June 16, 2007
Imperial Presidencies III Posted by Fredric Smoler at 07:00 PM EST Josh Zeitz, pondering Richard Nixon, recalled Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.’s 1973 meditation on “the vast expansion of the federal state since the 1930s and the consequent emergence of an increasingly powerful and autonomous executive branch”. Schlesinger identified “the unchecked ‘imperial presidency’ as a threat to democratic values” and “noted that Nixon was not the first President to wield these expanded powers injudiciously, even if he ultimately proved to be the worst offender in modern presidential history.” Polemics about “the imperial presidency” were a significant part of the rhetorical world in which I came of age, but they did not go unchallenged. One of the more interesting challenges I remember hearing occurred when I was asked to be a member of a panel arguing about War Powers Act on local cable TV—this was in the early 1980s. Preparing for this, I wandered over to the Columbia Law School and read through the debate in Congress, then repaired to the main library and reread the relevant parts of the Federalist Papers, some diplomatic history, etc., and showed up loaded for bear, prepared to annihilate any miserably benighted advocate of the imperial Presidency. The debate was held in the auditorium of the suburban high school from which I’d graduated in the late 1960s, and I was feeling pretty cocky; I was then teaching the history of political theory at Columbia, I knew what I thought was a lot of military and diplomatic history, and the only other panelist likely to know anything about the subject was a high school teacher of American history. I remember winning the debate, although I knew at the time that I did not deserve victory. That high school teacher saw both sides of the question, which can suppress the instinct to go for the polemical kill, and did, whereas the audience was at that moment in our history pretty tired of imperial Presidents. It wanted to hear a nasty, unfair, one-sided case, and I gave them one. The instructive part of the day came because I knew from anecdotes that the high school teacher had spent his adolescence eating wormy cabbage in a Japanese internment camp in China, where his family wound up after fleeing Hitler’s Germany; the ones who didn’t get to China were killed by the Nazis. The high school teacher was too much of a gentleman to relate this family history in a debate, but he did note that FDR had not had nearly enough imperial authority to stop Hitler in his tracks, which significantly more U.S. aid to France in 1939 and 1940 would almost certainly have done. By later standards the isolationists in the 1930s Congress had significantly crimped the powers of the executive, so FDR had instead schemed to get us into war. He’d done it too slowly and much too cautiously, because he lacked the imperial authority to swiftly intervene in a war that killed at least 50 million people. That was how the high school teacher saw it, anyway, and he made a good case, one weakened when appealing to a crowd by his sadness and uncertainty when making it; he was passionately opposed to Reagan administration foreign policy, as he had apparently been opposed to the Vietnam War, two other achievements of imperial Presidents, but he did not know what sort of legal arrangements could possibly restrain LBJ and Reagan while leaving FDR and Truman free hands. Making sure that there could never again be an FDR tricking a too-hesitant America into a necessary war—in effect, one of the goals of some of the day’s reformers—seemed to that teacher to be a possibly suicidal outcome. It seems to me that if Bush gets us into a war with Iran, imperial Presidents will get an even worse name, but if Bush fails to use force and Iran one day launches nuclear weapons at Israeli, European, or American cities, opponents of imperial Presidencies will be widely execrated. Josh writes that “if history has shown us anything, it’s that unchecked presidential authority often leads to great abuses of the law and the public trust.” That high school teacher would probably reply that this is indeed one of the things history has shown us, but that history has shown us more than one thing.
June 16, 2007
Amnesty Now and Then III Posted by Alexander Burns at 05:30 PM EST John Steele Gordon writes in mild disagreement with Joshua Zeitz’s post “Amnesty Now and Then.” Mr. Gordon writes, “Joshua Zeitz’s linkage between a pardon for Richard Nixon and a pardon for Scooter Libby, and between some form of what I will call amnesty . . . for draft dodgers then and illegal aliens now, is a bit strained.” While endorsing the analogy between draft evaders and illegal immigrants, Mr. Gordon argues that the pardon of Richard Nixon and the pardon of Scooter Libby have relatively little in common. I don’t think this necessarily gets at the heart of Joshua Zeitz’s point—that Bush, like Ford, might do well to adopt a broadly forgiving approach to policymaking—but it’s a fair point all the same. I can’t say I agree with Mr. Gordon’s description of the Libby trial; Libby’s crime was actually not “practicing politics in Washington, D.C.,” but rather lying to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, as an intellectually honest National Review contributor notes here. But let’s not rehash that debate again so soon. Mr. Gordon’s assessment of the Libby trial is actually less problematic, as far as I’m concerned, than his reading of the current struggle over immigration reform. In articulating his nominal point—agreeing in part, and disagreeing in part, with Mr. Zeitz—Mr. Gordon offers an extended analysis of the barriers to the passage of the Kennedy-McCain bill. This is an undeniably important policy debate, and it concerns one of the few areas of legislation where President Bush might actually be able to accomplish something before the end of his term. As an explanation of why the President has so far failed to achieve anything substantive, Mr. Gordon’s description of recent events falls short. As Mr. Gordon sees it, the main obstacles to immigration reform are not the rightist Republican senators who voted in droves against ending the debate on the bill but rather the Democratic leaders in the Senate. Mr. Gordon asserts that the “villains” of the immigration debate are Harry Reid and “his political Svengali, Senator Chuck Schumer,” who are “both . . . far more interested in political advantage than in solving the nation’s problems. If the country’s immigration problems have to continue to fester so that these two can deny an achievement to President Bush, so be it.” This is a strange account of the Senate’s clash over immigration. If Harry Reid wanted to prevent the passage of S.1348, he could simply have decided not to bring the bill to the floor, or have delayed its consideration while proposing, say, a censure resolution against Alberto Gonzales that would have sucked up all of Congress’s attention. Instead of doing either of these things, though, Reid brought the bill to the floor and withdrew it only when its Republican opponents proved so implacable as to prevent what Mitch McConnell might call “a fair up-or-down-vote.” Chuck Schumer’s record of action on this bill is similarly upstanding: He voted for cloture on S.1348 at each and every opportunity. Schumer is a shrewd and ruthless political operator, to be sure, but these are hardly the actions of a man determined to undermine the President’s immigration agenda. No, anyone who looks at the record of votes on the immigration bill can see where its most serious opposition lies, and that is with the Republican caucus. And what’s more, I don’t think it’s really true that, as Mr. Gordon suggests, President Bush has done all he can to win Republican support for immigration reform. “He was up on Capitol Hill this week lobbying GOP senators,” Mr. Gordon writes, “and is willing to spend his fast-dwindling store of political capital on it. His rhetoric on the bill has been unusually strong as well. I’m not sure what more he can do.” It’s true that the President sympathizes strongly with the aims of the Kennedy-McCain bill, and he has spoken out in its favor. But if the President is serious about winning significant bipartisan support for its passage, he should be willing to take on its Republican opponents more aggressively, rather than just pleading for their cooperation. He could threaten to withhold his services as a fundraiser for Republican candidates who won’t give the immigration bill a fair shake. One such candidate might be Jefferson Sessions, the diminutive senator from Alabama who is one of the bill’s top Senate opponents. He has a fundraising dinner scheduled with President Bush on June 21. I wonder how Sessions would react if Bush suddenly realized he had to wash his hair that night. In the same vein, last Wednesday, June 13, Bush appeared at a fundraiser for Republican congressional candidates that raised $15.4 million. Can you imagine how those congressional candidates would have responded if the White House had postponed the President’s appearance at the dinner indefinitely, due to Bush’s need to focus on passing immigration reform? Of course, these thoughts will remain purely speculative. The President won’t threaten Jeff Sessions, nor will he withhold one ounce of his fundraising capacity from other xenophobic congressional candidates. Mr. Gordon suggests that Harry Reid is “widely perceived as being a partisan first and a senator second.” I’d suggest that the President’s kid-gloves approach to negotiating with Senate Republicans shows that his priorities are at least as partisan as those of his opposition. Blame rests with a lot of different parties for the stalling of S.1348, and some of those parties are Democrats. But Mr. Gordon’s breakdown of that blame is decidedly one-sided, and its factual basis is tenuous at best. If this bill ever passes, it won’t be because Harry Reid and Chuck Schumer break under pressure but because the Republican caucus decides that immigration reform is an idea whose time has come.
June 15, 2007
Getting Inside the Greatest Gunfights: An Interview with Bob Boze Bell Posted by Allen Barra at 07:20 PM EST Bob Boze Bell is a failed professional baseball player, former radio talk-show host, author, artist, cartoonist, Old West historian, and, currently executive editor of True West, which, founded in 1953, is the oldest continuing publication on the legend and lore of the American frontier. From today (June 15) to June 24 he will be emcee at the Single Action Shooting Society’s (SASS) End of Trail event at Founder’s Ranch, New Mexico. SASS members will reenact famous gunfights of the Old West, which include such legendary names as Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, Wild Bill Hickok, and Billy the Kid. The reenactments are based on Bell’s “Classic Gunfights,” which appear regularly in True West. The End of The Trail also marks the publication of Bell’s book Classic Gunfights III. From June 22–24 Bell’s artwork will be exhibited, featuring 16 original gouache and scratchboard paintings from his Classic Gunfights series. For more details on End of Trail, see the Single Action Shooting Society’s website. For more information on Bob Boze Bell’s work, check out his blog. (The June 6 and June 11 entries relate details on how he recreates a classic gunfight.) Bell answered these questions from True West’s office in Cave Creek, Arizona, when he should have been working. You've been studying this subject for decades now. Tell us how you got interested in legendary gunfights. This is hard for even me to believe, but I have had an interest in gunfights for 50 years! A half century. It was in 1957, when I starting reading True West magazine and learning the truth behind the many TV Westerns that I loved. I went through a couple of phases that distracted me (the three B’s: baseball, the Beatles, and babes), but I kept coming back to gunfights and the West. I got real serious on Christmas Day, 1989. My mother sent me The Saga of Billy the Kid by Walter Noble Burns as a present that Christmas and I read it in one sitting. At about two in the morning I set the book down, and that was it. I knew what I had to do. Not long after this a comic book company from Chicago called me. They were interested in reviving Classic Illustrated Comics and had heard that I did a comic strip called Honkytonk Sue, and would I be interested in doing something in the Classic Illustrated style on the West. They seemed kind of hard up, like they couldn't find anyone interested in the subject. I jumped at the idea and said I wanted to do the Walter Noble Burns Kid book, and the guy on the phone hesitated. He said he didn't know if they were going to do biographies. They never called me back, but at that moment, I knew exactly how to proceed. What is your Old West Classic Gunfight series, and how have you gone about reenacting some of them with the Single Action Shooters End of Trail event? I started developing a graphic novel on Billy the Kid. I took an excerpt idea to Arizona Highways, and, after some hesitation there as well, I got a cover gig to do Billy in Arizona. My painting of Billy graced the August 1991 cover, and at that point I figured I had it made as far as getting a book deal. I sent out a query letter and a copy of the magazine to 26 publishers, and all 26 turned it down, including True West (I have the letter I sent to them framed and in my office). Even my alma mater, the University of Arizona Press, turned me down, saying, “Just what the world needs, another book on Billy the Kid.” So I went to my father, borrowed $5,000, and got my Billy the Kid book printed for $20,000. I was in the book business. One of the things I have always enjoyed doing is illustrating fight scenes. I used to do this after school at my father’s gas station on Route 66. I love seeing action in movie terms: wide shot, POVs, crane shot, eye socket shot, you name it. More than one critic has said the action sequences in the Billy book are the best part. When two crazy friends and I bought True West magazine in 1999, I immediately proposed a regular feature on Classic Gunfights, taking apart a gunfight and using the best maps, photos, and illustrations to put the reader in the scene with the best research and a no-nonsense narrative, warts and all. The first gunfight appeared in 2000, and I have since published over 75 fights that appear in three Classic Gunfight books (approximately 25 gunfights per book). What sources have been used for historical accuracy? The trick is to find the best researcher on each fight, and invariably there is one person who has dedicated decades to ferreting out the minute details about each second of a particular fight. In the case of the Northfield Bank robbery by Jesse James and the Youngers, it’s Jack Koblas, who lives in Minnesota. He knows every second of that fight. Frederick Nolan, of Chalfont Saint Giles, England, is the absolute Billy the Kid expert. For train robbery and the subsequent Silver City shootout, it’s Texas author Bob Alexander. If I’m doing anything on Tombstone I always contact Neil Carmony in Tucson to get the straight skinny. Of course, I have many friends in the Earp field, along with a few enemies, so I don’t suffer from sources in that arena, but Neil is the go-to guy for me. What gunfight are you currently working on? Currently I'm doing the Battle of Big Dry Wash for the August issue of True West. I Googled it, got the historical website for Camp Verde, contacted them, and they recommended Dr. Sam Palmer of Paradise Valley. Last Thursday I drove up to the Mogollon Rim, and Dr. Sam gave me a personal tour of the site. He has been studying this fight for 25 years, camps out on the actual site often, has found 4,000 artifacts, and knows every soldier’s name and history on both sides of the fight. This may sound odd to the outsider, but there is virtually a person like Sam for every fight I have done. I shoot about 50 photos on the site, then I start researching Apache photos and U.S. Army gear, cribbing shamelessly from Frederic Remington and others, and trying to blend the gear, the men and the location shots into an accurate portrayal of the event. Sometimes I can't get it all down like it is in my head, but I usually try to do at least six illustrations per fight. My goal is to get it right, make it concise, and make it fun and exciting to read. One of my pet peeves is reading about a fight and not being able to figure out where they are standing, who is where, how did the room look? That’s why I use Gus Walker, the Mapinator, who I have worked with for seven years. He is a great mapmaker, can take a very complicated posse chase and fight and break it down so you know exactly where everyone is. When we did the battle of Northfield, Gus broke it down to four phases, and shows where Jesse, Cole, Frank, and all the townsmen were at each stage of the fight, plus where they were shot, etc. Then Gus and I tracked Jesse and Frank’s run all the way from Minnesota back to Missouri, utilizing all of the newspaper reports of sightings. We backed all of this up by showing each item to Jack Koblas. To my knowledge, no one has ever done this before. I am very proud of our efforts in this area. The members of the Single Action Shooting Society that are going to the reenactments have practiced drawing and shooting hours on end. How do you think they’d fare against Wild Bill Hickok, Billy the Kid, and John Wesley Hardin? The short answer is not very well. It’s one thing to shoot against stationary targets or in a controlled environment, but to get an idea how different it would be, imagine going into a biker bar, jumping up on a pool table and yelling out, “Only homos ride Harleys!” Then try to defend yourself. That is the closest modern equivalent I can think of to the world of Hickok, the Kid, and Hardin. It’s a whole ’nother deal. In the movies nearly every gunfighter favors the standard Colt Peacemaker, but real-life gunfighters such as Wild Bill, Jesse James, Doc Holliday, and Billy the Kid often preferred different weapons. What were some of the other choices they had and the reasons they might have preferred them? There were dozens of choices for weaponry and an almost unlimited variety within those choices. Long barrels, short barrels, six-shot, seven-shot, single-shot. That’s one of the things I think the movies have not played with enough, and that’s the wide variety of weapon styles on the frontier. It would be like a movie showing everyone driving Fords. Frank James preferred a Remington pistol, Doc Holliday and Billy the Kid were known to carry a Lightning, or Thunderer, self-cocking, or double-action pistols. Hickok was partial to his .36 caliber Navy Colt. So what was the term that most of these men were known by? Gunfighters? Pistoleers? Shootists? What were the most popular terms for them in their own time? The term gunfighter is pretty much a modern (1950s) term, although I hesitate to say they never used it, because I am constantly amazed by terms that show up in the newspapers of the 1880s. For example, it is now widely believed that being “quick on the draw” is a modern invention of Hollywood, and although low-slung, metal-clipped holsters were basically invented in the 1950s for quicker times in competitions, I can show you newspaper accounts of Ben Thompson’s killing in San Antonio where the paper claimed he was fast on the draw. And I can also show you low-slung, buscadero-style rigs from the 1880s. Now, they were rare, and that is the key, but you can get yourself in trouble by saying, “They never did that,” or “They never wore that.” You’d be surprised at what they had. Fighting men on the American frontier were called pistoleers, man killers, shootists, gunmen, and a slew of other handles. This may sound like an odd choice of words, but do you have a favorite gunfight? In terms of drama and the personalities involved, if you could go back in time to see just one fight, which would it be? In terms of sheer firepower and the bravery of one guy, I think the Ingalls gunfight when two wagon-loads of lawmen (24) took on the outlaws (7) of Ingalls, Oklahoma, and one guy (Arkansas Tom) dominated the lawmen and kept them pinned down until his comrades could escape. That is an amazing fight It’s in Classic Gunfights I. Put yourself back in the Old West, just before what could erupt into a deadly confrontation. You can carry one sidearm. What do you choose? And how would you carry it? In the pocket of your coat like Wyatt Earp before the OK Corral, or perhaps in the waistband of your pants like many did? In a holster? If so, what kind? Cross-draw? Shoulder holster, perhaps? A sawed-off shotgun under the coat still beats everything. It scared everyone, was quite intimidating, and, this is the key part, at close range you didn’t have to be a good shot. Beyond that I’d want a Walker Colt, because it looks like a cannon. You can pick two men in all of Old West history to accompany you into this possible confrontation. Who do you want on your left, and who on your right? I want Billy the Kid on my right, laughing, smiling, and deadly. And I want Wild Bill Hickok on my left, with the butt handles of those two hoglegs daring anyone to mess with the editor of True West magazine. Come to think of it, I wish I had those two when I have to deal with my creditors.
June 15, 2007
Imperial Presidencies II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 02:15 PM EST As Joshua Zeitz notes, the late Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., coined the phrase “the imperial presidency” in 1973. It seems to me that people usually start to worry about an overreaching White House when the other party is in power there, and that the other two branches of the government—not exactly averse to wielding power themselves—can be counted on to keep executive imperialism under control. The Founding Fathers, after all, knew what they were about. But the phrase always reminds me of one of the sillier incidents of the Nixon presidency. On January 27th, 1970, British Prime Minister Harold Wilson was greeted at the White House by White House guards decked out in snappy new uniforms. Nixon, apparently, had been impressed with the uniforms worn by the presidential and royal guards who had greeted him on a European tour the previous year. He ordered the sprucing up of the White House police, who had until then been dressed more or less like ordinary American policemen. The uniforms featured double-breasted white tunics with lots of gold braid, a black gunbelt and holster, and black vinyl, gold trimmed hats that Time magazine thought looked like something that might be worn by a cross between a Belgian customs inspector and Prince Danilo in The Merry Widow. The New York Times described the get-ups as “dazzling new operetta-like uniforms” and thought the White House police looked distinctly sheepish wearing them. It also noted that they had been designed by a Washington tailor named Jimmie Muscatello, whose downtown store featured a sign in its window saying “Pants cuffed free while you wait.” When the pictures of the White House ceremony hit the TV news programs and the newspapers, the entire nation collapsed as one in helpless mirth. The new uniforms soon disappeared, beginning with the hats, which were never seen again. If the United States is to have an imperial presidency, it seems it will have to be clothed in workaday, republican garb.
June 15, 2007
Amnesty Now and Then II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 09:20 AM EST I think Joshua Zeitz’s linkage between a pardon for Richard Nixon and a pardon for Scooter Libby, and between some form of what I will call amnesty (even though the term is inaccurate—but life is short) for draft dodgers then and illegal aliens now, is a bit strained. First, I agree that the Ford proposal for ending the legal problems of draft evaders is an excellent historical analogy for the proposal to end the legal problems of currently illegal aliens. Ford’s proposal and the proposal in the immigration bill were the only real, practical solutions to the two problems. We couldn’t jail 100,000 otherwise law-abiding young men then or expel 12 million workers now. But I do not think it correct to say that Bush has given only lukewarm support to the immigration bill. He was up on Capitol Hill this week lobbying GOP senators, a very unusual thing for a president to do and a clear sign that he means business and is willing to spend his fast-dwindling store of political capital on it. His rhetoric on the bill has been unusually strong as well. I’m not sure what more he can do. If you want villains here, I nominate Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and his political Svengali, Senator Chuck Schumer. Both are far more interested in political advantage than in solving the nation’s problems. If the country’s immigration problems have to continue to fester so that these two can deny an achievement to President Bush, so be it. Reid yanked the bill off the floor, despite the pleas of such not-exactly-Bush-allies as Senator Ted Kennedy, called it the President’s bill, which it is not (it was written by Senators McCain and Kennedy), and claimed that the President had failed again. There’s a reason Senator Reid’s approval ratings are even lower than the President’s: he’s widely perceived as being a partisan first and a senator second. He’s the sort of politician who gives politics a bad name. He doesn’t even seem to be very adept at it. But I don’t see any correspondence between Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon and Bush’s possible pardon of Scooter Libby. Ford pardoned Nixon for raisons d’état, to get Watergate over and done with so the country could face the many very serious problems of the dismal 1970s. And he did it despite the fact that it was bound to hurt him politically, which it did, badly. It was, therefore, a genuine profile in courage, one that has been vindicated by time, now that the passions of thirty years ago have died down. Any Bush pardon of Libby, however, would not be for the good of the country. One more Washington insider in the hoosegow would be only a personal tragedy for Scooter Libby. In this case a pardon would be to prevent what is, in my view and that of many others, a grotesque miscarriage of justice. Scooter Libby faces two and a half year in jail for the crime of practicing politics in Washington, D.C. Nor would it cost Bush much politically. People who wish him ill anyway would be up in arms, of course. I can just hear Senator Schumer on the Sunday talk shows calling it, in Schumer’s apparently one and only political metaphor, “a dagger to the heart of the American justice system.” But most people just don’t give a damn. It’s political inside baseball that only the chattering classes care about. If the President were to pardon Scooter Libby, it would be a three-day story at most.
June 14, 2007
No Captain Von Trapp Posted by Alexander Burns at 06:15 PM EST Kurt Waldheim is dead today at the age of 88. He died of heart failure, not from Waldheimer’s disease, an illness-according to a joke from the 1980s-in which you have trouble remembering that you were once a Nazi. Waldheim has to go down as one of the most successfully mendacious world leaders of the last quarter-century. As a hundred obituaries will soon describe, Waldheim served two terms as secretary-general of the United Nations and then, in 1986, won election as president of his native Austria. He accomplished the latter feat despite the inconveniently timed revelation that he’d spent several years in the 1940s as a Nazi storm trooper. When the Austrian magazine Profil first leveled the allegations against Waldheim, he rejected them entirely, but as information gradually trickled out, it became impossible for his denials to continue. It came out that Waldheim had joined a Nazi student group as early as age 20 and had, as a member of the Sturmabteilung, been attached to a division that committed atrocities in Greece and the Balkans. Looking back at Waldheim’s evolving reaction to the world’s discoveries about his past, it’s quite striking how defensive and unapologetic he was. Asked, on “60 Minutes,” why he omitted the fact of his military service from his 1985 autobiography, In the Eye of the Storm, Waldheim replied, “Out of almost 400 pages only 15 deal with my background as a child and youth.” Fair enough. With space constraints like those, it’s easy to see how a minor episode like signing up with the Nazis could get edited out. During the same television appearance, Waldheim also offered a slippery apology, as he put it, to “those of my American friends who felt misled that I left out part of my curriculum vitae.” I’m not sure whether that apology sounds more condescending or insincere, but there’s at least a little of each sentiment in there. Later, when the world learned that Waldheim had earned the Zvonimir combat medal from Nazi-run Croatia, the former diplomat gave a really pitiable, high school excuse. Yes, he said, I won the medal, but so did basically everyone in my unit! Thanks to a combination of good damage control by Waldheim’s campaign and a swelling of defensive, nationalist sentiment among Austrian voters, Waldheim won the Austrian presidency with 53.9 percent of the vote. In a way, though, this was just the beginning of his troubles. Both the American and Soviet ambassadors to Austria failed to attend his inauguration, and the United States put Waldheim on a “watch list” that prevented him from setting foot on American soil. In an attempt to clear his name of war-crimes accusations, Waldheim cooperated with a panel of historians that investigated his World War II service. But while no damning evidence of war crimes emerged, no smoking gun for some Belgian prosecutor to seize upon, the investigation also confirmed a series of inconvenient facts about Waldheim’s military career, corroborating the widespread perception that the Austrian leader was no Captain von Trapp. Waldheim’s name will probably not be especially well remembered; his tenure at the UN was undistinguished and his presidency never truly recovered from the scandal with which it began. His life story, though, is a reminder of just how inescapable the past can be–Waldheim succeeded in escaping his own past, but only for so long. It’s also troubling evidence that Austria still has a ways to go in order to fully come to terms with its role in the Second World War. It’s not really true that those who do not understand history are doomed to repeat it, but it’s hard to see how a country that advances figures like Waldheim and Jörg Haider has tried to understand history at all.
June 14, 2007
Imperial Presidencies Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 05:15 PM EST In today’s lead feature, Allen Barra interviews James Reston, Jr., about his new book, The Conviction of Richard Nixon: The Untold Story of the Frost/Nixon Interviews. Reston argues that “Watergate was the most important political scandal in America in the twentieth century and possibly the biggest scandal of the entire American Presidency. It was so largely because a criminal conspiracy was run right out of the Oval Office in the White House. The scandal was not about the burglary at the Watergate complex in Washington but about the cover-up of the involvement of President Nixon’s reelection campaign in the burglary.” This is surely correct, though it’s worth remembering that Richard Nixon’s administration was less an aberration and more an extreme culmination of trends that had been on the build for several decades. In 1973 Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., a prominent historian and onetime advisor to John F. Kennedy, wrote about the vast expansion of the federal state since the 1930s and the consequent emergence of an increasingly powerful and autonomous executive branch. Identifying the unchecked “imperial presidency” as a threat to democratic values, Schlesinger noted that Nixon was not the first President to wield these expanded powers injudiciously, even if he ultimately proved to be the worst offender in modern presidential history. Indeed, we now know that Robert Kennedy, who served as attorney general in his brother’s administration, not only approved wiretaps on Martin Luther King, Jr., but also directed the IRS to audit Richard Nixon in 1962. Under Lyndon Johnson’s watch, the FBI tried unsuccessfully to use illegal recordings of a hotel-room tryst to blackmail King into committing suicide and worked overtime at the Democratic National Convention in 1964 to infiltrate the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, a political organization comprised of black and white civil rights activists. It was also under Johnson’s authority that the CIA conducted the extensive–and patently illegal–surveillance and disruption of domestic political organizations, and that the FBI deliberately tried to disrupt peace rallies by planting violent saboteurs in the ranks of peaceful demonstrators. Congress did its best to curb many of these abuses in the aftermath of Watergate. Sen. Frank Church chaired hearings that brought to light the CIA’s violation of its charter, leading to more stringent regulations barring the agency from conducting domestic intelligence against U.S. citizens, while a stronger War Powers Act and new campaign-finance regulations made it tougher for presidents to wage war without congressional oversight or to engage in the kind of money laundering and dirty-tricks tactics for which Nixon’s re-election committee became famous. The question today is whether in the past seven years we’ve seen a return to the imperial presidency. Certainly the concentration of administrative power in the West Wing–with political advisers meddling with the Justice Department and U.S. attorneys’ offices–would suggest this is the case. If history has shown us anything, it’s that unchecked presidential authority often leads to great abuses of the law and the public trust.
June 14, 2007
On Evil Empires II Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 04:20 PM EST Alexander Burns related an interesting story yesterday. In 1982–fully a year before he famously termed the Soviet Union an “evil empire”–Ronald Reagan began honing this language when he asked, rhetorically, of the British Parliament, “Must civilization perish in a hail of fiery atoms? Must freedom wither in a quiet, deadening accommodation with totalitarian evil?” Had Reagan posed the same question during his “evil empire” speech before the National Association of Evangelicals, many in the audience might well have answered, “yes,” or “sort of.” Millions of conservative Christian fundamentalists in this period believed deeply in the doctrine of dispensational premillennialism. Based on prophetic writings in the Old and New Testaments, premillennialism holds that God deals with human beings in distinct epochs, or dispensations; that the current (sixth) dispensation–the church era, or the Gentile era–will come to a close upon the arrival of the Antichrist (known also as the Beast), who will visit terror upon unsaved human beings; that the Antichrist’s reign of seven years, called the Tribulations, will be directly preceded by the in-gathering of world Jewry back to Palestine and by a tremendous event called the Raptures, which will see saved souls (or saints)–both living and dead–lifted directly from Earth to heaven; that at the end of the Tribulations, Jesus Christ will lead an army of saints to do battle with the Beast; that Christ will defeat the Beast at the Battle of Armageddon and introduce a thousand-year reign of peace; and finally, that at the conclusion of that millennium, Christ and Satan will engage in a final battle, resulting in the Satan’s ultimate defeat. As early as the 1940s, increasing numbers of fundamentalists understood the Cold War as a clear indication that the Antichrist’s armies were fulfilling prophecy by, first, constructing a worldwide government and, second, using these global institutions to inaugurate a seven-year reign of terror. “There is no reason why Anti-Christ should not be both a principle of opposition to God and the incarnation of that in a single person,” argued Clarence Edward Macartney of the First Presbyterian Church of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Rather than look specifically for a single person who might be the Antichrist incarnate, Macartney argued that it was important to search out those deeds and events that bore the Antichrist’s imprimatur. This line of thinking led him straight to the Kremlin’s doorstep. “It is an interesting and significant fact,” he concluded, “that in that very country, Russia, where the scriptural portrayals of Anti-Christ have most impressed themselves upon the minds of Christian people in past generations—in that very country we have had one of the worst outbreaks of Anti-Christ in government.” Many believing Christians welcomed the terrible events of the Tribulation as they lifted the curtain on a new and magnificent age for Christ’s army of saints. Russia was widely regarded as a key player in this drama–as “Gog,” the ruthless, militaristic nation from the North that, according to popular prophecy, would invade the Holy Land some time in the middle of the Antichrist’s reign. Gog’s defeat was, in fact, a scriptural prerequisite of Christ’s imminent return. So to Reagan’s question–must the world end in nuclear conflict with the Soviet Union?–some of his evangelical supporters may have answered, yes.
June 14, 2007
Amnesty Now and Then Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 01:50 PM EST There is a striking though certainly not perfect parallel between today’s speculation about Scooter Libby–will the President pardon him or commute his sentence?–and the controversy surrounding Gerald Ford’s decision on September 8, 1974, to issue a full and unconditional pardon to his predecessor, Richard Nixon. At the time, Ford felt compelled to couple Nixon’s pardon with a declaration of conditional amnesty for civilians and servicemen who had either dodged the draft illegally or gone absent-without-leave to avoid deployment to Vietnam. Just shy of 115,000 young men were living underground in the United States or were in exile, most of them in Canada and Sweden. Ford, a decorated World War II veteran, told the national convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars in late August that these men were “in a sense . . . casualties . . . I want them to come home if they want to work their way back . . . So I am throwing the weight of my presidency into the scales of justice on the side of leniency. I foresee their earned reentry–their earned reentry–into a new atmosphere of hope, hard work, and mutual trust.” Deeply influenced by his three sons, who ranged in age from their late teens to early twenties, Ford introduced a system that allowed offenders the opportunity to turn themselves over to authorities, present their case to civilian and military appeal boards, and receive either commutation of their sentences, a full pardon, or pardon or commutation in return for alternative forms of national service. Roughly 20,000 men ultimately participated in this system, and most received either pardons or clemency. On the subject of Richard Nixon, Ford was eager to get the monkey that was Watergate off his back. Worried that the press was fixated on the potential prosecution and imprisonment of the former President to the exclusion of the new President’s domestic and foreign policy agendas, and genuinely concerned about Nixon’s emotional well-being, Ford understood that he could not seem to be setting one standard for ordinary citizens and another for Presidents. Thus, linking conditional amnesty for draft dodgers and deserters to a pardon for Richard Nixon provided balance. Not everyone was placated. In the wake of the Nixon pardon, Ford’s press secretary, Jerald terHorst, resigned in protest, while Ford’s approval rating plummeted from 71 percent to 50 percent in a matter of days. But by any measure, it was a bold move. George W. Bush has remained quiet on the subject of a presidential pardon for Scooter Libby. At the same time, he has offered lukewarm but certainly not wholehearted support for a bill that would give more than ten million illegal immigrants the opportunity to earn legal status in the United States. Ford’s insistence that his program was not one of “amnesty” but rather “earned reentry” is echoed in the current debate over immigration reform; its supporters also insist that their program is not one of amnesty but rather leniency and fairness. Like the Vietnam-era draft dodgers and deserters, today’s illegal immigrants could enjoy a chance to earn the right to live in the United States. Like the young men of 1974, they would be expected to turn themselves over to the authorities and to undergo a long process before attaining legal status. Conservative Senate Republicans scuttled the immigration reform package last week. Now the question is whether the President will go to bat for that bill as aggressively as he did for tax cuts, the war in Iraq, and his controversial Medicare Part D program. If he does, he can make the case that a pardon for Scooter Libby is in keeping with his general sense of fairness and leniency. If he doesn’t, such a pardon would apply different burdens on ordinary people, many of whose children are American citizens, and vice-presidential aides.
June 14, 2007
French Anti-Americanism Posted by Fredric Smoler at 12:10 PM EST Alex Burns, citing a March 2003 Pew poll with contrary data, wonders where I got the notion that anti-American sentiment in France did not increase in the run-up to the Iraq war. I remember reading this a couple of years ago, although I do not remember where, but Googling now, I find an article titled “Global Anti-Americanism and the Lessons of the "French Exception", published in an electronic version of The Journal of American History (Vol. 93, No. 2, September 2006), by Phillipe Roger, whose book I had cited in the previous post. Roger writes, “It is worth noting, for instance, that in the polls taken by the U.S. State Department in the fall of 2002 (which showed strong evidence of the surge of adversarial views in Germany and Great Britain), France, which was in the forefront of political opposition to the Bush administration, showed no sign of aggravated anti-Americanism, with negative opinions staying at the same level as before the diplomatic crisis (a 1 percent variation, irrelevant in such polls).” That said, I would not claim that French anti-Americanism hasn’t risen since the Iraq war, because I have seen polling data suggesting that it has. On the other hand, a little over a year ago I gave a seminar paper, on which occasion I met a distinguished and I thought shrewd American academic who had just spent a term teaching in Paris at one of the Grandes Écoles. He reported that on the strength of his experience with students from the French elite, whose views he seemed to think were a leading indicator of majority opinion in France, the French were about to become both more pro-Israeli and more pro-American, in part in reaction to the wave of immigrant riots and arson that had recently swept France. I do have the sense that some (by no means all) European opposition to the American invasion of Iraq was inspired by fear that troubles with Muslim immigrants would worsen in the wake of any war. Now that the troubles have duly worsened, the same anxieties may have produced an opposite and somewhat perverse and misconceived reaction: The Americans may be imagined to be hitting back at Islam, after having provoked it, and after it has newly alarmed the French. When something frightens us, our responses can be contradictory, and volatile.
June 14, 2007
The Frost of Yesteryear Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 10:40 AM EST Publishers send me a lot of books. Usually I spend a minute or two flipping through the pages before deciding whether to keep or discard them. A few months back I got uncorrected proofs of a forthcoming book called The Conviction of Richard Nixon. Hmm, I thought, the title is certainly intriguing. Is it an imaginary trial, written by a lawyer perhaps? An account of the congressional investigations of 1973-74? An episode from his earlier career? Some sort of alternative history? On closer inspection, I was disappointed; it seemed to be just another rehash of Watergate. And when I looked closer, it was even less promising: A rehash not of the scandal itself but of David Frost’s 1977 interviews with Nixon. The idea, evidently, was that Frost had “convicted” Nixon in some unspecified fashion. An entire book about some interviews? I dropped it in my wastebasket. Imagine my surprise, then, when a play based on that book opened on Broadway this spring. In fact, Frank Langella, who plays Nixon, has just won a Tony Award.* And now there’s an interview on this site in which the author and our own Allen Barra discuss the Frost/Nixon encounter as if it were the most important event in the history of the Republic. Now, I was around in 1977—not yet old enough to vote, but not much younger than at least one of my fellow bloggers today—and I distinctly remember how disappointing everyone found the interviews. Nixon admitted things he had to admit because they were on tape, said he couldn’t remember other stuff, came up with some bogus rationalizations, confessed to errors in judgment, and made the obligatory show of contrition. In other words, Tricky Dick had been his usual Nixonian self, evasive and unrevealing. Despite his histrionics, the interviews added up to a big nothingburger, with plenty of cheese. To be sure, memory can be deceptive, especially after so many years. For example, Mr. Reston says in his interview that “no one ever accused Richard Nixon of being an idiot,” which I know for a fact is not true; in my youth, people did it all the time. So I looked at newspapers from when the interviews were broadcast. (I used the New York Times, which in those long-gone days was liberal but not left-wing, because that’s what the Forbes library has on microfilm.) Sure enough, the reaction was one of disappointment. According to an unsigned item in the Week in Review section, “the spectacle was a familiar one . . . Mr. Nixon moved closer than ever before to admitting culpability in the Watergate cover-up, but he insisted, as before, that he was guilty of no crime and portrayed himself, in typically Nixonian terms and gestures, as a victim of circumstance whose errors sprang from good intentions. . . . No important factual information about Watergate emerged from the interview.” If Nixon was “convicted,” it was the tapes that did it. In the Frost interviews he accepted responsibility without blame, admitted mistakes but not criminal acts, and said he had resigned voluntarily to spare the nation further turmoil. Nothing new, nothing unexpected. Viewers were unimpressed; ratings declined sharply for later installments in the series, and a poll taken afterwards showed a small decline in Nixon’s “highly unfavorable” rating, from 47 to 42 percent. How did this damp squib become a watershed, a momentous turning point, a landmark in the history of the Presidency? At first glance, the case resembles that of another play currently running on Broadway, Inherit the Wind. As is well documented (here and here, for example), most contemporary observers, including H. L. Mencken, saw the Scopes Trial as a victory for creationism; no one thought Clarence Darrow had shown up William Jennings Bryan. But later historians ignored all this and portrayed the trial the way they wished it had been. There are some similarities between that and the Nixon interviews, though the Scopes Trial got enormously more publicity when it happened, and I’m sure that Frost/Nixon does a better job of sticking to the truth (it could hardly do worse). Yet I think a closer Broadway parallel lies in the recent rash of “jukebox musicals,” in which the works of ABBA or Billy Joel are woven in a story and performed on stage every night. We all know that nothing is as good as it was when you were young; the girls were prettier back then, the music was better, and the politics were more exciting and clear-cut. So now that the 1970s are in the ascendant with Broadway’s graying audiences, why not generate another batch of retro kicks with a show based on the decade’s greatest political hit, Watergate? As Mr. Reston points out, Watergate “put the nation through a terrible agony”—so terrible and agonizing that Democrats have been gleefully reliving it ever since. Cherry-pick the best moments, embed them in a backstory, hire some impersonators, and you’ve got a Broadway hit. In politics as in music, the worn-out schtick of the late 1970s seems fresh and new when it’s been out of circulation for a while. And, truth be told, we all find ourselves humming “Dancing Queen” and “Only the Good Die Young” once in a while. So there’s no harm in reliving your youth by wallowing in Richard Nixon’s reptilian charm one more time. Like Billy Joel and ABBA, it’s a guilty pleasure—though if Nixon were around today, he would be sure to dispute the “guilty” part. --------------------- * I’m sure Langella does a great job, though in my childhood, Nixon was the easiest person in the world to imitate. All you had to do was puff out your cheeks and say, “Let me make one thing perfectly clear” in a gruff voice, and you had him dead on. If you were going all out, you made V signs with your fingers--in fact, if you did that and glowered, you could imitate Nixon silently. I’m also just barely old enough to remember when people used to imitate LBJ. That might have been even easier: Just put on any sort of Southern accent, however fake, and people in our far-from-cosmopolitan little Northeastern town, where the very idea of a Southern accent was inherently hilarious, would laugh uproariously. It still worked a decade later when Jimmy Carter was President. There was a commercial for frozen waffles in which a Southern-accented mother told her husband that she’d just made waffles in the toaster, whereupon her twin little girls chimed in with: “An’ weeee he’ped!” This always put me and my siblings out of commission for the next five minutes. For the whole time I was in middle school, all you had to do was say, “An’ weeee he’ped!,” even if it made no sense in the context, and people would think you were the next Richard Pryor.
June 13, 2007
More Normandy II Posted by Alexander Burns at 05:15 PM EST Fred Smoler’s post yesterday, “More Normandy,” added some interesting thoughts to our exchange about World War II and the uses of historical analogy. Mr. Smoler summarizes my argument–that the deterioration of American efforts in Iraq followed an increase and led to a decrease in heavy-handed historical analogy from both pro-war Americans and anti-war Europeans–and remarks that it is “a very logical and initially persuasive speculation,” but one that he does not necessarily agree with. Mr. Smoler suggests that anti-American sentiment in France actually did not increase in the run-up to the Iraq war, which it presumably would have in a situation where American arrogance was provoking caustic French editorials comparing the U.S. to Nazi Germany. I’m not sure in which information Mr. Smoler is grounding his assessment of French anti-Americanism, but I’m familiar with at least one or two sources that support a different set of conclusions. In March of 2003, during the last weeks of the run-up to war, the Pew Center conducted a survey of European attitudes toward the United States and the results were grim. In France, just 31 percent of respondents reported having a positive view of the United States, compared with 63 percent who did in 2002. To be precise about what that statistic means, it may not exactly indicate a doubling of anti-American sentiment, but it does show a halving of pro-American sentiment. The drop-off in France was not as precipitous as it was in Germany (61 percent in 2002 to 25 percent in 2003) or Russia (61 percent in 2002 to 28 percent in 2003), but it’s pretty good evidence of a decline in American standing there. Additionally, over a longer time period, from April of 2002 to March of 2004, French support for an independent European foreign policy grew by 15 percent. I think Mr. Smoler is probably right, in a sense, that anti-Americanism did not increase in France after “the burst of American France-baiting in the run-up to the war”–that is to say, I don’t think the French started resenting American foreign policy because some Americans said mean things about them. I do think, though, that these data show movement away from sympathy with the United States coinciding with America’s unrelenting preparations for war. I doubt that overblown, Rumsfeldian historical analogy, and the corresponding venom from Le Monde, set this Franco-American schism in motion, but these rhetorical exchanges were at least the proverbial smoke that signaled a more dangerous fire. None of this, incidentally, clashes with the point Mr. Smoler makes in the third paragraph of his post, that “it is mostly increasing U.S. power and apparent hyper-modernity that provokes apprehension and animosity . . . When the threat of American hegemony looks most acute, any rival of America’s may look good, and Chirac sought to bring in the Chinese as French allies against the U.S. When the Americans begin to falter, a second look at the prospect of Chinese hegemony may have made that alternative seem less appealing.” Indeed, this argument meshes nicely with the one I’ve made above, regarding the relationship between war preparations, rhetoric, and Franco-American animosity. And it also helps explain why someone like Nicolas Sarkozy, who might once have been rejected as an American fifth-columnist, a twenty-first-century Pétain, just moved in to the Palais d’Élysée.
June 12, 2007
On Evil Empires Posted by Alexander Burns at 11:50 AM EST In his front-page feature today, John Steele Gordon notes the anniversary of one of Ronald Reagan’s greatest performances–his speech at the Berlin Wall. Mr. Gordon says at the start of his piece that Reagan’s speech is still a good read and an important primary source from recent history. Mr. Gordon proceeds to give a good overview of the Berlin Wall’s history, its place in the divided German nation, and its educational value as a case study of the Cold War. Mr. Gordon alludes briefly to another case study in Cold War history that nicely illustrates the balancing act of international politics. He writes: “Reagan called the Soviet Union an ‘evil empire’ in 1983, rhetoric that would have been impossible a few years earlier and that caused much tut-tutting on the left.” Reagan’s speech, in which he first referred to the U.S.S.R. as an “evil empire,” was a controversial one delivered to the National Association of
Evangelicals. The year before, in a speech to Britain’s House of Commons, Reagan had already begun experimenting with the language that he used with such flair in 1983. In a short sequence of rhetorical questions, Reagan had asked Parliament, “Must civilization perish in a hail of fiery atoms? Must freedom wither in a quiet, deadening accommodation with totalitarian evil?” It was obvious to his listeners to which “totalitarian evil” Reagan was referring. Reagan remains famous for his uncompromising stand against Soviet Communism. But what makes these strident speeches useful as illustrations of Cold War power politics is the extent to which they clashed with Reagan’s actual policies. Today, no one could get away with calling the fortieth President soft on Communism. In the year he coined the term “evil empire,” however, that was not the case. A September 18, 1983, column by David Broder, “The Right is Really Sore at Reagan . . . ,” highlighted conservatives’ disapproval of Reagan’s temperate response to the Soviet downing of Korean Air Flight 007. Activist organs like the Paul Weyrich’s Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress, Howard Phillips’s Conservative Caucus, and Richard Viguerie’s Conservative Digest blasted the President for his thoroughly un-militant reaction. Though Reagan called the Soviets’ attack “an act of barbarism,” his punitive response consisted mostly of a few gestures, like closing a couple of Aeroflot facilities in the United States. Activists like Weyrich believed that, by electing Reagan, they had installed a President who would be a tireless crusader against Communism, willing to go to almost Hobbesian lengths in order to advance the cause of capitalist democracy. And so they had. But Reagan, and the men who advised him, understood that rhetoric like the “evil empire” speech would be most effective when matched up with more measured, deliberate actions. For all the concern about his admitted belief in an impending apocalypse, Reagan did not actually want a nuclear war.
By berating and intimidating his Russian counterparts with fierce, even reckless rhetoric (which angered the left), but simultaneously showing them that the door to negotiated reform was open (angering the right), Reagan helped lay the groundwork for the substantive breakthroughs of the late 1980s.
June 12, 2007
More Normandy Posted by Fredric Smoler at 10:35 AM EST Alex Burns wrote, in response to my post on a visit to Normandy in June of 2004, that this year’s anniversary saw so many fewer comparisons between the U.S. and the Third Reich, and so much less notice of the anniversary in every respect, for a straightforward reason, which is that decennial anniversaries make for a bigger splash. He also suggests “two other explanations, both related to the use and abuse of historical memory. The first is that, while critics of American policy are apparently less willing, this week, to twist the stories of World War II in order to assail the United States, so are boosters of American policy more timid in their creative employment of the same stories. In 2004, Le Monde editorialists were not the only ones misusing the history of the Second World War. At the Republican National Convention, Rudy Giuliani likened George Bush to Winston Churchill, and in an interview with ‘Good Morning America,’ Dick Cheney seemed to liken himself to FDR while answering a question about the relationship between military service and presidential leadership. What’s more, at least as early as 2002, Donald Rumsfeld was likening the Bush administration’s global attitude to that of Churchill in 1938 and implying, less than subtly, that its liberal critics had more in common with the hapless Neville Chamberlain.” This is a very logical and initially persuasive speculation, but thinking it over, I am not sure that I agree with it. The implication seems to be that the analogy-mongering on both sides meant that absurd levels of anti-Americanism were provoked by absurd levels of Francophobia (and Europhobia). However, in the case of France, where the ludicrous Hitler analogy I quoted had surfaced, anti-Americanism did not actually increase in the wake of the invasion of Iraq and the burst of American France-baiting in the run-up to the war. France was the only Western European country where anti-Americanism did not increase in 2003-2004—it had reached its natural (and pretty high) limit under President Clinton (a man the French did not particularly dislike). French anti-Americanism does not seem to track egregiously bad behavior by the United States, for its modern form dates to 1927, which was not a date of peculiarly vicious American misbehavior, but did see the publication of a striking cluster of anti-American books, starting a very durable tendency in French intellectual fashion (as reported by Phillipe Roger in The American Enemy: The History of French Anti-Americanism). A modern low in the sentiment was hit in the mid-1980s, when President Reagan made us loathed over much of Western Europe, but not in France, which had recently discovered the Soviet gulag. Oddly enough, now that the war in Iraq is going as badly as both Chirac and the French Left had predicted, the Fifth Republic’s most pro-American French President has just been elected. How can we account for this? Here’s one guess: In June of 2004, it was not so clear that Iraq would go so badly, so the perceived danger of American hegemony (to French amour propre, at any rate) looked very real. That is also what happened in 1927—we looked like we were going to leave Europe in the dust. It didn’t help that we hadn’t done anything for France lately, nor that we did not look like a reliable partner against a resurgent Germany. On Roger’s theory, it is mostly increasing U.S. power and apparent hyper-modernity that provokes apprehension and animosity, and my guess is that comparisons to the Nazis are simply the ultimate expression of those sentiments. When the threat of American hegemony looks most acute, any rival of America’s may look good, and Chirac sought to bring in the Chinese as French allies against the U.S. When the Americans began to falter, a second look at the prospect of Chinese hegemony may have made that alternative seem less appealing. There are various other possibilities, of which the most Francophile is a notion I once saw asserted by Ralph Peters, interviewed a couple of years back in American Heritage, although that is not where I came across the remark. Peters observed that the French are actually foul weather friends—they are only there when we really need them. We did not think we needed them in 2003-2004, and they didn’t turn up. We need them more now, and here they seem to be. Alex Burns offers a second theory about the decline of the U.S.-in-Iraq-as-Hitler analogy, which is that “a more apt historical analogy has developed for the Iraq war: Vietnam. These days, when people talk about Iraq, they are far more likely to refer to the Tet Offensive than the Normandy invasion.” Mr. Burns is skeptical about the perfection of this analogy, and I agree with him. Some people did make the Vietnam analogy in 2004, although I have the impression that this was more common in the U.S. and the Third World than in Europe. My guess is that the Vietnam analogy was less impressive in 2004 because the memory of the apparently effortless American victory of 2003 was too recent, and in France it may even have looked a bit like the German victory of 1940, although with fewer casualties to either civilians or invaders. It is in any case worth remembering that the U.S. war in Vietnam in its own day itself provoked a fair amount of the very hardy U.S.-as-the-Nazis analogy. The only other people to be as frequently compared to the Nazis are the Israelis, while in the most recent books on the strategic bombing of the Second World War and the forced transfer of populations in 1945, one could be forgiven for thinking that the Nazis have become the Jews. It’s a lively world out there in analogy land.
June 10, 2007
Joy and Serendipity in Archival Research II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 10:30 AM EST Ellen Feldman’s most interesting post reminded me of my own two great moments in research, although only in one case archival. As with her, they were not Lincoln letters, alas, but peculiarly satisfying nonetheless, one bit of joy, one bit of serendipity. When I was writing about New York City in the 1840s I turned, as all who need to know about New York City in the 1840s must, to Philip Hone’s diary. Hone (1780–1851) had been mayor of New York in the 1820s and was one of its leading citizens until his death. His diary, along with that of his younger contemporary, the lawyer George Templeton Strong (1820–1875), are simply indispensable to the history of New York as it exploded in size from a modest seaport to the megalopolis of the western hemisphere. They are also very good reading, and Strong’s diary is often very, very funny. By the 1840s Hone was getting old and crotchety, bemused and often annoyed. In 1844, for instance, he wrote, “. . . this world is going too fast. Improvements, politics, reform, religion—all fly. Railroads, steamers, packets, race against time and beat it hollow. Flying is dangerous. By and by we shall have balloons and pass over to Europe between sun and sun. Oh, for the good old days of heavy post-coaches and speed at the rate of six miles an hour!” I was struck by the now-trite phrase “the good old days.” I suddenly realized, however, that before Hone’s generation there had been no such thing. Hone’s parents and grandparents and great-grandparents had been born into a world that had been relatively unchanging in terms of its technology and economics, and therefore its social and political relationships. Until the first decades of the nineteenth century, the old days had been pretty much the same as the new days, at least as to how life was lived day to day. I wondered when was the first use of the phrase, “the good old days,” and so I turned, as again one must, to the Oxford English Dictionary. To my utter delight, the first use of the phrase given in the OED was 1848. I had found one four years older and, so far as I know, the very first use of the phrase. I became interested in this first generation to experience what we now take for granted—ceaseless technological change and its affect on our quotidian existence—and I wrote about it for American Heritage here. My little bit of serendipity came when I was in the New York Public Library looking for letters by Jim Fisk, the Wall Street figure who was spectacularly murdered in 1872. (See my book The Scarlet Woman of Wall Street: Jay Gould, Jim Fisk, Cornelius Vanderbilt, the Erie Railway, and the Birth of Wall Street.) He didn’t write many, and the one I found that day was of no interest, having been written by a secretary on a trivial subject and only signed by Fisk. In the same folder, however, was a letter written by Henry Adams when he had been serving as secretary for his father Charles Francis Adams, who was minister to Great Britain during the Civil War. I forget what the letter concerned, for what fascinated me was Henry Adams’s handwriting. It was as regular and precise as though it had been written by a machine. Nineteenth-century handwriting was often very readable, as students were taught penmanship in school then and good handwriting was a sign of a good education. It was also, of course, the only way for a person to communicate by writing in those days, and so it simply had to be readable. Adams’s handwriting was something else entirely, very atypical of the handwriting of the day and completely devoid of even the slightest carelessness. It was the handwriting of a calligrapher, not a secretary, with a peculiar cramped style. I had always disliked Henry Adams, brilliant as he was, and now I knew exactly why: Anyone with handwriting like that had to be a most unpleasant human being.
June 9, 2007
Joy and Serendipity in Archival Research Posted by Ellen Feldman at 03:15 PM EST The June 8 edition of The New York Times reported the discovery in the National Archives of a two-sentence letter written by Abraham Lincoln to Major General Henry W. Halleck, the Union general in chief, in the wake of the Union victory at Gettysburg. The contents of the letter was known, because the two sentences had been forwarded by telegram to General Meade, though without the original document the accuracy of the Halleck’s telegram would always be in question. More to the point, or at least my point, the archivist who found the letter, Trevor Plante, was not searching for it. “I was looking for something else,” Plante said. Archival research, as anyone who has done it knows, can be tedious, frustrating, and fruitless. Few of us will ever experience the thrill of finding a missing Lincoln letter. But spend enough time burrowing into original documents and you are almost sure to experience at least an occasional moment of serendipity and joy. Plante’s discovery stuck me with special force, because I had just returned from the Houghton Library at Harvard. I had gone there to study some Margaret Sanger documents in the papers of the American Birth Control League, and I found what I was looking for. I also stumbled across a letter I had heard about but never read verbatim. This was not a discovery. The letter was catalogued. Others had seen it. But holding in my hand the worn stationery and reading Sanger’s exact words to her husband brought me suddenly closer to the story and revealed the wily woman behind the fearless warrior. Sometimes revisiting even well-known documents provides rewards. A few years ago, when I was researching a book on Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd, I kept running across references in secondary sources to a letter from ER to her mother-in-law early in her marriage. The quote did not show the future First Lady at her best. She complains of the “Jew party” at Bernard Baruch’s and says she never wishes “to hear money, jewels, or labels mentioned again.” ER’s early anti-Semitism did not surprise me. I took it as a signpost indicating how far she traveled from the point where she began. But the word labels confused me. In all the pictures I studied, I never spotted a small polo player on FDR’s shirts or an LV on ER’s handbags. I did not go back to the original letter to check it. I was too busy stalking the less well-documented Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd. But another historian did, and managed to decipher ER’s difficult handwriting, made more illegible by her habit of writing first horizontally, then vertically over it in an old-fashioned attempt to save paper. What she wishes never to hear mentioned again is not labels but sables, a luxury far more in keeping with the early years of the twentieth century. Lest I sound too much like a Luddite in praise of original documents, I must add that the one infinitesimal historical discovery I ever made came not from archival sources but from the wonders of technology. Most historians date Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd’s first visit to the White House, under her secret service code name of Mrs. Johnson, to August 1941. Thanks to the constant updating of the presidential chronology, I found a meeting on June 5 of the same year. The difference of several weeks would not seem important to anyone other than an obsessed writer, except for the incidents of the previous evening. While Lucy and the President met for the first time in more than two decades, Marguerite “Missy” LeHand, FDR’s personal secretary and constant companion during those same two decades, lay in her small room on the third floor of the White House, incapacitated by the after-effects of a stroke suffered the night before. Thus, as one woman exited FDR’s life, another reentered it. The digitalization of sources is a boon to historians, just as the dusty original documents will always be a seduction. According to Allen Weinstein, the United States archivist, the discovery of the Lincoln letter “reminds us that history is a dynamic thing, new information will always come to light.” I might add to that the idea that subsequent students of history will always experience anew the thrill of connecting with old documents.
June 9, 2007
The Still-Important Lessons of America’s War Against Mexico Posted by Allen Barra at 09:55 AM EST America’s 1846–1848 war with Mexico was one of the most important and most consequential events in our history. It is also the least known and understood of our wars. Professor Timothy J. Henderson of Auburn University Montgomery has written A Glorious Defeat: Mexico and Its War with the United States, one of the first studies of the war and its impact on the Americas from a Mexican perspective. Professor Henderson answered these questions from his home in Montgomery, Alabama. A very good case could be made for calling America’s war with Mexico the most important in our history. By that I mean that many historians feel that one way or another America would eventually have gained its independence from Britain, which leaves the Mexican War as the one that most shaped the country as we know it today. In addition, it also helped create the conditions for the American Civil War. Would you concur with some or all of this? I would love to be able to say that I think this was the most important war in our history. That might be good for book sales. But when you think about it, in history everything that happens leads to whatever happens next, so I don’t think it’s really possible to take any one event out of context and say it’s the most important. In fact, in the first chapter of my book I make the case that the different ways in which the United States and Mexico gained their independence was crucial to how the two countries developed subsequently. The Founding Fathers of the United States were broadly in agreement on most of the important issues. They wanted independence, they wanted representative government, they wanted certain basic rights to be guaranteed, they didn’t want a state church, and so forth. Mexico’s founding fathers had serious disagreements on those fundamental points, which made it hard for them to get much constructive work done. The result was that as the United States grew stronger and wealthier, Mexico grew weaker and poorer. So from this perspective, the wars of independence look pretty decisive. But then you have to ask what caused the wars of independence to go the way they did. Would U.S. independence have been the same had it not been for, say, the Glorious Revolution? Would Mexico’s independence experience have been the same had the wars of the Spanish conquest gone differently? Of course, if you keep on like this you’re going to end up back with Cain slaying Abel, but I think that’s how history operates. It’s all of a piece. I also think people have a healthy skepticism toward authors who go around crowing about how important their topic is. But then again, let’s face it: The U.S.–Mexican War was extremely important. It doubled the size of the United States, halved the size of Mexico, laid the groundwork for two civil wars, and embittered U.S. relations with the rest of the hemisphere down to the present day. And what’s really remarkable is how little attention it’s received from historians. I think if you go into a bookstore in search of a book on the U.S.–Mexican War, it’s a pretty sure bet you’re going to be leaving empty-handed. Meanwhile, you’ll find truckloads of books on the Civil War and World War II. I’m not exactly sure what accounts for that. May I suggest that the reason so little has been written on it is because Americans have always seemed to be a little guilty about the Mexican War? Ulysses S. Grant, for one, did not seem proud to have served in it; late in his life he called the war “one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation.” Congressman Abraham Lincoln and Congressman (and ex-President) John Quincy Adams spoke out against it passionately. In Kurt Andersen’s novel Heyday, which came out earlier this year, his chief protagonist is a veteran who is ashamed to have fought in it. When I first read Andersen’s novel, I thought he was projecting a modern attitude back on the wary, but I was surprised at how many prominent Americans were against it at the time. Do you think the war gave Americans something of an uneasy conscience that has stayed with us? I think there may be something to that, though I wouldn’t want to overstate it. First of all, most professional historians—and by that I mean the type that work in universities and write books they don’t necessarily expect to be widely read—are not likely to shy away from a topic because they think it makes their country look bad. Excessive national pride can be a real liability in a profession that prizes objectivity. Second, while it’s true that there was a lot of opposition to the war at the time, that opposition was for a wide variety of reasons, most of which had little to do with sympathy for Mexico. Some thought the war would weaken the South and slavery; some thought the manner in which the war was started subverted the democratic process; still others fretted about how the addition of more territory might be somehow detrimental to the United States. Some military men took a dim view of the war simply because they deemed their opponents to be racially inferior and hence unworthy. As for our own time, my suspicion is that most people nowadays don’t have many strong feelings one way or another about the war, simply because they know almost nothing about it. I talk to people all the time—intelligent, educated folks—who are genuinely surprised to learn that the Southwest came to us by way of a war with Mexico. That’s true even of people who’ve lived their entire lives in the Southwest, and of people who grew up in towns with names like “Buena Vista” and “Monterrey.” If more people knew the circumstances under which the United States began the war with Mexico, they might have cause to cringe. But my impression is that folks who like to read about wars tend to favor military history, and from a purely military standpoint the United States acquitted itself very well in Mexico. The bottom line, I think, is that for Americans—and most peoples of the world, I would guess—winning counts for a great deal, and the United States won the war with Mexico decisively. In the bargain, it achieved the objective of territorial expansion, which I think most Americans broadly supported. And when I read some of the rhetoric in the debate on immigration, I don’t see a nation wracked by guilt over past injustices to Mexico. The most enigmatic Mexican of the war period is Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna. To most Americans he is simply the man who killed Davy Crockett at the Alamo and who surrendered Texas to Sam Houston. It’s astonishing to read about Mexican history and find out that a man so seemingly unprincipled could have been such an influence on Mexican politics for so long. What was the secret of his longevity in Mexico? Were there no better and stronger candidates to rule Mexico? Good question. If you look at some of the lowlights of Santa Anna’s career, it’s really hard to understand how anyone could have taken him seriously. Among those lowlights were the notorious massacres at the Alamo and Goliad; the elaborate state funeral he held for his amputated foot; his marriage, at age 50, to a girl of 15, and that coming only a few weeks after the death of his well-regarded wife of 19 years. And then there was the way he insisted on being treated as Old World royalty in what was supposed to be a republic. All of that makes him look to us like a monster or a buffoon. I think there are several reasons for his longevity. First, Mexican politicians of the day were extremely divided between conservatives, who wanted to preserve the old society inherited from colonial days, and liberals, who wanted to change just about everything. There were very talented men on either side, but there was practically no possibility that either side would cooperate with their opponents. Santa Anna wasn’t identified with either side (or, more accurately, he was identified with both sides at different points in his career). People tended to see him as a man of action, someone who would do things while the politicians bickered. His reputation for decisiveness, by the way, was not undeserved. He did tend to take action, even if his actions were not always based on sound judgment. Also, he was very good at cultivating support within the Army and in his home region of Veracruz, which was strategically very important. But in the end I think the crucial factor is something we will never quite understand, given that we will never have the opportunity to actually meet the guy. You can find lots of statements from people who knew the details of Santa Anna’s career and had every reason to be cynical about him, but when they met him face to face they reported that he was nothing like what they’d expected. He seemed to them to be very sober, serious, and impressive, someone you instinctively trust and are inclined to follow. A born leader. His contemporaries obviously saw something in him that gets lost in any mere account of the details of his career. Not to defend the concept of Manifest Destiny, but given the burgeoning power of the United States and the relative weakness of Mexico, was the seizure of Mexico’s northern territories inevitable? Was there a point in the history of Mexican-American relations where things might have been handled differently, possibly resulting in a more amicable settlement of problems? I think Mexico was bound to lose its northern territories one way or another. In fact, Mexico never really had effective control of those territories. If Mexico had had the wherewithal to populate and defend those lands, it probably would never have invited a bunch of Anglos from the United States to settle in Texas in the first place. What military resources Mexico had were being squandered largely on domestic squabbles, and they clearly lacked the capacity to defend those faraway places from predatory nations. And strong nations were indeed predatory. If the United States hadn’t taken those lands from Mexico, some other power likely would have. As for whether the dispute could have been settled more amicably, I think it could have, but there are an awful lot of ifs involved. If the United States had truly understood what a sensitive political issue this was for Mexicans, or at least for Mexican politicians, it might have found a way to purchase Mexico’s lands that would have allowed Mexico to claim some honor and dignity. If Mexico’s leaders had found a way to compromise with one another, they might have found a way to negotiate a deal and claim it as a victory. They might even have found a way to actually populate and defend their northern territories. But the United States was impatient, aggressive, and arrogant. Mexicans were understandably alarmed at the U.S. tendency to lump Mexicans in with those “inferior” races that deserved to be despoiled and dominated. For their part, Mexican politicians were quick to play the blame game. Since successes in Mexico were so few and far between, it was essential to blame someone else for the failures, whether it be rival politicians or the evil United States. José Joaquín de Herrera, who was president of Mexico in 1845, during the crisis over the annexation of Texas, wanted to negotiate the matter and was overthrown for it. For many Mexican politicians and military men, compromise signaled weakness. Showing weakness in a confrontation with the United States could, many Mexicans felt, result in the end of their existence as a nation. So in the end, given the prevailing attitudes on both sides at the time, an amicable solution seems pretty unlikely. Still, the U.S.–Mexican War was so unnecessary and it involved so many dumb decisions—it was like most wars in that respect, I guess—that it’s hard not to think a better outcome could have been reached with just a wee bit more wisdom and patience. You write in your preface that “the immigration issue periodically flares into heated debate, as it did while I was completing this book. On the American far right, some hysterically characterize Mexican immigration as an ‘invasion.’ One fringe group even conjures the specter of a ‘Conquest of Aztlan’–a term often used by Chicano right activists for the territory of northern Mexico ceded to the U.S. by the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848—charging that the Mexican government is actively abetting a conspiracy to retake the lands it lost to the United States in 1948.” How can a study of the Mexican War help us to understand and better deal with the immigration controversy of our own time? I’m struck by how similar the debate on immigration is to the debates that preceded the U.S.–Mexican War. The debate tends to treat Mexico as if it were at best irrelevant to the issue, or at worst an agent of evil. It seems that the debaters seldom take into account that the problem now is identical to the problem then, namely the vast disparity in wealth and power between the two countries. Many of the migrants who come here have to abandon their families and endure tremendous hardship. It’s not as if they want to do that; they’re merely behaving as perfectly rational economic actors, going where the jobs are. So it’s offensive when people portray them as an evil brown-skinned horde intent on subverting our nationality and sapping our prosperity. Obviously, if Mexico were to become a prosperous and stable country, then the flow of illegal immigrants would slow to a trickle. Problem solved. During the negotiations on the formation of the European Union, the problem of disparities in wealth was taken into account, and the wealthier countries invested billions to develop the economies of poorer countries like Spain and Portugal. That’s worked out very well for all concerned. By contrast, when the United States, Canada, and Mexico negotiated NAFTA, it seemed that all parties took it for granted that Mexico would be a permanent junior partner, mostly a source of cheap labor and lax environmental rules. The idea that the three countries might one day achieve parity, perhaps even be joined into a single economic unit, was not admitted even as a distant goal or a wild fantasy. It seems to me that there is a fatalistic assumption—and unfortunately it’s an assumption made by many Mexicans as well as Americans, by defenders of immigration as well as its critics—that nothing can be done to make Mexico more prosperous. Such assumptions poison the entire debate. People who want to defend immigration happily point out that Mexicans are willing to do nasty, low-paid jobs that are just too hard or disgusting for Americans to do—and they say it as if this is a good thing. I have a hard time seeing that as a positive. Do we really want to encourage the formation of a permanent underclass of ethnically distinct people doing disagreeable menial labor? Isn’t that kind of what slavery was all about? And yet the notion that Mexicans might aspire to well-paid, non-menial jobs is downright horrifying to many Americans, who apparently assume Mexicans were created for the very purpose of doing grunt labor. Other defenders of immigration argue that it’s beneficial to Mexico, since Mexican workers in the United States send about $20 billion a year to their families back home. That sum is equal to the amount Mexico gets from selling oil, its most lucrative export. That money supposedly aids Mexican development and stability. But here again, is it really healthy for an economy to be so dependent on money sent home by low-paid immigrants living in a foreign country? Wouldn’t it be better for both countries to seriously explore means to achieve mutual, and mutually reinforcing, prosperity? Just asking. I really think one of the reasons there’s so little progress on the immigration issue is that the old concept of Manifest Destiny, although it may have morphed a bit over the years, is still alive and well. In a recent interview with John McCain, Bill O’Reilly suggested that immigrants are breaking down the “white, Christian, male power structure” of the United States. And McCain, a contender for the Presidency of the United States, agreed with him. I’m actually kind of impressed that these guys would come right out and say what so often is an unspoken subtext. There’s an enduring and extremely smug assumption that the lands of North America were bestowed upon Anglo-Americans by God himself, and the presence of non-white, non-English-speaking people in our midst, in a condition anywhere approaching equality, is tampering with something that was divinely ordained. I don’t get much sense that these folks are aware that our Southwestern lands were actually taken at gunpoint in a war that was waged on a notoriously bogus pretext. And McCain’s from Arizona. Someone should ask him about that.
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