Donald Rumsfeld's Moral Confusion

As another academic year begins at The Ohio State University, I am beginning my 25th year of teaching the History of U.S. Foreign Relations.  As always, I must brace myself for the influence popular culture invariably plays in shaping, and distorting, my students’ views about America’s engagement with the wider world.  Too frequently, films, television programs, mass-market magazines, and the like simplify and misinform– offering myth, stories of personal valor, and tales of derring-do as substitutes for thoughtful analysis and reflection.

But recently I have been dismayed to hear high-ranking government officials trying to pass off their own brand of misleading and inaccurate opinions about the American past as objective “facts.”  Those of us in the teaching profession will now need to work even harder if we are to counter such “truths.”  Yet we must if we hope to fulfill our responsibilities in helping to develop the informed, critical thinking among our citizenry that democracy requires.

The latest example of the deliberate distortion of history came just this past week, in a speech by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to the American Legion.  In his speech, Rumsfeld offered a history lesson.  But it was bad history, wildly inaccurate history.  Truth be told, it was a version of history that would not have earned a passing grade in any American history classroom.  The speech reads more like a political tract than an honest effort to grapple with this country’s history.  Indeed, this speech is yet another act of political sloganeering–a tactic that, sadly, has become a hallmark of the George W. Bush administration. 

Rumsfeld’s principal focus was on the historical parallels–“similarities,” as he called them, between the pre-World War II years and the present -- in terms of how we have responded to external threats to our nation’s security.  That a man who has become in his second stint as Pentagon chief one of the least popular, and least respected, defense secretaries since Robert McNamara would choose to use a high-profile public forum to deliver a twisted, self-serving exposition verges on the bizarre.  It tells us more about the desperation of this individual, and this administration, than about our nation’s history. 

What did Rumsfeld say that was so inaccurate?  That the United States faced a determined, dangerous enemy in Hitler’s Germany?  No problem there.  That some in the United States preferred to ignore, rather than confront, Hitler?  No problem there. That this inward focus was a lamentable example of “cynicism and moral confusion?”  Big problem there! 

A short historical perspective might help explain my outrage with this gross distortion.  One of the most respected national figures of that generation was Ohio’s own Senator Robert Taft, the grandfather of our current governor.  Even his political opponents, and he had his share, did not doubt the elder Taft’s integrity, honor, and patriotism.  But Senator Taft believed sincerely–if wrongly-- that the nation’s security could best be safeguarded by a policy of hemispheric defense rather than military engagement with Hitler.  Famed aviator Charles Lindbergh, whose patriotism no one questioned either, believed the same, as did the legions of equally loyal citizens who joined the “America First” committees that mushroomed throughout the country.  History has not been kind to their position; most now see it as a profound misunderstanding of the threat posed by the Germans, and their Japanese and Italian allies.

That most who held such complacent views were conservative and Republican, and that most of those who opposed them were moderate or liberal Democrats, should not concern us now.  But to call such “folks,” to use Rumsfeld’s term, morally confused or cynical appeasers—or part of a “blame America first brigade”--does grave injustice to their memory and to our nation’s history.  I am confident that Governor Taft will join with me in condemning this besmirching of his grandfather’s name and reputation. Impugning the integrity, honor, or moral fiber of those who reach different judgments about difficult questions of national security advances neither historical understanding nor political discourse.  It is typical of the name-calling and juvenile “you-are-with-us-or-you-are-with-the-terrorists” mentality that dominates the most combative, prickly, and partisan administration in my lifetime.

Another theme of Rumsfeld’s address troubles my historian’s soul.  That is his contention that the threat posed by Nazi Germany and its allies can be equated with that posed by Islamic fundamentalists today.  That’s another historical whopper.  Serious threats to security require foes that combine hostile intentions with significant capabilities.  As students in any college course on national security learn their first day, hostile intentions alone are not sufficient.

Do Islamic radicals pose a significant threat to the security of the United States?  Absolutely.  Do some of their number lay awake at night hatching plans to murder, preferably in grisly, theatrical fashion, large numbers of Americans to make a political point?  Absolutely.  Is that a deeply worrisome phenomenon that demands our highest vigilance?  Absolutely.

Does that make them the equivalent of Hitler Germany?  Decidedly not.  Hitler presided over the most populous and resource-rich country in Europe, with the world’s second most productive economy (after the United States).  His armed forces were the largest in the world by 1939, his air force the most formidable one the planet had seen.  By mid-1940, Hitler’s military machine had conquered much of Western Europe.  Germany appeared well positioned to subdue England, which would have given him the world’s largest navy.  The Middle East, with its strategic oil reserves, lay within reach.

U.S. experts feared that an Axis-dominated world order was being forged.  They worried, with good reason, that the military-industrial power of a Germany-Japan-Italy axis would dwarf that of the United States.  America’s physical safety–even its very existence–was threatened, our democratic institutions at risk, our traditions of respect for individual rights and personal liberties jeopardized.  The world could be dominated, as President Franklin D. Roosevelt said, by a philosophy of force, and the United States might not survive as a lone island of democracy in so hostile a world.

Why would our defense secretary stoop to offering history lessons to veterans?  The answer is clear: politics, particularly, the upcoming mid-term elections in which the Republicans may lose control of at least one chamber of Congress.  Our defense secretary’s sudden interest in the German/Nazi threat in Europe in the years before Pearl Harbor cannot be understood apart from the political and public opinion crisis that this administration has belatedly realized it faces.

In listening to Rumsfeld’s fatuous take on American history, I cannot help but remember another famous line from a quite different Republican.  “There is nothing wrong with America,” President Ronald Reagan liked to say, “that can’t be fixed by what’s right with America.”  Amen to that.  Let’s never forget those wise words from a man who, whatever shortcomings he might have had, was a true patriot.  Reagan would never have put in the category of “what’s right with America” the deliberate use of historical falsehood, manipulative scare-mongering in the service of electoral ambition, and crass insensitivity to the lives of American military personnel being asked to fight and die for a mistake—a colossal mistake.  Reflecting his customary buoyant optimism, Reagan was fond of saying, “We can do better.”  Indeed.  We can, and must, do better.  The American people deserve nothing less.

A shorter version of this column appeared Sept. 22 in The Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch.