A Date With History

NEWSWEEK: A year out, how do you think 9-11 stands in the succes-sion of important dates in American history? Will we remember it in the way we remember, say, July 4, or Dec. 7, or Nov. 22?

Joyce Appleby: I think it will take its place along with Pearl Harbor, which is to say it will be very vivid in the memory. It’s there. But I don’t see that it’s going to represent what July 4 does, nor do I see it being imbedded in a holiday or a commemoration. But it’s certainly going to be every bit as powerful, I would think, as Pearl Harbor for this generation.

Arthur Schlesinger Jr.: It all depends how we handle what comes next. We now have the possibility of going to war with Iraq and destabilizing the entire Arab world. The question is whether September 11 will lead to another global war, in which case it will be salient in memory, or whether it will lead to containment of Saddam Hussein and police and intelligence work against terrorism. In that case, it’s likely to end up more like Feb. 15, 1898, which was when the battleship Maine exploded–an important event that has faded in memory.

David Levering Lewis: I agree with Arthur. What we make of this outrage will determine the resonance of our commemorating it in the future. In the immediate wake of 9-11 there was a moment that I hope will return. There seemed to be a virtual consecration on the part of Americans to self-assessment and to probing the circumstances that produced the greatest violation of our sense of self since Pearl Harbor. And indeed when people asked, “Why do they hate us?” a large number of Americans were encouraged to believe that there might be an earnest and prudent and informed search for answers to that question. Without losing sight for one moment of the monstrous wrong done to us, wasn’t it, we thought, incumbent upon the citizens of the most powerful nation on the planet to understand why–after the initial burst of outraged sympathy–people in Europe as well as the developing world were prone to say that there were good reasons not to be astonished that such a terrible assault happened?

Alan Brinkley: We need to make a distinction between history and memory. In the memory of everyone old enough to have experienced September 11, this date will remain one that we will remember for the rest of our lives, just as almost all Americans old enough to do so remember the Kennedy assassination every Nov. 22.

But that’s not the same as becoming a major event in history. For example, JFK’s death is a huge event in memory. It may or may not have been a truly major event in history. September 11 is similar. We may not know for years or decades whether it truly changed the course of history.

Michael, you’ve just finished a book on how FDR and Truman dealt with rebuilding postwar Germany. What do you think the public appetite is now for nation-building, in Afghanistan or elsewhere?

Michael Beschloss: It’s always tough to get Americans to support any kind of nation-building. Even at the end of World War II, Roosevelt knew that it would be hard to get Americans to make the sacrifices required to build democracies in Germany and Japan that wouldn’t threaten us again. He knew how allergic Americans were to international organizations. He felt in 1945 that they wouldn’t tolerate our keeping troops in Europe for more than a year or two. But the point is that, despite all of this, he and Truman made the case. Here, in 2002, we have a situation in which the president will have to make the case without the advantage that Roosevelt and Truman had. In 1945, Americans were coming out of a war through which they had been united–and most of them understood the importance of trying to create a better postwar world.

Schlesinger: FDR and Truman had the further advantage that they were dealing with countries with a high degree of literacy, with functioning institutions, with legal infra- structure and so on, whereas in Afghan-istan, and even in Iraq, we’re dealing with countries which have no democratic traditions nor historic experience of self-government.

People talk about the American Empire, but the American Empire is very different from the British Empire and the French Empire, or for that matter the Roman Empire. In the case of the British and the French, they had a colonizing tradition. They sent their young citizens to man the outposts of empire. We’ve never had that.

Beschloss: If you take Germany and Japan in 1945, it’s an even better history for us to have. After our victory in World War II, we essentially said to those countries: “We don’t want to colonize you. We want to show you how to become democrats and practice self-determination as quickly as possible.”

Alan, you’ve been thinking about the cold war [in writing a biography of Henry Luce]. Do you see parallels there with what we face now?

Brinkley: I’ve thought from the beginning that the aftermath of September 11 would be much more like the cold war than it would be like any other conflict in our history. They share this: the cold war was a kind of vague and undefined conflict that flared up occasionally into actual, real wars, but was mostly a standoff that produced a whole range of behaviors on both sides that under other circumstances would have seemed unusual. So barring some kind of Armageddon, which is not impossible, I think what may be the aftermath of September 11 is a long period of struggle along many fronts without any clear sense of how it will end, or whether it will end.

By the way, one feature of the attacks that we haven’t mentioned is the fact that we saw it. We saw it over and over again.

Appleby: Yes. These horrifying pictures, of all facets of this disaster, will, I think, give it a resonance. These pictures will be played on the anniversary 10, 20, 30 and 40 years from now.

Lewis: In that way it will be very much like the JFK footage–the Zapruder film.

Beschloss: I agree. Those pictures will always give September 11 the emotional power it deserves for future generations. They will understand how horrible that day was. But how they see it in history will depend on the period still to come–and that we won’t know for dec-ades. To use the analogy of the Kennedy assassination, that event has the greatest importance in history for those Americans who believe that because JFK was removed from the scene, our country changed–that if Kennedy had lived, we wouldn’t have gone deeply into Vietnam, for example, or that the domestic conflagrations of the late 1960s wouldn’t have happened.

Our last great war president, FDR, was said to have a first-class temperament but a second-class intellect, which might also be said of the incumbent. How do you think Bush is doing?

Schlesinger: Bush has the great advantage of low expectations. He is not stupid. I think he’s rather effective politically, and he’s rather effective personally. But he’s devoid, as far as one can tell, of intellectual curiosity. FDR had a sense of history. As far as I can see, George Bush has no curiosity about history, no interest in the past and a limited interest in the future. He lives day to day.

Brinkley: Presidents are, more than we often like to admit, products of circumstance as much as they are of their own inherent qualities. George Bush seemed certain to be on the road towards being a minor president before September 11, both by temperament and by the circumstances he faced. And I think that’s one of the reasons many people voted for him. You know, how badly could he screw things up? Everything was going so well. How much harm could he do? But since September 11, of course, he has had the opportunity to become a very important president. And it’s at that point that the conjunction between a president’s personality and capacities and circumstances becomes critical. I don’t see in Bush the capacities that Franklin Roosevelt had to exert leadership: to be open to a range of ideas, to be stealthy and devious when necessary, to handle a wide range of different possibilities at the same time. Bush is a very single-minded man, it seems to me, and that, I think, served him well in the immediate aftermath of September 11. It provided an aura of strength and certitude at a time when the public needed it. But over the longer term, this is a set of circumstances that’s going to require a lot of subtlety, a lot of ability to deal with complexity, and I just haven’t seen any evidence that this president, or, for that matter, this administration, has that capacity. So I think this could end up being a very unfortunate conjunction of person and moment.

Schlesinger: One of the things I’m most disturbed by since the attacks is the tame acceptance of the idea that the decision for war or peace is President Bush’s to make by himself. As if Article I, Section 8, of the Constitution had been mysteriously canceled one dark night. I think that the members of Congress should reassert, reaffirm the constitutional requirement that Congress has the exclusive power to authorize a war.

Lewis: Indeed. Mustn’t it be said that part of the reason for the president’s apparently cavalier unconcern with the Constitution is that, in fact, the loyal opposition is not really loyal, but slavish and passive? And that is, it seems to me, one of the most troubling aspects of the aftermath of 9-11: that a confused blend of patriotism and official intimidation has resulted in giving too much slack to this president.

In the cold war we worried about the emergence of a national-security state. Now we have a homeland-security state emerging. We’ve been talking about the international implications of 9-11, but the domestic implications are also terribly daunting–the trimming of habeas corpus and a new imperial presidency.

Appleby: I think it’s related to the personality of this president as well. The reason Bush’s approval ratings were so high was because he was strong, but what we now see is that that strength comes from a single-mindedness of bellicosity. What I think is interesting is that this president now has the chance of returning us to a cold-war mentality where homeland security is linked with international insecurity, because there is a nebulous enemy. It’s certainly a deceptive and secretive enemy. What we forget is that the cold war was an anomalous period. That was not America’s way of being in the world–to have quasi wars and proxy wars and covert operations and spies and domestic intimidation. After the fall of the Berlin wall, there was a possibility that we might recover that spirit of foreign policy that Wilson embodied, open covenants openly arrived at, ideally speaking, as it were. But now it looks as though we’re moving right back into that cold-war mindset, in which we will have a black and white world of good versus evil, and we’ll be a part of suppressing dissent around the world. This is as worrying to me as the invasion of American rights at home.

Brinkley: It’s true that the claims of what are the prerogatives of the president have expanded so rapidly that all of the limitations of presidential power that were painfully and carefully constructed in the aftermath of Vietnam and Watergate seem now to be almost casually repudiated. If that tendency continues un-checked and unchallenged, then I think this will turn out to be, for better or worse, a very important presidency because it will fundamentally change the power relationships among the branches of government, and between government and the people.

Appleby: And it comes at a time in which Congress does not have powerful, articulate leaders. Today politicians feel themselves so intimidated by the public or polls and the next election that they are enabling the president to move in the direction Alan is talking about.

Beschloss: That’s right. Many members of Congress before World War II and early in the cold war were willing to oppose the use of force abroad out of personal conviction, knowing that if they turned out to be wrong it would wreck their political careers. And for many, it did. That’s the way the system should work. Nowadays political leaders are much less willing to risk being caught on the wrong side–especially on issues of war and peace.

David, you’re writing about this now. How do you think all this looks from “over there”–the Islamic world?

Lewis: I think we risk losing the opportunity to convey to the Islamic world the message of democracy and of economic development. After all, these societies are terribly corrupt at the top. Seventy percent of their population is under 20, and 80 percent of them are unemployed. They’re all a time bomb. The message to be conveyed should be about a partnership in the 21st century. Instead the churlish unilateralism of recent times will, I think, play into the hands of our enemies.

After the attacks–but not now–the United Nations had a place in the policy mix. The mobilizing of international opinion and logistical support were imperatives. Nose-thumbing at international obligations seemed juvenile, missile defense irrelevant in a war where suitcase bombs were in the enemy arsenal. But regrettably, it has to be conceded that now the prospect of any such overhaul has been overwhelmed by a war on terrorism whose objectives are scarily ecumenical and whose duration we’ve been told may be without term.

Brinkley: In one sense, it almost doesn’t matter what we do. Given the power that we have, the rest of the world is always going to be suspicious of us and wary of us, and perhaps rightly so. But having said that, I think there are things that we can do, and at times have done, to temper the resentment of the United States around the world. Even during the Vietnam War, when most of the world was united against our policies in Vietnam, we were pursuing other policies that much of the world approved–the opening to China, detente with the Soviet Union. In this case, I can’t think of a time in our history as the world’s great power, which of course is a relatively short history, in which the world as a whole seems so uniformly uncomfortable with what we’re doing in the world.

The potential for unleashing a level of anti-Americanism around the world–not just in the Middle East and the areas where we may take military action, but in Europe and among our friends–is higher at this point than I think it’s ever been, at least in my lifetime.

Schlesinger: I agree with Alan. I think that we are in a very dangerous relationship with the rest of the world. The go-it-alone policy of the United States–of the present administration–shows a certain amount of condescension and contempt for international institutions and for international opinion. After all, we may be omnipotent, but we’re not omniscient.

title: “A Date With History” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-30” author: “Melanie Palumbo”

To assess the significance of the day—and to be sure, it’s very, very early—NEWSWEEK convened a round-table discussion with some of America’s most distinguished historians: Joyce Appleby, a former president of the American Historical Association; Michael Beschloss, the presidential historian; Alan Brinkley, a professor at Columbia University; David Levering Lewis, the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of W.E.B. DuBois, and Arthur Schlesinger Jr., former special assistant to President Kennedy. They spoke together by telephone with NEWSWEEK’s Jon Meacham. Edited excerpts:

NEWSWEEK: A year out, how do you think 9-11 stands in the succession of important dates in American history? Will we remember it in the way we remember, say, July 4, or Dec. 7, or Nov. 22? Joyce Appleby: I think it will take its place along with Pearl Harbor, which is to say it will be very vivid in the memory. It’s there. But I don’t see that it’s going to represent what July 4 does, nor do I see it being imbedded in a holiday or a commemoration. But it’s certainly going to be every bit as powerful, I would think, as Pearl Harbor for this generation.

David Levering Lewis: I agree with Arthur. What we make of this outrage will determine the resonance of our commemorating it in the future. In the immediate wake of 9-11 there was a moment that I hope will return. There seemed to be a virtual consecration on the part of Americans to self-assessment and to probing the circumstances that produced the greatest violation of our sense of self since Pearl Harbor. And indeed when people asked, “Why do they hate us?” a large number of Americans were encouraged to believe that there might be an earnest and prudent and informed search for answers to that question. Without losing sight for one moment of the monstrous wrong done to us, wasn’t it, we thought, incumbent upon the citizens of the most powerful nation on the planet to understand why—after the initial burst of outraged sympathy—people in Europe as well as the developing world were prone to say that there were good reasons not to be astonished that such a terrible assault happened?

Michael, you’ve just finished a book on how FDR and Truman dealt with rebuilding postwar Germany. What do you think the public appetite is now for nation-building, in Afghanistan or elsewhere? Michael Beschloss: It’s always tough to get Americans to support any kind of nation-building. Even at the end of World War II, Roosevelt knew that it would be hard to get Americans to make the sacrifices required to build democracies in Germany and Japan that wouldn’t threaten us again. He knew how allergic Americans were to international organizations. He felt in 1945 that they wouldn’t tolerate our keeping troops in Europe for more than a year or two. But the point is that, despite all of this, he and Truman made the case. Here, in 2002, we have a situation in which the president will have to make the case without the advantage that Roosevelt and Truman had. In 1945, Americans were coming out of a war through which they had been united—and most of them understood the importance of trying to create a better postwar world.

Schlesinger: FDR and Truman had the further advantage that they were dealing with countries with a high degree of literacy, with functioning institutions, with legal infra- structure and so on, whereas in Afghanistan, and even in Iraq, we’re dealing with countries which have no democratic traditions nor historic experience of self-government.

Alan, you’ve been thinking about the cold war [in writing a biography of Henry Luce]. Do you see parallels there with what we face now? Brinkley: I’ve thought from the beginning that the aftermath of September 11 would be much more like the cold war than it would be like any other conflict in our history. They share this: the cold war was a kind of vague and undefined conflict that flared up occasionally into actual, real wars, but was mostly a standoff that produced a whole range of behaviors on both sides that under other circumstances would have seemed unusual. So barring some kind of Armageddon, which is not impossible, I think what may be the aftermath of September 11 is a long period of struggle along many fronts without any clear sense of how it will end, or whether it will end.

By the way, one feature of the attacks that we haven’t mentioned is the fact that we saw it. We saw it over and over again.

Appleby: Yes. These horrifying pictures, of all facets of —this disaster, will, I think, give it a resonance. These pictures will be played on the anniversary 10, 20, 30 and 40 years from now.

Lewis: In that way it will be very much like the JFK footage—the Zapruder film.

Beschloss: I agree. Those pictures will always give September 11 the emotional power it deserves for future generations. They will understand how horrible that day was. But how they see it in history will depend on the period still to come—and that we won’t know for decades. To use the analogy of the Kennedy assassination, that event has the greatest importance in history for those Americans who believe that because JFK was removed from the scene, our country changed—that if Kennedy had lived, we wouldn’t have gone deeply into Vietnam, for example, or that the domestic conflagrations of the late 1960s wouldn’t have happened.

Our last great war president, FDR, was said to have a first-class temperament but a second-class intellect, which might also be said of the incumbent. How do you think Bush is doing? Schlesinger: Bush has the great advantage of low expectations. He is not stupid. I think he’s rather effective politically, and he’s rather effective personally. But he’s devoid, as far as one can tell, of intellectual curiosity. FDR had a sense of history. As far as I can see, George Bush has no curiosity about history, no interest in the past and a limited interest in the future. He lives day to day.

In the cold war we worried about the emergence of a national-security state. Now we have a homeland-security state emerging. We’ve been talking about the international implications of 9-11, but the domestic implications are also terribly daunting—the trimming of habeas corpus and a new imperial presidency.

Appleby: I think it’s related to the personality of this president as well. The reason Bush’s approval ratings were so high was because he was strong, but what we now see is that that strength comes from a single-mindedness of bellicosity. What I think is interesting is that this president now has the chance of returning us to a cold-war mentality where homeland security is linked with international insecurity, because there is a nebulous enemy. It’s certainly a deceptive and secretive enemy. What we forget is that the cold war was an anomalous period. That was not America’s way of being in the world—to have quasi wars and proxy wars and covert operations and spies and domestic intimidation. After the fall of the Berlin wall, there was a possibility that we might recover that spirit of foreign policy that Wilson embodied, open covenants openly arrived at, ideally speaking, as it were. But now it looks as though we’re moving right back into that cold-war mindset, in which we will have a black and white world of good versus evil, and we’ll be a part of suppressing dissent around the world. This is as worrying to me as the invasion of American rights at home.

Brinkley: It’s true that the claims of what are the prerogatives of the president have expanded so rapidly that all of the limitations of presidential power that were painfully and carefully constructed in the aftermath of Vietnam and Watergate seem now to be almost casually repudiated. If that tendency continues unchecked and unchallenged, then I think this will turn out to be, for better or worse, a very important presidency because it will fundamentally change the power relationships among the branches of government, and between government and the people.

David, you’re writing about this now. How do you think all this looks from “over there”—the Islamic world? Lewis: I think we risk losing the opportunity to convey to the Islamic world the message of democracy and of economic development. After all, these societies are terribly corrupt at the top. Seventy percent of their population is under 20, and 80 percent of them are unemployed. They’re all a time bomb. The message to be conveyed should be about a partnership in the 21st century. Instead the churlish unilateralism of recent times will, I think, play into the hands of our enemies.

After the attacks—but not now—the United Nations had a place in the policy mix. The mobilizing of international opinion and logistical support were imperatives. Nose-thumbing at international obligations seemed juvenile, missile defense irrelevant in a war where suitcase bombs were in the enemy arsenal. But regrettably, it has to be conceded that now the prospect of any such overhaul has been overwhelmed by a war on terrorism whose objectives are scarily ecumenical and whose duration we’ve been told may be without term.

Brinkley: In one sense, it almost doesn’t matter what we do. Given the power that we have, the rest of the world is always going to be suspicious of us and wary of us, and perhaps rightly so. But having said that, I think there are things that we can do, and at times have done, to temper the resentment of the United States around the world. Even during the Vietnam War, when most of the world was united against our policies in Vietnam, we were pursuing other policies that much of the world approved—the opening to China, détente with the Soviet Union. In this case, I can’t think of a time in our history as the world’s great power, which of course is a relatively short history, in which the world as a whole seems so uniformly uncomfortable with what we’re doing in the world.

The potential for unleashing a level of anti-Americanism around the world—not just in the Middle East and the areas where we may take military action, but in Europe and among our friends—is higher at this point than I think it’s ever been, at least in my lifetime.

Schlesinger: I agree with Alan. I think that we are in a very dangerous relationship with the rest of the world. The go-it-alone policy of the United States—of the present administration—shows a certain amount of condescension and contempt for international institutions and for international opinion. After all, we may be omnipotent, but we’re not omniscient.