RICHARD PIPES is one of our most eminent historians. His books on Russian and Soviet history have been among the most influential and (at least as far as the academic left and Russian nationalists like Alexander Solzhenitsyn are concerned) among the most controversial. But his new autobiography--"Vixi," Latin for "I lived" --is of interest not just for his academic work but also for his service as a White House adviser. The book is also an informal history of the last days of the Cold War, documented in dramatic fashion by someone who was most assuredly not a belonger in official Washington.
Pipes came to America in 1939 as a sixteen-year-old refugee from Poland. A Warsaw-born predecessor in the White House, Zbigniew Brzezinski, was already in Canada with his family when World War II broke out--and one wonders what the Kremlin thought when two anti-Communist Poles became White House foreign-policy advisers: Brzezinski as national-security adviser to a waffling Jimmy Carter, and Pipes as a national-security desk officer to Ronald Reagan. Moving from his longtime Harvard to Washington during the first two years of Reagan's presidency, Pipes was able to apply his knowledge and sense of strategy to the formulation of policies that helped bring down the Soviet Union.
He had had some earlier experience with Washington as a member of the Committee on the Present Danger and later as head of an official group that audited the CIA's analyses of the Soviet economy--and found the CIA work to be woefully inadequate. Unfortunately, this experience didn't prepare him for the kind of stealth needed to win Washington's battles.
Nevertheless, Pipes's appointment (thanks to Richard V. Allen, head of the National Security Council and himself a leading anti-Soviet strategist) was felicitous: a president who believed that the Soviet Union was not here to stay, a national-security chief who shared that view, and a Polish-American intellectual who agreed wholeheartedly. And they were all blessed with such superb speechwriters as Tony Dolan and Peter Robinson, and their successors who shared their clients' anti-Sovietism. That was why Reagan made his "evil empire" and Westminster speeches, and why later in 1987, over the hysterical objections of the State Department, he spoke at the Brandenburg Gate, with the Berlin Wall behind him, to utter his dramatic apostrophe to the Soviet Union: "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall."
One thing is clear from "Vixi": Pipes simply didn't or wouldn't understand the principles of a town where a bureau chief frequently has more power than his cabinet-secretary superior. As Pipes, the Harvard professor, describes it: "Such vanity as I possess was and remains that of an intellectual who wants to influence the way people think and feel rather than one who enjoys power over them or craves the status of a celebrity."
But the only sure way to achieve that influence is through political power. Henry Kissinger wrote a number of highly influential foreign-policy books as a Harvard professor. His influence, however, only became measurable when he went to work for President Nixon as national security adviser, a post from which he made his great leap forward to become secretary of state.
Pipes's complaint about mistreatment by Allen--who, he says, looked upon Pipes "as a potential rival and hence kept me in the background"--is unattractive. Far more significant is Pipes's assertion that Nancy Reagan and Michael Deaver took a dim view of Allen "since they were determined to tame Reagan's anti-communism and draw him closer to the mainstream," the mainstream being the anti-anti-communism which, I assume, they favored. Mrs. Reagan, he says, "was troubled by her husband's reputation as a primitive cold warrior." Anti-Communists like Allen and Pipes did not fit into the Nancy Reagan-Deaver world. Deaver and James Baker, says Pipes, "seemed to treat [Reagan] like a grandfather whom one humors but does not take seriously."....
Much of what Pipes complains about in Washington ought not to have come as a surprise to him. He was accorded respect and attention, he says,"not for what I did, said or wrote but for what I was or at any rate was perceived to be"--but why should exposure to the universal condition of mankind be a shock? He felt"muzzled because I was sufficiently highly positioned so that every word I uttered could be interpreted as representing the administration"--but why shouldn't the media consider an interview with a famous historian about German and Soviet foreign policy, conducted in the Executive Office Building across the road from the Oval Office, as reflecting the views of the president who appointed him?

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Edward Said's Legacy: A Negative View (posted 9-29-03)

Ibn Warraq ("a pseudonym used to protect himself and his family from Islamists") is the author of Why I am Not a Muslim; writing in the Wall Street Journal (Sept. 29, 2003):

Late in life, Edward Said made a rare conciliatory gesture. In 1998, he accused the Arab world of hypocrisy for defending a Holocaust denier on grounds of free speech. After all, free speech "scarcely exists in our own societies." The history of the modern Arab world was one of "political failures," "human rights abuses," "stunning military incompetences," "decreasing production, [and] the fact that alone of all modern peoples, we have receded in democratic and technological and scientific development."
Those truths aside, Mr. Said, who died last week, will go down in history for having practically invented the intellectual argument for Muslim rage. "Orientalism," his bestselling manifesto, introduced the Arab world to victimology. The most influential book of recent times for Arabs and Muslims, "Orientalism" blamed Western history and scholarship for the ills of the Muslim world: Were it not for imperialists, racists and Zionists, the Arab world would be great once more. Islamic fundamentalism, too, calls the West a Satan that oppresses Islam by its very existence. "Orientalism" lifted that concept, and made it over into Western radical chic, giving vicious anti-Americanism a high literary gloss.
In "Terror and Liberalism," Paul Berman traces the absorption of Marxist justifications of rage by Arab intellectuals and shows how it became a powerful philosophical predicate for Islamist terrorism. Mr. Said was the most influential exponent of this trend. He and his followers also had the effect of cowing many liberal academics in the West into a politically correct silence about Islamic fundamentalist violence two decades prior to 9/11. Mr. Said's rock-star status among the left-wing literary elite put writers on the Middle East and Islam in constant jeopardy of being labeled "Orientalist" oppressors -- a potent form of intellectual censorship.
"Orientalism" was a polemic that masqueraded as scholarship. Its historical analysis was gradually debunked by scholars. It became clear that Mr. Said, a literary critic, used poetic license, not empirical inquiry. Nevertheless he would state his conclusions as facts, and they were taken as such by his admirers. His technique was to lay charges of racism, imperialism, and Eurocentrism on the whole of Western scholarship of the Arab world -- effectively, to claim the moral high ground and then to paint all who might disagree with him as collaborators with imperialism. Western writers employed "a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient." They conspired to suppress native voices that might give a truer account. All European writings masked a "discourse of power." They had stereotyped the "Other" as passive, weak, or barbarian. "[The Orientalist's] Orient is not the Orient as it is, but the Orient as it has been Orientalized," he said.

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How Gerhard Weinberg Discovered Hitler's Second Book (posted 9-25-03)

Daniel Johnson, writing in telegraph.co.uk (Sept. 25, 2003):

In 1958, Gerhard Weinberg made the kind of discovery that features in every historian's dreams. During his summer holidays, the young American scholar had been examining captured German military documents in the US Army archives, which - back then - were housed in a converted torpedo factory in Alexandria, across the Potomac from Washington DC. Before being shipped back to Germany, each one was being microfilmed.

Humdrum work, but Weinberg was alert to a remote yet exciting possibility. In a memoir, one of Hitler's secretaries had mentioned a "secret" book about Nazi foreign policy - Weinberg's special subject. Then, when Hitler's Table Talk was published by Hugh Trevor-Roper (later Lord Dacre) in 1953, there was a reference to this "unpublished work" by Hitler himself. Weinberg hoped to track it down one day, though it was not easy to know where to look.
One day, leafing through the contents of a green box-file, he found a folder labelled "Draft of Mein Kampf". Inside was a 324-page typescript: "The moment I looked at it, read the opening lines and the attached document on its confiscation, it became obvious to me that this was not a draft of Mein Kampf. In fact, this was the book to which I had seen references," he says.
It was a dramatic moment: Weinberg had unearthed a previously unknown second book by Hitler, the only one he ever wrote after Mein Kampf. "This thing in fact existed and was here! It really existed, it had survived," says Weinberg, recalling his excitement. "Lots of stuff, after all, had been destroyed - and now this could be made accessible to anybody who had an interest in it."
By a stroke of good fortune, it had already been declassified by the authorities, which meant there was nothing to stop Weinberg making it public. Before there could be any question of publication, however, he had to be sure that it was authentic. Though this was a quarter of a century before the great "Hitler Diaries" hoax - which damaged the reputations of the Times, the Sunday Times and the late Lord Dacre - Weinberg was already aware of the danger of forgery.
The document itself, though yellowing, was in decent condition. Weinberg applied the logical methods of Sherlock Holmes: "If you look carefully, you can see that it has been dictated straight on to a typewriter, because, periodically, there is a space and then a full stop or a comma. In other words, the person who was typing thought there was another word coming and had already hit the space bar, then realised it was the end of the sentence or there was a comma coming. And I knew from other information that it was a practice of Hitler's to dictate on to the typewriter. So the physical appearance of the document was consistent with the way that Hitler actually operated."
The provenance of the typescript was good: it had been found among other documents known to be genuine. According to the brief report appended by the American officer who confiscated it in 1945, this copy had been kept in the safe of the Nazi publishing house and then handed over by Josef Berg, the manager, who thought it had been written "more than 15 years ago" (i.e. before 1930).
The Munich Institute for Contemporary History, which had also been searching for the Hitler book, told Weinberg that it had received correspondence about it. Among the letters was one from a man called Lauer, who said that, during the war, Berg had shown him the manuscript of a book by Hitler.
"I checked up: who is Lauer and why would anybody show him secret things out of the safe?" said Weinberg. "It turned out that this was a man who had edited a whole bunch of songbooks for the Nazi party, so he knew his way around the publishing house. So it made sense that Berg, a close friend with whom he had worked there, might make himself important by saying: 'Hey - you know what we got here?' "
Berg, who was still alive, then provided a crucial detail. Writing to the institute in 1958, he mentioned that there had been another copy of the typescript. Weinberg seized on this: "At one point, after the first couple of hundred pages of what we used to call ribbon [top] copy, it suddenly changed, and the last 100 or so pages were clearly carbon copies. That suggests to me that when they were collating it, back in 1928, somebody goofed. There were, at one point, two copies - at least.
"Now, this combination of information, and a careful reading of the text, convinced me that there was no question but that this was authentic. The bits and pieces of evidence fitted together and made sense.
"All the corrections, with one exception, were made on the typewriter while Hitler was dictating. He would suddenly stop and say: 'Strike that', and Max Amann [the publisher to whom Hitler dictated the second volume of Mein Kampf as well as this second book] would 'xxx' out a few words, and then would come a new bunch of words. There is one short word corrected by ink. My guess is that this was done at the time. There is no editing; it was never worked over, even for spelling errors. It's the way it came out of the typewriter in the summer of 1928. Then it was simply stashed away."
Once the question of authenticity had been settled, Weinberg asked himself: why did Hitler's second book never appear at the time he wrote it? "I think Max [the publisher] advised him against publishing it just then," Weinberg says. It would have competed with Mein Kampf, the second volume of which was not selling well. "The following year, Hitler aligned himself with the very people he attacked in this manuscript: the people on the political Right who wanted to undo the Versailles Treaty. Hitler thought they were utter fools - but he was not about to say that in print, when they gave him money to travel all over Germany and appeal to the German people. And, later on, all kinds of other changes would have had to be made [to the book]."
Did Hitler ever refer to the book again?
"The one time when he did refer to it in his table talk was in February 1942, almost 14 years after he had written it. Obviously, in the intervening years, his decision not to publish it must reflect some kind of choice."

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Professor of Art History Honored by Smithsonian for book About Banned Homosexual Images (posted 9-25-03)

Steve Houchin, writing in the student newspaper of the Universty of Southern California (Sept. 24, 2003):

The Smithsonian American Art Museum has recognized a USC professor of art history for his book on censorship and homosexuality.
Richard Meyer, chair of the art history department and an associate professor of modern and contemporary art, won the 2003 Charles C. Eldredge Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in American Art for his book "Outlaw Representation: Censorship and Homosexuality in TwentiethCentury American Art."
"Outlaw Representation" is a study of homosexual art from the years 1934 to 2000. It examines the censorship and public scrutiny experienced by artists whose work was declared immoral and indecent.
"In a way I wrote this book as a defiance of censorship," Meyer said. "I wanted to say that these images are worth more attention and have a lot to offer. They should be taken seriously."
Works by artists such as Robert Mapplethorpe and Andy Warhol are examined in order to point out specific controversies throughout history. The book takes art that was at one time considered scandalous and gives readers the opportunity to analyze them seriously, Meyer said.
"When there are moments of public censorship the artist experiences a lot of press coverage and visibility, but under the sign of scandal," he continued. "The work is battled over by various groups and any attention to the artwork itself is lost."
Meyer, who spent a total of 10 years working on "Outlaw Representation," said the book wasn't published without conflict.
Oxford University Press asked to remove certain images from the book, Meyer said. He refused to remove any of the artwork and, consequently, the book was only published in the United States.
Meyer said he felt that if he removed images the book would become incomplete.
"I'm glad I didn't back down," he said. "I hated the idea that a book about censorship was going to be censored."
While attending graduate school at the University of California at Berkeley, a large controversy arose involving the censorship of Robert Mapplethorpe's art. In 1989 the Corcoran gallery of art canceled an exhibit of Mapplethorpe's called "The Perfect Moment" two weeks before it was supposed to open.
"For me, this was the moment I lived through where I decided I wanted to be able to contribute to the explanation of why these works are important," he said. "I really wanted to use my training as an art historian to tell a story which hadn't been told."

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Wilbur H. Siebert: A Memorial Marker to Commemorate His Research on the Underground Railroad(posted 9-23-03)

HE was considered the world's foremost authority about the historic Underground Railroad.
On Tuesday, the late Wilbur H. Siebert, grandfather of a St. Clairsville area businessman, will be honored with the dedication of a historical marker at The Ohio State University.
Siebert, a professor of history at OSU from 1893 to 1935, published dozens of books and other articles on the Underground Railroad in Ohio and elsewhere.
At the age of 80 in 1951, Professor Siebert wrote his final book, "The Mysteries of Ohio's Underground Railroads."
Siebert is being recognized by Ohio State's Department of History, and The Ohio Historical Society as part of the Ohio Bicentennial Commission's celebration of Ohio's statehood.
John S. Marshall, longtime resident of St. Clairsville and grandson of Professor Siebert, will attend Tuesday's dedication ceremony.
Marshall has maintained an impressive number of significant artifacts and memoirs of his grandfather's works.
Siebert is recognized for organizing one of the most extensive historical collections on the Underground Railroad in the United States. "When Professor Siebert began teaching history at Ohio State in 1891, there was precious little published information on the subject," noted Peter Hahn, OSU professor of history and vice chair of the department. "It's fitting to memorialize his contributions to Ohio history and Ohio's Bicentennial with this marker."

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Roy Foster: Irish Revisionist (posted 9-22-03)

Andrew Brown, writing in the Guardian (Sept. 13, 2003):

Elongated, stooped and rather handsome, like the decoration in an illuminated manuscript, Roy Foster stands against the gold-washed wall of his house in Kentish Town, north London. He cuts a strange, somewhat 90s figure, but it's not clear from which century. Is he from the 1890s, when modern Irish nationalism was conceived in the occult imagination of WB Yeats? Or the 1990s, when hatreds that had seemed to define Irish history throughout the 20th century seemed at last to lose some of their power? Most of that decade he spent on the second volume of an authorised biography of Yeats, which is also a history of the birth of modern Ireland and its myths about itself. It is an astonishing blend of scholarship and sympathy, which brings together all his preoccupations with Irish history, the English language and the role played in human affairs by dreams and desires that never came true.
"History is not about manifest destinies, but unexpected and unforeseen futures," he has written. "The most illuminating history is often written to show how people acted in the expectation of a future that never happened." This remark points to the difficulty of the task he has set himself as a historian: anyone can ascertain the things that actually happened. What's hard is the sympathetic reconstruction of the things that never happened, but which are needed to make sense of the things that did.
His Modern Ireland has become the standard history of the period from about 1600 onwards, in which Irish history was dominated by the fact that a largely Catholic country was being governed by a constitutionally Protestant one. The first volume of his Yeats biography was praised to the skies: "Absolutely marvellous," says Conor Cruise O'Brien, who also calls Foster "a very brilliant, insightful historian."
But Modern Ireland was significant not just as a history. Its publication, and its success, marked important parts of the process whereby modern Ireland came to terms with one of its own founding myths: that the essence of Ireland was forged in 700 years of oppression by the Saxon invader.
Foster was one of the generation of Irish historians who came to maturity as the price of sectarian rhetoric became apparent in the bloody shambles of Northern Ireland. Their work became known as "revisionism"and was mocked by their enemies. But it was deadly serious, because it dealt with the history and nature of Irish identity. When a war was being fought in the north and people were being blown up to decide whether Protestants could be properly Irish the question of whether Protestants had in the past been properly Irish was not a purely academic one. Nor was the related question of whether Irish history was the story of Irish nationalism. Foster is in no doubt that it was not.
"The Irish nationalist myth was energising and in many ways necessary for a couple of generations after indepen dence and the necessary reappraisals in the last generations haven't taken away from that," he says now. "I remember very distinctly in 1966, when I was 17, the commemoration of the Easter Rising. We went up to Dublin and were rather excited to see that Eamon de Valera was still there." The president was, after all, a figure from the myth himself, who had been condemned by the British to be shot after the rising.
"All this," Foster says now, "was pre- the balloon going up in the north and pre- the rebirth of the IRA. The change in perception, after all these old issues which used the old rhetoric flared into life was very marked." What made the revisionism possible, he says, was the very success of the nationalist project in producing a state where the old questions had seemed quite safely mythological. The south was "a country that over 70 years has developed a stable, mature, and increasingly confident polity while manipulating multiple forms of ambiguity in terms of national identity and political ethos - opposite parties standing for the same things, a 'first national language' spoken by next to nobody as their first national language, a claim on territory that few politicians really wanted, and a booming economy dependent on international handouts."
There was, however, one area of Irish life where this picture of history was not accepted, and that was among professional historians. From about 1940 onwards, at both the historically Catholic University College Dublin, and the historically Protestant Trinity College, the study of history was dominated by men who rejected the nationalist myth. They did not write large books, and their work was largely unknown to the general public. But they taught generations of teachers that Irish history was far more complicated than could be publicly acknowledged. The writer Colm Tóibín came up to University College Dublin in 1972 from a very hard-line republican background, which incarnated the tradition of violent republicanism. His grandfather had fought in 1916. He was shocked to discover that "my teachers didn't want to know anything about physical force republicanism. They talked about O'Connell and Parnell instead. This was in 1972, when a car-bomb campaign was being waged in the north and was being justified, not just in the name of what the other side had done last week, but also in the name of what Pearse and Connolly had died for in 1916."
The term "revisionist" first became a term of abuse in Irish historiography in the late 1970s. Ruth Dudley Edwards, whose father Owen had been one of the 40s generation of historians at University College, published a biography of Patrick Pearse in 1978. She was accused of being a revisionist: "I didn't know the word. But there was a perception that we were part of a political movement." ...The quick book to make some money was Modern Ireland, and proved to be the channel through which all the pent-up scepticism of four decades of revisionism could burst into Irish public life. "Nobody else had the grasp, the energy, the style, in a sense, to get at all that graduate work and synthesise it," says Tóibín. "It really forced itself into the Irish home. People who would have bought Tim Pat Coogan bought this instead. When you went to look anything up in in it, you got the facts, but you came away scratching your head, and refusing a grand narrative."
The distinctive quality of Modern Ireland among best-selling histories lies in the way it answers almost every question by suggesting all the answers are incomplete, and there is more to learn on almost every subject. The writer Selina Hastings met him when he was busy with it. She asked what he was doing - she was working on a biography of Nancy Mitford at the time - and when he answered "Irish history", her heart sank and it showed. "Don't worry," he said. "I'm doing it all about food and the private lives of curates."
Nothing could be more destructive of the simple certainties of the old story. The narrative swings along easily enough, but the narrative is steeped in the rational, careful, sceptical temper of Foster's mind. He wrote of FSL Lyons, a historian he greatly admired, that "his intelligence was notably subtle, reflective, interrogative" and these, say his admirers, are the qualities displayed in his own work. Irish history is full enough of atrocity but Foster reacts with irony where others might fizzle with indignation.
It all flickers playfully as summer lightning, until it strikes and scorches. In a recent paper on the role of hatred in Irish history, he writes: "Historical study of the IRA has now shown a rather different view of the strategy behind the 1981 hunger strikes than Padraig O'Malley's sensitive but over-literary analysis. As one of the prisoners put it, 'We felt that the IRA should have been slaughtering people in 20s and 30s' outside the prisons, to counterpoint the individual deaths in the Maze. This is an instructive contrast to O'Malley's reading of the tactic as 'the ancient tradition of the heroic quest, embedded in the hidden recesses of the Celtic consciousness'."
But even here, the Fosterish touch is to praise as "sensitive" the author he's about to disembowel. "Foster always uses the stiletto," says Edwards, "Whereas Conor Cruise O'Brien will use anything - even a mortar." Tóibín points out that Foster has not aligned himself against the Hume-Adams agreement that brought Sinn Fein into politics in Northern Ireland in the way the other most notable revisionists have done.

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Pipes and Kramer: Anti-Arab and Anti-Muslim, Says Joel Benin (posted 9-18-03)

Joel Benin, writing in Mondediplo.com (July 2003):

LEADING the charge against critical thinking about Islam and the Middle East in the US are Martin Kramer, Daniel Pipes, and Steven Emerson. Exploiting legitimate fears since 11 September 2001, their writings and speeches seek to impose an anti-Arab and anti-Muslim orthodoxy on Americans.
Shortly after 11 September 2001 Martin Kramer, former director of the Dayan Centre for Middle East Studies at Tel Aviv University, published a tract condemning the entire academic field of Middle East studies in North America (1).
Kramer alleges that the "mandarins" of the Middle East Studies Association of North America have imposed an intellectual and political orthodoxy inspired by Edward Said's Orientalism (2); moreover they failed to predict the attacks or warn the US public about the dangers of radical Islam. Kramer has not seen fit to criticise the FBI and the CIA, who are specifically charged with conducting intelligence and preventing crime.
Kramer also edits Middle East Quarterly, the house organ of the Middle East Forum, a neo-conservative thinktank directed by Daniel Pipes. Pipes has a long record of attempting to incite Americans against Arabs and Muslims. In 1990 he wrote: "Western European societies are unprepared for the massive immigration of brown-skinned peoples cooking strange foods and maintaining different standards of hygiene . . . All immigrants bring exotic customs and attitudes, but Muslim customs are more troublesome than most"(3).
One recent project of the Middle East Forum is Campus-Watch, a website designed to police dissent on university campuses. Its aim was to "monitor and gather information on professors who fan the flames of disinformation, incitement, and ignorance".
Campus-Watch (which has now been removed from the web due to criticism of its McCarthyite character) claimed that Middle East scholars "seem generally to dislike their own country and think even less of American allies abroad". The reason was that "Middle East studies in the US have become the preserve of Middle Eastern Arabs, who have brought their views with them".
President Bush recently nominated Pipes for a seat on the board of directors of the US Institute for Peace, a congressionally funded foundation established in 1984 "to promote the prevention, management, and peaceful resolution of international conflicts".

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John Esposito: American Dissenter (posted 9-18-03)

Omayma Abdel-Latif, writing in A HREF="http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2003/645/intrvw.htm">Al-Ahram< (July 3-9, 2003):

John Esposito acknowledges the fact that in the US he is "a controversial figure". One of America's foremost authorities and interpreters of Islam, as the Wall Street Journal once described him, Esposito is also considered to be one of the few voices of dissent within American academia. His opponents charge that he is an "apologist for Islam and soft on Muslims" and that he and his colleagues have misinformed the US administration about the true dangers of Islamist groups, contending that they underestimated the so-called Islamic threat.
Esposito dismisses such charges as "ideologically-inspired". He defines himself as simply "a scholar of Islam". For him it is almost an article of faith that there is a war being fought by some ideologues to win "the hearts and minds" of the American people. "In the old days, being controversial was fine because we had a more open society. Now we don't, so we get nailed," said 63- year-old Esposito in an interview with Al-Ahram Weekly during a brief stop in Cairo last week.
Over the past three decades, and long before the "green menace" replaced the red one, Esposito has been carving a niche for himself as an authority on matters Islamic. He is founding director of the reputable Centre for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University, a centre established in 1993 to address the issue of dialogue between Islam and the West. Esposito, once chair of the Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESNA), has written numerous articles, books and essays about Muslim politics, beliefs and cultures. His books are usually described as jargon-free and provide "a lucid introduction to truths on Islam which must become common knowledge", as Karen Armstrong, the famous theologian once said of his latest book Unholy War: Terror in the Name of Islam.

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Niall Ferguson: Now a Star (posted 9-17-03)

Cate Devine, writing in the Glasgow Herald (Sept. 15, 2003):

Niall Ferguson is in jaunty mood. "Right, chaps, what's the order of battle?" he says as he is ushered into the reception hallway of his alma mater, Glasgow Academy, to shake hands vigorously with two old masters (Latin and English). He is undaunted by the experience. In fact, he looks distinctly relieved to have left behind him the bohemian Great Western Road. The clubby welcome of the old boys, into which war metaphors are the accepted passwords, is much more his thing.
Professor Ferguson was a star pupil in the mid-1970s when the fully independent school, one of the top in Scotland, was still boys-only.
Ferguson, the handsome (some say) 39-year-old Glaswegian who won over a whole new generation of TV viewers to history with his controversial Channel 4 series about the British Empire, and who was recently poached from Oxford University by New York University, was in Glasgow to deliver the Dallachy lecture to some 300 guests of the academy. He is now the darling of the American right, and was voted most popular professor by his high-flying US students within a matter of days. You can see why. His humour is distinctly establishment. He jokes: "I feel queasy when I come back to school, and even queasier when I think of Latin. My son has just started learning it and he keeps asking me the words for things like tongue." He smiles as the others clock the significance of what he's just said. "Really? Which school?" they murmur, and another exclusive conversation begins.
I'm in the group, but not part of it. Actually, Ferguson doesn't address me once during this little male bonding exercise. It's only when we sit down in his old Latin classroom that he speaks directly to me, and that's only because he has to.
Why is he so evasive? "Because I know what you're going to say about me," he responds immediately. And what would that be? "That I'm a right-wing unionist Thatcherite." Surely he doesn't think I have an agenda? This undoubtedly brilliant man knows a bit about journalism, but obviously not that much.
He's married to Sue Douglas, the former Scotsman executive editor, ex-editor of the Sunday Express, friend of Andrew Neil, and currently an executive with Conde Nast. On his way up, Ferguson himself wrote freelance columns for the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail - though under the pseudonyms of Alec Campbell and Campbell Ferguson so as not to upset his impoverished colleagues in British academia. He now has a (pounds) 1.3m three-book contract and enjoys a superstar lifestyle, dividing his time between his bachelor pad in Manhattan and the family home in rural Oxfordshire, where Mrs F prefers to reside with their three children - Felix, nine, Freya, eight, and Lachlan, three. They will not, he tells me later, be educated in Scotland.
He looks at his exam register from 1976, tuts, and shakes his head. "I failed at the final hurdle. I only got a B in maths. There's simply no excuse for that." What exactly is wrong with getting a B in A-level maths? "I got As in everything else - history, English, and Latin. Being weak in maths is my one big intellectual regret because, along with English, it is the other global language."
He also believes firmly that everyone should learn Latin. Does it worry him that most state comprehensives no longer teach it? "Oh, don't they?" he says. "Well, it seems to me that if you are interested in history, it's important to understand the kind of people who waged the First and Second World Wars. These were the officer classes and they were drilled in the classics. Latin is an elite education, and learning it helps us understand Britain's role in the world. The Roman empire has undoubtedly cast her shadow on our mindset.
"People say that America is the new Rome, but they don't know what that means. They don't really understand what Roman civilisation was."
Ferguson's next book, and his lecture at Glasgow Academy, is about the American empire. He believes America is as imperial as Rome and Britain were in their heyday, but that it lacks self -awareness. "It is an empire in denial," he says, "and an empire that doesn't recognise its own power is a dangerous one.

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Why Is John Lott Receiving Better Treatment than Michael Bellesiles? (posted 9-12-03)

Dick Dahl, writing for joingtogether.org (Sept. 11, 2003):

Early this year, it looked as though researcher John R. Lott, Jr.'s days as an influential voice on domestic gun policy in the U.S. were over. Lott, widely touted by pro-gun activists since the publication of his book, "More Guns, Less Crime," in 1998, found himself under attack for his inability to provide evidence to support some of his claims about the effectiveness of guns for self-defense.
Most significantly, when asked to provide details of a survey that supposedly proved that 98 percent of gun defenses involved the mere brandishing of the weapon, Lott said that his computer crashed. And despite his claim that the survey was large and national, he could produce neither any records of it nor names of anyone who knew anything about it. Then, to top off Lott's apparent disgrace, a resourceful Weblogger named Julian Sanchez conducted research to show that Lott had created a fake persona named Mary Rosh for the purpose of providing rave reviews of John Lott's work.
Much of the media response to these developments was predictable. Only one year earlier, Emory University historian Michael Bellesiles had resigned from his job under fierce pressure from pro-gun advocates over his own inability to substantiate a claim in his book, "Arming America," published in 2000. In it, Bellesiles wrote that levels of gun ownership in early America were not as high as is generally believed. It was an argument that calls into question the gun lobby's assertion that firearms have always been an intrinsic part of American culture, but when he said that he could not produce notes to prove a section about the paucity of guns in early probate records because he'd lost the notes in an office flood, the National Rifle Association went on the attack. The effort was successful and Bellesiles resigned.
So when Lott's various credibility problems emerged earlier this year, the press called him the pro-gunners' Bellesiles. Understandable though the comparison may be, however, the media portrayal of the two men as equals within the two opposing ideological camps is misleading. Where Bellesiles' contribution to the overall gun-control argument was primarily interesting on a historical level, Lott's work is critically important to the pro-gun side. The pro-gun argument for minimal or no restrictions on gun ownership essentially rests on two claims: (1) The Constitution ensures individual rights to guns, as opposed to the milit