Jon Meacham: How History Informs Our World
[Jon Meacham is the Editor of Newsweek.]
History has always been a tactile thing to me, and I like to think that I come by it honestly. I grew up on Missionary Ridge, a Civil War battlefield where you could still find Minié balls in the ground and in trees more than a century after Union troops broke the Confederate line in the autumn of 1863. As a boy, I played World War II, wearing my grandfather's old gunnery-officer Navy helmet from the Pacific. Years later, a secretary to Winston Churchill gave me one of the signed pictures of Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt that had been presented to members of the prime minister's party during the White House Christmas of 1941—a souvenir that reminded me of the old lyric "I danced with a man who's danced with a girl who's danced with the Prince of Wales."
It is true that living in the past—to be a kind of History Channel Miss Havisham—can be bad for the mind and the soul, preventing us from engaging in the battles and causes of our own time. But when we are at our best, history and heroes enable us to look ahead, not backward. We are the sum of the stories we tell ourselves, and those stories are necessarily rooted in our experience, and by how we choose to interpret the experiences of others. These mechanics of memory create a new, present reality that then determines the future. To understand where a leader might take us, or what a friend is really like, requires understanding what they look to, and what they make of it.
There are moments around the NEWSWEEK offices when the interest many of us have in the past provides others with plenty of ammunition. A few years ago, Jonathan Alter and I were standing outside a small kitchen here, intensely debating the comparative significance of Louis Howe and Harry Hopkins in FDR's life. A colleague who needed an answer to a question about the issue of the magazine we were working on came by, shook his head sadly and somewhat pleadingly said: "Can't we please talk about this century for a minute?"
We could, and did, but in fact all the centuries run together. It is tempting in a discussion like this to cite a Certified Great to make the case, from Shakespeare ("What's past is prologue") to Faulkner ("The past is never dead; it's not even past") to Churchill ("The future is unknowable, but the past should give us hope"). But we do not need an eloquent benediction to see an obvious truth: the future and the past and the present are all mixed up together.
What we choose to remember is critical, since the narratives that play in our heads shape everything. Churchill saw himself as another Marlborough or Nelson, defeating a Continental foe, and there was a happy ending. George W. Bush thought of himself as another Truman or Reagan, but the story would have turned out better if he had been willing to play the role of president more as his own father did.
This issue of stories and fathers seems particularly relevant at a time when we are about to choose between two presidential candidates who have thought deeply about history and family. It is interesting that both John McCain and Barack Obama are authors of books about their fathers; they clearly believe that, in Wordsworth's phrase, the child is father of the man.
Epigraphs from McCain's "Faith of My Fathers" and Obama's "Dreams From My Father" say much about their views of the world. McCain quotes the old hymn—a favorite of FDR's, the war president under whom McCain's father and grandfather served—from which he drew his title...
Read entire article at Newsweek
History has always been a tactile thing to me, and I like to think that I come by it honestly. I grew up on Missionary Ridge, a Civil War battlefield where you could still find Minié balls in the ground and in trees more than a century after Union troops broke the Confederate line in the autumn of 1863. As a boy, I played World War II, wearing my grandfather's old gunnery-officer Navy helmet from the Pacific. Years later, a secretary to Winston Churchill gave me one of the signed pictures of Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt that had been presented to members of the prime minister's party during the White House Christmas of 1941—a souvenir that reminded me of the old lyric "I danced with a man who's danced with a girl who's danced with the Prince of Wales."
It is true that living in the past—to be a kind of History Channel Miss Havisham—can be bad for the mind and the soul, preventing us from engaging in the battles and causes of our own time. But when we are at our best, history and heroes enable us to look ahead, not backward. We are the sum of the stories we tell ourselves, and those stories are necessarily rooted in our experience, and by how we choose to interpret the experiences of others. These mechanics of memory create a new, present reality that then determines the future. To understand where a leader might take us, or what a friend is really like, requires understanding what they look to, and what they make of it.
There are moments around the NEWSWEEK offices when the interest many of us have in the past provides others with plenty of ammunition. A few years ago, Jonathan Alter and I were standing outside a small kitchen here, intensely debating the comparative significance of Louis Howe and Harry Hopkins in FDR's life. A colleague who needed an answer to a question about the issue of the magazine we were working on came by, shook his head sadly and somewhat pleadingly said: "Can't we please talk about this century for a minute?"
We could, and did, but in fact all the centuries run together. It is tempting in a discussion like this to cite a Certified Great to make the case, from Shakespeare ("What's past is prologue") to Faulkner ("The past is never dead; it's not even past") to Churchill ("The future is unknowable, but the past should give us hope"). But we do not need an eloquent benediction to see an obvious truth: the future and the past and the present are all mixed up together.
What we choose to remember is critical, since the narratives that play in our heads shape everything. Churchill saw himself as another Marlborough or Nelson, defeating a Continental foe, and there was a happy ending. George W. Bush thought of himself as another Truman or Reagan, but the story would have turned out better if he had been willing to play the role of president more as his own father did.
This issue of stories and fathers seems particularly relevant at a time when we are about to choose between two presidential candidates who have thought deeply about history and family. It is interesting that both John McCain and Barack Obama are authors of books about their fathers; they clearly believe that, in Wordsworth's phrase, the child is father of the man.
Epigraphs from McCain's "Faith of My Fathers" and Obama's "Dreams From My Father" say much about their views of the world. McCain quotes the old hymn—a favorite of FDR's, the war president under whom McCain's father and grandfather served—from which he drew his title...