The historian’s art is not really some noble (and unobtainable) gesture like “seeking the truth.” Rather, it is the more mundane, yet harder objective: to restore the historical narrative, to tell a story as “it really happened.” At an even more granular level, the ultimate purpose of any history is to restore, in some fashion, the personal histories of the actors within the event(s) being recounting. It is not altogether ironic, then, to find that a historian can have “his story” restored – such as was the case when Bernie Weisberger’s wartime story crossed my path in 2002.

_______________________________________________________

A brief explanation is first necessary: In late 2001, I was working on my Master’s thesis concerning US intelligence in Indochina at the end of World War II. My interest centered on a number of small team of United States’ intelligence officers from the US Army, Navy and the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), whose missions took them across China and Southeast Asia. One set of teams belonged to an Allied joint effort known as the Target Intelligence Committee or TICOM. Their mission was to go to Japanese headquarter and communications facilities to collect information about their cryptography (codes and ciphers), as well as their exploitation of Allied communications and codes.

Of particular interest to me was the team that went to Hanoi. In the process of researching that team, I found the reports of the two other TICOM teams that were dispatched to Canton (Guangzhou) and Shanghai/Nanking (Nanjing). I was conferring with historians from the US Army’s Intelligence and Security Command, when I mentioned my find. One of them passed along an email from Bernie Weisberger. Could he get a copy of the report he and his partner, Frank Tenny had written in October 1945? I mailed Bernie a copy of the report*. The following recounts, in the barest fashion, Bernie’s adventure at a place that was simultaneously dangerous, mysterious, boring, and tedious.

In Europe, TICOM teams had operated with great success. Nazi Germany was completely occupied and the TICOM teams freely roamed Europe gathering Axis codes and interviewing personnel about the Enigma and other code and cipher systems. However, the experiences of the TICOM teams in the Pacific and Asia were markedly different. The rapid Japanese surrender in August 1945 had caught the Allies by surprise. Few plans and units were in place for the disarming of Japanese forces, repatriation of POWs, occupation and administration of conquered territory, and the acquisition of records, especially in China. The Allied commands in Kunming and Chungking (Chongqing) had to slap together TICOM teams from volunteers, quickly brief them, and dispatch them by plane, train, or truck to Japanese army headquarters in Hanoi, Shanghai, Nanjing, Chongqing and Peking (Beijing). These teams usually consisted of one or two officers and two or three Nisei interpreters. The team designated to get to Shanghai and Nanjing consisted of two army officers, 1st Lieutenant Francis Tenny and 2nd Lt. Bernard Weisberger, and two Nisei interpreters, T/Sgt Ralph Kidani and Sgt Shizo Takai. Bernie mentioned to me later that he was not quite clear for what he was volunteering, but it was better than sitting around in Kunming.

The territory the team had to travel was fraught with unknown dangers. For one, there was no way to predict what sort of reception the team would receive from the Japanese. Recall that the Japanese army in China and many other places had not been defeated. Even though the Emperor had announced Japan’s surrender, many units were hostile to the idea, and some of the Emperor’s relatives had to be dispatched to various Group and Theater commands to assure compliance with the terms. With the long delay in occupying Japanese territory, local commands had time to destroy relevant and incriminating records, especially secret material and anything to do with atrocities and treatment of Allied POWs. Then there was the rumor-mongering - as one Chongqing newspaper reported, rogue SS “Werewolf” units operating in China. (This was fantasy. A few German military and SS intelligence officers were scattered about China. They were not diehard fanatics.)

There were more mundane issues to overcome. Just getting to Shanghai proved difficult; Bernie and his team did not arrive until 20 September, some 18 days after the Japanese official surrender (and five weeks after Japan accepted terms). There were no vehicles available for them to get around the city. Since the Chinese had occupied the city and assumed control, the team had to rely solely upon the Chinese military administration for local support and transportation. To meet with the Japanese, Frank and Bernie had to go through the local Chinese occupation command. As their report noted, it took six days, including ”three days of false starts and dinners with the Chinese in order to secure one interview,” with the chief of the Japanese 13th Army’s Code Department.

The meetings were conducted with three sets of interpreters, eight Chinese, and five Japanese, all carrying on business “with incredible hubbub.” Meanwhile, the Japanese officers were free to come and go. Under no compulsion from the Chinese, the Japanese stalled responding to the team’s requests for information. They politely bowed and saluted, but largely ignored American requests. The Japanese also played the game of “what’s past is past” and tried to be friends with the American team. But Frank and Bernie saw through these tactics and reported that most records and cryptographic material had been destroyed and the interviewees were not forthcoming. As noted in the report, because of immunity from the Chinese, the Japanese “had no hesitation in lying to us.”

Things were little different in Nanjing. There they managed to interview two Japanese officers under much of the same condition as in Shanghai. Those officers, too, tended to claim ignorance of details of their work in China and asserted what they did was of no importance.

Eventually, Frank and Bernie collected samples of 18 Japanese codes and ciphers, and interviewed over 15 officers and civilians from code and communications departments in Shanghai and Nanjing. As they reported there was little hope of getting substantial information unless the Americans controlled the meetings and their context.

Interestingly, Frank and Bernie also interviewed a number of German and Italian code and communications experts in Shanghai. These belonged to a German military intelligence element known locally as the Erhardt Bureau or Kriegs organization (War organization). Set up in 1942, this small element, composed of Italian and German maritime and civilian radio operators, monitored Allied shipping and air radio communications. Supposedly their take was shared with the local Japanese intelligence, but it is unknown what, if anything was done with the information. Frank and Bernie were fortunate in that they were working alongside an OSS intelligence gathering team, part of the X-2 division, or Counter Intelligence. It was noted that the two teams gathered much information from the Germans. By late October 1945, Frank and Bernie’s team was back in Kunming.

______________________________________________________

This story came full circle on April 24, 2002. On that day, INSCOM hosted a celebration of the TICOM experience at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, and over a dozen former members were invited, including Bernie and Frank, as was I. The INSCOM commander, Major General Keith Alexander, extolled the results and bravery of the teams. Bernie and Frank were rather amazed at the rhetoric, feeling that their mission’s danger and results was somewhat exaggerated. Both had a droll take on their mission, seeming to view it as a high lark of sorts. Bernie insisted that Frank wrote the entire report – he claimed, with a smile, that Frank knew more than he did and was a better writer.

At the end of the event, Bernie autographed a copy of America Afire and inscribed to me: “…with thanks for his part in recovering some personal history and best wishes. – Bernie Weisberger.

*Report on Axis SIGINT and Cryptographic Activities in the Shanghai and Nanking Area.

26 October 1945

I have known Bernie Weisberger for fifty years. Throughout that time, he has been an intellectual mentor, an avuncular adviser, a splendid correspondent, and a dear and honest friend. He was the only historian I ever had as a teacher who really valued the idea that history could and should be written outside the academy, and that telling a good story in a book mattered as much as historiographical foreplay.

I remember the way Bernie sometimes role-played a historical figure (like John C. Calhoun) or read dramatically from revealing primary sources in a large class on Civil War and Reconstruction.

(This was surely an expression of his thespian tendency demonstrated on a number of occasions in University of Rochester productions.) I really did not know then about Bernie’s professional reputation, or his earlier books, Reporters for the Union (1953) or They Gathered At the River (1959). However, I do remember wondering why a professor whose name appeared to be Jewish was so interested in evangelical Protestants. When I returned to graduate school to earn a Ph.D. at the University of Virginia, Bernie’s 1959 book presaged my own dissertation and first book, Mission For Life: The Judson Family and American Evangelical Culture, which was published exactly twenty years after his. And, predictably, I was repeatedly asked: “ How does a nice Jewish girl get interested in a subject like this?” I know now that Bernie provided me with a broad and sensitive introduction to American social and cultural life which was a building block for my thirty year career at Cornell.

Bernie also encouraged and stimulated my love of primary sources. As a high school student in an Advanced Placement American History in Mount Vernon, New York, I was fortunate to have Alden T. Vaughn, then a Columbia University Ph.D. student, as my teacher and he assigned Commager’s Documents, the huge collection that no one could carry easily around in the halls. I found those documents “interesting” and I understood their importance for what historians did, but I had no sense of the magic of finding your own sources, or of the splendid isolation and pleasure that could come from sticking my head in a microfilm reader, turning the handle, and tuning out everything else on campus.

After Bernie became my adviser, I was fortunate to interact with him only in small groups or independent study classes, usually in his office in Rush Rhees Library. By this time, he was a department chair, and interaction with students had become a pleasant diversion from a group of cantankerous historians dealing with all the things that energized the profession in the mid 1960s. I admired Bernie for his politics as well as his intellect: he went to Selma in 1964 with another of my history professors, Christopher Lindley, and when they came back I was energized by the powerful story they told one afternoon in a hushed, dark Rush Rhees reading room. Because I wanted my own civil rights adventure, I began to work for Chris Lindley’s efforts to dismantle racial discrimination in the city’s apartment rentals. I had a phony diamond engagement ring and I was able to secure rental agreements only hours after African graduate students were told there was no vacancy. Together, Bernie and Chris were a powerful pair of teachers, both role models, willing to take history outside the classroom. Studying muckraking literature with Bernie was an absolute high point because of his ebullient interpretation of the books the Muckrackers created and the journalism that they practiced.

But there were two memorable undergraduate projects that I did under Bernie’s direction that really stoked my desire to be a professional historian even though that education was detoured for a number of years by a short-lived “practice marriage.” Both of these papers – one on Masonic newspapers in upstate New York in the antebellum period, and the other on the development of the social and artistic image of Abe Lincoln in the Depression Era – still ignite the circuitry in my brain but not because they added that much to my knowledge base. Rather, each one gave me extraordinary pleasure: the thrill of historical detective work and the reward of finding a pattern or disjuncture in words from the past both printed and handwritten. I still have copies of the papers I produced on my portable Smith Corona. One has a constant typo throughout—“Linclon” as opposed to Lincoln, over 25 times. These days, a spell check would have prevented my shame which Dr. Weisberger appropriately called me on. I still do not type Lincoln’s name with ease.

Over the years, with new books and my immersion in women’s history and the social history of medicine, I still saw Bernie in New York City, in Chicago, in Upstate New York, and at historical meetings. I recall that I once tried to “fix him up” with another historian of women, and when I married again in the early 1970s, he embraced my new husband and son with authentic affection. He has always been for me “the touchstone” for what it means to be a powerful teacher and an engaged historian. At 92, he has published a startling number of meaningful books (Is it really 25?) and while none was a best seller, all combine his penchant for in-depth research with a confident control of the narrative. I was honored to be named, as Bernie is, a fellow of the Society for American Historians, an honorary based on quality of writing.

Bernie Weisberger has mastered electronic technology better than any nonagerian I know and his e-mails remain well written, warm, pithy, and persistently skeptical about American and world politics. By his own admission, he remains today a “pissed off Progressive.” I hope that this “electronic festschrift” will provide him with evidence that he was a very special teacher and mentor who shaped my approach to history and my way of telling it. 

In the spring of 1929 a famous economist named Irving Fisher, held in high esteem by his colleagues, predicted that stock market would keep going up and up and up.  “Fisher Says Prices of Stocks Are Low,” proclaimed a New York Times headline.  Two days later the stock market crashed.  Fisher had been wrong as wrong can be. Ever after he has been held in contempt.  Oh, to be so wrong!

But he hasn’t been alone, has he?  Some years ago a social scientist at the University of Pennsylvania decided to find out if experts are good at making predictions.  He sent them questionnaires about scores of subjects and then he sat on the answers, waiting to see just how good they were at predicting the future.  He awaited ten years.  Then he collated the results.  The upshot was that his experts were terrible.  With few exceptions these putative pundits did little better than chance in predicting the course events had taken.

Despite their paltry record of success none of the experts suffered from their record of failure.  They still appeared on television as pontificators.  The newspapers still featured their op eds as if their authors were fountains of wisdom.  The public still bowed before them as luminaries of knowledge.  Why?  The conclusion of the social scientist who had proven they were not terribly good fortune tellers was that there is little to no cost when a pundit blunders.  With only a few exceptions, one of them being what happened to Mr. Fisher, whose reputation as a failed prognosticator has become legendary, we don’t remember when pundits mess up.  No one (except for our Penn social scientist) keeps score.

But if we did, who might come out on top?  Who has been right far more than he’s been wrong?  If asked I would nominate Bernard Weisberger.

I first came to know Bernie, as he’s known to one and all, forty years ago.  I was a student at Vassar.  He was a teacher there.  Later, he became a columnist at American Heritage, where he wrote about events in the news.  He has also written for this website.  In all that time I cannot recall his ever getting any major event or trend wrong.  I don’t say this because we agree on things.  We have always seemed out of step with one another politically.  When first we met I was a conservative supporter of Nixon and he was a liberal opponent of Nixon.  Later, he moved left and joined the ranks of Nader supporters.  By then a liberal myself, I enthusiastically backed Al Gore.  But Bernie always understood the main currents that pulsed through the American electorate.  No one was better at figuring out the forces driving the country this way and that than Bernie.

The best example I have of his perspicacity was a piece he did for HNN back in the summer of 2002.  It was pure Bernie.  George Bush had proposed that the giant surpluses the government was accumulating be spent on tax cuts.  Bernie thought this was short-sighted.  So did many others.  But Bernie’s opposition wasn’t based on a hunch or blind partisan posturing.  It was rooted in his knowledge of history.  Most Americans, suffering from an ignorance of history, thought that surpluses were a new phenomenon.  Bernie knew better.  We’d had three discrete periods when the government had found itself flooded with cash.  Each time, Bernie showed, the politicians in Washington had dreamed up ways to spend the money only to discover thereafter how short-sighted they’d been.  The surpluses didn’t last.   The title of the piece was, "What History Tells Us Will Likely Happen to Those Giant Surpluses.”  You can read it here on HNN.  The number associated with the URL indicates it was the 91st original essay we published.  It remains one of the best.  Twelve years later it still holds up.  And as we all now know, sadly to our regret, Bernie was right.  The surpluses did not last.

In the concluding paragraph of the piece Bernie notes that while “it does look as if a more prudent and less political use of the surplus would have made better sense,” such “self-abnegation was hardly to be expected.”  Do you detect the world-weariness with which this was said?  It’s there, but it’s hidden.  In person Bernie was often more direct.

Not long ago my husband and I were in Chicago and Bernie came down from the suburbs to share a meal.  He was already in his nineties, but still able to hop on a train and make the journey.  Shortly after we fell into deep conversation Bernie turned to me and said, “people are crazy and do damn fool things.”  I shot up.  I have been quoting this line of his for years and turned to my husband to see his reaction.  Here was Bernie himself saying those now famous words.  Alas, my husband had not heard them.  Age had taken its toll on Bernie’s once vibrant delivery.  The words came out too softly.  But they had come.  And I had heard them.  A broad smile crossed my face.  

Bernie has seen it all in his long life.  War.  Depression.  Bungling politicians.  At times it turned him into a pessimist.  In recent years events have made him fearful of what the future would bring.  But he has never succumbed to a harsh verdict on humanity.  “People are stupid and do damn fool things,” perhaps, but they aren’t despicable.  They are just human.

To a historian the tale of history is often crammed with sorrowful events that easily could have been avoided had reason prevailed.  Bernie has understood this as well as anybody.  But it's never made him a sourpuss.  I've always appreciated that about him more than anything.  It suggests great wisdom.  As a young man wondering what to do with my life, it occurred to me that I could do worse than follow in Bernie’s footsteps as a journalist cum historian.  I’ve never had cause to regret my decision.  Thanks Bernie.  It was your example I was following.    

I hadn’t yet reduced myself to pleading with Bernie, but it was close. These were the final moments of the 2000 presidential election, and my email exchange with him began to resemble the overheated pamphleteering days of old.

Late into the night our words and warnings and jeremiads would spin off the virtual printing press, each trying to persuade the other.

Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good, I implored with the faint hope that Bernie might abandon his principled vote for Nader in favor of Gore, fearful that Bush would become the most conservative and dangerous president in our lifetime.

But to Bernie, the Democratic Party needed a wake-up call. It had abandoned those “mystic chords of progressive memory,” as he put it, and sacrificed working Americans in favor of corporate give-aways and campaign contributions. What were once the guiding ideals of the party, he wrote, “have barely been kept alive even in attenuated form.”

So Bernie and I agreed to trade votes. I cast a Nader ballot in safe Maryland, and Bernie checked Gore in what was then a still uncertain Illinois. We each got the other to vote for our guy – with a wink and a smile.

It was quintessential Bernie. Disagreement need not be disagreeable, and political passion among colleagues and friends is all about respect, love, and even a little joy.

And woven into every conversation is an abiding Bernie principle: American history is a sacred trust that we in the present need to respect.

So in many ways Bernie’s Nader push really wasn’t about the election after all. It was about an America bequeathed to us through generations of sweat, hardship, sacrifice, and the hardscrabble pursuit of the American Dream.

“We (you and I) do share something,” he wrote to me then, “to wit a wish for the regeneration of those progressive ideals that gave us the Square Deal, New Freedom, New Deal, Fair Deal and Great Society – loosely, the vision of a cooperative rather than a competitive society, with each of us having a stake in everyone else's welfare and communities using government as the agent of reining in greed and lifting up those on the bottom, recognizing individual differences and merit but making equality and justice rather than accumulation the first priorities of society.”

There’s a morality tale to the American story that Bernie tells, one of the powerless confronting power and innocence coping with guile. But true to Bernie, overriding all is a story of optimism and hope. A true belief in the American creed. A genuine conviction that ideals can prevail even with mighty forces amassed against them.

Bernie was my mentor at Vassar College, where he taught three of my courses and supervised my senior thesis. And looking back over these four decades I think my own buoyant view of the American experiment can be traced to those days in Swift Hall when Bernie delighted us with stories of American grit, perseverance, and resilience.

And stories he told. We learned of an America huddled in the Lower East Side, empowered in union halls, besieged by Red Scares, satirized by Mr. Dooley. It was America scheming in Tammany Hall and forbearing in the cotton fields, marching for temperance and fighting for suffrage.

But on this vast canvas he painted there was always a constant: that even amid hardship, injustice, and frustration, Americans always remain unbowed.

Perhaps that is why Bernie refused to compromise back in 2000. Because to him the American character should never run from hope.

In the America Bernie taught me, I honor the immigrant, the enslaved, the segregated, the working men and women, the muckraker, all fighting against the odds, all believing in the American promise.

And to that list I should add the historian, my mentor and friend, Bernie Weisberger.

On a sunny day in August, 1959, I presented myself for my doctoral orals in the Social Science Research Building of the University of Chicago on East 59th Street. My examiners were historians I had worked with for the past five years – with one exception. I had heard a rumor that a Bernard Weisberger, himself a Chicago PhD of not many years before, was joining the faculty. And lo, “Mr. Weisberger” showed up for my exam, and a good thing he did. It was the first time I laid eyes on Bernie. Although I had great respect for my older teachers, they could be, frankly, on the stodgy side. In exchanges with them, I sometimes felt like I was running in sand. With Bernie, I flew. He was so lively and rapid-fire, a strong fresh wind. Thanks to him, the exam came alive, and I got through successfully.

We have had countless meetings in the fifty-five years since – in Manhattan, at his “country estate” near Elizaville between the Hudson and the Taconic Parkway, and for the past couple of decades, in Evanston and the North Shore. Bernie has never seen an opera he didn’t like, especially if it’s French or Italian. One of our great shared pleasures is to enjoy a Sunday matinee at the Chicago Lyric Opera, followed by a martini and a meal at a nearby bistro.

As a historian, Bernie (like me – it’s a modus operandi we share) has been a prospector rather than a miner. Both diggers seek to unearth something valuable. The miner, however, spends his or her career plumbing a vein as deeply as s/he can, working in a defined subject area, lamp on forehead (as I once wrote). The prospector, on the other hand, like the California Forty-Niners, pick and pan in hand, fences off a few square feet of turf, follows a hunch, sinks or swims, then moves on to another promising lode. Both miners and prospectors work hard and are skilled; neither is “better” than the other. They just operate differently. In the Old West, contrary to stereotypes, miners greatly outnumbered prospectors, and so it has been with historians. Prospectors are rare.

Bernie, however, is a true prospector. His dissertation on Civil War army correspondents developed into his first book, Reporters for the Union (Little Brown, 1953). Then he moved to nineteenth-century revivalism in They Gathered at the River (1958, 1979), and on to The Dream Maker: William C. Durant, Founder of General Motors (1981), one of the most searching biographies anywhere of a corporate mogul and the enterprise he created. Then came Cold War, Cold Peace: The United States and Russia since 1945 (1984) and a number of books with American Heritage and Time-Life. In 1994 he published a labor of love, his collective biography of the La Follettes of Wisconsin: Love and Politics in Progressive America, and the (in my opinion, underappreciated) America Afire: Jefferson, Adams, and the Revolutionary Election of 1800 (2000). It’s a fine history of the 1790s and the formation of the American party system. And these titles are only some of his twenty-five listed in the Library of Congress catalog.

Nor has Bernie eschewed shorter pieces. His 1959 article in the Journal of Southern History, “The Dark and Bloody Ground of Reconstruction Historiography,” was one of the first to challenge the long-prevalent, deeply racist “Dunning School” interpretation of Reconstruction and post-Civil War black history. Along with the late Kenneth Stampp’s The Peculiar Institution (1956), revisionism of that depth and thoroughness took intellectual and moral guts. Bernie also produced dozens of monthly columns for American Heritage explaining the historical roots of current events. You get the point! He has produced a truly remarkable body of historical work.

When I had the honor of dedicating my small book on Progressivism to Bernie, I called him “a true Progressive.” He is that, and he is truly a mensch. My life and my historical work (much of which he has read for me in manuscript) are much the better for having had Bernie as a friend.

It also would have also been more useful if this book combined such a broader comparison film-wise with a narrower or more carefully organized framework of sociological terms.  At the center of Corkin’s argument about the relationship between film and the city is a transition from “Fordism” to post-Fordism that is imprecise and incautiously applied.  Corkin defines that transition not only as the abandonment of mid-twentieth-century industrial production methods and labor relations, but also as the broad transition from an industrial to a “post-industrial” or “informational” society, the even broader cultural shift from the modern to the post-modern, as well as New York’s emergence as a global city, the gentrification of Manhattan neighborhoods and the rising culture of narcissism.  Such alignments are controversial enough when argued on their own (financially speaking, for instance, New York has been a global center since at least the end of World War II).  To apply them to the history of film would require a much more extensive study of Hollywood production over a longer period in the history of cities.  Perhaps this volume is merely Corkin’s starting point.  I hope so, as such a study needs to be done. 

Comments in some cases have been edited. Click here for the archives.

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Nicolas Baverez: The French Are in Decline (posted 12-4-03)

Lara Marlowe, writing in the Irish Times (Dec. 3, 2003):

The theme is as old as the Romans and crops up through history with persistent regularity. A decade ago a book about "the fall of the American empire" was a huge success in the US. This autumn France was seized by its own bout of declinisme, thanks to the economist and historian Nicolas Baverez.

Mr Baverez's book, La France Qui Tombe (France is Falling), has remained on the best-seller list since early September. "I was surprised by the effect it had, and by the violence of some reactions," he said in an interview. "I've received piles of mail, all of it positive, but the reaction of the polticial and media establishment has been very negative." The decline of France, real or imagined, has been debated on virtually every radio and television programme. The Prime Minister, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, reportedly hates Mr Baverez's book. Yet when given the opportunity to debunk the careful accretion of facts and figures demonstrating two decades of diminishing economic and political influence, Mr Raffarin is silent....

Mr Baverez sees only one way to reverse France's decline: reform, reform, reform. "Europe cannot do it for us," he says. The US, Britain and now Germany have made the effort, he notes.

Reducing the highest taxation in Europe, abrogating the 35-hour working week (which translates into a 2 per cent annual reduction in the number of hours worked by French people) and tackling the health system's E30 billion deficit are "urgent measures" recommended by Mr Baverez.

Reform would thin the ranks of France's 5.1 million civil servants, he says, but that would be the result, not the beginning.

It was a sure sign of decline when French diplomats went on strike for the first time in history on Monday. Paris maintains the world's second-largest diplomatic service on a shoestring budget.

The Foreign Ministry's paper supplier stopped deliveries because of late payments. Staff were asked to use both sides of every sheet, and the European Affairs Minister had to buy her own notepads.

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Conrad Black: Reviled as a Businessman, Celebrated as a Historian (posted 12-4-03)

Tina Brown, writing in the Washington Post (Dec. 4, 2003):

It's odd how fast grandeur becomes gloomy when the miasma of misfortune sets in. No one could have predicted that the book party for Conrad Black's monumental study of Franklin D. Roosevelt at New York's Four Seasons restaurant would coincide with his stepping down as CEO of the publishing company Hollinger International -- owner of the Chicago Sun-Times, the Jerusalem Post and, in the U.K., the Daily and Sunday Telegraph and the venerable conservative weekly the Spectator -- under a cloud of allegations of financial self-dealing and an SEC investigation.

Even with hosts as luminous as philanthropist Jayne Wrightsman and fashion designer Oscar de la Renta, acceptances shrank to a small band of loyalists like Henry Kissinger and Ronald Perelman. Unfortunately for Black, a packed, convivial book party for former treasury secretary Robert Rubin was coincidentally raging in the next room. "I'm just doing a fly-by," one society hostess said as she scurried through to the Rubin fiesta beyond.

The strangest moment was when the deposed chairman of Sotheby's, and ex-con, Alfred A. Taubman sidled in. In December 2000, when Lord Black celebrated his wife's 60th birthday with a luxe blowout at another swell New York restaurant, La Grenouille, he baffled the guests with a long, mellifluous toast to the honesty, sobriety, integrity etc., of Taubman -- the relevance of which became clear only months later when honest Al was indicted in a price-fixing scandal at the venerable auction house. Now Taubman was offering reciprocal loyalty.

The meager turnout was a bummer, since Black's 1,300-page biography has had stellar reviews. Historians from Alan Brinkley to Daniel Yergin have hailed it as the best single volume on the many perplexing aspects of FDR's political life. A belligerent neo-con before it was fashionable, Black has paradoxically contrived to write an admiring appraisal of Roosevelt's pre-Pearl Harbor reluctance to fight the Nazis and the economic interventionism of the New Deal for which neo-cons of the '30s bitterly reviled FDR as "that man."

What's interesting about Black is that he's a throwback to the era when media moguls were still called press lords. His eyes sparkle with self-regard but he is at logorrheic ease on any subject with a historical reference. His wife, Barbara Amiel, writes a sharply barbed, rousingly pro-Israel column in the Telegraph. She famously caused interesting trouble when she wrote up the anti-Semitic remarks made by the French ambassador at a dinner he thought was private. She gets away with it because she's not only Lady Black but a brainy, brunette femme fatale with spectacular cleavage. Once, at a dinner party at the publisher Lord Weidenfeld's Chelsea apartment (the party was for Al Taubman, as it happens), I appreciated the deftness with which at cocktail hour she reconnoitered the dining room to switch place cards and seat herself next to a less grand but more amusing man. It was a moment right out of Anthony Trollope.

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Steven L. Kaplan: He Knows More About the History of French Bread than Anyone Ever Has (posted 12-4-03)

Deborah Baldwin, writing in the NYT (Nov. 29, 2003):

Steven L. Kaplan stared through the window of a Paris bakery one Sunday morning, looking like an osprey ready to swoop.

"I've watched him work," Mr. Kaplan said hungrily, speaking of the baker, Dominique Saibron, and his tenderly cultivated sourdough starter, known in the business as levain.

If Mr. Kaplan admires your levain, it is no small thing. He knows more about French bread than practically anyone else, some of France's top bakers say.

A relentless researcher, Mr. Kaplan was one of the people who helped salvage the crusty mainstay in the 1980's, when many baguettes tasted like sliced white bread.

Mr. Kaplan has, in fact, done so much to ennoble the baguette and its cousins, the boule and the bâtard, that he has twice been dubbed a chevalier by the French government for his contributions to the "sustenance and nourishment" of French culture.

The bread baron Francis Holder, who runs Paul, the innovative international chain of bakeries, calls Dr. Kaplan's expertise extraordinary. Jean Lapoujade, a director of the renowned bakery Poilâne, said, "We look forward to his next work with impatience."

Not bad when you consider that Mr. Kaplan, 60, is not a baker and not even French. He is an American professor at Cornell University who grew up in Brooklyn and Queens. "We ate kornbrot," he said, speaking of the dense European rye....

In his award-winning books and many papers on the cultural and political significance of French bread, Mr. Kaplan has charted its role in the revolution of 1789, its anchoring of the French table through the early 20th century and its decline during the 50's, when the baguette became a voluptuous but empty emblem of postwar prosperity. A victim of hypermechanization, fast-acting industrial yeast and suppressed fermentation, Mr. Kaplan said, "it looked lovely but was barren of odor and taste."

Scholars say Mr. Kaplan was the first person to put a shift in consumer tastes into the context of a changing workplace and society.

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So Who Is David Brooks? (posted 11-28-03)

George Gurley, commenting on David Brooks, the new NYT conservative columnist; in the NY Observer (Nov. 11-24-03):

"He's every liberal's favorite conservative," said Michael Kinsley, founding editor of Slate. "He may have no enemies, but that will change: If he still has no enemies writing a column for The New York Times for a couple years, he's failed."

"People were always stopping me, saying that they liked his stuff," said The Times' Ms. Collins. "There is something about him-he's like the conservative guy who can talk to liberals."

"Obviously he's a post-Raines hire, and a very, very smart one," said Andrew Sullivan, the conservative blogger and occasional Times contributor. "He's every liberal's idea of a sane conservative, and he 's every conservative's idea of what a liberal's idea of a sane conservative is. He's not a fire-breather. My boyfriend much prefers his stuff to mine. But I can deal with that."

On this day, the normally unflappable Mr. Brooks seemed nervous: He was tearing up pieces of paper and fiddling with an empty coffee cup. There was a party in his honor that night, and he admitted that being a conservative in New York City can be "socially unpleasant."

"It's a question you don't want to come up," he said. "You'd rather just have a conversation. And then if you say, as I used to, 'I work at The Weekly Standard,' you get the Hitler salute or something like that. I've been at bar mitzvahs where people are seated next to me and they would get up and leave the table. I'm sure it happens to liberals in Alabama, too."

Still, Mr. Brooks isn't exactly swapping spit with the Republicans' far right: He said he finds Fox News' Bill O'Reilly to be "an insufferable ass" and that he "strongly dislikes" leggy blond author Ann Coulter. "I think she creates more liberals than anybody in America," he said.

He's not as harsh on Attorney General John Ashcroft.

"I don't agree with a lot of what he's done, but I think he's been unfairly attacked," Mr. Brooks said. "There's sort of a Saturday Night Live divide in this country. For some people in this country, it's totally out of their realm of sensibility, and John Ashcroft is one of those people. I can't imagine he's sitting around watching Saturday Night Live and loving it. And I'm sort of on the coastal Saturday Night Live divide, on the same side as most of the people who read The Times."

Mr. Brooks said he's against the death penalty, "incredibly mushy-headed" on whether a second-trimester abortion should be legal (he thinks it's O.K. in the first, not in the third), and believes in gay marriage and gays in the military. "It's from personal observation that gay people don't have a choice in being gay," he said.

Although he's not enamored of the Bush tax cuts, he's upbeat about the economy ("The numbers speak for themselves," he said), but the big domestic issue for him is polarization. "We're increasingly dividing-geographically, culturally, religiously, commercially-into totally different segments," he said. "People don't even talk to each other."

And don't call him a neocon.

"I have a rule that if the word 'neocon' appears in a sentence, there' s a 90 percent chance that everything else in that sentence is untrue," he said. "Because people have this idea that there's a secret conspiracy, which I know for a fact is untrue. What people miss is that when they talk about [Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul] Wolfowitz and [Pentagon adviser Richard] Perle and [Weekly Standard editor William] Kristol, they think they're somehow all conversing all the time-but I know for a fact they're just three people who share some ideas but don't talk all that much, and they're not particularly close."

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Should Columbia University Tell Who Funded the Edward Said Chair in Middle East Studies? (posted 11-20-03)

Jonathan Calt Harris, managing editor of Daniel Pipes's www.Campus-Watch.org, writing in frontpagemag.com (Nov. 19, 2003):

Columbia University’s newly established Edward Said Chair in Middle East Studiesis noteworthy for several reasons. The position is named for the recently deceased professor best known for his defense of Palestinian “resistence.” And Rashid Khalidi, an overt supporter of Palestinian violence and – according to a just-published biography of Yasir Arafat from Oxford University Press – a former PLO press spokesman[i], has joined Columbia to fill the post.

But there is something even more objectionable about this chair: It is anonymously endowed and Columbia University – perhaps against the law – refuses to disclose the donors. According to Columbia, the donors’ names are confidential. “We don’t disclose them without their permission,” said spokeswoman Katie Moore, adding that Columbia has “the same policy that every school would have.”[ii]

But what “every school” does is not the issue. What counts are Columbia’s own regulations.

Several donors to the chair’s endowment fund have been identified. The Hauser Foundation, headed by New York philanthropist Rita Hauser, is one of them. Ms. Hauser’s former law firm, Stroock & Stroock & Lavan, has been registered as recently as 2001 with the Justice Department as an agent for the Palestinian Authority.

Another donor is the Olayan Charitable Trust, a New York-based charity affiliated with the Saudi-based Olayan Group. The vice president of corporate communications at Olayan’s New York offices, Richard Hobson, has said that while the trust does not publicize its donations, that he believed it is, “one of the lead donors but not the lead donor.”[iii]

And Martin Kramer, editor of the Middle East Quarterly, reports he has a list of contributors to the chair that includes a foreign government.[iv]

Hiding the donors goes against Columbia’s own rules, which stipulate that a “principal investigator” involved in any university grant or contract is mandated to release information for “dissemination to members of the University community” when such requests are made.[v] An endowed chair is not specifically a university grant or contract, but neither is it that different.

“It is highly unusual, to say the least, for the donor or donors of an academic chair to hide their identity,” says Columbia’s Awi Federgruen, a former dean of the graduate business school. “In the face of various precedents,” he continues, “at Berkeley, Michigan and most recently the Zayed chair donated by the United Arab Emirates to the Harvard Divinity School, one cannot blame the public for being concerned.”[vi]

(Harvard Divinity School recently came under fire for accepting a $2.5 million dollar donation from Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahyan, the President of the United Arab Emirates’, in July, 2000. Zayed was also the namesake sponsor of the Zayed Center in Abu Dhabi, a center known for forwarding anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism. Surprisingly, the storm of criticism resulted in the Zayed Center’s closure but Harvard Divinity School is yet debating whether or not to keep the gift.)[vii]

To keep a gift from a foreign government secret is at minimum a major lapse in judgment and perhaps illegal, on two grounds:

· Khalidi now heads Columbia’s Middle East Institute and in this capacity will oversee nearly $1 million in federal funds over the next three years. Funding for the Said Chair is not simply Columbia’s business, given the incumbent’s oversight of public monies. The public needs to know how the person disbursing taxpayer funds is himself paid.

· Federal law requires that a higher education institution accepting gifts from foreign entities valued at $250,000 or more disclose these contributions and their source,[viii] and New York State law further requires donations of $100,000 to be disclosed.[ix] Research in 2002 by the New York Senate Higher Education Committee revealed there is little, if any, compliance with this law.[x]

Even apart from Khalidi’s shameful bias and Columbia’s blind acceptance of it, the new professor’s clandestine chair puts the entire university under a cloud of impropriety and the only way to fix this is by fully disclosing the funds for his appointment. Federgruen correctly observes that “the sooner matters are out in the open, the better it will be for all parties concerned.”

Columbia needs to come clean and reveal who is funding the Edward Said Chair in Middle East Studies.

[i] Rubin, Barry, and Rubin, Judith Colp, Yasser Arafat, A Political Biography, Oxford University Press, 2003. Pg. 78. Notes 8 and 9.

[ii] “Hauser Helps Fund Professor of Hate”, By Adam Daifallah, New York Sun, July 23, 2003.

[iii] “Hauser Helps Fund Professor of Hate”, By Adam Daifallah, New York Sun, July 23, 2003.

[iv] “Concealment Continues as Columbia”, By Martin Kramer, Sandstorm, September 9, 2003. http://www.geocities.com/martinkramerorg/2003_09_08.htm

[v] “Regulations Governing Externally Funded Research and Instruction,” http://www.columbia.edu/cu/vpaa/fhb/app/app_h.html

[vi] Awi Federgruen, Charles E. Exley Professor in Management at the Graduate School of Business, Columbia University, interview, August 2003.

[vii] “Arab nation seen halting center aid, Students criticized donation to Harvard” by Jenna Russell. Boston Globe, August 20, 2003.

[viii] US. Code Title 20, Chapter 28, Subchapter I, Part B, Sec. 1011f. http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/20/1011f.html

[ix] New York State Senator Kenneth P. LaValle, April 9th, 2002. Press Release Archive. http://www.senatorlavalle.com/press_archive_story.asp?id=199

[x] New York State Senator Kenneth P. LaValle, April 9th, 2002. Press Release Archive. http://www.senatorlavalle.com/press_archive_story.asp?id=199

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Historians Rewrite History: The Campaign to Exonerate Doris Goodwin (posted 11-13-03)

Timothy Noah (aka"Chatterbox"), writing in Slate (Nov. 14, 2003):

Chatterbox never intended to revisit the Doris Goodwin plagiarism case. She's paid her dues, however unwillingly, and her forthcoming book about Abraham Lincoln deserves to be judged on its merits. But when the New York Times publishes a letter denying Goodwin ever committed plagiarism—signed by a pack of distinguished historians, including Arthur Schlesinger Jr., John Morton Blum, Robert Dallek, and Sean Wilentz—the violence done to the truth is too much to bear silently. Historians, of all people, should know better than to rewrite history.

The letter in question appeared in the Oct. 25 New York Times. (To read it, click here.) It was written in response to an Oct. 4 Times story headlined "Are More People Cheating?" that placed Goodwin in the same rogue's gallery as former Tyco Chairman L. Dennis Kozlowski and accused rapist (and confirmed adulterer) Kobe Bryant. Admittedly, that was pretty rough, perhaps rougher than necessary. But what really seems to have provoked the historians' ire was the following perfectly accurate sentence: "Renowned historians like Doris Kearns Goodwin and Stephen Ambrose have plagiarized colleagues' work." ...

Goodwin is no Jayson Blair or Stephen Glass. What she did was wrong, but it shouldn't be career-destroying. Nonetheless, it's quite a stretch to say that Goodwin hews to the "highest standards of moral integrity." A true moral exemplar wouldn't duck the "plagiarism" label, as Goodwin has. And a true moral exemplar wouldn't have hidden the evidence of her plagiarism for many years, acknowledging it only after the press found out about it. That's exactly what Goodwin did. Goodwin's best-known borrowings were lifted from Kathleen Kennedy: Her Life and Times, a biography of JFK's high-spirited sister. The author Lynne McTaggart discovered the plagiarism in the late 1980s, threatened legal action, and reached a quiet settlement with Goodwin's publisher, Simon & Schuster. Goodwin didn't come clean even about her "inadvertence" until news of it broke last year in the Weekly Standard. More to the point, Goodwin left the plagiarized portions intact in subsequent editions of the book in question, The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys, until the Weekly Standard revelations compelled her to fix them.

Moreover, Goodwin is no one-time offender. In August 2002, the Los Angeles Times ran a story by Peter King reporting that Goodwin's subsequent book, No Ordinary Time, also contained passages that were lifted from other books (though once again, Goodwin had scrupulously footnoted).

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Edward Alexander: Historian Martin Jay Argues that Jews Are to Blame for Anti-Semitism (posted 11-11-03)

Edward Alexander, writing in frontepagemag.com (Nov. 11, 2003):

"There is a great temptation to explain away the intrinsically incredible means of liberal rationalizations. In each one of us, there lurks such a liberal, wheedling us with the voice of common sense." -- Hannah Arendt

In the Winter-Spring 2003 issue of Salmagundi, Berkeley professor Martin Jay argues that Jews themselves are "causing" the "new" anti-Semitism. Chief among these perfidious Jews, he names Ariel Sharon, the "fanatic settlers" and also the American Jews who question the infallibility of the New York Times and National Public Radio. ("Ariel Sharon and the Rise of the New Anti-Semitism".)

Unlike the late Edward Said (of whom he writes with oily sycophancy), Jay does not deny the existence of a resurgent anti-Semitism. On the other hand, he, in effect, dismisses its manifestations -- vandalized synagogues and cemeteries, "tipping over a tombstone in a graveyard in Marseilles or burning Torahs in a temple on Long Island [as] payback for atrocities [my emphasis] committed by Israeli settlers." At the same time, he ignores its more serious expressions: stabbings, shootings, murder—all of which have been unleashed against Jews in Europe, as well as in Israel. "The actions of contemporary Jews," Jay concludes, "are somehow connected with the upsurge of anti-Semitism around the globe" , and it would be foolish to suppose that "the victims are in no way involved in unleashing the animosities they suffer."

The academic boycotters of Israeli universities and the professorial advocates of suicide bombing are in the front lines of the defense of terror, which is the very essence of Palestinian nationalism. But they themselves are supported by a rearguard of fellow travelers, a far more numerous academic group whose defining characteristic is not fanaticism but time-serving timorousness.

In the Thirties, "fellow travelers" usually referred to the intellectual friends of Communism (a subject well analyzed in David Caute's book on the subject), although both Hitler and Stalin tried to attract people from America and Britain who served their purposes in the conviction that they were engaged in a noble cause.

At the moment, the favorite cause of peregrinating political tourists is the Palestinian movement, and the reason why fellow travelers favor this most barbaric of all movements of "national liberation" is that its adversaries are Jews. Jews are always a tempting target because of their ridiculously small numbers (currently 997 out of every 1000 people in the world are not Jews) and their image as avaricious corrupters of the young, thieves, agents of Satan, conspiring human devils and Zionist imperialists. As a representative example of the academic fellow-traveler in the ongoing campaign to depict Israel as the devil's own experiment station, Martin Jay is exemplary.

Although Jay's main concern is the (supposedly) "new" anti-Semitism, his heavy reliance on the thesis of Albert Lindemann's unsavory book, Esau's Tears: Modern Anti-Semitism and the Rise of the Jews (1998). He suggests that he believes political anti-Semitism, from its inception in the nineteenth century, has been in large part the responsibility of the Jews themselves. Lindemann's book argued not merely that Jews had "social interactions" (a favorite euphemism of Jay's) with their persecutors but were responsible for the hatreds that eventually consumed them in Europe; anti-Semitism was, wherever and whenever it flared up, a response to Jewish misbehavior.

According to Lindemann, the Romanians had been subjected to "mean-spirited denigration" of their country by Jews, and so it was reasonable for Romania's elite to conclude that "making life difficult" for the country's Jewish inhabitants, "legally or otherwise, was a "justifiable policy." His abstruse research into Russian history also revealed to him that whatever anti-Semitism existed there was "hardly a hatred without palpable or understandable cause." The 1903 Kishinev pogrom, Lindemann grudgingly admitted, did occur but was a relatively minor affair in numbers killed and wounded, which the Jews, with typical "hyperbole and mendacity," exaggerated in order to attract sympathy and money; it was a major affair only because it revealed "a rising Jewish combativeness." (As for the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Lindemann apparently never heard of it, for it goes unmentioned in his nearly fifty pages on Russia.) In Germany, Jews (especially the historian Heinrich Graetz), were guilty of a "steady stream of insults and withering criticism...directed at Germans"; by contrast, Hitler (who published Mein Kampf in 1925-27) was a "moderate" on the Jewish question prior to the mid-1930s; besides, "nearly everywhere Hitler looked at the end of the war, there were Jews who corresponded to anti-Semitic imagery." In addition to being degenerate, ugly, dirty, tribalist, racist, crooked, and sexually immoral, the Jews, as depicted by Lindemann, further infuriated their Gentile neighbors by speaking Yiddish: "a nasal, whining, and crippled ghetto tongue."

Although Jay is by no means in full agreement with Lindemann's thesis (as he is with that of an even cruder polemic by Paul Breines called Tough Jews), he is intensely grateful to this courageous pioneer for breaking a "taboo" on the "difficult question about the Jewish role in causing anti-Semitism," for putting it "on the table." (Readers familiar with this dismal topic will be disappointed to learn that neither Lindemann nor his admirer Jay is able to explain the "Jewish role" in causing the belief, widespread among Christian theologians from St. Augustine through the seventeenth century, that Jewish males menstruate.) This is a remarkable statement to come from a historian. Washington Irving's Rip van Winkle lost touch with history for twenty years while he slept; Jay's dogmatic slumber seems to have lasted 36 years, since 1967, when the brief post-World War II relaxation of anti-Semitism came to an end.

A brief history lesson is in order here. At the end of the second World War, old-fashioned anti-Semites grudgingly recognized that the Holocaust had given anti-Semitism a bad name, that perhaps the time was right for a temporary respite in the ideological war against the Jews. But in 1967, the Jews in Israel had the misfortune to win the war that was unleashed against them by Gamal Nasser, who had proclaimed—in a locution very much akin to Jay's style of reasoning—that "Israel's existence is itself an aggression."

After their defeat, the Arabs reversed their rhetoric from "Right" to "Left," de-emphasizing their ambition to "turn the Mediterranean red with Jewish blood" and instead blaming "the Middle East conflict" on the Jews themselves for denying the Palestinians a state (something that, of course, the Arabs could have given them any time during the nineteen years that they were entirely in control of the disputed territories of "the West Bank"). Since that time what Jay calls the "difficult question about the Jewish role in causing anti-Semitism" has not only been "on the table"; it has provided a royal feast for such heavy feeders as Alexander Cockburn, Desmond Tutu, Michael Lerner, the aforementioned Said, Patrick Buchanan, Noam Chomsky, most of the Israeli Left, and scores of other scribblers. Indeed, the New York Times, which during World War II did its best to conceal the fact that Jews were being murdered en masse, now admits they are being murdered, but blames them for, in Jay-speak, "unleashing the animosities they suffer."

The particular form given by nearly all these forerunners of Lindemann is, of course, blatant reversal of cause and effect in taking for granted that it is Israeli occupation that leads to Arab hatred and aggression, when every normally attentive sixth-grader knows that it is Arab hatred and aggression that lead to Israeli occupation. Jay is very fierce not with Lindemann for regurgitating every anti-Semitic slander dredged up from the bad dreams of Christendom but with Lindemann's "overheated" critics (in Commentary, in the American Historical Review, in Midstream). In the same manner, his outrage about suicide bombings is not against the bombers or their instructors and financiers but against "American Jewish panic" and "Israeli toughness" in reacting to them and so perpetuating (no cliche is too stale and stupid for Jay) "the spiral of violence."

Just as Jay insinuates some mild criticism of Lindemann, he also "qualifies" every now and then his insistence that the Jews themselves are to blame for anti-Semitism, but always in a way that only serves to make his core argument all the more gross and flagrant. "Acknowledging this fact [that the Jewish victims are "involved in unleashing" hatred on themselves] is not 'blaming the victim,' an overly simple formula that prevents asking hard and sometimes awkward questions, but rather understanding that social interactions are never as neat as moral oppositions of good and evil."

Like most liberals, Jay cannot credit the existence of the full evil of the world. "In the case of the Arab war against the Jewish state," Ruth Wisse has observed, "obscuring Arab intentions requires identifying Jews as the cause of the conflict. The notion of Jewish responsibility for Arab rejectionism is almost irresistibly attractive to liberals, because the truth otherwise seems so bleak." Although Jay tries to twist Hannah Arendt's well-known criticism of Sartre's foolish argument that the Jews survived in exile thanks to gentile persecution into an endorsement of his own foolish argument about Jewish responsibility for that persecution, he is himself a classic case of what Arendt called the wheedling voice of "common sense" that lurks inside every liberal, explaining away the "intrinsically incredible," such as the fact that a people would choose to define itself entirely by its dedication to the destruction of another people.

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The Historian as Deadhead (posted 11-13-03)

Interview with Dennis McNally, published in The Door Magazine (Nov./Dec. 2003):

Dennis McNally is a board member of two non-profit organizations, the Northern California affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union and Music in Schools Today. He comes from a military family and graduated from High School in Maine. He attended St. Lawrence University, received a Masters degree and Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in American History. His Doctoral dissertation was a biography of Jack Kerouac, the Beat writer, which was published by Random House, in 1979, bearing the title Desolate Angel: Jack Kerouac, the Beat Generation, and America. By the late 1970's he became a Deadhead, moved to San Francisco, and was hired by Jerry Garcia to become the Grateful Dead's biographer and historian. By 1984, the Dead made him their publicist, a position he still holds today. After over twenty years of first hand experience and research he published the first and only official history of the Grateful Dead. In August 2002, Broadway Books, a division of Random House, Inc, published A Long Strange Trip. The Door sent its left coast correspondent, Bob Gersztyn to interview McNally, in between his numerous bookstore and radio appearances.

THE DOOR MAGAZINE: How did you become the Grateful Dead's biographer and historian? MCNALLY: It's not really all that complicated a story. I wrote a book about Jack Kerouac called Desolate Angel and in the course of it I wanted to write a book about The Grateful Dead. I felt that there were all kinds of direct historical connections. Neal Cassidy, who of course is the Dean Moriarty character in "On The Road" and was involved with "The Merry Pranksters" with the Grateful Dead, is the obvious link, but in general there's a historical progression there that I wanted to explore. It turned out Jerry Garcia thought the same thing, which was kind of convenient for me. On a more personal level I was thinking about doing something about the beat generation in general, and there was a guy in my life who one day said, 'no, you should do Kerouac, and I can help you out. You can stay with my friends in New York City.' When you're a broke graduate student this is very attractive, so, I started on the Kerouac book. He also turned me on to the Grateful Dead. I had this personal connection.

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Philip Nobile: Doris Kearns Goodwin Should Not Be Celebrated (posted 11-11-03)

Editor's Note: Last month the NYT published an article which included Doris Kearns Goodwin among a list of people who have been caught cheating. More than a dozen historians subsequently protested in a letter to the editor of the paper. Their letter was published. Philip Nobile, the investigative journalist who was critical of Ms. Goodwin in these pages, subsequently wrote a letter to the editor protesting the protest. The Times declined to publish his riposte, which follows:

To the Editor:

Despite the defense plea of Arthur Schlesinger, Douglas Brinkley, Robert Dallek, and David Halberstam, there is no innocent explanation for Doris Kearns Goodwin's massive (and still covered up) plagiarism (Letter to the Editor, Oct. 25, 2003). The historians who saluted Ms. Goodwin's "scholarship and integrity" and described her copying in "The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys" as "errors result[ing] from inadvertence" have not done their homework.

First, regarding scholarship: quite apart from infamous looting of Lynne McTaggert's "Kathleen Kennedy: Her Life and Times," Ms. Goodwin has admitted to reproducing dozens of passages without proper attribution from additional books in her Kennedy work (NYT, Feb. 23, 2002). How many passages from how many books? She won't say, despite telling your paper that she had instructed her assistants to comb her biography for unattributed material in view of publishing a corrected version of "The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys," a volume yet to appear. At the least, it is impossible to believe that a writer as sharp as Goodwin could accidentally copy ninety-one passages from McTaggert without noticing the difference between McTaggert's words and her own (Associated Press, March 23, 2002).

Second, Ms. Goodwin forfeited her integrity in 1987 when she (a) paid McTaggert a large sum to keep quiet about the plagiarism and then (b) successfully papered over her acknowledged theft by backdating a new preface to "The Kennedy and the Fitzgeralds" that granted McTaggert extra credit. Having bought her way out of disgrace, this former Harvard scholar did not do the next intellectually honest thing: in subsequent editions of her book she did not bother to put quotes around all of the McTaggert passages. "I made the corrections [McTaggert] requested," she waffled in TIME (Jan. 27, 2002), as if this private concesssion satisfied her obligation to history and the truth.

Until Ms. Goodwin makes full disclosure, that is, until she releases her research notes for "The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys," the original manuscripts, the investigation by her assistants, and the legal settlement with McTaggert, including the amount of hush money, no historian dare claim that she is not a plagiarist, especially in light of the known evidence.

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Brian VanDeMark Found Guilty of Plagiarism (posted 10-29-03)

Nelson Hernandez, writing in the Washington Post (Oct. 29, 2003):

A U.S. Naval Academy history professor accused of plagiarism lost his tenured status and his pay was cut after a board of his peers concluded that he had committed acts of "gross carelessness" in his book about the atomic bomb, the academy's academic dean announced yesterday. The three-member investigating committee found that Brian VanDeMark's book "Pandora's Keepers: Nine Men and the Atomic Bomb" "included a number of instances of improper borrowing and inadequate paraphrasing, and that these improprieties constituted plagiarism," Dean William C. Miller said at a news conference. The committee also found that the borrowing was the result of carelessness and not deliberate. Miller said that effective yesterday, VanDeMark, a professor at the academy since 1990 and once considered a rising star, lost the tenure he earned in 1998 and will be on probation for at least three years, after which he may reapply for tenure. VanDeMark's status was also reduced from associate professor to entry-level assistant professor, and his annual salary was cut from $73,317 to $63,043. He also will be required to correct the instances of borrowing in "Pandora's Keepers" before it is republished. The book was recalled by its publisher, Little, Brown and Co., soon after the allegations were publicized in late May. VanDeMark, 43, declined interviews yesterday but issued a statement through the academy in which he said: "I reiterate my personal responsibility and accept accountability for my unintentional mistakes. "Pandora's Keepers was a big undertaking -- a 399-page biography of nine men with 676 footnotes and a bibliography including all of the sources used -- and I became overconfident about paraphrasing a lot of secondary sources." The announcement ends VanDeMark's spell in academic limbo and allows him to resume teaching core courses at the academy in the spring semester. The academy began an investigation into the accusations immediately after they were published by the New York Times. Miller said that the investigation, conducted by his fellow history professors, was completed by late June or early July and that VanDeMark took nearly a month to respond. After that, Miller was left to render his decision, bearing in mind that VanDeMark, like all of the academy's civilian faculty, is a federal employee and entitled to protections afforded civil servants. Miller said that he spent much time pondering whether the plagiarism had been deliberate. "I relied very heavily on the judgment of the professors we used to consider this inquiry," he said, and they found that "the whole approach to documenting the sources of the book was flawed," pointing to sloppiness rather than purposeful theft. The academy did not release the text of the report on the grounds that it is part of VanDeMark's confidential file.

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In Defense of Doris Kearns Goodwin (posted 10-27-03)

Letter to the Editor of the NYT (Oct. 25, 2003):

We write as historians to attest to our high regard for the scholarship and integrity of Doris Kearns Goodwin and to protest vigorously your article "Are More People Cheating?" (Arts & Ideas, Oct. 4), with the photograph of Ms. Goodwin displayed in the company of some of the most notorious scoundrels in America.

Cheating is a deliberate intent to deceive or defraud. Plagiarism is a deliberate intent to purloin the words of another and to represent them as one's own.

Ms. Goodwin did not intentionally pass off someone else's words as her own. Her sources in her 1987 book, "The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys," were elaborately credited and footnoted. Her errors resulted from inadvertence, not intent.

She did not, she does not, cheat or plagiarize. In fact, her character and work symbolize the highest standards of moral integrity. ARTHUR SCHLESINGER JR. DOUGLAS BRINKLEY ROBERT DALLEK DAVID HALBERSTAM New York, Oct. 9, 2003

Editor's Note: The NYT published just a few of the names of the signers of the letter. Here is the complete list:

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

John M. Blum

Gabor Borritt

Douglas Brinkley

Catherine Clinton

Robert Dallek

John Diggins

John Gable

David Halberstam

Walter Isaacson

Don Miller

Evan Thomas

Richard Wade

Sean Wilentz

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Michael Fry: Threatens to Sue TV Company Over BBC Production (posted 10-23-03)

Stephen McGinty, writing in the scotsman.com (Oct. 18, 2003):

KIRSTY Wark’s production company is facing a legal battle with one of Scotland’s leading historians following a money and copyright dispute over a historical television series.

Professor Michael Fry is unhappy at the use of his book, The Scottish Empire, by Wark Clements for their six-part examination of Scotland’s imperial past. He said his 2001 work was the main inspiration for Scotland’s Empire, produced for BBC Scotland by Wark Clements, owned by Wark and her husband, Alan Clements.

However, the production company insists a range of sources were used, including Scotland’s Empire, a new book by Professor Tom Devine, who was a consultant on the series.

Prof Fry said: "Unless they can satisfy me that I am not the chief inspiration for the series they are making then I will take legal action against them in order to secure my rights as an author and the usual financial acknowledgement in these instances."

A key plank of Prof Fry’s argument is that Prof Devine’s work only charts the Scottish empire until 1815, while his book and the television series continue until the present day.

Wark Clements, who also produced The First World War for Channel 4, said a fee of £7,500 for permission to use the book as research material was paid to John Tuckwell, the managing director of Tuckwell Press, who co-published Prof Fry’s book with Birlinn Press. Prof Fry said he was unaware of the deal until recently, and has had no money. He claimed the copyright lay with him, not Tuckwell Press.

Now both Prof Fry and Hugh Andrew, the managing director of Birlinn Press, are pursuing Wark Clements for financial remuneration and the opportunity to inspect the programmes in order to verify how much use was made of Prof Fry’s scholarship. Mr Andrew said: "I have exchanged one letter with Paul Murray of Wark Clements and written a second seeking further information, and until I receive more clarification, I would be spitting in the wind."

Wark Clements acknowledge the idea for the series sprang from the publication of Prof Fry’s book. Mr Murray, the company’s head of factual programmes, met the historian and later drew up a proposal for the series. But the production company insists that at an early stage in development, a decision was made that the series would reflect the opinions of a range of academics, not one author.

Scotland’s Empire, which has no scheduled transmission date as yet, covers a huge time period, from around 1700 and the disaster of the Darien Expedition, which brought Scotland to its knees, to 1997 and the handover of Hong Kong, a colony driven by Scottish business interests. Individual programmes tackle the involvement of Scots missionaries, adventurers and businessmen in nations such as the United States, Africa, India, the West Indies, South Seas and the Orient.

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Robert Donia: The Historian Who Testified at the Bosnian War Trials (posted 10-23-03)

Adam Supernant, writing in the Michigan Daily (Oct. 21, 2003):

Called to be an expert witness in the trials following the Bosnian war of the 1990s, Robert Donia has testified against seven Serbian and Croatian war criminals at The Hague during the past six years.

The University alum brought his experiences on how history can be used or abused in international law yesterday as the annual DeRoy Visiting Professor in Honors speaker.

Donia ended up testifying at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia through a series of coincidental circumstances.

Hailed as one of the most significant challenges facing international law in recent history, the Netherlands-based ICTY aims to prosecute those responsible for violating international law during the Bosnian war, including Slobodan Milosevic, the former president of Yugoslavia.

Serving as an expert witness for the prosecution, Donia testified against Serbian and Croatian criminals charged with genocide, murder and other war crimes.

The uniqueness of his position is that since all of the trials were successfully appealed, the focus of the trial would be factual evidence while the appeal would be based on the more specific points of international law.

Given Donia's background as a leading historian of the region, his work centered on testifying in the actual trial rather than the appeal.

"If historians and lawyers were lined up on opposite ends of the field, John Madden could say these teams don't like each other," he said.

Expert witnesses for the defense would often omit certain pieces of fact, Donia added.

They would attempt to legitimize the Bosnian war by arguing Serbia and Croatia's claims to the area have been longstanding and that Bosnia and Herzegovina was and still is part of medieval Croatia.

Another defense argument was that the Balkan people as a whole were "inherently incapable of possessing superior organizational skills," based on the argument that while fast food was prominent in Western Europe and America, food preparation takes much longer in the Balkans.

"I think it's somewhat unexpected that history is such a part of international law trials. It seems peculiar that he is testifying at the war crimes tribunal," Law School student Scott Risner said....

Donia was drawn to studying the Balkans by "just a series of coincid]]> Wed, 24 Apr 2024 15:18:19 +0000 https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/1195 https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/1195 0

NEW KID ON THE BLOCK 11-06-03

I am pleased to join Liberty and Power.  As I told David when I was invited, there are several writers on this list whose work I've admired for some time.  It's awfully flattering to be invited to join such an august group.  I hope I can hold up my end of the bargain.

I author the majority of my blogging work at SCSU Scholars.  SCSU is St. Cloud State University, my employer, which National Association of Scholars president Steve Balch once described as"ground zero" of the battle against political correctness in Minnesota.  The Scholars blog grew out of a desire to have a way for people opposed to the infantilization of our university's curriculum, the curtailment of free speech, and the continued poor governance by both the administration and a faculty union. 

I am hoping to bring a couple of items from there to the readers of L&P, but more to the point I'd like an opportunity to expand my writing beyond issues in higher education.  I will write often on international political economy and central banking (these are my areas of expertise).

Posted by King Banaian at 4:50 p.m. EST

]]> Wed, 24 Apr 2024 15:18:19 +0000 https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/1621 https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/1621 0

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Richard Pipes: The Reluctant Power Scholar (posted 9-30-03)

Arnold Beichman, writing in the Weekly Standard (Sept. 29, 2003):

RICHARD PIPES is one of our most eminent historians. His books on Russian and Soviet history have been among the most influential and (at least as far as the academic left and Russian nationalists like Alexander Solzhenitsyn are concerned) among the most controversial. But his new autobiography--"Vixi," Latin for "I lived" --is of interest not just for his academic work but also for his service as a White House adviser. The book is also an informal history of the last days of the Cold War, documented in dramatic fashion by someone who was most assuredly not a belonger in official Washington.

Pipes came to America in 1939 as a sixteen-year-old refugee from Poland. A Warsaw-born predecessor in the White House, Zbigniew Brzezinski, was already in Canada with his family when World War II broke out--and one wonders what the Kremlin thought when two anti-Communist Poles became White House foreign-policy advisers: Brzezinski as national-security adviser to a waffling Jimmy Carter, and Pipes as a national-security desk officer to Ronald Reagan. Moving from his longtime Harvard to Washington during the first two years of Reagan's presidency, Pipes was able to apply his knowledge and sense of strategy to the formulation of policies that helped bring down the Soviet Union.

He had had some earlier experience with Washington as a member of the Committee on the Present Danger and later as head of an official group that audited the CIA's analyses of the Soviet economy--and found the CIA work to be woefully inadequate. Unfortunately, this experience didn't prepare him for the kind of stealth needed to win Washington's battles.

Nevertheless, Pipes's appointment (thanks to Richard V. Allen, head of the National Security Council and himself a leading anti-Soviet strategist) was felicitous: a president who believed that the Soviet Union was not here to stay, a national-security chief who shared that view, and a Polish-American intellectual who agreed wholeheartedly. And they were all blessed with such superb speechwriters as Tony Dolan and Peter Robinson, and their successors who shared their clients' anti-Sovietism. That was why Reagan made his "evil empire" and Westminster speeches, and why later in 1987, over the hysterical objections of the State Department, he spoke at the Brandenburg Gate, with the Berlin Wall behind him, to utter his dramatic apostrophe to the Soviet Union: "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall."

One thing is clear from "Vixi": Pipes simply didn't or wouldn't understand the principles of a town where a bureau chief frequently has more power than his cabinet-secretary superior. As Pipes, the Harvard professor, describes it: "Such vanity as I possess was and remains that of an intellectual who wants to influence the way people think and feel rather than one who enjoys power over them or craves the status of a celebrity."

But the only sure way to achieve that influence is through political power. Henry Kissinger wrote a number of highly influential foreign-policy books as a Harvard professor. His influence, however, only became measurable when he went to work for President Nixon as national security adviser, a post from which he made his great leap forward to become secretary of state.

Pipes's complaint about mistreatment by Allen--who, he says, looked upon Pipes "as a potential rival and hence kept me in the background"--is unattractive. Far more significant is Pipes's assertion that Nancy Reagan and Michael Deaver took a dim view of Allen "since they were determined to tame Reagan's anti-communism and draw him closer to the mainstream," the mainstream being the anti-anti-communism which, I assume, they favored. Mrs. Reagan, he says, "was troubled by her husband's reputation as a primitive cold warrior." Anti-Communists like Allen and Pipes did not fit into the Nancy Reagan-Deaver world. Deaver and James Baker, says Pipes, "seemed to treat [Reagan] like a grandfather whom one humors but does not take seriously."....

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Edward Said's Legacy: A Negative View (posted 9-29-03)

Ibn Warraq ("a pseudonym used to protect himself and his family from Islamists") is the author of Why I am Not a Muslim; writing in the Wall Street Journal (Sept. 29, 2003):

Late in life, Edward Said made a rare conciliatory gesture. In 1998, he accused the Arab world of hypocrisy for defending a Holocaust denier on grounds of free speech. After all, free speech "scarcely exists in our own societies." The history of the modern Arab world was one of "political failures," "human rights abuses," "stunning military incompetences," "decreasing production, [and] the fact that alone of all modern peoples, we have receded in democratic and technological and scientific development."

Those truths aside, Mr. Said, who died last week, will go down in history for having practically invented the intellectual argument for Muslim rage. "Orientalism," his bestselling manifesto, introduced the Arab world to victimology. The most influential book of recent times for Arabs and Muslims, "Orientalism" blamed Western history and scholarship for the ills of the Muslim world: Were it not for imperialists, racists and Zionists, the Arab world would be great once more. Islamic fundamentalism, too, calls the West a Satan that oppresses Islam by its very existence. "Orientalism" lifted that concept, and made it over into Western radical chic, giving vicious anti-Americanism a high literary gloss.

In "Terror and Liberalism," Paul Berman traces the absorption of Marxist justifications of rage by Arab intellectuals and shows how it became a powerful philosophical predicate for Islamist terrorism. Mr. Said was the most influential exponent of this trend. He and his followers also had the effect of cowing many liberal academics in the West into a politically correct silence about Islamic fundamentalist violence two decades prior to 9/11. Mr. Said's rock-star status among the left-wing literary elite put writers on the Middle East and Islam in constant jeopardy of being labeled "Orientalist" oppressors -- a potent form of intellectual censorship.

"Orientalism" was a polemic that masqueraded as scholarship. Its historical analysis was gradually debunked by scholars. It became clear that Mr. Said, a literary critic, used poetic license, not empirical inquiry. Nevertheless he would state his conclusions as facts, and they were taken as such by his admirers. His technique was to lay charges of racism, imperialism, and Eurocentrism on the whole of Western scholarship of the Arab world -- effectively, to claim the moral high ground and then to paint all who might disagree with him as collaborators with imperialism. Western writers employed "a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient." They conspired to suppress native voices that might give a truer account. All European writings masked a "discourse of power." They had stereotyped the "Other" as passive, weak, or barbarian. "[The Orientalist's] Orient is not the Orient as it is, but the Orient as it has been Orientalized," he said.

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How Gerhard Weinberg Discovered Hitler's Second Book (posted 9-25-03)

Daniel Johnson, writing in telegraph.co.uk (Sept. 25, 2003):

In 1958, Gerhard Weinberg made the kind of discovery that features in every historian's dreams. During his summer holidays, the young American scholar had been examining captured German military documents in the US Army archives, which - back then - were housed in a converted torpedo factory in Alexandria, across the Potomac from Washington DC. Before being shipped back to Germany, each one was being microfilmed. Humdrum work, but Weinberg was alert to a remote yet exciting possibility. In a memoir, one of Hitler's secretaries had mentioned a "secret" book about Nazi foreign policy - Weinberg's special subject. Then, when Hitler's Table Talk was published by Hugh Trevor-Roper (later Lord Dacre) in 1953, there was a reference to this "unpublished work" by Hitler himself. Weinberg hoped to track it down one day, though it was not easy to know where to look.

One day, leafing through the contents of a green box-file, he found a folder labelled "Draft of Mein Kampf". Inside was a 324-page typescript: "The moment I looked at it, read the opening lines and the attached document on its confiscation, it became obvious to me that this was not a draft of Mein Kampf. In fact, this was the book to which I had seen references," he says.

It was a dramatic moment: Weinberg had unearthed a previously unknown second book by Hitler, the only one he ever wrote after Mein Kampf. "This thing in fact existed and was here! It really existed, it had survived," says Weinberg, recalling his excitement. "Lots of stuff, after all, had been destroyed - and now this could be made accessible to anybody who had an interest in it."

By a stroke of good fortune, it had already been declassified by the authorities, which meant there was nothing to stop Weinberg making it public. Before there could be any question of publication, however, he had to be sure that it was authentic. Though this was a quarter of a century before the great "Hitler Diaries" hoax - which damaged the reputations of the Times, the Sunday Times and the late Lord Dacre - Weinberg was already aware of the danger of forgery.

The document itself, though yellowing, was in decent condition. Weinberg applied the logical methods of Sherlock Holmes: "If you look carefully, you can see that it has been dictated straight on to a typewriter, because, periodically, there is a space and then a full stop or a comma. In other words, the person who was typing thought there was another word coming and had already hit the space bar, then realised it was the end of the sentence or there was a comma coming. And I knew from other information that it was a practice of Hitler's to dictate on to the typewriter. So the physical appearance of the document was consistent with the way that Hitler actually operated."

The provenance of the typescript was good: it had been found among other documents known to be genuine. According to the brief report appended by the American officer who confiscated it in 1945, this copy had been kept in the safe of the Nazi publishing house and then handed over by Josef Berg, the manager, who thought it had been written "more than 15 years ago" (i.e. before 1930).

The Munich Institute for Contemporary History, which had also been searching for the Hitler book, told Weinberg that it had received correspondence about it. Among the letters was one from a man called Lauer, who said that, during the war, Berg had shown him the manuscript of a book by Hitler.

"I checked up: who is Lauer and why would anybody show him secret things out of the safe?" said Weinberg. "It turned out that this was a man who had edited a whole bunch of songbooks for the Nazi party, so he knew his way around the publishing house. So it made sense that Berg, a close friend with whom he had worked there, might make himself important by saying: 'Hey - you know what we got here?' "

Berg, who was still alive, then provided a crucial detail. Writing to the institute in 1958, he mentioned that there had been another copy of the typescript. Weinberg seized on this: "At one point, after the first couple of hundred pages of what we used to call ribbon [top] copy, it suddenly changed, and the last 100 or so pages were clearly carbon copies. That suggests to me that when they were collating it, back in 1928, somebody goofed. There were, at one point, two copies - at least.

"Now, this combination of information, and a careful reading of the text, convinced me that there was no question but that this was authentic. The bits and pieces of evidence fitted together and made sense.

"All the corrections, with one exception, were made on the typewriter while Hitler was dictating. He would suddenly stop and say: 'Strike that', and Max Amann [the publisher to whom Hitler dictated the second volume of Mein Kampf as well as this second book] would 'xxx' out a few words, and then would come a new bunch of words. There is one short word corrected by ink. My guess is that this was done at the time. There is no editing; it was never worked over, even for spelling errors. It's the way it came out of the typewriter in the summer of 1928. Then it was simply stashed away."

Once the question of authenticity had been settled, Weinberg asked himself: why did Hitler's second book never appear at the time he wrote it? "I think Max [the publisher] advised him against publishing it just then," Weinberg says. It would have competed with Mein Kampf, the second volume of which was not selling well. "The following year, Hitler aligned himself with the very people he attacked in this manuscript: the people on the political Right who wanted to undo the Versailles Treaty. Hitler thought they were utter fools - but he was not about to say that in print, when they gave him money to travel all over Germany and appeal to the German people. And, later on, all kinds of other changes would have had to be made [to the book]."

Did Hitler ever refer to the book again?

"The one time when he did refer to it in his table talk was in February 1942, almost 14 years after he had written it. Obviously, in the intervening years, his decision not to publish it must reflect some kind of choice."

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Professor of Art History Honored by Smithsonian for book About Banned Homosexual Images (posted 9-25-03)

Steve Houchin, writing in the student newspaper of the Universty of Southern California (Sept. 24, 2003):

The Smithsonian American Art Museum has recognized a USC professor of art history for his book on censorship and homosexuality.

Richard Meyer, chair of the art history department and an associate professor of modern and contemporary art, won the 2003 Charles C. Eldredge Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in American Art for his book "Outlaw Representation: Censorship and Homosexuality in Twentieth­Century American Art."

"Outlaw Representation" is a study of homosexual art from the years 1934 to 2000. It examines the censorship and public scrutiny experienced by artists whose work was declared immoral and indecent.

"In a way I wrote this book as a defiance of censorship," Meyer said. "I wanted to say that these images are worth more attention and have a lot to offer. They should be taken seriously."

Works by artists such as Robert Mapplethorpe and Andy Warhol are examined in order to point out specific controversies throughout history. The book takes art that was at one time considered scandalous and gives readers the opportunity to analyze them seriously, Meyer said.

"When there are moments of public censorship the artist experiences a lot of press coverage and visibility, but under the sign of scandal," he continued. "The work is battled over by various groups and any attention to the artwork itself is lost."

Meyer, who spent a total of 10 years working on "Outlaw Representation," said the book wasn't published without conflict.

Oxford University Press asked to remove certain images from the book, Meyer said. He refused to remove any of the artwork and, consequently, the book was only published in the United States.

Meyer said he felt that if he removed images the book would become incomplete.

"I'm glad I didn't back down," he said. "I hated the idea that a book about censorship was going to be censored."

While attending graduate school at the University of California at Berkeley, a large controversy arose involving the censorship of Robert Mapplethorpe's art. In 1989 the Corcoran gallery of art canceled an exhibit of Mapplethorpe's called "The Perfect Moment" two weeks before it was supposed to open.

"For me, this was the moment I lived through where I decided I wanted to be able to contribute to the explanation of why these works are important," he said. "I really wanted to use my training as an art historian to tell a story which hadn't been told."

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Wilbur H. Siebert: A Memorial Marker to Commemorate His Research on the Underground Railroad(posted 9-23-03)

HE was considered the world's foremost authority about the historic Underground Railroad.

On Tuesday, the late Wilbur H. Siebert, grandfather of a St. Clairsville area businessman, will be honored with the dedication of a historical marker at The Ohio State University. Siebert, a professor of history at OSU from 1893 to 1935, published dozens of books and other articles on the Underground Railroad in Ohio and elsewhere.

At the age of 80 in 1951, Professor Siebert wrote his final book, "The Mysteries of Ohio's Underground Railroads."

Siebert is being recognized by Ohio State's Department of History, and The Ohio Historical Society as part of the Ohio Bicentennial Commission's celebration of Ohio's statehood.

John S. Marshall, longtime resident of St. Clairsville and grandson of Professor Siebert, will attend Tuesday's dedication ceremony.

Marshall has maintained an impressive number of significant artifacts and memoirs of his grandfather's works.

Siebert is recognized for organizing one of the most extensive historical collections on the Underground Railroad in the United States. "When Professor Siebert began teaching history at Ohio State in 1891, there was precious little published information on the subject," noted Peter Hahn, OSU professor of history and vice chair of the department. "It's fitting to memorialize his contributions to Ohio history and Ohio's Bicentennial with this marker."

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Roy Foster: Irish Revisionist (posted 9-22-03)

Andrew Brown, writing in the Guardian (Sept. 13, 2003):

Elongated, stooped and rather handsome, like the decoration in an illuminated manuscript, Roy Foster stands against the gold-washed wall of his house in Kentish Town, north London. He cuts a strange, somewhat 90s figure, but it's not clear from which century. Is he from the 1890s, when modern Irish nationalism was conceived in the occult imagination of WB Yeats? Or the 1990s, when hatreds that had seemed to define Irish history throughout the 20th century seemed at last to lose some of their power? Most of that decade he spent on the second volume of an authorised biography of Yeats, which is also a history of the birth of modern Ireland and its myths about itself. It is an astonishing blend of scholarship and sympathy, which brings together all his preoccupations with Irish history, the English language and the role played in human affairs by dreams and desires that never came true. "History is not about manifest destinies, but unexpected and unforeseen futures," he has written. "The most illuminating history is often written to show how people acted in the expectation of a future that never happened." This remark points to the difficulty of the task he has set himself as a historian: anyone can ascertain the things that actually happened. What's hard is the sympathetic reconstruction of the things that never happened, but which are needed to make sense of the things that did.

His Modern Ireland has become the standard history of the period from about 1600 onwards, in which Irish history was dominated by the fact that a largely Catholic country was being governed by a constitutionally Protestant one. The first volume of his Yeats biography was praised to the skies: "Absolutely marvellous," says Conor Cruise O'Brien, who also calls Foster "a very brilliant, insightful historian."

But Modern Ireland was significant not just as a history. Its publication, and its success, marked important parts of the process whereby modern Ireland came to terms with one of its own founding myths: that the essence of Ireland was forged in 700 years of oppression by the Saxon invader.

Foster was one of the generation of Irish historians who came to maturity as the price of sectarian rhetoric became apparent in the bloody shambles of Northern Ireland. Their work became known as "revisionism"and was mocked by their enemies. But it was deadly serious, because it dealt with the history and nature of Irish identity. When a war was being fought in the north and people were being blown up to decide whether Protestants could be properly Irish the question of whether Protestants had in the past been properly Irish was not a purely academic one. Nor was the related question of whether Irish history was the story of Irish nationalism. Foster is in no doubt that it was not.

"The Irish nationalist myth was energising and in many ways necessary for a couple of generations after indepen dence and the necessary reappraisals in the last generations haven't taken away from that," he says now. "I remember very distinctly in 1966, when I was 17, the commemoration of the Easter Rising. We went up to Dublin and were rather excited to see that Eamon de Valera was still there." The president was, after all, a figure from the myth himself, who had been condemned by the British to be shot after the rising.

"All this," Foster says now, "was pre- the balloon going up in the north and pre- the rebirth of the IRA. The change in perception, after all these old issues which used the old rhetoric flared into life was very marked." What made the revisionism possible, he says, was the very success of the nationalist project in producing a state where the old questions had seemed quite safely mythological. The south was "a country that over 70 years has developed a stable, mature, and increasingly confident polity while manipulating multiple forms of ambiguity in terms of national identity and political ethos - opposite parties standing for the same things, a 'first national language' spoken by next to nobody as their first national language, a claim on territory that few politicians really wanted, and a booming economy dependent on international handouts."

There was, however, one area of Irish life where this picture of history was not accepted, and that was among professional historians. From about 1940 onwards, at both the historically Catholic University College Dublin, and the historically Protestant Trinity College, the study of history was dominated by men who rejected the nationalist myth. They did not write large books, and their work was largely unknown to the general public. But they taught generations of teachers that Irish history was far more complicated than could be publicly acknowledged. The writer Colm Tóibín came up to University College Dublin in 1972 from a very hard-line republican background, which incarnated the tradition of violent republicanism. His grandfather had fought in 1916. He was shocked to discover that "my teachers didn't want to know anything about physical force republicanism. They talked about O'Connell and Parnell instead. This was in 1972, when a car-bomb campaign was being waged in the north and was being justified, not just in the name of what the other side had done last week, but also in the name of what Pearse and Connolly had died for in 1916."

The term "revisionist" first became a term of abuse in Irish historiography in the late 1970s. Ruth Dudley Edwards, whose father Owen had been one of the 40s generation of historians at University College, published a biography of Patrick Pearse in 1978. She was accused of being a revisionist: "I didn't know the word. But there was a perception that we were part of a political movement." ...The quick book to make some money was Modern Ireland, and proved to be the channel through which all the pent-up scepticism of four decades of revisionism could burst into Irish public life. "Nobody else had the grasp, the energy, the style, in a sense, to get at all that graduate work and synthesise it," says Tóibín. "It really forced itself into the Irish home. People who would have bought Tim Pat Coogan bought this instead. When you went to look anything up in in it, you got the facts, but you came away scratching your head, and refusing a grand narrative."

The distinctive quality of Modern Ireland among best-selling histories lies in the way it answers almost every question by suggesting all the answers are incomplete, and there is more to learn on almost every subject. The writer Selina Hastings met him when he was busy with it. She asked what he was doing - she was working on a biography of Nancy Mitford at the time - and when he answered "Irish history", her heart sank and it showed. "Don't worry," he said. "I'm doing it all about food and the private lives of curates."

Nothing could be more destructive of the simple certainties of the old story. The narrative swings along easily enough, but the narrative is steeped in the rational, careful, sceptical temper of Foster's mind. He wrote of FSL Lyons, a historian he greatly admired, that "his intelligence was notably subtle, reflective, interrogative" and these, say his admirers, are the qualities displayed in his own work. Irish history is full enough of atrocity but Foster reacts with irony where others might fizzle with indignation.

It all flickers playfully as summer lightning, until it strikes and scorches. In a recent paper on the role of hatred in Irish history, he writes: "Historical study of the IRA has now shown a rather different view of the strategy behind the 1981 hunger strikes than Padraig O'Malley's sensitive but over-literary analysis. As one of the prisoners put it, 'We felt that the IRA should have been slaughtering people in 20s and 30s' outside the prisons, to counterpoint the individual deaths in the Maze. This is an instructive contrast to O'Malley's reading of the tactic as 'the ancient tradition of the heroic quest, embedded in the hidden recesses of the Celtic consciousness'."

But even here, the Fosterish touch is to praise as "sensitive" the author he's about to disembowel. "Foster always uses the stiletto," says Edwards, "Whereas Conor Cruise O'Brien will use anything - even a mortar." Tóibín points out that Foster has not aligned himself against the Hume-Adams agreement that brought Sinn Fein into politics in Northern Ireland in the way the other most notable revisionists have done.

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Pipes and Kramer: Anti-Arab and Anti-Muslim, Says Joel Benin (posted 9-18-03)

Joel Benin, writing in Mondediplo.com (July 2003):

LEADING the charge against critical thinking about Islam and the Middle East in the US are Martin Kramer, Daniel Pipes, and Steven Emerson. Exploiting legitimate fears since 11 September 2001, their writings and speeches seek to impose an anti-Arab and anti-Muslim orthodoxy on Americans.

Shortly after 11 September 2001 Martin Kramer, former director of the Dayan Centre for Middle East Studies at Tel Aviv University, published a tract condemning the entire academic field of Middle East studies in North America (1).

Kramer alleges that the "mandarins" of the Middle East Studies Association of North America have imposed an intellectual and political orthodoxy inspired by Edward Said's Orientalism (2); moreover they failed to predict the attacks or warn the US public about the dangers of radical Islam. Kramer has not seen fit to criticise the FBI and the CIA, who are specifically charged with conducting intelligence and preventing crime.

Kramer also edits Middle East Quarterly, the house organ of the Middle East Forum, a neo-conservative thinktank directed by Daniel Pipes. Pipes has a long record of attempting to incite Americans against Arabs and Muslims. In 1990 he wrote: "Western European societies are unprepared for the massive immigration of brown-skinned peoples cooking strange foods and maintaining different standards of hygiene . . . All immigrants bring exotic customs and attitudes, but Muslim customs are more troublesome than most"(3).

One recent project of the Middle East Forum is Campus-Watch, a website designed to police dissent on university campuses. Its aim was to "monitor and gather information on professors who fan the flames of disinformation, incitement, and ignorance".

Campus-Watch (which has now been removed from the web due to criticism of its McCarthyite character) claimed that Middle East scholars "seem generally to dislike their own country and think even less of American allies abroad". The reason was that "Middle East studies in the US have become the preserve of Middle Eastern Arabs, who have brought their views with them".

President Bush recently nominated Pipes for a seat on the board of directors of the US Institute for Peace, a congressionally funded foundation established in 1984 "to promote the prevention, management, and peaceful resolution of international conflicts".

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John Esposito: American Dissenter (posted 9-18-03)

Omayma Abdel-Latif, writing in A HREF="http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2003/645/intrvw.htm">Al-Ahram]]> Wed, 24 Apr 2024 15:18:19 +0000 https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/1722 https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/1722 0 Click here to return to the latest entries in Comments About Historians.

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• Howard Zinn: A Million Copies of His Book Have Been Sold
• Daniel Pipes Assailed by Muslim Group
• Historians Against the War
• Roger Kimball: Still Slaying the Dragons of the Left
• Brian Dippie: The Canadian Who Grew Up Loving the American West
• Francis Fukuyama: Still Convinced He Was Right
• Glenda Gilmore: Victim of the Right Wing?
• Eric Alterman: Noam Chomsky Is Untrustworthy as a Historian
• "The Antidote to Simon Schama"
• Herbert Aptheker, Communist
• Henry Kamen: Did He Slur The Conquistadores?
• Eric Foner: Did He Trivialize 9-11?
• Rashid Khalidi: Radical?
• John Hope Franklin: Joining A Lawsuit Over The Tulsa Race Riot
• Benny Morris: Disenchanted
• Chris Hill: Why Was He Forgiven?

• Hobsbawm: Nostalgic For The Cold War

• Re: Ellis, Ambrose And Goodwin

• Niall Ferguson: Apologist For British Imperialism

• Losers Call Howard Zinn

• Newt Gingrich, Historian

• Trevor-Roper: In Memory Of A Historian Who Challenged Marxism

• Michael Bellesiles: Defended In The Pages Of The Oah Newsletter

• David Mccullough: Present At The State Of The Union Address

• Two Brits In Favor Of War With Iraq

• Joel Beinin: His Problem With Math

• Jorg Friedrich: Assailed For Claiming Germans Were Victims Too

• Robert KC Johnson: Defended By New York Sun

• Richard Pipes: Seer?

• Thomas Fleming: How He Narrowly Missed Becoming A Lawyer

• Eric Hobsbawm: Ruined By Communism?

• Karen Armstrong: Apologist For Suicide Bombers?

• Roger Wilkins: Jefferson's Complicated Legacy

• Brian Victoria: Exposing The Violent History Of Zen

• Roy Foster: Assailing The Nostalgic Myth That Surrounds Irish History

• Daniel Pipes: Defended Against Charge Of Mccarthyism

• Gavin Menzies: The Chinese Beat Columbus

• Keith Windschuttle: The Firestorm He's Created In Australia

• David Irving: In League With The Boycott Israel Crowd

• Robert Dallek: Historian Or Gumshoe?

• Stephen Ambrose: He Changed The Way We Look At War

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Eric Hobsbawm: No Apologies (posted 8-24-03)

Sarah Lyall, writing in the NYT (August 23, 2003):

Born in 1917, the year of the October Revolution, the historian Eric Hobsbawm has lived through much of "the most extraordinary and terrible century in human history," as he describes it, from the rise of Communism and fascism to World War II, the cold war and the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

Recent events, he says, "fit in with the gloomy picture" he has had of world affairs for the last three-quarters of a century.

But for an unapologetic pessimist, Mr. Hobsbawm is remarkably robust, bordering on cheerful.

As he describes in "Interesting Times: A 20th-Century Life" (Pantheon), his new memoir, Mr. Hobsbawm has overcome considerable odds, including a fractured childhood in Weimar Germany, to become one of the great British historians of his age, an unapologetic Communist and a polymath whose erudite, elegantly written histories are still widely read in schools here and abroad.

He turns his analytical historian's eye on himself, examining with wry, rich detail the history of the century "through the itinerary of one human being whose life could not possibly have occurred in any other," he writes. The title's twin meanings — interesting times, according to the old Chinese curse, inevitably carry tragedy and upheaval, too — neatly capture the tensions between his personal history and his life as a historian.

"Do you remember what Brecht said — `Unlucky the country that needs heroes'?" Mr. Hobsbawm asked. "From the point of view of ordinary people, uninteresting times, where things aren't happening, are the best. But from the point of view of a historian, obviously, it's completely different."

Mr. Hobsbawm, a gangly 86-year-old with thick horn-rimmed glasses and an engagingly lopsided smile, spoke in his living room in Hampstead, long the neighborhood of choice for London's leftist intellectuals, in between sips of coffee. The room was lined with books; the front hall was full of the toddler paraphernalia that comes when one's home is a destination of choice for grandchildren (he has three). The telephone rang constantly as various family members and friends called to discuss plans that Mr. Hobsbawm invariably said would require further consultation with his wife, Marlene, who was out for the morning.

Mr. Hobsbawm is that unlikeliest of creatures, a committed Communist who never really left the party (he let his membership lapse just before the collapse of the Soviet Union) but still managed to climb to the upper echelons of English respectability by virtue of his intellectual rigor, engaging curiosity and catholic breadth of interests. He is an emeritus professor at the University of London and holds countless honorary degrees around the world, from Chile to Sweden.

Yet he will always be dogged by questions about how he can square his long and faithful membership in the Communist Party with the reality of Communism, particularly as it played out under Stalin. In "Interesting Times," he denounces Stalin and Stalinism but also praises aspects of Communist Russia and argues that in some countries, notably the former U.S.S.R., life is worse now than it was under the Socialist system.

Some people will never forgive Mr. Hobsbawm for his beliefs. In an angry review of his new book in The New Criterion, David Pryce-Jones said that Mr. Hobsbawm was "someone who has steadily corrupted knowledge into propaganda" and that his Communism had "destroyed him as an interpreter of events."

"Interesting Times" has gathered mostly glowing reviews across Britain. But the book again raises the problem that even Mr. Hobsbawm's admirers find dismaying.

In The Times Literary Supplement, the historian Richard Vinen said that "Interesting Times" does not give a satisfactory explanation of its author's motivations. "The closer that he comes to such questions, the more confusing he becomes," Mr. Vinen wrote.

Mr. Hobsbawm does address the issue in a section explaining why he did not abandon Communism in 1956 when Nikita S. Khrushchev's electrifying denunciation of Stalin sent waves of revulsion at Stalin's crimes through the worldwide movement. But while many of his colleagues resigned from the party in horrified protest, Mr. Hobsbawm did not.

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Eric Hobsbawm: Lying to the Credulous (posted 8-24-03)

David Pryce-Jones, writing in the New Criterion (January 2003):

Eric Hobsbawm is no doubt intelligent and industrious, and he might well have made a notable contribution as a historian. Unfortunately, lifelong devotion to Communism destroyed him as a thinker or interpreter of events. Such original work as he did concerned bandits and outlaws. But even here there is bias, for he rescued them from obscurity not for their own sake but as precursors of Communist revolution. His longer and later books are constructed around the abstractions of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat and the supposedly pre-ordained class struggle between them, capital and capitalism, empire and imperialism—in short the Marxist organizing principles which reduce human beings and their varied lives to concepts handy to serve a thesis worked up in advance and in the library. This material, needless to say, was derived from secondary sources.

The purpose of all Hobsbawm’s writing, indeed of his life, has been to certify the inevitable triumph of Communism. In the face of whatever might actually have been happening in the Soviet Union and its satellites, he devised reasons to justify or excuse the Communist Party right to its end—long after Russians themselves had realized that Communism had ruined morally and materially everybody and everything within its reach. He loves to describe himself as a professional historian, but someone who has steadily corrupted knowledge into propaganda, and scorns the concept of objective truth, is nothing of the kind, neither a historian nor professional.

It becomes quite a good joke that Communism collapsed under him, proving in the living world that the beliefs and ideas in his head were empty illusions, and all the Marxist and Soviet rhetoric just claptrap. This Hobsbawn cannot understand, never mind accept. His best-known book, Age of Extremes, published as recently as 1994, still attempts to whitewash Communism as “a formidable innovation” in social engineering, glossing with fundamental dishonesty over such integral features as enforced famine through collectivization and the Hitler-Stalin Pact, and omitting all mention of the massacre at Katyn, the terrifying secret police apparatus of Beria, and the Gulag. At the same time, Hobsbawm depicts the United States “unfortunately” as a greater danger than the Soviet Union. Presenting him with a prestigious prize for this farrago, the left-wing historian Sir Keith Thomas said, “For pure intelligence applied to history, Eric Hobsbawm has no equal.” Another left-winger, the journalist Neal Ascherson, held that “No historian now writing in English can match his overwhelming command of fact and source.” So much for Robert Conquest, Sir Kenneth Dover, Sir Hugh Lloyd-Jones, Bernard Lewis, and other genuine scholars.

A mystery peculiar to the twentieth century is that intellectuals were eager to endorse the terror and mass-murder which characterized Soviet rule, at one and the same time abdicating humane feelings and all sense of responsibility towards others, and of course perverting the pursuit of truth. The man who sets dogs on concentration camp victims or fires his revolver into the back of their necks is evidently a brute; the intellectual who devises justifications for the brutality is harder to deal with, and far more sinister in the long run. Apologizing for the Soviet Union, such intellectuals licensed and ratified unprecedented crime and tyranny, to degrade and confuse all standards of humanity and morality. Hobsbawm is an outstand- ing example of the type. The overriding question is: how was someone with his capacity able to deceive himself so completely about reality and take his stand alongside the commissar signing death warrants?

Not long ago, on a popular television show, Hobsbawm explained that the fact of Soviet mass-murdering made no difference to his Communist commitment. In astonishment, his interviewer asked, “What that comes down to is saying that had the radiant tomorrow actually been created, the loss of fifteen, twenty million people might have been justified?” Without hesitation Hobsbawm replied, “Yes.” His autobiography, Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life,[1] conveys the same point, only rather more deviously. On the very last page, it is true, he is “prepared to concede, with regret, that Lenin’s Comintern was not such a good idea,” though for no very obvious reason (except as a cheap shot) he concludes the sentence by cramming in the comment that Herzl’s Zionism was also not a good idea. Note that slippery use of “Comintern” as a substitute for Communism itself. The concession, such as it is, is anyhow vitiated by an earlier passage when he attacks America and its allies, bizarrely spelled out as India, Israel, and Italy, and referred to as rich and the heirs of fascism. In this passage he predicts, “The world may regret that, faced with Rosa Luxemburg’s alternative of socialism and barbarism, it decided against socialism.” (Which leaves Americans as barbarians.) By my count, these are the only two expressions of regret in this long book. In contrast, the October revolution remains “the central point of reference in the political universe,” and “the dream of the October revolution” is still vivid inside him. He cannot bring himself to refer to Leningrad as St. Petersburg. Learning nothing, he has forgotten nothing.

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Eric Hobsbawm's Romance with Communism (posted 8-24-03)

Christopher Hitchens, writing in the NYT (August 24, 2003):

In March 1950 there was a public debate in New York City, moderated by the eminent radical sociologist C. Wright Mills. The motion before the meeting was: Is Russia a socialist community? Proposing for the ayes was Earl Browder, a loyal Stalinist who had nonetheless been removed by Moscow (for some minor deviations) from the leadership of the American Communist Party. Opposing him was the mercurial genius Max Shachtman, later to become a salient cold warrior but then the leader of the Trotskyist (or Trotsky-ish) Workers Party. Reaching his peroration against Browder, Shachtman recited the names of the European Communist leaders who, for their own minor deviations, had been liquidated by Stalin. Turning to his antagonist, he pointed and said: ''There, but for an accident of geography, stands a corpse!'' Eyewitnesses still relish the way in which Browder turned abruptly pallid and shrunken.

Eric Hobsbawm has been a believing Communist and a skeptical Euro-Communist and is now a faintly curmudgeonly post-Communist, and there are many ways in which, accidents of geography to one side, he could have been a corpse. Born in 1917 into a diaspora Jewish family in Alexandria, Egypt, he spent his early-orphaned boyhood in central Europe, in the years between the implosion of Austria-Hungary and the collapse of the Weimar Republic. This time and place were unpropitious enough on their own: had Hobsbawm not moved to England after the Nazis came to power in 1933, he might have become a statistic. He went on to survive the blitz in London and Liverpool and, by a stroke of chance, to miss the dispatch to Singapore of the British unit he had joined. At least a third of those men did not survive Japanese captivity, and it's difficult to imagine Hobsbawm himself being one of the lucky ones.

For the most active part of his life as an intellectual and a historian, Hobsbawm identified himself with the Soviet Union, which came into being in the same year he did. The failure and disgrace of this system are beyond argument today, and he doesn't any longer try to argue for it. In ''Interesting Times,'' he explains his allegiance in a pragmatic-loyalist manner, to the effect that many people were saved by Communism from becoming corpses, and that one was obliged to choose a side. This is utilitarianism, not Marxism, and he seems to recognize the fact by being appropriately laconic about it. It seemed to make sense at the time; he lost the historical wager and so did the party; history, he says, does not cry over spilled milk. Willing as I was to be repelled by such reasoning (blood is not to be rated like milk, after all), I found that I was instead rather impressed by its minimalism. If you wanted to teach a bright young student how Communism actually felt to an intelligent believer, you would have to put this book -- despite its rather stale title -- on the reading list.

To have marched in the last legal Communist demonstration in Berlin in 1933 may have been an experience as delicious as protracted sexual intercourse (Hobsbawm's metaphor, not mine), but the experience of defending the indefensible and -- more insulting -- of being asked to believe the unbelievable was far less delightful and, equally to the point, very much more protracted. Again, Hobsbawm's vices mutate into his virtues (and vice, as it were, versa). He is determined to show that he was not a dupe, but went into it all with eyes open, while he is no less concerned to argue that he did not want to become one of those ''God That Failed'' ex-Communists. Is this idealism or cynicism? He was one of a group of solid and brilliant English Marxist historians, including Christopher Hill and Edward Thompson and John Saville, none of whom could stomach the Communist Party after 1956. Yet he soldiered on as a member until the end of the Soviet Union itself, while admitting that he hardly ever visited the place and that when he did, he didn't much care for it.

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Thomas Reeves: Howard Zinn Is Not Courageous (posted 6-16-03)

Thomas Reeves, writing for the National Association of Scholars (June 16, 2003):

In the May 23, 2003 issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education, James Green, a professor of history and labor studies at the University of Massachusetts at Boston, published a lengthy hymn of praise to radical leftist historian Howard Zinn. The occasion was the celebration of the sale of one million copies of Zinn's textbook A People's History of the United States. "First published in 1980, the book, updated by the author, continues to be assigned in countless college and high-school courses, but its commercial sales have remained strong as well. It is probably the only book by a radical historian that you can buy in an airport." Green is obviously of one mind with Zinn. Both endorse the usual litany of leftist assumptions, including the innocence and goodness of minorities, the evil of nearly all war, the wickedness of capitalism, and the corruption inherent in virtually every American institution. Christopher Columbus and Ronald Reagan are villains; socialists and pacifists are heroes. You get the picture. It's a tidy, always predictable, little world liberals and leftist radicals inhabit. American history is largely a story of oppression and exploitation. We should be ashamed to wave the flag.....

Should this passionate mission and stunning achievement be portrayed as courageous? That's Green's spin on the Zinn story. Well, one must give Zinn his due for being an active civil rights backer in the 1960s. But on a larger scale, Zinn's record reveals more expediency than bravery. For decades, he has been engaged in the creation and dissemination of propaganda, profiting handsomely in every way by telling the Left what it wants to hear and helping to foist these views on ignorant youth.

True courage would have been a devotion to objectivity, as elusive as that sometimes is, to present the story of American history in all of its complexities and shades of gray. True courage would have been to step outside the boundaries of politically correct conformity to explore the true richness of the human experience, striving for balance, fairness, and detachment. If Zinn had taken this approach, his book sales might have been lower and his speaking engagements fewer in number. He might be ignored rather than lionized on American campuses. But millions of Americans would be better informed, and the national culture would be wiser and healthier.

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Stephen Howarth: Claims that He Was a Victim of Plagiarism (posted 6-13-03)

Alex Beam, writing in the Boston Globe (June 3, 2003):

More than a year ago, Newburyport historian James Charles Roy, while researching the life of Admiral Horatio Nelson, noticed what he calls "similarities in material" in two well-known books. One was Booker Prize-winning author Barry Unsworth's 1999 novel "Losing Nelson," about a man obsessed with the reputation of the hero of Trafalgar. The other was a popular 1988 biography, "Nelson: The Immortal Memory," written by Stephen Howarth and his late father, David.

Roy wrote to Howarth, pointing out two passages, each about 150 words in length, that Unsworth seems to have lifted from the biography. Howarth quickly compiled his own list of 20 alleged "modes of expression or original use of language first created by either my father or myself and subsequently used by Mr. Unsworth without permission or acknowledgement."

About half of Howarth's examples of supposed copying seem exaggerated. But I have little doubt that Unsworth wrote portions of his novel with the Howarth book open next to his keyboard.

Howarth wrote Unsworth a brief letter, with examples of the books' overlaps, in February of last year. Unsworth acknowledged his debt to the Howarths: "The biography you wrote with your father was a very valuable help to me." He also pointed out that he had consulted a "mass of material" while researching "Losing Nelson" and noted that "it is not easy, when one is seeking to absorb a great quantity of factual information and reproduce it in another form . . . to avoid echoes of the language in which it is originally cast."

Unsworth then characterized his book as "a totally original work of the imagination, derivative from nothing and no one." In conclusion, he wrote, "I very much hope that there are no hard feelings on your part - to have exerted an influence on another writer must after all be a source of gratification."

But there were hard feelings on the part of Howarth, who found the reply "annoying." He consulted a lawyer in England, who advised him that too much time had elapsed since the publication of "Losing Nelson" to pursue legal action, and "that in terms of a percentage of [Unsworth's] text, the copyright infringement was too small for further action without considerable further expense." Howarth did allow Roy to contact the press, which is how I became involved.

I first tried to reach Unsworth, who lives in Italy, several weeks ago. The 73-year-old novelist has not been in good health, and his wife advised me in an e-mail that he had nothing to add to the comments he made in his letter to Howarth, quoted above.

Unsworth's American publisher, Nan Talese of Doubleday, is of course a big fan of his. "The fact that some of the phrases of the Howarth book found their way from Barry's research notes into his novel is indeed unfortunate, but hardly a matter of gravity," Talese e-mailed me. "Knowing Unsworth as a most modest writer of unassailable integrity, I am sure he regrets it, and has no wish to glory in others' work."

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Anthony Glees: His New Book About the East German Stasi Is Causing Waves (posted 6-11-03)

David Leigh, writing in the Guardian (June 11, 2003):

The historian Anthony Glees, in what will prove either to be a reputation-making or a reputation-busting book released this week, is accusing a senior Liberal Democrat politician and fellow-academic, John Roper, of having been an "agent of influence" for the East German communist secret police, the Stasi.

Lord Roper rejects the charge indignantly. The 68-year-old former Labour and SDP MP says he was engaged in building bridges with East Germany in the 1980s as part of a Foreign Office-approved policy of thawing relations.

He was deceived, he says, about the background of an undercover Stasi officer he employed as a research fellow when he was director of studies at Chatham House. Friends of Lord Roper describe Professor Glees as having "a chip on his shoulder" and looking for a succès de scandale .

Lord Roper says Prof Glees appears to be promoting the philosophy of the Iraq arch-hawk, Richard Perle, now an influential figure in George Bush's Washington circle, but then a dedicated cold warrior who argued that contacts with Soviet bloc regimes only served to give sustenance to the enemy.

Friends of Prof Glees, on the other hand, privately describe Lord Roper as "a pompous buffoon who was totally out of his depth" in his contacts with the communists. At the heart of the row is a rumbling controversy about the identity of the so-called "Chatham House spy".

The Royal Institute of International Affairs, as Chatham House is officially known, has long been the bastion of foreign policy thinking, with close links to the defence and political establishment. It famously gave its name to the Chatham House rules: off-the-record in journalistic parlance.

Prof Glees, a German speaker, has successfully used his knowledge of the surviving fragmentary Stasi files, some of which have only recently been decoded, to expose a succession of minor British figures as having - wittingly or unwittingly - helped the secret police in the days of the cold war.

He alleges that the Stasi successfully penetrated Chatham House, where Lord Roper was director of studies in the 1980s and filed a series of secret intelligence reports on defence and political topics which might have been gleaned from those around Roper.

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Paul Berman: Does He Know What He's Talking About? (posted 5-27-03)

Stephen Schwartz, writing in frontpagemag.com (May 27, 2003):

Berman is considered by many to be the successor to the American socialist writer Irving Howe, but although Howe had many faults, an addiction to padding and hot air was not among them. In addition, Howe's writing on the radical left was historically sound, even when wrong in its interpretation. By contrast, fact checking is foreign to Berman, who is so busy tossing off clever remarks that he has left major holes in his arguments. He cannot even get the assassination in Sarajevo in 1914, which set off the First World War, right: The victim was Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary, not, pace Berman, "the Grand Duke of Serbia."

Berman recalls the names of obscure French radical magazines accurately, but mangles historical events known to every literate person. He is at his worst when argument sweeps away fact altogether. Near the beginning of this book, he declares, with his habitual insouciance, that in Somalia in 1993, the U.S. intervention "which was intended to feed the Muslim masses, was also intended to crush the Muslim few who stood in the way."

Such allegations are not only heartless, they are slanderous. They also draw on faulty research; toward the book's end, he places Mogadishu in Sudan, rather than Somalia. But they sound clever.

Berman's devotion to superficially convincing rhetoric persists. He reproduces Camus's tired clichés about rebellion and extremism as if they were novelties, equating all forms of protest, throughout modern history, with terrorism. For all his reading, he apparently knows nothing of a fundamental, if deeply flawed work in this area, The Sociology and Psychology of Communism, by Jules Monnerot, which offers an explicit comparison of communism with Islam.

While it is certainly true that the Wahhabi and neo-Wahhabi varieties of Islamic extremism, as well as the ideology of the Ba'ath party, have a totalitarian nature in common with the ideologies of the 20th-century dictators, Berman fudges any understanding that, no matter how much we should hate Bolsheviks and Nazis, they may not, as he claims, be reduced to "tentacles of a single, larger monster." A valuable recent study of the Soviet regime, Stalin's Last Crime, by Jonathan Brent and Vladimir P. Naumov, points out an issue widely overlooked by political theorists: Stalin, like Mao after him, did not protect the Marxist state, but systematically attacked and undermined it by massive bloodlettings among its cadres. Thus, Stalin did not, as Berman would have it, "whimsically" liquidate Communists. There was an undeniable gap between the humanist claims of the Communist regimes and the reality of their rule; Stalin and Mao subverted the former to reinforce the latter. By contrast, the brutalities of Hitler an Mussolini were clearly intended to guard their state apparatus, founded on an open ideology of brutalization.

But for Berman to have noted that aspect of modern totalitarianism would require, in general, greater care in the fashioning of his polemic. Early on, for instance, he alleges that "Germany, the sworn foe of the French Revolution," was viewed by "enlightened and progressive thinkers" in the 19th and early 20th centuries as the "principal danger to modern civilization." Such a view was not shared by a number of leading figures in the history of socialism: Marx and Engels in reality viewed Germany, and even German imperialism in Eastern Europe, as a liberating force in opposition to Russian reaction. Having made his anti-Germanic declaration, Berman seemingly reverses it by describing Marxism as a "cult of German philosophy."

On topic after topic, Berman betrays his affinity for the glib parallel. Close to the end of this book, he judges the faint-heartedness of 1930s French leftists and contemporary liberals regarding military action against dictatorships as a consequence of their "refusal to accept that, from time to time, political movements do get drunk on the idea of slaughter."

Before that, he describes, and then derides, the left reflex against war that embodied the traumatic effects of societies so drunk in the First World War. He has confected a false account of French socialism in the interwar period, and seems to have joined the company of those ex-leftists, few as they are, who now see the massacres of 1914-1918 (and, one might add, the insanities of Saigon) as unambiguous liberation struggles. But the righteous battles against Franco and Hitler, the defence of Korea and the Balkan Muslims and Kosovars, and the removal of Saddam Hussein cannot retrospectively legitimize the errors and horrors of Verdun and Vietnam.Berman lashes the Europeans who failed to prevent the Balkan massacres of the 1990s, failing to grasp that his own polemics against Islam echo much of the propaganda used to justify the Serb assaults on Bosnia-Hercegovina and Kosovo. He has gained high praise for his commentary on Sayyid Qutb, a leading modern Islamist theorist, which was published in the New York Times in advance of this book's appearance. But his simplistic analysis of totalitarianism is aggravated by his projection of an Islam completely without nuance.

While Qutb, an Egyptian lumpen intellectual, has had immense influence on young jihadists, he is not considered a serious religious commentator by the majority of traditional ulema, or established scholars within the faith. Forming an opinion about contemporary Islam after reading Qutb alone is rather like judging the whole history of the radical left by the writings of Noam Chomsky.

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Ilan Pappe: His Conference at Haifa Closed by School Authorities (posted 5-27-03)

Haim Watzman, writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education(May 27, 2003):

The University of Haifa blocked a controversial academic conference last week, leading some researchers to charge that the institution is violating academic freedom.

The daylong conference, scheduled for last Thursday, was on the subject of the historiography of the 1948 war between Israel and the Palestinians. Israelis call this conflict the War of Independence and Palestinians call it al-Naqba, meaning "the catastrophe."

The meeting was organized by a group of scholars who are often termed "post-Zionists," central among them the historian Ilan Pappe, of the university's international-relations department. According to Mr. Pappe, when the participants arrived at the hall where the conference was scheduled to take place, the room was locked and security men were stationed outside.

In an e-mail account of the incident that Mr. Pappe sent to his colleagues at the university, he said that he had been instructed by the university's dean of social sciences, Aryeh Ratner, to cancel the conference. According to Mr. Pappe, Mr. Ratner said that the conference could not be held at the university because one of the scheduled speakers was Udi Adiv. Mr. Adiv served a jail term in the 1970s and 1980s after being convicted of spying for Syria.

Another speaker was to be Teddy Katz, who claims that Israeli forces committed a massacre in 1948 in the Arab village of Tantura. Mr. Katz's master's thesis on this incident was approved, and then the approval was rescinded, in another controversy at the university (The Chronicle, November 9, 2001).

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Robert Dallek: Surprised by the Fuss About Mimi (posted 5-23-03)

Joanna Weiss, writing in the Boston Globe (May 20, 2003):

It was only 38 words, two lines in an 800-page biography, Robert Dallek mused. That's all the mention his book, "An Unfinished Life," made of the now-notorious "Mimi," the 19-year-old intern who had a tryst with President John F. Kennedy.

And the bespectacled Boston University professor, best-known for his tomes on Lyndon Johnson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and foreign policy, said he never imagined how much - even in this post-Watergate, post-Clinton era - the twin notions of "sex" and "intern" would attract public fascination.

"It's been sort of a firestorm," Dallek said of the tabloid covers and talk show rants, after a lecture last night at the John F. Kennedy Library and Museum. "What's amazing to me is how much interest there is in this."

Apart from the shock of this new attention, the fear of being labeled a scandal-monger, the fact that his photograph appeared next to Monica Lewinsky's in the New York Daily News - Dallek admitted he hasn't been entirely depressed at the turn of events.

"I haven't resisted, you know," he said, eyebrows raised. "Because obviously, it's a talking point in selling the book."...

The book came out just days after he discussed the affair in a May 11 broadcast interview with Dateline NBC. Soon afterward, he got a call from a reporter at the New York Daily News, who wanted to talk about the intern.

"I naively said to him, 'You're going to run a story about this?' " Dallek recalled.

The reply: "Man, we're going to run it on the front page."

The rest, one might say, is history. Yet how long the excitement will last is unclear; "I think it will subside," Dallek said.

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Simon Schama: How He Found His Voice (posted 5-23-03)

Andrew Billen, writing in the London Times (May 20, 2003):

"Many people in, as they say, 'the broadcasting community' expected us to bomb, and how! History was the single least popular subject in schools. The presenter-led genre of documentary was considered passe. And here I was, a white male, not dead, but quite unfashionable enough.

"But we got off to such a headwind that we were allowed to get a bit more essay-like and demanding of the audience as it went on. The viewing did fall off, actually, partly because the last series went out in the summer and the World Cup was on, but there's no doubt that some of the last programmes were among the best, in my view."

I say I was surprised by the demotic voice he chose in the early episodes.

Actually I winced at its cliches: Anglo-Saxon Britain lived in "the long shadow of Rome"; "a truckload of trouble" accompanied the Norman invasion; propaganda worked "like a dream"; the Normans owned Britain "lock, stock and barrel".

I tell him I thought the programmes grew more fluent as they went on; he thanks me, ignoring my implied criticism of his earlier style.

"Yeah, no one was telling me to do that. I wanted to have a slightly more street-ish voice without being pretentiously blokeish. I loved what Kenneth Clark did, but I thought some sort of alternative voice would do for history."

Once he got to the tough, yet elegiac, final episodes, the death of Empire, women under Victoria, Churchill and Orwell, his voice grew to match its subject.

"I think the coda was lyrical because I felt that way," he says. "It just came straight out."

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Daniel Pipes: Caught in the Crossfire of the Musim Civil War (posted 5-22-03)

Hussain Haqqani, writing in the Wall Street Journal:

Although the Washington Post, among others, has editorialized against his appointment, the controversy should be seen in the context of the civil war of ideas in the Muslim world -- between those who wish to reconcile adherence to their faith with modernity and those seeking the restoration of a mythical glorious past. The Pipes nomination has become a test of strength for those Islamists who wish to paint the war against terrorism as a war against Islam. If they can rally American Muslims to their cause, they would be able to limit the scope of debate about Islamic issues within parameters set by them. That objective doesn't serve the interests of the U.S. or of Muslims....

Islam's external enemies, and their real and perceived conspiracies, are the focus of most discourse in the Muslim world. Colonial rule and, since then, injustices meted out to Muslims under non-Muslim occupation in several countries are real issues that need to be addressed. But the failure of Muslim societies -- in particular the leaders -- to embrace education, expand economies or to innovate cannot be attributed solely to outside factors. The root causes also lie in the fear of some Muslims to embrace reasoned debate and intellectual exchange, lest this openness somehow dilute the purity of their beliefs.

The campaign against Mr. Pipes is an example of this tendency to scuttle discussion. Muslims who disagree with his views should respond to him with arguments of their own. Slandering him might help polarize secular and Islamist Muslims, but it won't raise the level of discourse about Islamic issues. It's time for Muslim leaders in the U.S. to break the pattern of agitation that has characterized Muslim responses to the West.

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Robert Caro: Kisses and Makes Up with the LBJ Library (posted 5-22-03)

David Barboza, writing in the NYT (May 22, 2003):

For 26 years Robert A. Caro has painstakingly chronicled the life of Lyndon Baines Johnson. He has interviewed more than a thousand of Johnson's former aides and colleagues. He has pored over countless records in the Johnson presidential archives. And to critical acclaim he has published three volumes of his projected four-volume biography of Johnson. His latest volume, "Master of the Senate," received the Pulitzer Prize for biography this year.

But because of a long-running feud over his portrayal of the 36th president, Mr. Caro and his work were unwelcome at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum here. His best-selling Johnson books were conspicuously absent from the museum's bookstore. He says he thinks that important records in the Johnson archives were kept from him.

"They would go out of their way to insult me," Mr. Caro said in an interview in the L. B. J. Library reading room, where he was continuing his research.

And the library did not invite him to speak. "I think I was the only Johnson biographer who had never been asked to speak there," Mr. Caro said by telephone from New York City, where he lives.

But that changed on May 13 when the library, under new leadership, embraced him. He spoke to a crowded gathering there. He autographed copies of "Master of the Senate." He was even honored at a dinner in the private suite that Johnson kept at the library after he left the White House in 1969, a suite that Mr. Caro had never seen in his 26 years of work here, even though it was just down the hall from where he conducted much of his research.

"It was time for us to have him here," said Betty Sue Flowers, a former English professor who recently took over as director of the library and museum. "I think it's good to have a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of Johnson speak here, and I have no problem with Caro."

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David McCullough: His Uninspiring Lecture (posted 5-22-03)

Philip Kennicott, writing in the Washington Post (May 16, 2003):

Last night at the Ronald Reagan Building, McCullough gave the prestigious Jefferson Lecture, the highest humanities honor the federal government can bestow. The setting was festive,]]> Wed, 24 Apr 2024 15:18:19 +0000 https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/1604 https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/1604 0