Not because of any personal animus towards Richard Nixon--my only personal beef with the President at the time was that Watergate hearings used to interrupt my favorite cartoons in the afternoon. I am of course like many unhappy about its legacies: there is no question that late 20th Century American antipathy towards government and politics finds its deepest and most wounding origins in the career of Richard Nixon and the traumas he visited upon his office and his society. Even Nixon's curiously moderate record has to be stacked up against the kinds of political careers he helped set in motion, more than a few of which have come back to haunt us in the current Administration.
My gratitude has to do with the composite impact of the tape transcripts which continue to be made available: 240 more hours were made available to the public this month. That has obvious specific relevance to scholars working on the Nixon Administration, on the US government in the early 1970s, on the history of the Presidency, and so on. But I think it has a deeper relevance, one that has still gone largely unappreciated.
The tape transcripts, taken as a whole, show us an unintended, relatively unmediated view of the interior culture of political power, something that ordinarily historians know almost nothing about whether we're dealing with ancient or recent cases, Western or non-Western societies. Most of the people who have listened to the tapes released in recent years come away with rather ordinary, even banal, revelations about Nixon's character and worldview, more or less confirming things that we already guessed or knew anyway, that Nixon was an anti-Semite, or disliked Kissinger, or that he hated the Eastern Establishment.
What I think is more useful is to begin to think about Nixon not as the atypical, psychologically curious figure that he undoubtedly was, but also to see him and his conversations with aides and visitors as a revelation of what the typical business of political decision-making and information-gathering may look like in its general outlines. Yes, certainly, there is a Nixonian particularity to the more recent transcripts that have been released--it is hard to imagine Ronald Reagan or Bill Clinton having quite the same loopily off-the-cuff, awkwardly polite locker room discussions with aides about Greek homosexuality and the character of political enemies and so on. But what I strongly suspect is quite typical about the transcripts is the decidely non-Olympian, non-omniscent perspective they display. The later, non-Watergate tapes tend to show that while Nixon and his aides knew more than the average citizen or the average pundit or the average Congressman about national and international affairs, and had far more ability to move events and institutions in a direction that he desired--that's what power is, in the end--his knowledge and influence were also finite, sometimes strikingly so. I have argued this before, but it seems to me that the total body of tapes offers a fairly striking rebuke to ideas about historical causality that require power to always do that which it ought to do, and to always have a transparent command of the social and cultural landscape it inhabits. The tapes reveal that there were numerous conspiracies within the Nixon White House--but they also tend to undercut a conspiratorial conception of history.
This promises to be fun. It’s also an opportunity for me to practice classic
blogging, bringing material of interest to historians into this space as a jumping-off
point for discussion, rather than the long, meandering mini-essays I put up
at my own site.
For all that I am planning to focus more narrowly on history and historiography
here, though, I am going to make my first entry about a computer game, namely,
the recently release Medal of Honor: Rising Sun, which is set in the Pacific
theater of World War II. As the web-based comic strip Penny
Arcade pointed out, there is something very strange about the fact that
this game is not only being marketed actively in Japan but is selling reasonably
well there.
You could conclude this says something about computer games or about Japan, but I think it is instead a continuing sign of the strange disconnect between the popular global representation of World War II and the way that World War II veterans themselves have depicted the war. The thing that bothered me most about the wave of celebrations of “the greatest generation” that Tom Brokaw and Steven Spielberg helped to kick off was not so much the gooey sentimentality that accompanied so much of it, but the active forgetting of the skepticism and pragmatism expressed by so many veterans themselves about the war effort and its leadership, produced in part due to the collision between a citizen army and an entrenched military bureaucracy.
Even works of light entertainment about World War II used to be suffused with
that attractively cynical, wary attitude towards authority and the pretenses
of leadership: Spike
Milligan’s Adolf Hitler: My Part in His Downfall or the film
The
Dirty Dozen, for example.
It seems to me that it might be a good time to get back in touch with that much more complex sensibility about World War II (and thus war in general--Anthony Swofford’s Jarhead is a nice latter-day inheritor of this perspective) and that even computer games could work to that end.
It was the first time I've been to Vegas, and many of my reactions were predictable, echoing a generation of writing about it, from my discomfort with the pathos of seeing parents pulling slots at midnight with small children sleeping in strollers a legally mandated distance behind them to a kind of awe at certain kinds of breathtakingly huge and spectacular vulgarities. There were also more ordinary kinds of mini-experiences--I couldn't help but think that the vaguely pathetic, run-down feeling of the Star Trek-themed restaurant in the Hilton (with a kitchen that appeared to be run by sadistic Romulans) mirrored the sorry state of its source franchise, while seeing Cirque de Soleil's show at the Bellagio was an unambiguous delight, one of the most remarkable performances I've ever experienced.
But sitting in"outdoor" seating at a restaurant inside the simulated St. Marks Square, with its roof painted as if it were a pleasant summer dusk, listening to fairly good opera and watching an Italianate clown saunter through the area entertaining passers-by, I couldn't help but think two things: first, that the experience was extraordinarily pleasant, and second, in some ways, that the experience was as (if differently) pleasant than being in the real St. Marks.
Confessing that feeling might get me a bemused, condescending wink from a knowingly postmodern thinker about simulacra--ah-hah! you are meant to feel that way--but it might also earn me a horrified frown from a more conventional preservationist or historical viewpoint: the Venetian is created, artificial, an imitation, inferior; the real Venice an organic, authentic product of centuries of history.
Authenticity is something scholars talk about a lot now, and most have learned to regard claims for it skeptically, perhaps too much so. Because even someone who might enjoy the Venetian's recreation of Venice knows there is a meaningful difference between the two, whether or not they're a trained historian.
Its just that the difference is not quite as simple as it appears. So many of the urban spaces and sights that we commonly regard as historical, and that preservationists rise ardently to defend, are that way because of accident and neglect, not because they were preserved through the generations as an inheritance for the future. Neighborhoods in Philadelphia and many other American cities that we now regard as attractively historical got that way in many cases because they turned into slums in between their construction and the present day, and they were too much trouble to pull down in between. The places in European cities that have survived centuries of war and growth have often done so for similar reasons, because no one troubled to build something new on top of them, or because no one burned or bombed them down.
And more than a few of the places that we now venerate as monuments or invocations of the authentic past were in some past moment built as gaudy, excessive, vulgar monuments to the wealth and power of their current inhabitants. Florence, for example, was Las Vegas once, in a way, and that we should now view it as tasteful and elegant is partially an artifact of the distance between its vainglorious making and its present state. It survives as it does in no small measure because travellers continue to find it a worthy destination, because it has been knowingly shaped into being a pleasurable experience for visitors, no less than the Venetian's simulated Italian afternoon.
Even Las Vegas now has an accidental history visible to any who care to see it. Venture beyond the Venetian and Treasure Island towards Circus Circus and the Stardust, and you see an older Strip, one that is in its own way a deeply authentic invocation of a time now gone. I am not the first to wonder when the statute of limitation on vulgarity expires and something becomes elegant merely by fact of its extended chronological survival.
Preservation is a good thing, on the whole, because however the physical reminders of the past come to us, through whatever accident, they carry immense meaning and power, a revealed truth that we could encounter no other way. But I wouldn't want the fact that the Venetian and Venice are very different to blind me to the fact that having a good dinner under the easy light of a recreated Italian sky, serenaded by dinner-theater opera, is as pleasant a thing as one might ask for in this world.
Characterizing--or caricaturing--the whole from a single example is something we all do, and have to do, and there is always an element of error or exaggeration in such characterizations. I know that I’ve been quite legitimately criticized by some for talking about “the left” when I’m talking about some very particular, possibly peripheral, fringe or fractional constituency or position.
But on the whole, it seems to me that the best online discussions are those that arise from usefully provocative arguments, where there is a willingness to engage in persuasive dialogue and everyone is trying, more or less, to share a common language and agreed-upon standards.
Of these standards, I think the hardest to articulate and maintain is the use of historical analogies, a problem that has also preoccupied some of my colleagues here at Cliopatria. I found a website that explains very well some of the reasons why we all make recourse to analogies to describe and predict situations that in some ways are strikingly novel, like the current war on terror and the conflict in Iraq. Doing without historical analogy would be like trying to do without metaphor--and in some ways, it would also be like doing without the empirical substance of informed policy making. We can only predict what might happen by thinking about what has happened: it is the only data we have. Though one of the things we know about the past is how unreliable conventional wisdom about the applicability of historical analogies to new situations often has been. (I confess that one of my private, shameful pleasures as a historian is reading old newspapers in sequence and feeling a kind of unholy delight about how wrong the pundits of the day are about what’s going to happen next.)
I have been trying to think about whether there might not be some loose, informal standards of discursive fairness when making explanatory historical analogies in general public debate, so as to preserve the mutual transparency between all participants. A few have occurred to me, but I think HNN readers might be able to add to the list. My own list includes:
1. Commonality
A useful historical analogy should be one that a generally educated person not only recognizes but can evaluate fairly, either because they themselves have lived through the events being referred to or because there is sufficient density and richness of knowledge about the analogy.
If one is going to use an unfamiliar example (and this shifts depending on where and when the discussion is happening)-- ay I used a precolonial African historical example of some kind--it seems to me incumbent on the person citing the analogy to provide some details at a very high standard of preemptive fairness to those who might disagree with the reasoning. Meaning, if I use an unusual or unfamiliar analogy, I should provide the kinds of details that I myself might use to argue against as well as for the relevance of the analogy in question.
2. Causality
I don’t find it very useful when someone says something like “Dean is like McGovern” or “Dean is like Neville Chamberlain” as if the meaning of the comparison was obvious. This is generally the kind of analogy-making that isn’t about fostering productive conversation, but is just instead a kind of rhetorical dirty-pool or name-calling that rapidly gives way to tit-for-tat exchanges. “Your guy is Pol Pot”, “No, YOUR guy is Pol Pot” and so on.
To be useful, an analogy has to involve a deeper, more fleshed out assertion about causality, about why something happened in the past and why the same kinds of causal mechanisms are in place now. To analogize a contemporary negotiation to Chamberlain’s meeting with Hitler is not useful unless you are simultaneously asserting a direct causal relation between some later event (the Nazi invasion of Poland, World War II in general, or the Holocaust) and the specific mistakes or actions of Chamberlain at the time. That argument has become something of a shorthand assumption that everyone makes, but it actually requires a pretty precisely weighted case about the primary or necessary causes of Nazi aggression--and using it as an analogy requires that you take on board most of that argument, from its theoretical roots to its empirical specificities, as being relevant to some highly particular contemporary situation. You can’t just say, “Appeasement is always bad” as if the particular analogy demonstrates that case as a self-evident universal. A good analogy in public debate requires a precise sense of the ideas about causality it invokes.
3. Multiplicity
The good use of historical analogy requires more than one particular instance to make meaningful claims about the likely course of future events. No analogy is so overwhelmingly perfect for describing the present that it can stand alone. Nothing ever happens quite the same way twice.
If, for example, you want to liken Howard Dean to some past candidate for the Presidency, I think you need to offer at least two or three useful, related analogies, unless you’re only trying to smear or celebrate him, in which case you’re not very interested in actual debate or conversation in the first place. Analogies, used well, are partly about building models, and any useful social model requires more than one instance or case to be more than just a rhetorical drive-by shooting.
4. Contingency
The productive use of historical analogy takes a certain amount of humility, a belief in the open-ended and debatable applicability of the analogies that one is suggesting. Making analogies is like offering a historical counterfactual, a what-if: it is a hypothesis, and one that has to be presumptively open from the first instance to skepticism. I am always amazed when analogy-makers plant their feet and fight like alley cats for the singular, immoveable truth of the analogy they’ve offered
The good use of analogy should always incorporate an if-then structure, with a sense of contingent outcomes in the past and present. If I am going to say, “Contemporary states can learn a lot from the experience of late 19th and early 20th Century regimes in the West in their dealings with anarchist and socialist Terrorism” or “The American experience in the Phillipines has powerful resonance with contemporary operations in Iraq”, one of the things I ought to do from the outset is talk about the different possible ways to understand that analogy, and make a reasoned if short-hand case for the particular use I am proposing.
There is nothing that I find more interesting that these kinds of controversies over the representation of history, which I owe partly to my graduate advisor, David William Cohen, and some of the other professors I studied with at Johns Hopkins. They’re a central part of what my advisor called “the production of history”, and they’re especially interesting controversies for historians in the United States and Western Europe as they invariably intertwine professional historians and popular ideas about history.
The temptation is just to step back and study these controversies for themselves, of themselves, because they themselves bear extraordinary witness to the substance of historical experience, as the British historian Raphael Samuel passionately argued in Theatres of Memory. As the South African historian Carolyn Hamilton observes regarding the Zulu monarch Shaka, in all subsequent representations of Shaka right up to the miniseries “Shaka Zulu” or the heritage amusement park Shakaland, one can discern the footprint of an original, source history—but it cannot be separated out or subtracted from the later history of thinking about or imagining Shaka.
The same is true in this case: the attempt to represent Onate has intricably embedded inside of it the entire history of Spanish colonization of the American Southwest, its annexation by the United States, race relations on the US-Mexico border, the treatment of Native Americans, and contemporary identity politics. Studying the debate isn’t just a matter for a contemporary sociology.
Satisfying as it is to simply stand on the sidelines and look on with interest, it seems to me that the responsibilities of professional historians go beyond Olympian detachment—even if they don’t demand an equally problematic Promethean intervention. A thread at Invisible Adjunct asks, “What does the public want from historians?” There were a lot of interesting answers in the thread, but clearly one of the things the public wants is that historians enter into disputes over the meaning and uses of history as participants, not just observers.
The problem is that a debate like the one over Onate offers no simple point of entry for a scholar. What the statue’s makers observe is true. Onate is part of the history of El Paso; in his own time and place, he could legitimately be called courageous, and equally, was not notably more or less brutal than most of his European contemporaries in the New World. True enough that to oppose a statue to Onate is almost necessarily to oppose all celebratory representations of European settlers. And what historian Marc Simmons observes in the Times article is also true, that vilifying Onate and ennobling the Acoma Indians, his victims, overlooks the extent to which the Acoma themselves once were victimizers before they became victims, much as the Sioux were imperialists who became the victims of imperialism. A scholar can agree that what Simmons says is true—but a scholar can also confirm that what the Acoma say is true, that Onate committed acts of brutality and aggression, and his notable achievement was no more and no less than an act of imperial conquest.
The problem is that this doesn’t tell us anything about how we should choose to represent history in our public spaces. The past stretches out in infinite variety. Why Onate on a horse, and not Onate ordering the mutilation of women and children? Both representations have a truth to them: they happened, they’re part of our historical imagination, they resonate with an actually existing part of the American public.
Do we make monuments to celebrate or venerate the past? What person, then, is so unambiguously worthy of celebration that we could all feel comfortable with a statue of them, while also being important to or emblematic of the past? Do we make monuments to educate about the past, or to mourn it? What, then, shall we choose to teach about, and how can we select the singular moments to mourn in the long procession of humanity’s pain? (Not to mention the fact that if we’re building a monument to history at an airport, there really might be something rather odd about saying, “Welcome to El Paso, where 406 years ago, some Native Americans were mutilated by Spanish conquerors”.)
In my Production of History course, one of my favorite assignments in terms of results has been when I’ve handed students events and individuals not normally the subject of monuments or museum exhibits and asked them to lay out a design for a public representation of their topic. The best paper ever came from one student who was handed the Whisky Rebellion. She designed a museum exhibit that was built as a series of concentric circles. In the core circle was a “just the facts, ma’am” overview of the Whisky Rebellion, written as a series of scholarly presentations. The next circle out was primary documents and materials from the Whisky Rebellion. The next circle beyond that was later representations of the Whisky Rebellion by American writers and intellectuals over the years. The next circle beyond that was connected histories: histories of tax revolts, of American populism from Jackson to early 20th Century progressivism, of rural-urban antagonism, of the “paranoid style” in American politics and hostility to “big government”. Finally she had a circle where visitors would craft their own impressions of the history they’d seen—where current tax dissenters might be able to make an exhibit, or where contemporary moonshiners might be able to talk about the history of their craft, or audiences could debate the importance of what they’d seen through their own contributions.
I thought that was the most perfectly envisioned exhibit you could imagine, both about the event itself and about the way that the event has become meaningful to wider public, including scholars. I agree that it is not easy to accomplish the same density of effect with a statue or memorial, but it is not impossible, either. Perhaps that’s the role scholars can play, not by arguing for or against something like the Onate statue, but by urging us to ask why we want to remember the past, and about how we might best accomplish our diverse purposes.
My brothers have a passion for Death Valley and the area around it. I have spent less time there than they have, but it impresses me, too. Beautifully desolate as it is, what interests me most is actually the human landscape, past and present, that it contains, the stories restlessly lost within its boundaries.
I think in the end the reason that I myself am drawn more to the sensibility of the humanities as a historian than the social sciences is that I want the history I write and read to be attentive to and engaged by the idiosyncratic experience of people like the singer at the Amargosa Opera House.
My current book project is a series of essays about the lives of three Zimbabwean men who were born in the early 20th Century and died in the 1980s. The main thread running through the essays is my feeling that I need to write about their lives and choices in individualized, particularized ways, and not to turn them into typified, representative sketches of collectives or groups the way that social history in Africanist scholarship often does, or the way that social science usually aggregates particular experiences into patterns and structures. It’s not that it is invalid to do those things—in fact, it’s necessary and of course I do it myself as a scholar and intellectual, all the time and without apology.
It’s just that I regret it when history as a rhetorical form or intellectual discipline doesn’t make room for the particularity and peculiarity of experience as such. Once when I presented a short summary of my current project to a group of social scientists, one smiled and said, “So you are studying outliers, that can be useful.” Well, yes and no. To study individual stories, or idiosyncratic communities and narratives, as outliers is just another way of typifying them, relating them to a norm or representative population. In a way, I’m arguing that all historical experience is an outlier, that we can find in it something that has to be understood for itself, of itself—but that also can be understood by relating it to what any of us live and do in our lives. Sometimes it takes a life strange to your own life, in all its individuality, to make you realize just how strange even your own life and history are.
Death Valley brings that home, somehow. It’s not just the lonely opera houses, or the obvious ghost towns on its fringe. One afternoon near there my brother, father and I drove out some miles from any settlement on a barely visible dirt path between the mountains, and eventually happened to glimpse a nearby hillside that had a cave or hole at the top. We clambered up about 300 feet to find that we were looking at a homely, crude mineshaft that had clearly been hacked out by no more than two or three men at some point in the last 120 years. It didn’t go down very far, we could see that, but it was still a few years’ worth of work. We could see a few old signs of the work of the unknown prospectors left scattered around. It was pretty clear that they had found nothing of value. A few men shivered through cold desert nights in the winter and blazing heat in the day the rest of the year to dig out some rocks from a desolate mountainside in the middle of one of the great wastelands on the planet.
Maybe one of them left his bones or his spirit or his hopes at the bottom of that hole, or maybe they just shrugged and moved on, unbothered and unruffled by time and labor that could for me be nothing but pointless suffering. I can’t say. I’ll never be able to say. But I’d hate to simply bury that hole inside of a whole, or to lose that opera house to the tender care of a poetics inadmissable in the practice of history.
The general study of retro-technology strikes me as the premier field for demonstrating that technical knowledge is not a matter of linear cumulation over time, and one of the best illustrations that the past truly is a foreign country. There’s nothing further from the truth than A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court : cast into medieval Europe, or 12th Century Africa, or Ming China, and magically granted perfect ability to speak and understand languages, a modern person would still flounder simply in their ability to use, not to mention make, the characteristic technologies of the day, both everyday and extraordinary ones.
The Secrets of Lost Empires series on the PBS program Nova did a marvelous job of demonstrating that a few years ago.
Turns out it’s pretty difficult to build an effective fortress-smashing catapult. Merely having an expertise in modern engineering doesn’t allow you to just quickly McGuyver one up out of a few logs and some rubber bands.
It's great stuff, at any rate. I think one of the dream research projects in the whole world would be putting an inventive technologist together with a historian, giving them some millions of dollars and institutional support, and letting them methodically study retro-technology. Not only is it a great cure for the hubris of modernity, it’s a pretty instructive guide to the kinds of actual social and economic infrastructure that past societies must have had to build and use their characteristic technologies.
You don’t have to buy all of Moretti’s project or his vision of what he’s doing to see the immense value of it. I found Moretti’s essay in the New Left Review frustrating in its application of world-systems theory, becaue I think that the world-systems approach is one of the most ill-suited slants for a systematic approach to cultural history that I can think of. Moretti’s ambitions to rid literary analysis of sticky questions of interpretation, which I take to be somewhat exaggerated for effect, aren’t that useful either, largely because they're unnecessary. (More on that in a minute).
But what Moretti generally proposes to do speaks exactly to one of the areas where cultural history is typically weak, and that is the inability of cultural historians to make meaningful or confident statements about what is typical or proportionate with regard to any given kind of text or cultural practice, and equally, their inability to offer large-scale or systematic accounts of the circulation and consumption of particular cultural works in relation to all other cultural works in a given era or society.
Some cultural historians do a good job of finding quantitative or systematic information about their particular object of study—a particular kind of publication, text or cultural work, a particular genre, a particular site of cultural consumption. Sometimes cultural historians are able to offer tentative characterizations of the relationship between one form or type of cultural work and other forms, or of relations to the totality of popular culture, but these statements are usually just educated guesswork.
Moretti is perfectly right that if you take any given chronological slice in any given modern nation, our knowledge of the total range of what was published (just to stick to books) is actually strikingly absent, and I strongly suspect that there are many surprises to be found in a more systematic, quantified account of that range. There are a lot of things that I’d like to be able to say with confidence today about American television in the last fifty years, or about the totality of the printed material in circulation in southern Africa between 1890 and today (both locally published and imported), and I simply can’t based on available scholarship.
Of course this information alone doesn’t resolve an equally important and always debatable set of questions. Even if we find out that novels in England in the last century are a much less predominant form of publication than the body of literary criticism might lead one to believe, it doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be spending most of our analytic time on novels.
There are only a few questions or problems that turn on the frequency or quantity of publication, only a few assertions that need grounding in that systematic, quantified account. You could still easily argue that a cultural form which occupied a miniscule slice of the total cultural activity in a given era was nevertheless the most powerful, influential or hegemonic cultural form in that time or place, or that it was the key or linchpin of popular culture in that era. You can still say that certain kinds of exemplary or highly particular works somehow best represent the spirit of a particular culture, or best problematize some of its characteristic internal struggles and contradictions. You can still do close reading of a single text (as either a historian or a literary critic) and find it valuable. But both cultural history and historicist literary criticism could benefit enormously from a truly systematic, carefully quantified account of the totality of cultural work in any given moment and place.
I generally think it's a bad sign when scholars have to fall back onto the"back off, man, I'm a scholar" tactic. It's usually a sign of a weak underlying case producing bluster. There are times where it's justified, where an obscurantist or mindless polemicist is howling to the moon about some issue that he or she literally knows nothing about. But even then, you have to deliver the goods, and say what it is that you know that someone else doesn't.
In this case, I think it's a really bad sign that Alterman actually writes, in his own words,"Since he is not trained as a historian, Morris lacks the ability to weigh the value of one conversation against another, considering context, hidden motives and persons present". For one, the notion that this is a particular or peculiar methodological skill of historians strikes me as a bit odd. For another, it suggests that Alterman has never seen any of Errol Morris' films besides"The Fog of War", despite his profession of admiration for Morris' work. If there's anything that Morris seems good at, it's weighing the value of conversations against one another, and uncovering contexts, motives and situations that condition particular conversations.
More to the point, it seems to me that in their exchange in the Nation is actually a pretty good example of meat-and-potatoes history, and were Morris a historian publishing in historical journals, he would be at least making a permissible argument. If you read carefully the specifics that are at stake here, Morris first off is making an incredibly tightly focused chronological argument about late 1963 and early 1964 about a very narrow window of contingency in which he believes Robert McNamara was advising Johnson to consider withdrawing from Vietnam. Alterman responds with a quote from May 1964 suggesting a contrary possibility. At the least, since Morris so carefully circumscribes the temporal period of his claims, they're actually rather carefully"historical" in the scholarly sense. He doesn't deserve to be rebuked as a good filmmaker, bad historian. It may be that there's a reasonable argument to be had about evidence either way, but that's what good historians do.
More to the point, when Alterman quotes McNamara and Johnson, I come away convinced that both of them were saying more or less the same thing: that the war was a unwinnable dog and they can't get out. Alterman quotes McNamara at the end of his point #3 and Johnson at the beginning of #3 and seems to think that they're saying something completely different. To me, it seems like pretty much the same thing.
There's a more general problem here with the whole damn discussion, and that's the bizarre fetish that most of the people who care about pinning fault for Vietnam on some particular villain have about carrying the day for their man, and the religious mania they have for resolving all contradictions in the record. What I come away convinced of from this discussion and everything else I've ever read about it is that Johnson, McNamara, Bundy, Kennedy and everyone else who had a say about it believed and said contradictory things depending on the time of day, the context, the mood, and the people in the room. Exactly what Alterman says historians are supposed to consider. Why he wants to smooth out those contradictions so that one admitted"pathological liar" and not the other ends up with the lion's share of personal responsibility for a complicatedly collective, institutional and social failure is not clear to me. I haven't yet seen"The Fog of War", but I have a hard time believing that Morris, who normally wallows in contradiction and ambiguity, is as eager to deal out absolution and punishment in such easy measure. Maybe it's because Alterman needs to preserve the Johnson of the Great Society and civil rights agains the Johnson of Vietnam, the same way that the somewhat pathetic rear-guard devotees of John Kennedy's sacred flame need to believe that had he lived, all the bad events of the 1960s would never have happened.
Me, I can live with a world where McNamara and Johnson and all their advisors said different things at different moments, and believed different things at different moments--maybe three contradictory things at the same time. I guess I don't have a dog in this fight.
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