks against London; Merseyside and Glasgow were also raided; and there were less massive attacks around the country. The Royal Air Force apparently destroyed 4 Me109s and a Ju88 by day, may have destroyed another four Me109s, shot down another Ju88 that night, and lost five of its own aircraft, recovering four Allied pilots. In fact, something happened that was very eventful indeed. Hitler indefinitely postponed Operation Sea Lion, the code name for Germany’s invasion of Britain. It has recently been the fashion to minimize the importance of the Battle of Britain, and there is some military reason for doing that. No matter what the outcome of the duel in the air, Sea Lion would almost certainly have failed, for a number of reasons, most of them discussed on this blog in August. This tendency toward minimizing the battle can also be grossly overdone. I recently had cause to reread something I wrote a few years ago, reviewing a book by the great military historian Richard Overy, on the sixtieth anniversary of the Battle of Britain, and making the case for the importance of the battle, and I’ll reprint some of it here: “The Battle of Britain was . . . a necessary battle, one in which a vastly powerful state, led by a regime determined to enslave or exterminate the rest of the peoples of the world, received its first check—and that check proved decisive. When all the epistemological posturing is over, competent historians acknowledge that both antagonists were aware that Hitler's forces had sought to destroy the RAF and break Britain's will, and failed signally to do either, thus losing the aura of invincibility. Victory in the Battle of Britain secured American aid, won precious time, broke German momentum, and did much more: Seeking to retrieve that aura of invincibility eight months later, Hitler invaded Russia, and began the two-front war which would destroy him. The fatal timing of this decision was a product of defeat in the Battle of Britain; grossly unprepared to do so, Hitler invaded Russia in an attempt to compel Britain to make peace. “Although Overy shies away from even the mildest rhetorical flourishes as he describes the Battle, he is perfectly aware that the stakes could not have been higher. More than a century ago Mahan, the great American theorist of sea power, analyzing the role of the Royal Navy in the wars against Napoleonic France, penned a once-famous phrase: something about ‘the storm-beaten wooden ships upon which the Grand Army never looked, but which forever stood between it and the conquest of the world.’ If a Napoleonic world-empire seems almost infinitely less appalling nowadays than it did to Mahan's contemporaries, if such a threat seems ludicrously quaint, it is because we now know how much worse it gets: because we know, or once knew and have not quite forgotten, about the little metal monoplanes upon which Hitler never looked, but which forever stood between him and a viciously racist world-empire studded with crematoria, lit by lamps shaded with human skin.” It occurs to me that the fascinating thing about today’s anniversary is that a momentous event was entirely unrecognized by all of the participants. The 1969 movie Battle of Britain got this marvelously right. If I can trust my memory, that film ends with exhausted and irritable RAF pilots waiting in the morning sun, expecting to scramble to meet the incoming Luftwaffe raids. Time passes, fantastically tired men read in chairs, until one looks up at the empty sky and quietly remarks something to the effect that “Jerry is rather late today.” A few more minutes pass, in silence, and someone says, with no sense of excitement or happiness, something like “Yes, he is rather late.” It is the most effective use of anticlimax I have ever seen. When we think about it, we generally concede that we do not always recognize events of vast significance while they are occurring, but we nonetheless retain an expectation that great events will announce themselves with suitable fanfare, and modern journalism often seeks to gratify this expectation. It remains true that historical understanding of events almost inevitably occurs after the fact. As Hegel famously observed, with somewhat uncharacteristic lyricism, “the owl of Minerva only takes wing at dusk.” Human beings do, however, have the capacity to make very good art of their inability to quickly comprehend the meaning of their times. They employ irony when they do so, exploiting the often blackly comic potential that exists in the gap between dramatic date and date of composition. Last Tuesday I taught Plato’s Protagoras, in which men confidently assert the wisdom of ordinary people on the eve of the Athenian decision to fight what would become known as the Peloponnesian War, in which Athens would be absolutely defeated. That is a savage irony about the possibility of historical understanding in real time. The concluding scene of Battle of Britain by contrast reminds us that ironies do not inevitably work most powerfully when they point to our stupidity and fecklessness.
September 17, 2006
On Conscription Posted by Fredric Smoler at 04:50 PM EST This website yesterday noted that “on this date in 1940, President Franklin Roosevelt signed into law the first peacetime military draft in American history.” Of course, it wasn’t peacetime everywhere—the panzers had crushed France a few months earlier, and Hitler had earlier conquered Poland, Denmark, Luxembourg, Belgium, and the Netherlands, the Battle of Britain was still raging, and Japan was continuing its war on China. Our first peacetime draft was a tardy response to a very dangerous change in the balance of power, and to the military successes of vicious regimes. It is worth thinking about the oddities of the American and British experiences with conscription. When the French Committee of Public Safety invented modern conscription with the Levée en Masse of 1793, it had deployed a weapon so deadly that it eventually compelled widespread emulation. Quantity, as the Russians say, has a quality all its own, and all things being equal, any society that could mobilize a hitherto unprecedented percentage of its military manpower was going to roll over armies composed of sufficiently smaller numbers of better-trained professional soldiers. By 1914 most European states had peacetime conscription. Great Britain and the United States, however, were protected by moats (Britain is an island, and the U.S. is bordered by two oceans and two derisory military threats). The perceived disadvantages of conscription—the loss of liberty, sheer expense, the potential strengthening of potentially tyrannical governments—outweighed the perceived advantages—greater military strength. There was no spur of necessity, and peacetime conscription was off the agenda, no matter how much European military experience seemed to suggest its advantages. Sea power was thought adequate for national security, and warships had the great advantage of being improbable means of political coercing American citizens or British subjects. As a result, in the U.S. and Great Britain, the peacetime professional enlisted man was not a particularly admired person. He was generally imagined to be from what we would now call the underclass. In this respect, along with others, American and British societies were very far from being militarist. By contemporary standards, their peacetime armies were not only politically peripheral, they were tiny. In the late 1930s the American army ranked somewhere between that of Bulgaria and that of Paraguay. When necessity did arrive—in the case of the U.S., to deal with a massive rebellion, in both cases, to deal with German militarism, Nazi and Imperial Japanese aggression—conscription was introduced, then terminated in the immediate wake of victory. The U.S. and Great Britain did reintroduce conscription for portions of the Cold War, but both abandoned it long before the collapse of the Soviet Union. Conscription was eventually seen to be not only unpleasant but unnecessary. Professional military forces seemed to be significantly more formidable than mass conscript armies. Vietnam had been interpreted to mean that American conscripts were not militarily effective, while the Falklands War and both wars against Iraq were seen to vindicate the professionals. After all, in all three cases professionals smashed large conscript armies with what were by historical standards tiny losses. In the wake of the triumph of professional forces in 1991, NATO allies and former Warsaw Pact enemies began to develop all-volunteer militaries. There are, of course, old arguments in favor of conscription in a democratic society. Many have argued that defending the nation is a reasonable obligation for all citizens, one that should not be shucked off onto the poor and desperate. The army is sometimes imagined to be the “school of the nation,” a place in which basic political values are inculcated—this view has been held by both the left and the right in different times and places. Conscript armies are sometimes depicted as the school of the nation in a different sense. They are imagined to be institutions in which people from different classes and races and regions get to know one another, and become one people. But the great argument in favor of conscription tends to be necessity; the advantage of superior numbers is taken to be indisputable. After our first Iraq War, that argument looked hollow; as we remain mired in the current Iraq War, one we are widely argued to be losing in large part because we lack enough troops, the argument may sound less silly. One argument for conscription seems to me to be pretty weak, although it is also the one we have heard most recently. Conscript armies, we are told, make war less likely, because middle class voters will be less bellicose if their own children are at risk. On the fifth anniversary of 9/11, a New York Times editorial bemoaned that a “pinched view of our responsibility as citizens got us tax cuts we didn’t need and an invasion that never would have occurred if every voter’s sons and daughters were eligible for the draft.” This argument would not have much impressed any contemporary surveying four years of carnage on the Western Front, or the victorious armies of the first French Republic, or, for that matter, the history of the Roman Republic, or the Athenian Empire. For much of history, the civic militarism of democratic societies has terrified the elites who tried to defend themselves with professional soldiery. For that matter, if that New York Times editorial was correct, one would expect the war in Iraq to be more popular with the upper middle classes at home, whose children have avoided it, than with the people who are actually serving. Some months ago the numbers suggested that the opposite was true. While the Army was having trouble meeting its recruiting goals, reenlistment rates for Americans actually fighting in Iraq were ahistorically high. And off the top of my head, I would bet that states with a disproportionately high percentage of people serving in the Army are likelier to go Republican than Democratic. The relationship between military service and views of a given war seem a deal trickier than that Times editorial suggests.
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