April 13, 2007
Andrew Roberts Posted by Alexander Burns at 03:45 PM EST There’s a disturbing article in today’s web edition of The New Republic. Unfortunately, it’s a subscribers-only feature, but I think it’s worth highlighting all the same. The piece is called “Bush’s Imperial Historian,” and it focuses on the career of Andrew Roberts, whose work Fred Smoler discussed here last month. Like the Jacob Weisberg review that Mr. Smoler disliked, the article is written in a fairly derisive tone. Unlike the Weisberg piece, I think this one raises important, larger criticisms of Roberts’s work. Roberts’s historical worldview, according to the writer, Johann Hari, is deeply compromised by his love of empire and the British aristocratic tradition. As a result, Roberts tends to play it fast and loose with facts when it will allow him to tell a better story. From downplaying the negative consequences of the Amritsar massacre in India to totally ignoring the IRA backlash against British internment policy in Northern Ireland, Roberts is clearly not averse to staggering historical revisionism. Hari, à la Weisberg, crosses the line from criticizing Roberts to mocking him, calling him a “fifth-rate Rudyard Kipling.” His substantive objections to Roberts’s work should still be taken seriously. I’d actually say the same of Weisberg’s original review. I certainly agree with Fred Smoler that Weisberg’s tone is problematic. The points that he makes, and that Mr. Smoler discusses, would have been much more palatable if their common criticism of Roberts, that he is a historian with little patience for nuance, had been stated more directly. Toward the end of Weisberg’s review, there is what seems to me to be a particularly salient criticism of Robert’s work: “Roberts is as sloppy as he is snobbish. . . . The San Francisco earthquake did considerably more than $400,000 in damage. Virginia Woolf, who drowned herself in 1941, did not write for Encounter, which began publication in 1953. The Proposition 13 Tax Revolt took place in the 1970s, not the 1980s—an important distinction because it presaged Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980. Michael Milken was not a ‘takeover arbitrageur,’ whatever that is. Roberts cannot know that there were 500 registered lobbyists in Washington during World War II because lobbyists weren’t forced to register until 1946. Gregg Easterbrook is not the editor of The New Republic. ‘No man gets left behind’ is a line from the film Black Hawk Down, not the motto of the U.S. Army Rangers; their actual motto is ‘Rangers Lead the Way.’” The New Republic commented on the Weisberg piece around the same time as Mr. Smoler, and compared this paragraph to Jamie Lee Curtis’s tirade, directed at Kevin Kline, in A Fish Called Wanda (“Aristotle was not Belgian!”). Cute comparisons aside, though, it’s a very grave failing for a historian to be as untroubled by factual inaccuracy as Roberts evidently is. Even if one ignores his personal failings, such as a shocking association with South Africa’s ultra-rightist Springbok Club, it’s hard to ignore such obvious shortcomings.
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