Feb. 29, 2005

Katsumoto Saotome, the historian who built a museum to commemorate the Tokyo firebombing of 1945:

Japanese people haven't fully learned from the past. I think that is the government's intention. In my opinion, they think if people learn about this miserable past then Japan will not be able to go to war in the future.

Feb. 29, 2005

Rev. John P. Wauck of Rome's Santa Croce Pontifical University:

"The irony is that the most active papacy in history is becoming the least active."

Feb. 29, 2005

William H. McNeill, in his new memoir:

I aimed at rebutting the prejudice that makes world history unacceptable to most historians because no one can assure accuracy by writing about the whole world using primary sources in all the original languages. I remain unrepentant, claiming that inferences and large doses of imagination actually have allowed the construction of a far more adequate understanding of the cosmic and human past than earlier generations achieved. I even believe that this is the central intellectual accomplishment of the twentieth century.

Feb. 25, 2005

Michela Wrong, the author of In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz: Living on the Brink of Disaster in the Congo:

The fact that the most popular recent book written on King Leopold's depredations, Adam Hochschild's King Leopold's Ghost, was the work of an American outsider rather than a Belgian speaks volumes about the deliberate amnesia Belgium developed on the actions of its beloved king.

Feb. 25, 2005

Newt Gingrich, in the course of an interview with the Christian Science Monitor that raised question about his moral authority given his three marriages:

I tell you up front, I am a sinner; I suspect you are, too. Now that we have that out of the way, let's talk about whether as a historian I can talk about how the Declaration of Independence was written, what Thomas Jefferson stands for, and whether it is good for American families to go on a walking tour of Washington to see historically the absolute fact that the Founding Fathers were deeply committed to the idea our rights come from God.

Feb. 25, 2005

Stephen F. Cohen:

The most important event of the late twentieth century began twenty years ago this month. On March 11, 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev became leader of the Soviet Union, and within a few weeks the full-scale reformation he attempted to carry out both inside his country and in its cold war relations with the West, particularly the United States, began to unfold. Perestroika, as Gorbachev called his reforms, officially ended with the Soviet Union and his leadership in December 1991. The historic opportunities for a better future it offered Russia and the world have been steadily undermined ever since.

Feb. 24, 2005

Tom Engelhardt:

Iraq has a population of approximately 25 million people, 20% of whom, roughly speaking, are Kurds who are not likely to be in American"interrogation centers" in Iraq right now. So that leaves us with about 20 million other Iraqis, which means that 1 out of every 2000 non-Kurdish Iraqis is being held under less than pleasant conditions by American forces. Figure that each of those prisoners has 9 close family members and friends likely to be angry about his imprisonment (certainly an underestimate). That brings us to 1 of every 200 Iraqis detained or closely involved with a detainee. If you do the figures just for Sunnis (undoubtedly the major part of the incarcerated population but only 20% of Iraq's population), the situation looks far, far worse. I offer this as one very partial explanation for what's fuelling the ongoing (and not about to go anywhere else or simply be defeated) insurrection. Talk about winning hearts and minds!

Feb. 24, 2005

David Kirkpatrick, reporting in the NYT:

All week, Doug Wead has said the reason he secretly recorded some of his phone calls with President Bush was for history's sake. But Wednesday, after a blast of criticism, Mr. Wead abruptly decided he had spoken too soon."History can wait," he said, promising to turn over the tapes to Mr. Bush...."My thanks to those who have let me share my heart and regrets about recent events," Mr. Wead wrote in the statement, posted on his Web site Wednesday."Contrary to a statement that I made to The New York Times, I know very well that personal relationships are more important than history.""Nobody believes my story that I saw him as a figure of history," Mr. Wead said with exasperation."I guess I have got a story that is unbelievable to people."

Feb. 22, 2005

Myrlie Evers-Williams, the widow of NAACP martyr Medgar Evers:

What was it that set Martin Luther King on fire? We need to know - to know - the history. ... I have a fear that as we embrace all that we have, we will forget what it took to get here.

Feb. 21, 2005

USA Today headline, Presidents' Day:

"Honest Abe is now an honest-to-gosh babe"

Feb. 21, 2005

Columnist Ellen Goodman:

IS IT TOO late to put a family trademark on the New Deal? The way things are going, the founding father of Social Security will be an icon for the crowd that wants to unravel it. All that's left is for the Bush administration to change its theme song from ''Hail to the Chief" to ''Happy Days are Here Again."

Feb. 21, 2005

Sam Roberts, in a news story in the NYT:

For the first time, more blacks are coming to the United States from Africa than during the slave trade. Since 1990, according to immigration figures, more have arrived voluntarily than the total who disembarked in chains before the United States outlawed international slave trafficking in 1807. More have been coming here annually - about 50,000 legal immigrants - than in any of the peak years of the middle passage across the Atlantic, and more have migrated here from Africa since 1990 than in nearly the entire preceding two centuries.

Feb. 18, 2005

Jim Horton:

Now at the opening of the twenty-first century, it is almost inconceivable that any American who does not live in total isolation could be unaware that African American history is celebrated in February. The significance of that history for the nation as a whole, however, is seldom understood by the general public and sometimes not fully appreciated in the classroom. I vividly remember during the early 1970s, when I was a beginning faculty member teaching what was then called Black History, being asked by well-meaning colleagues teaching the American history survey to give a guest lecture in that course on African Americans. “I want the students to get a little black history, and I don’t know any of that stuff” one senior professor explained. He routinely referred to black history as one of the “exotic new branches of history.” I was greatly disturbed by my colleague’s assumptions that relegated the African American experience to the outer margins of American history. At the time, I was sorely tempted to offer him a parallel opportunity to provide a lecture in my Black History class on the topic of American history.

Feb. 18, 2005

Tom Engelhardt:

A recent poll conducted by the Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience, highlighted at the History News Network website (which is always filled with provocative pieces as well as the latest news on history, recent and ancient), sent George Washington up against George W. Bush in a run for the presidency. While the first George W beat the present George W in the overall race (due to a Democratic anything-but-George-the-recent vote), he lost to our President among Republicans (those traditionalists!) by a staggering 2-to-1 margin.

Ya gotta love it! And it makes sense. After all, how many years (including that miserable, cold, ill-planned winter at Valley Forge) did it take the first George W to win his little revolution on the pathetic East Coast of our future nation, while the newest George W is taking (and making) jihadis on a planetary scale? Oh, and bad news for FF (Founding Father) George. He's slipping as an American icon too."Only 46 percent of the 800 adult Americans surveyed could identify him as the general who led the Continental Army to victory in the Revolutionary War." Am I mistaken or wasn't that the war that began when our British Allies in Basra charged up Baghdad Hill?

Feb. 18, 2005

Dov S. Zakheim, former Bush Undersecretary of Defense:

... we must be careful about grand plans to spread democracy rapidly around the region. The French revolutionary armies carried with them the promise of"liberty, equality, fraternity" as they invaded one state after another throughout the 1790s. After years of warfare, and despite being led by one of the greatest generals of all time, those armies were roundly defeated, their dream was shattered by the return of autocratic rule, and Europe was not set free.

Feb. 17, 2005

Garin K. Hovannisian, editor in chief of The Bruin Standard, an alternative student newspaper at UCLA:

My professor, Mary Corey (History, UCLA), is always inspired and never dull, even in her darkest moments. Especially in her darkest moments. When George W. Bush was reelected, Corey told our class that she was “in a decidedly bad mood,” but proceeded to give a colorful lecture anyway. She is filled with marvelous stories and spiked with a foul sense of humor. She can talk for a whole hour and you would want her to continue. But only if you are a liberal. If you are not, you find yourself decomposing in your seat or chewing through your own tongue.

Feb. 16, 2005

Max Hastings:

Today, it remains hard not to look warily upon modern Japan, a society in collective denial about its past crimes, even as Western historians publish relentless accounts of our own imperial falls of grace, most far less awful than those of Nippon.

Feb. 16, 2005

Floyd Norris, in a review of a new biography of John Kenneth Galbraith:

It was 52 years ago, after Adlai E. Stevenson lost to Dwight D. Eisenhower despite witty speeches written by Mr. Galbraith, that this economist summed up the problem in words that sound as if they could have been written last year."American liberals have made scarcely a new proposal for reform in 20 years," he wrote."It is not evident that they have had any important new ideas." In the following years, Mr. Galbraith helped to provide the ideas that shaped the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Liberals could use a new Galbraith now.

Feb. 14, 2005

Economist Arthur Laffer:

President Clinton, along with his Congress, reduced federal government spending from almost 23% of GDP to a little over 19% of GDP. He left office with the federal budget in surplus. But more importantly, Mr. Clinton provided Mr. Bush with the fiscal flexibility to do what was right. The decline in asset values that began in March of 2000, the economic slowdown and the 9/11 attacks on America were not President Bush's fault -- or even indirect consequences of his actions. And yet they led to a recession, a huge shortfall in federal tax revenues and an urgent need for additional spending on national security. Clearly President Bush should not have raised taxes on the last three people working, and he didn't. The right thing to do was to cut tax rates and increase defense spending, which is exactly what he did. The ensuing deficits that have resulted are from correct policy decisions.

Because of President Clinton, President Bush's budget deficits can easily be absorbed by the U.S. economy. If budget deficits were to remain at today's level of $412 billion per year for the next decade (not my recommendation, of course) and normal growth were 5% per annum, the national debt as a share of GDP in 2015 would be four percentage points lower than it was in 1993. And, 1993 was the beginning of an enormously prosperous period of U.S. history. From his speeches and his budget, President Bush clearly understands that this isn't good enough. He has proposed significant reductions in the growth rate of non-defense spending, which will bring these debt-to-GDP numbers way down. Without the need to cajole Congress into tax cuts or defense spending increases, he'll get what he wants.

Feb. 14, 2005

From the new book, Public Pillars, Private Lives: The Strengths and Limitations of the Modern American Presidents by Timothy Holder, John Moretta, Carl Luna and Jaime Ramon Olivares:

"Whether successful or not, the attempt to reverse the liberal legacy of the twentieth century will be the lasting legacy of George W. Bush, arguably the most significnt Republican politician since Abraham Lincoln.

Feb. 14, 2005

Chalmers Johnson, in a letter to the editor of the NYT:

To the Editor:

Re"C.I.A. Defers to Congress, Agreeing to Disclose Nazi Records" (news article, Feb. 7):

Now that the C.I.A. has agreed to release classified information about its relationships with Nazi war criminals, I hope that it will be equally forthcoming in opening up similar data about its relationships with Japanese war criminals.

There is still much that scholars do not know about the occupation of Japan by the United States, some of which continues to affect present-day Japanese politics.

Chalmers Johnson
President
Japan Policy Research Institute

Feb. 11, 2005

Jonathan Schell:

It's significant -- and discouraging -- that Sistani's first act after the election was to signal through aides that all Iraqi law should be founded in Islamic law. For all his tactical sagacity, he may turn out to belong to the long list of leaders able to win power but unable to found a just new order.

Feb. 11, 2005

Letter from Gary Hart, to the Editor of the NYT:

To the Editor:

My, how times change. David Brooks ("Mr. President, Let's Share the Wealth," column, Feb. 8) suggests giving every child born in America $1,000 to start out in life. It's a great idea, but hardly a new one.

George McGovern proposed essentially the same thing in 1972 and was hooted off the stage. Let's at least give him some of the credit.

Gary Hart
Kittredge, Colo., Feb. 8, 2005

Feb. 10, 2005

Richard Cohen:

The line -- the semiofficial one, that is -- has changed on George Bush. Where once he was supposedly the sort of guy who eschewed books and even thinking and favored instead a decision-making process that was almost entirely the product of instinct, we are now told that the president reads books -- really and truly. Among those cited, and famously so, is Natan Sharansky's"The Case for Democracy," which supposedly enthralled Bush because up to then, we may deduce, the case for democracy was not obvious to the man who heads the world's most powerful . . . er, democracy. Better late than never, I suppose.

But better yet to take all of this with a grain of salt. Bush was never the Texas dolt he was made out to be -- he is blessed with a quick and keen wit -- and he is not now a blinkin' intellectual....

Because Bush is certain he can bend history his way, he just might become one of those American presidents who is thought to have made a difference. The most recent was Ronald Reagan, who had many of Bush's qualities and won the Cold War not merely because he was there near its end but because he thought it would end and would end soon and would end on his terms.

This quality, this firm and unmistakably American belief that history is our pal, our angel -- ours, and not anyone else's -- and that we can alter it, bend it and embrace it for our own needs, explains why Bush has emerged, and been accepted, as a book-reader. It's not because he fears reliving history, either as tragedy or farce. It's because he intends to change it.

Feb. 8, 2005

Sergio Luzzatto, a historian and papal expert:

The self-humiliation that the pope inflicts on himself each day in front of the television cameras courageously recounts a thousand-year-old story. For believers, the Vicar of Christ is called on to bear witness to the dual nature of Jesus: human and divine. No matter how sick, a pope cannot step down for the simple reason that his body is not his.

Feb. 7, 2005

Charles Babington and Dan Eggen in the Washington Post:

The Senate voted 60 to 36 ... to confirm Alberto R. Gonzales as attorney general, but only a handful of Democrats backed him after days of often strident debate over his role in setting controversial interrogation policies for detainees. … Not since 1925, when the Senate twice rejected attorney general nominee Charles B. Warren, has a nominee received as few minority-party votes as Gonzales did, according to Senate historians.

Feb. 7, 2005

Edmund L. Andrews, in the NYT:

Chad Kolton, a spokesman for the White House Office of Management and Budget, said Mr. Bush was on track to cut the deficit by half over the next five years."We have a two-pillar approach for getting the budget deficit down by half," Mr. Kolton said,"by restraining the growth in government spending and encouraging greater economic growth that leads to higher tax revenues."

But even if rising tax revenues do help reduce the deficit over the next five years, the subsequent five years are likely to be far more difficult.

For starters, Mr. Bush wants to permanently extend his tax cuts rather than allow them to expire by 2011. That would cost about $1.8 trillion over the next decade, and most of the cost would occur after 2009.

If Congress prevents an expansion of the alternative minimum tax, which Mr. Bush has said he wants, the cost would be $500 billion over the next decade and well over half of those costs would in the second five years.

Those blows would be hitting the budget at the same time that the costs of the new Medicare prescription drug programs approach $100 billion a year and as the flood of baby boomers start to claim Social Security and Medicare entitlements.

By that time, however, Mr. Bush will no longer be in office.

Feb. 5, 2005

Bob Woodward:

"Watergate is like an octopus, only its got hundreds of tentacles and sides and parts."

Feb. 4, 2005

Juan Cole:

'"Actually, it's a lot of fun to fight. You know, it's a hell of a hoot. ... It's fun to shoot some people. I'll be right upfront with you, I like brawling." He added,"You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn't wear a veil. You know, guys like that ain't got no manhood left anyway. So it's a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them." '

T.E. Lawrence,"Lawrence of Arabia," was tortured and almost driven mad when he realized he got a thrill from shooting a man dead. His sadistic pleasure in killing Ottoman troops in Syria seems to have been wrought up with his rape by an Ottoman officer who thought him a Circassian Jordanian rather than a British secret agent. At one point he writes in Seven Pillars of Wisdom about how beautiful the dead Ottoman soldiers looked in the moonlight, lined up straight, after a battle.

One of the reasons that the Neoconservatives are wrong that unilateral war can be used for good, for spreading democracy, is that war brings out the worst in human beings, making some of them sadists and racists. Sometimes it is necessary to fight a war to defend oneself. An elective war is always a mistake. It twists one's own society, and someone else's as well.

Just as few priests are pedophiles, few soldiers are sadists. Mattis has brought dishonor on the US Marine Corps with his words. Killing is never appropriately called"fun." I think he should resign.

Feb. 4, 2005

Michael Getler:

[The Washington Post's] Style section last Tuesday featured an"Appreciation" of Rose Mary Woods, who died last week at the age of 87. She was the former secretary to President Richard Nixon who had claimed in 1973 to have inadvertently caused an 181/2-minute gap in a tape recording that would have been crucial to the Watergate investigation. The Style story, by Hank Stuever, had a big chunk of white space in the middle. It was a spoof, but some readers didn't get it and wanted either a new paper or the story restored online.

Feb. 4, 2005

Jack Shafer:

The administration's idea of a conversation is a long, platitudinous presidential monologue. Every administration has warred with reporters, but Bush's is the first to challenge the very legitimacy of the press....

George Wallace invented the politics of running for president by running against Washington. Richard Nixon, who perfected the technique and handed it forward to Ronald Reagan and the Bushes, pioneered the politics of running for president by running against the press. He and Vice President Spiro Agnew dished the press more savagely than Bush has. But battling the press ultimately backfired on Nixon, and Reagan found charm and manipulation worked better than overt hostility."[James A. Baker III] decided early on that there were only two constituencies that mattered—the national media and Congress—and he devoted a great deal of time and energy to wooing the media," Reagan administration veteran Ed Rollins told Michael Kelly in an October 1993 New York Times Magazine feature.

It's been George II's good fortune to launch his campaign against the nattering nabobs of the media at a time when the Jayson Blair/Jack Kelley/60 Minutes Wednesday scandals have turned journalists into inviting targets of scorn. At this point, the average citizen thinks the average Washington reporter is a full-of-himself jackass. The Bush administration probably figures that if the press swings at it and connects, 1) the blow won't hurt and 2) over-aggressive reporting will only play to the White House's favor.

Feb. 4, 2005

From the newsletter of the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Living in the present may be the key to happiness, says Carlin Flora, a staff writer at ... [Psychology Today]."Our sense of well-being is intimately tied into our perception of time," she says.

Feb. 3, 2005

Historian David Blight, in the course of a review of the PBS slavery documentary,"Slavery and the Making of America":

Lynne V. Cheney's emboldened advocates of conservative history may squirm at the fact that one of the principal black Revolutionary War heroes fought for the loyalists. But the documentary leaves no doubt: The Revolution triggered the largest emancipation of American slaves outside the ultimate freedom won in the Civil War -- and most of that liberation came through flight to the enemy. No Valley Forge in this documentary, and the minuteman is a fugitive slave. To some Americans not accustomed to seeing American history through the prism of the black experience, and shy of the subject of slavery altogether, this may seem a strange making of the America they want to imagine.

Feb. 3, 2005

Washingtonpost.com executive editor Jim Brady:

While it's clear web consumption of news is increasing, I'm not one who sees an end to the newspaper. Media history does not support the claim that new media make older media extinct. There are certainly examples of that, but TV did not put an end to radio and I don't see the Web putting an end to newspaper. They just will have to find a way to share the same playing field.

Feb. 2, 2005

Steven Aftergood:

The Anti-Defamation League yesterday called upon the Central Intelligence Agency to release records it is withholding relating to Nazi war crimes. The ADL, a Jewish organization devoted to combating anti-semitism, acted in response to a story in the New York Times on Sunday which revealed that the Agency has refused to divulge certain records, in spite of a 1998 law which mandated their disclosure. The dispute is an important test for CIA secret-keepers. If they can withhold highly-charged records of Nazi war crimes in defiance of a statutory obligation to disclose, then there is nothing that can ever force them to release more mundane documents. They will be a law unto themselves.

Feb. 2, 2005

Fred Barnes:

President Bush has done a lot of extracurricular reading lately, including books by novelist Tom Wolfe, historians Joseph J. Ellis and Ron Chernow, and former Russian dissident Natan Sharansky. I doubt, however, if he has dipped into the writings of philosopher Sidney Hook. But Hook, in"The Hero in History," made a distinction about world leaders that is relevant to Mr. Bush as he prepares to deliver his State of the Union address tonight.

Hook divided historical figures into two categories, event-making and eventful. He distinguished (at least in my simplified version of his thinking) between leaders who are uniquely adept at driving events and those who merely deal with events or issues as practically anyone in their position would. Most presidents are eventful (Carter, Bush 41, Clinton). They are basically caretakers, but Mr. Bush aims to drive history by being an event-maker. And so his speech will concentrate on the two overriding projects of his presidency, the liberation of Iraq and reform of Social Security.

Feb. 1, 2005

Columnist Richard Cohen:

Some modesty is in order. Every four years, my colleagues and I go to Iowa and New Hampshire to cover the early presidential contests. They are both small states, and sometimes it seems that every other person is either a pollster or a political operative. Yet with all the polling, with reporters interviewing everyone in sight, these states always surprise. If we cannot know Iowa, how can we possibly know Iraq?