September 11, Six Years Later: Did History Help?

The cover of our November/December 2001 issue.

Historians, in general, are not good at prediction. It isn’t their job—in fact, it’s the opposite of their job. Nor can they be expected to consistently come up with something brilliant on short notice; the essence of writing history lies in patient research and extensive thought. In addition, historians are acutely aware of what great effects small changes and chance occurrences can have on the course of events, sometimes undoing what seems inevitable. They also know better than anyone the hazards that lie in drawing analogies between widely varying times and places, or deriving rules from a handful of vague similarities. But that doesn’t stop them.

Historians, after all, are only human, and we all like to pick who will win the Oscars or the next election—secure, in most cases, in the knowledge that if we’re wrong, nobody will remember, and if we’re right, we can remind them. Yet since world events are at least slightly more important than the Super Bowl, what was said about them at the time is consequently more worthy of revisiting. In that spirit, we hope the historians who commented on the September 11 attacks for the November/December 2001 issue of American Heritage magazine will not mind if, six years later, we review what they said.

A few words of caution are in order. First of all, everything about September 11 that appeared in that issue was written in great haste. Because of our deadlines, we needed to have the copy in hand early in the week after the attacks, so we basically called some eminent historians and asked for whatever they could come up with over the weekend. We are enormously grateful that so many of them made the effort, amid everything else that was going on in that frantic period, to give us their thoughts, and the shortage of time should be kept in mind when revisiting their remarks.

Not only was there no time for contemplation, but at such an early stage, some basic facts were still unclear. Everyone knew that an invasion of Afghanistan was coming, but not how long it would take or what would happen afterward. One of our writers quoted the latest estimated death toll from the September 11 attacks as 6,000, a figure that was eventually cut by half. Iraq was mentioned only a few times, with all but one of the references (and that a very brief one) looking back to the 1991 Gulf War instead of ahead to its status as a possible battleground.

Because of this haste and lack of information, our panel tended to concentrate on the topics that were prominent immediately after September 11, some of which have long since lost their importance. Remember how, in a time of national trauma, Americans turned to lexicography, endlessly debating whether the words coward and crusade were being used properly and whether the phrase “war on terror” made sense? Remember when it was assumed that finding Osama Bin Laden would be America’s eternal top priority? It’s all there.

Still, the remarks that our panel pulled together overnight were much less overwrought and more considered than most of the commentary that circulated at the time. The historical parallels they invoked, the long views they took, and the basic principles of American democracy on which their points were founded combine to make their arguments, for the most part, sound as reasonable today as they did six years ago.

Unsurprisingly, many commentators found similarities between the war on terror and the conflicts they specialized in. Stephen Ambrose and Tom Brokaw recalled how our nation had fought back after Pearl Harbor; Sergei Khrushchev invoked the Russian Revolution, and Pauline Maier the American Revolution; John Lehman looked back to the 1980s, when he was Secretary of the Navy; James McPherson drew parallels to the Civil War.

Most of our respondents shied away from specific predictions, though some of their general remarks show considerable astuteness. Richard Brookhiser expected our allies to give us trouble (“the betrayals, cross-purposes, and fishing in troubled waters that everyone, except maybe Canada and Britain, will have in store for us”—he may have been too kind with his exceptions) and considerable domestic dissent to develop (“there will be many carpers, and some traitors”). Paul Berman endorsed the idea that the terrorists hate us because we’re free (“liberal values and practices arouse a wild fear in some people. . . . Our enemies fear and detest us precisely because we are an open society with individual rights”).

John Lukacs predicted with approval that “sometime during the twenty-first century,” Americans would return to isolationism: “withdraw from the Middle East,” rely on domestic energy, take trains instead of planes, and “guard their frontiers seriously, instead of opening them indiscriminately.” Caspar Weinberger said that “we must first identify with all reasonable certainty the targets and networks and people responsible” and then ruthlessly destroy them, without being “misled or diverted by any talk of ‘exercising restraint’ or giving a ‘measured response.’”

Fredric Smoler, in an extended article, agreed on the need to be firm in our response, disdaining halfway measures and economic sanctions. He also wrote: “If we end by setting up a new regime anywhere, it is not likely to be nearly as successful, or as long-lived, as the postwar regimes of Germany, Japan, and Italy have been. This will be sad for its citizens but will not necessarily make the exercise worthless.” John Lehman, too, advocated toughness and cautioned that the Commander in Chief “cannot depend on the sprawling bureaucracy to produce the plans and operations to carry out this campaign.”

The most common theme among our panel of historians was that the American people are strong and determined because they are free. Frederick Allen and Joshua Zeitz developed this idea in separate articles, the former concentrating on our technological and economic resources and the latter on our time-honored civil liberties. Kevin Baker made similar points in a column that focused on New York City, while Nathan Ward recalled how the metropolis and the nation recovered after the vicious and deadly Wall Street terrorist bombing of 1920.

Almost all our commentators agreed that if America could stay determined, it would win the war. Perhaps that was true, or perhaps it had cause and effect reversed, and we’ll stay determined only if we seem to be winning. The answer is being decided right now in Iraq—a place to which none of our commentators imagined the war spreading when they gave us their first impressions six years ago.

—Frederic D. Schwarz is a senior editor of American Heritage magazine.