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He spoke at a luncheon sponsored by the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. While the members of SHAFR ate tasty Lebanese dishes at Taverna's across the street from the Marriott, Zelikow reflected on how his experiences in government and his research into the Cuban Missile tapes have reshaped his understanding of history.
He did not come prepared to rehash 9-11 or the Iraq War and he barely touched on the subjects. Though he still dressed the part of a high government official, and he speaks with the command of someone who has wielded immense power, he concerned himself with the kinds of questions ordinary historians face all the time: How do we know what happened? What kind of evidence should we use? Have we overlooked something important?
His considered judgment, based especially on his experience as the executive director of the 9-11 Commission and as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's counselor, is that contingency plays a critical role in history and that historians can only understand how big a role that is if they undertake a robust investigation of what he repeatedly called microhistory. For it's by digging in the details that you find out how people thought, who they got along with, how decisions were made, and when they were made.
Do historians usually get things right? Zelikow's judgment is that historians work in most cases at so great a distance from the events they describe that they generally have gotten no better a view than can be had from 10,000 feet up. What's needed, he said, is the view from a helicopter ... 100 feet up--as historians of the Cuban Missile Crisis were lucky to obtain when the Kennedy tapes became available. What those tapes demonstrated beyond question, he argued, was that decades of research hadn't been able to uncover some of the critical forces shaping the outcome. As an example, he noted that until the tapes appeared no historian had understood that the Berlin crisis had fundamentally shaped Kennedy's decision to confront the USSR in Cuba. If it wasn't Cuba in October '62, it would be somewhere else later: that was the lesson of Berlin.
Here are extended excerpts from Zelikow's speech, which was entitled,"For Want of Knowledge": Microhistory and Pivotal Public Choices.
Part 1
Part 2
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