Roundup: Talking About History

Dan Clayton: Commemorating Saigon, 11 December 1961 ... A Date on the Dark Side of History

Dan Clayton is Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. He is currently completing a book (co-authored with Gavin Bowd) entitled Impure and Worldly Geography: Pierre Gourou and Tropicality.Four days ago President Barack Obama marked the 70th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor with some well worked homilies: of drawing, “strength from the example set by these [American] patriots and to honour all who have sacrificed for our freedoms” - the survivors of that calamity “remind[ing] us that no challenge is too great when Americans stand as one."[i]Today we reflect on a date less amenable to being commemorated from a position of national strength and self-assurance: 11 December 1961, the date when USNS Core reached Saigon Port, on President John F. Kennedy’s orders, with 32 CH-21C Shawnee helicopters from the 8th and 57th Transportation Companies and an air and ground crew of 400 to operate them, starting – for some – the Vietnam War.[ii]

Peter Godwin: The Real Legacy of Nelson Mandela

Mr. Godwin is the author of The Fear: Robert Mugabe and the Martyrdom of Zimbabwe.A frail Nelson Mandela, now 93, has gone back to Qunu, his ancestral home in rural Transkei, and his handlers have announced his withdrawal from public view. Even while he lives, unseemly squabbles have flared over the TV rights to his funeral.Since he officially retired in 2004, Mr. Mandela has concentrated on his foundation, the charity that is already his earthly embodiment. It owns his archives and mementos and controls his endorsements, which it uses to raise money for social-justice projects. There is even brand Mandela—a fashion line called 46664 after his prisoner number. The clothes feature an embroidered outline of his palm. Meanwhile, his grandchildren are launching "Being Mandela," a TV reality show that is being pitched in the U.S. as a "docu-soap" with an anti-Kardashian philanthropic twist. Globally, Mr. Mandela, who emerged from 28 years in apartheid prisons to vanquish any thought of racial revenge, is already iconic—a symbol of our better nature, the personification of forgiveness and nonracialism. But this legacy, which is championed primarily by earnest foreigners and white South Africans, is not the only one.

Daniel Yergin: Back to an Electric Future for Cars

Daniel Yergin's new book is "The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World." He received the Pulitzer Prize for his history of oil, "The Prize."

Andrew Roberts: India, Still the Brightest Jewel

Mr. Roberts, a historian, is author most recently of The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War (Harper, 2011). On Dec. 12, 1911, a century ago, the British Empire reached its apogee at the Delhi Durbar (Hindi for "court"). Half a million Indians, including all the ruling princes and nobility of the subcontinent, came to Delhi to celebrate the coronation of their new King-Emperor, George V. More than 100,000 of them assembled in the vast Coronation Park outside the city. The King-Emperor made the surprise announcement that the capital was to be transferred from Calcutta to Delhi."The ceremony at its culminating point exactly typified the oriental conception of the ultimate repositories of imperial power," recorded The Times of London. "The monarch sat alone, remote but beneficent, raised far above the multitude, but visible to all, clad in rich vestments, flanked by radiant emblems of authority, guarded by a glittering array of troops, the cynosure of the proudest princes of India, the central figures in what was surely the most majestic assemblage ever seen in the East." Kenneth Rose, in his biography of George V, called it "the most splendid spectacle in Indian history." In some ways, the splendid ideals of the Empire continue today in India's vibrant democracy.

Sam Redman: UC Berkeley on December 7, 1941

Editor’s Note: This blog entry is the first in a series from the Regional Oral History Office (ROHO). ROHO houses thousands of oral history interviews conducted since 1954. Some of those interviews, including many with Berkeley students, faculty, and staff recall the events of 70 years ago today – the bombing of Pearl Harbor. UC Berkeley on December 7, 1941 In a series of recent oral histories with UC Berkeley alumni, the Regional Oral History Office (ROHO) has recorded the recollections of individuals who were students at the time of the attack on Pearl Harbor – December 7, 1941. Many of them teenagers late in 1941, they are now approaching ninety years of age. These oral histories shed light on what UC Berkeley was like before the United States officially entered World War II, and provide insight as to how students, faculty, and staff reacted to the news of the event.

Marc Wortman: The Forgotten Crimes of Japan's Pearl Harbor Spy, Tadashi Morimura

Marc Wortman is the author of The Millionaires' Unit and The Bonfire. He is writing a book on the events of the year leading up to the U.S. entry into World War II. For more on Marc, go to marcwortmanbooks.com.There are moments when an individual holds history in his hands, and 1941 was a year of such moments. Takeo Yoshikawa knew that this was his.

Mark Tooley: Religious Isolationism and Pearl Harbor

Mark Tooley is president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy in Washington, D.C. and author of Taking Back the United Methodist Church. In the American psyche there's never been an event like Pearl Harbor, 70 years ago this week. Of course, 9/11 comes closest, but it followed decades of America's strategic involvement in the world as a superpower, including the Cold War, Korea, Vietnam, and later the Persian Gulf War and Balkans' conflicts, among others.Pearl Harbor followed two decades of virtual U.S. strategic isolation from most of the world's great conflicts. Most Americans had recoiled from World War I by firmly adhering to isolationism, non-interventionism, pacifism, or various combinations of all three. Clergy of the dominant Mainline Protestant churches, post-WWI, flocked to pacifism, reinforced by the liberal, utopian, "Social Gospel" theology then ascendant in the churches. A 1931 survey showed 54 percent of nearly 20,000 clergy rejecting war. A 1934 survey showed nearly 70 percent doing the same, with Methodists the most pacifist.

Catriona Bass: Russia’s History Wars: Access to the Truth Restricted -- Again

Catriona Bass is a writer specialising in Russia and Tibet.‘The truth is with us! We will be victorious!’ Few people outside Russia will have picked up on the fact that Vladimir Putin chose to end his speech to the ‘United Russia’ Congress on 27 November with an echo of Stalin and Molotov’s famous challenge to Germany at the start of the Second World War.In the week before the parliamentary elections, St Petersburg felt like a city of smoke and mirrors. Good news was everywhere. The TV announced that the city has the highest standard of living in Russia (not far below Zurich and Vienna). On the pavements, stencilled in big white letters by unknown activists ran the slogan: Peter is our city, Zenit is our team, Putin is our president.On 29 November, at the opening of an interactive exhibition for schools on childhood in the 1930s (for which has won an award), children were being invited to fly with the Soviet Hero Chkalov over the Arctic, put out a fire in the great Kirov tank Factory in Leningrad and help to bandage the wounded in the Spanish Civil War. ‘Children don’t know the history of our country,’ the curator told me.

Craig Shirley: December 7: A Day that Changed America

December 1941: 31 Days That Changed America and Saved the World is Craig Shirley’s reconstruction of just that, based on media coverage from the time. It’s a fascinating way to experience the look and the feel, the reactions and the emotion, the strategy, and the painful surprises of those 31 days. Shirley, author of two books on the Reagan years, including Rendezvous with Destiny, talks to National Review

Jim Lacey: Pearl Harbor: A Day of Infamy

Jim Lacey is professor of strategic studies at the Marine Corps War College. He is the author of the recently released The First Clash and Keep from All Thoughtful Men. The opinions in this article are entirely his own and do not represent those of the Department of Defense or any of its members.

Ian W. Toll: A Reluctant Enemy

Ian W. Toll is the author of “Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941-1942.” ON a bright Hawaiian Sunday morning 70 years ago today, hundreds of Japanese warplanes appeared suddenly over Pearl Harbor and laid waste to the United States Pacific Fleet. The American people boiled over in righteous fury, and America plunged into World War II. The “date which will live in infamy” was the real turning point of the war, which had been raging for more than two years, and it opened an era of American internationalism and global security commitments that continues to this day.By a peculiar twist of fate, the Japanese admiral who masterminded the attack had persistently warned his government not to fight the United States. Had his countrymen listened, the history of the 20th century might have turned out much differently.

Craig Shirley: Five Myths About Pearl Harbor

Craig Shirley, the president of Shirley & Banister Public Affairs, is the author of December 1941: 31 Days That Changed America and Saved the World.President Franklin D. Roosevelt called Dec. 7, 1941, “a date which will live in infamy.” And that day, when the Japanese launched a surprise attack on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, has lived in infamy for 70 years. Yet even as the memory of the attack has lasted, so have the misperceptions surrounding it. On this anniversary, here are a few myths worth dispelling.The U.S. government had no knowledge of a potential Japanese attack before Dec. 7.Beyond the obvious signs of Japan’s increasing aggression — including its sinking of an American naval vessel in the Yangtze Riverand its signing of the Tripartite Pact with fascist Italy and Nazi Germany — various specific war warnings had been sent by Washington to military commanders in the Pacific for some days before Dec. 7.The War Department had been intercepting and analyzing secret cables between Tokyo and the Japanese Embassy in Washington and thought at one point that the Japanese would attack Hawaii on Sunday, Nov. 30. A Hawaii newspaper even warned, in a blaring headline, of a possible attack.

Paul R Pillar: Debasing Nazism

Paul R Pillar is a former senior CIA counterterrorist officer and now professor at Georgetown University.The challenge that Nazi Germany posed to the Western powers prior to World War II has been by far the most frequently invoked analogy in discussions of national-security policy in the subsequent three-quarters of a century. No other historical episode gets mentioned as often by pundits and policy makers in arguing that some menace or supposed menace needs to be confronted firmly. As with the use of many other historical analogies, the lesson being drawn has been stripped and dumbed down. What is drawn from the Nazi analogy is an adage that a threat must be stopped forcefully now to avoid a bigger and costlier fight later. The finer points of when it actually is or is not advantageous to utilize force or escalate a confrontation get lost in the dumbing down. Also lost are the details of the real 1930s-era European diplomacy that is the supposed source of the lesson. The poor use of this analogy has contributed to at least as many unwise as wise uses of force. The analogy was a major influence, for example, on the thinking of the Johnson-administration policy makers who led the United States into the Vietnam War.

Robert Fisk: Phoenician Footprints All Over Beirut

Robert Fisk is a multiple award-winning journalist on the Middle East, based in Beirut.I walked down a Phoenician street the other day, built under Persian rule.A bit bumpy and uneven underfoot – like many a street in modern day Iranian and Lebanese cities – but this one happened to be about 2,600 years old. It ran down to a small harbour, lined by covered stone sewers and drainage ditches on each side, massive door lintels before private homes and a row of shops and warehouses and possibly a temple, five streets and 18 buildings over an area of 3000sq m.I should say at once that this street constructed under Persian occupation is scarcely two miles from my home on the Beirut seafront, one of the great excavations which the rebuilding of the post-civil war city opened up for future generations, layer after layer of Paleolithic, Phoenician, Greek, Roman and Ottoman Beirut. The place was originally known as "byrt" – which possibly means cistern or well, according to researcher Josette Elayi – then it became Berytos in Greek, Berytus in Latin and now, of course, Beirut. The names are sandwiched together like the layers of streets. This street even yielded up terracotta figures of a woman with outstretched arms, probably the deity Ashtart....

Michael A. Cohen: When Democrats Became Doves

Michael A. Cohen is a regular columnist for Foreign Policy’s Election 2012 channel and is writing a book on the 1968 presidential election. Forty-four years ago this week, the senior senator from the state of Minnesota, Eugene McCarthy, stepped to a podium in the Senate Caucus Room and transformed the Democratic Party. Angered by the war in Vietnam and his belief that President Lyndon Johnson would "set no limit to the price" he was "willing to pay for a military victory," there McCarthy announced his intention to challenge the incumbent president of his own party in four presidential primaries.McCarthy didn't even bother to declare he was seeking his party's nomination -- after all, in the fall of 1967 everyone knew that Johnson was practically a shoo-in to be the Democratic presidential nominee in 1968.

Frank Rich: What Killed JFK

Thanksgiving week is a milestone for Barack Obama, but not one that many are likely to commemorate. The president who seemed poised to inherit John F. Kennedy’s mantle—in the eyes of Kennedy’s last surviving child and brother as well as many optimistic onlookers (me included) in 2008—will now have served longer than his historical antecedent. Obama, surely, does not want to be judged against any JFK yardstick, longevity included. It’s his rotten luck that he incited such comparisons at the start by being a young and undistinguished legislator before seeking the presidency; by giving great speeches; by breaking a once-insurmountable barrier for African-Americans, as Kennedy did for Roman Catholics; and by arriving in the White House with his own glamorous wife and two adorable young children in tow. He has usually shrugged off these parallels gracefully. These days, with his honeymoon long over, it’s particularly in his interest to do so. But Obama can’t escape JFK’s long shadow, and neither can we. Another wave of Kennedyiana has arrived just in time for the holidays: three major new books, all three already best sellers. But in the second decade of the 21st century, what, exactly, are the customers buying?

Ed Pilkington: Being Stalin's Daughter

Ed Pilkington writes for the Guardian.To his many detractors, Joseph Stalin was a monster on an epic scale who sent millions of "class enemies" to their graves. To the considerably smaller band of his enduring admirers, he was the man who saved the world from the far worse fate of Nazi tyranny. And then there was Svetlana. For her, his "little sparrow", Stalin was the imposing father whose long shadow haunted her throughout a lifetime spent in vain pursuit of escape.The story of Lana Peters, nee Svetlana Stalina, is on one level quite unexceptional. Spanning as she did the period from 1926 to her death last week in the American heartlands of Wisconsin, she experienced extremes of hardship and joy, success and poverty, that were common to generations of Europeans and Americans who lived through the brutal 20th century.

Robert Dallek: Kennedy, Reagan, Loved for All the Wrong Reasons

Robert Dallek’s latest book, “The Lost Peace: Leadership in a Time of Horror and Hope, 1945-1953,” has just been published in paperback.Nov. 30 (Bloomberg) -- The historian Richard Hofstadter said that the U.S. is the only country in history that believes it was born perfect and strives for improvement. The idea that we are a nation without flaws or that we can permanently eliminate our very human failings is, of course, delusional....The attraction to easy answers is echoed in a 2010 Gallup poll that asked Americans to assess the last nine presidents from John F. Kennedy to George W. Bush. Kennedy topped the list with an 85 percent approval rating. Only Ronald Reagan was in hailing distance of him, with 74 percent. Deciphering these results presents a challenge: Kennedy’s thousand days comprised one of the briefest presidencies in U.S. history. His slight record, devoid of major domestic legislative achievements, seems smothered by the country’s overwhelming regard.High Esteem

Joseph A. Palermo: Ross Douthat's Hit Job on JFK

Joseph A. Palermo has written two books on Robert F. Kennedy: In His Own Right: The Political Odyssey of Senator Robert F. Kennedy (Columbia University Press, 2001); and Robert F. Kennedy and the Death of American Idealism (Pearson Longman, 2008).Appearing in the New York Times' "Sunday Review" on the first Sunday following the 48th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy is the conservative commentator Ross Douthat's take on the former president. Right-wing pundits rarely make good amateur historians and Douthat's short hit piece, dripping with contempt, is fresh evidence for this conclusion. He sets out to debunk what he calls "premises" and "myths" associated with President Kennedy, but his effort is an embarrassing failure on all counts. Interpreting history is all about nuance and nuance is clearly not the forte of right-wing pundits like Douthat.Douthat begins his debunking by dismissing a series of straw man premises he ascribes to anyone who has written positively about John F. Kennedy: "The first premise is that Kennedy was a very good president, and might have been a great one had he lived [original italics]. Few serious historians take this view."

Marian Kester Coombs: American Folk Hero

Marian Kester Coombs writes from Crofton, Maryland.All history is biography, it’s said, but an individual biography usually shines a mere flashlight on surrounding historical events. John Szwed’s book on Alan Lomax is more like a floodlight thanks to his subject’s centrality to so much of American 20th-century culture. Alan Lomax knew everyone, went everywhere, appreciated just about everything, and worked tirelessly to foster in all Americans his own great love for them: the people, the folk.Imagine a world scarcely acquainted with the blues, bluegrass, work chants, gospel music and spirituals, jazz, zydeco, calypso, cowboy songs, and most of the great ballads of British and American folk music. Such a world would never have spawned rock ‘n’ roll. For some, that’s a tempting thought. But the world is richer for knowing these ancestors of rock. And for much of that knowledge we have the work of Alan Lomax to thank.Alan’s story (1915-2002) is in many ways a continuation of his father’s. John Lomax (1867-1948) grew up near the Chisholm Trail in Texas, fascinated by cowboy culture. By fascinated I mean obsessed: a lifelong compulsive devotion. That devotion, in ever more all-embracing forms, persisted in his younger son Alan....