Garrison Keillor: Getting History Right

One more reason to believe in God is the hope for the ultimate judgment when someday Someone will pronounce the final truth and we'll be done with all these small mean anecdotes that pass for history. Meanwhile, they constitute most of what we know about politics, stories told by men with a grudge. This is discouraging to the older person. This is all I will ever know about George W. Bush, a series of disparaging observations by people who've met him. Thanks to his own need for secrecy and comfort, nobody will be able to make an informed judgment of the man until you and I are dead and gone. One more reason young people pride themselves on being ill-informed: It don't matter because nobody else knows either.

The Nixon tapes were a lightning bolt of illumination, but historians are only starting to unearth the truth about events that dominated the news when I was a young man, and others, such as the assassination of John F. Kennedy, we've almost given up hope of ever understanding. To anyone who was old enough in 1963 to be affected by those gunshots in Dallas, it's truly dreadful, 40 years later, to still not know who was responsible. It is almost unbearable to think about this.

I would be happy to find out that I'm wrong about the president. It's exhilarating to discover the truth and to find out that you were off the mark. Alger Hiss probably was a Soviet agent and the fact that Richard Nixon was his accuser doesn't change that. There was a Soviet espionage network in our government and the fact that Joseph McCarthy was a drunk, a bully and a cynical opportunist doesn't change that. Along with a lot of other Democrats, I've wasted a lot of time on these issues that I was, in fact, wrong about. I'm glad to be set straight. ...