Smoke But No Fire
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.