Roundup: Talking About History

William S. Lind: Why Conservatives Hate War

William S. Lind is director of the American Conservative Center for Public Transportation and author of the Maneuver Warfare Handbook.

Eric Alterman: The Cuban Missile Crisis: Thirteen Days... and Fifty Years

Eric Alterman is a Distinguished Professor of English, Brooklyn College, City University of New York, and Professor of Journalism at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. He is also "The Liberal Media" columnist for The Nation and a fellow of The Nation Institute, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress in Washington, DC, where he writes and edits the "Think Again" column, a senior fellow (since 1985) at the World Policy Institute. Alterman is also a regular columnist for Moment magazine and a regular contributor to The Daily BeastIn my 2004 book, When Presidents Lie, I coined the term “post-truth presidency.” I borrowed it, in part, from the now late ex–Watergate felon Charles Colson, who in 2002 condemned America’s “post-truth society,” in which “even the man on the street sees little wrong with lying.” The great irony of this observation lay in the fact that Colson’s column was itself an artifact of post-truthism. It was actually written by a ghostwriter.

Jon Wiener: Remembering the Berlin Wall

This article is adapted from How We Forgot the Cold War: A Historical Journey Across America, published in October. Copyright ©2012 by the Regents of the University of California. It is excerpted here with the permission of the author, a professor of history at UC Irvine.For Republicans today, Ronald Reagan provides the gold standard of political virtue. In their view, perhaps his greatest achievement was “winning” the cold war—the icon for which is the Berlin Wall. Pieces of the Wall are on display in a surprising number of American locations, from the low-down (a Las Vegas casino men’s room) to the more upscale (the Microsoft Art Collection in Redmond, Washington). More than forty places in the United States display sections of the Wall, according to Wikipedia . Taken together, these commemorations tell us something about how Reagan, and the cold war, are being remembered—and forgotten.

George Soros: Using Raoul Wallenberg to Unite the EU

George Soros is chairman of Soros Fund Management and of the Open Society Institute. Originally, the European Union was what psychologists call a "fantastic object," a desirable goal that inspires people's imaginations. I saw it as the embodiment of an open society: an association of nation-states that gave up part of their sovereignty for the common good and formed a union dominated by no single nation or nationality. The euro crisis, however, has turned the EU into something radically different. Member countries are now divided into two classes — creditors and debtors — with the creditors in charge. The EU is today held together by grim necessity. That is not conducive to a harmonious partnership. The only way to reverse the trend is to recapture the spirit of solidarity that animated the European project from the start. To that end, I recently established an Open Society Initiative for Europe, or OSIFE. In doing so, I recognized that the best place to start would be where current policies have created the greatest human suffering: Greece. The people who are suffering are not those who abused the system and caused the crisis. The fate of the many migrant and asylum seekers caught in Greece is particularly heart-rending. But their plight cannot be separated from that of the Greeks themselves.

Walter Bingham: Reminiscences of ‘Kristallnacht’

The writer is a resident of Jerusalem and host of the radio show Walter’s World. Throughout the Jewish world, there were/will be meetings to commemorate "Kristallnacht," – or the night of the broken glass – from November 9 to 10, 1938.That night, most synagogues throughout Germany, Austria and the by then annexed Czechoslovakian Sudetenland were set alight, thousands of Jewish businesses were destroyed and almost 30,000 Jewish men sent off to concentration camps.The trigger for these atrocities can be found in the events of a few years earlier. During 1938 the Polish authorities were concerned about the German annexation of Austria in March of that year and also about the increased persecution of German and Austrian Jews. It was not their welfare that concerned them, but they feared that the many Polish nationals among them would either want to or be forced to return to Poland.

Gareth Evans: Breaking the Silence ... Remembering Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields

Gareth Evans, Australia’s foreign minister for eight years and President Emeritus of the International Crisis Group, is currently chancellor of the Australian National University and co-chair of the Global Center for the Responsibility to Protect.One of the worst atrocity crime stories of recent decades has barely registered in the world’s collective conscience. We remember and acknowledge the shame of Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur. We agonize about the failure to halt the atrocities being committed almost daily in Syria. But at least until now, the world has paid almost no attention to war crimes and crimes against humanity comparable in their savagery to any of these: the killing fields of Sri Lanka in 2009.

Neil Tweedie: The Assassination of J.F.K ... The Finger Points to the KGB

Neil Tweedie writes features for The Daily Telegraph. The young American was agitated, increasingly emotional, and had laid a loaded gun on the table. The Soviet Union must grant him a visa as soon as possible, he pleaded. His life was being made intolerable by FBI surveillance and he, a dedicated communist, wished to return to the arms of Mother Russia. One of the three Soviet diplomats present took the gun and unloaded it before returning it to its owner. There would be no visa in the near future, he explained calmly. Dejected, the American gathered up his documents and departed the Soviet consulate, bound not for his previous home in New Orleans, but Dallas. It was Mexico City, Saturday, September 28 1963, and the man wanting the visa was Lee Harvey Oswald. Fifty-five days later, he would assassinate John Fitzgerald Kennedy, 35th president of the United States. This is the standard version of events, as related by one of the “diplomats” present that day, Oleg Nechiporenko. The other two were Pavel Yatskov and Valery Kostikov. All were, in reality, officers in the KGB.

Linda K. Kerber: The 40th Anniversary of Roe v. Wade: A Teachable Moment

Linda K. Kerber is the May Brodbeck Professor in the Liberal Arts and professor of history emerita, and lecturer in law at the University of Iowa. She is the author or editor of several books, including No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship. She was president of the AHA for 2006.

George Derek Musgrove and Chris Myers Asch: Not Gone, Not Forgotten: Struggling Over History in a Gentrifying D.C.

George Derek Musgrove is an assistant professor of history at University of Maryland Baltimore County and the author of “Rumor Repression and Racial Politics: How the Harassment of Black Elected Officials Shaped Post-Civil Rights America (University of Georgia Press, 2012). Chris Myers Asch is the author of “The Senator and the Sharecropper: The Freedom Struggles of James O. Eastland and Fannie Lou Hamer” (University of North Carolina Press, 2011). They are collaborating on a book about race and democracy in the District.Who remembers the Irish of Swampoodle? The Jews of Petworth? The working-class whites of Anacostia? The blue-collar black community of Georgetown?For all but the most serious students of D.C. history, these once-vibrant communities are gone and forgotten, lost to the past in an ever-changing city that celebrates the new, the famous and the powerful. Yet the fact that those groups no longer live in those neighborhoods and that we know so little about them can help us understand why current discussions of gentrification can be so heated. 

Whittaker Chambers Relative: Farm Need Not Be Open to Public

David Chambers, a grandson of Whittaker Chambers, runs www.whittakerchambers.orgDr. Jon Wiener needs to set some facts straight, at least in the excerpt from his new book, just published by Salon (“A visit to the right’s least popular museum”).First, the Whittaker Chambers Farm is no museum. In fact is neither a requirement nor even an implication that a property designated as a National Historic Landmark need open to the public at all. In “Protecting America: Cold War Defensive Sites (A National Historical Landmark Theme Study),” dated October 2011, the NPS clearly holds the Whittaker Chambers Farm “private property, not open to the public.” Further, Whittaker Chambers (my grandfather) never claimed his farm meant much to the outside world. He described it as “a few hundred acres of dirt, some clusters of old barns and outbuildings… a few beeves and hogs or a flock of sheep.” (“Witness,” p. 517). It hasn’t changed much over the years....Jon Wiener replies:

Brahma Chellaney: Lessons of the China-India War Resonate 50 Years On

Brahma Chellaney, professor of Strategic Studies at the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research, is the author of Asian Juggernaut and Water: Asia’s New Battleground.

Amy B. Zegart: The Cuban Missile Crisis as Intelligence Failure

Amy B. Zegart is a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and the author, most recently, of Eyes on Spies: Congress and the United States Intelligence Community.

Seumas Milne: The First World War ... The Real Lessons of This Savage Imperial Bloodbath

Seumas Milne is a Guardian columnist and associate editor.  In the midst of deepening austerity, David Cameron is desperate to play the national card. Any one will do. He's worked the Queen's jubilee and the Olympics for all they're worth. Now the prime minister wants a "truly national commemoration" of the first world war in the runup to 2014 that will "capture our national spirit … like the diamond jubilee". So £50m has been found to fund a four-year programme of events, visits to the trenches from every school and an ambitious redevelopment of the Imperial War Museum.

Fyodor Lukyanov: Remembering the Nuclear Red Line

Fyodor Lukyanov is editor of Russia in Global Affairs.Nearly every detail of the Cuban missile crisis has been exhaustively studied and analyzed in the past 50 years. Even if additional documents are one day declassified and new details come to light, the overall picture of what happened will remain unchanged. Some elements of that standoff have passed into history, while others remain pertinent to this day. On the whole, though, it would hardly be possible to find a direct parallel between the October 1962 crisis and current events. The Cuban missile crisis marked the peak of the Cold War because it drew the red line that neither side was willing to cross. The bitter and ruthless confrontation continued for another 25 years, albeit more indirectly, as a game in which both sides sought to bring as many countries as possible into their own orbits. This rivalry and conflict of interests occasionally erupted into open hostilities in the form of proxy wars. The risk of a direct nuclear conflict dropped significantly as a result of the Cuban missile crisis, while the ruling elites in both the U.S. and the Soviet Union increasingly came to understand the dangers involved in pursuing adventurist policies. Leaders realized that strategic stability was a prerequisite to lasting peace...

John Yemma: The Cuba Crisis and the Illusion of Control

John Yemma is editor of the Christian Science Monitor.History is like archaeology. What humans live through in the present – economic struggles, political contests, national crises – drifts to the ground and slowly gets buried under the strata of more recent events. Then one day we excavate and wonder: What were our predecessors thinking?When Graham Allison reviews October 1962 with people under the age of 50, their usual reaction is dropped-jaw amazement. How, they ask, could leaders have felt so boxed in that they seriously entertained the idea of nuclear war?“It just seems incredible to people who didn’t live through those times,” says Dr. Allison, director of Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. “They can’t believe that there was a real chance of a war that would leave hundreds of millions of people dead.”...Related Links

Mark Zachary Taylor: An Economic Ranking of the US Presidents, 1789–2009: A Data-Based Approach

Mark Zachary Taylor is an assistant professor at the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs at Georgia Institute of Technology. He can be reached at mzak@gatech.edu.Abstract:How relatively good or bad were the economic performances of our past presidents? The answers to this question remain unclear. Most evaluations of presidential performance cloud the issue with partisan bias and subjective judgments or mix economics together with other policy areas. To address these shortcomings, this article uses new data from the Measuring Worth Project to calculate the relative economic rankings of the United States presidents who served from 1789 until 2009. It analyzes up to 220 years of data on economic growth, unemployment, inflation, government debt, balance of payments, income inequality, currency strength, interest rates, and stock market returns to estimate an economic grade point average for each president. Then, these estimates are used to test for correlations with other variables to generate hypotheses regarding the conditions for superior and inferior economic performance.

Jeffrey Wasserstrom: The Yellow Peril of Fu Manchu

Jeffrey Wasserstrom is a history professor at the University of California, Irvine and co-editor of "Chinese Characters: Profiles of Fast-Changing Lives in a Fast-Changing Land." Fear of China is back. But it's a nebulous fear, and this creates both an opportunity and an obstacle for the male and female anti-heroes of Christopher Buckley's latest look at the surreal world of lobbyist, the uneven but occasionally hilarious "They Eat Puppies, Don't They?" Both characters are eager to whip up anxiety about the Chinese military threat in hopes that Congress will fund development of a costly new weapon. They quickly realize, though, that China is different from radical Islam when it comes to generating dread.There is no obvious panic-inducing face for this phobia, no counterpart to Osama bin Laden. Yes, there is clear evidence of China's leaders treating opponents brutally at home and bullying neighbors in territorial spats, but this alone can't transform Beijing's bland technocrats into terrifying bogeymen. When lined up for group photos, Mr. Buckley notes, they still just look "like a delegation of identical, overpaid dentists." No one in the book actually says it, but you can almost hear the protagonists crying out: "Where is Fu-Manchu when you need him?"...

John R. Bohrer: Making Mitt: The Myth Of George Romney

John R. Bohrer's work has appeared at Esquire.com, Politico, Salon, The Awl, USA Today and other publicationsEveryone agrees: Mitt Romney is not like his father.The late Michigan governor and 1968 presidential candidate George Romney is remembered as a principled man of spontaneity and candor. His example is regularly invoked by both admirers of his son's disciplined campaign style and critics of Mitt's back-and-forth pandering. George, it is said, told the truth about the Vietnam War before it was popular to do so, with an unfortunately worded comment about “brainwashing” by U.S. government officials that cost him the 1968 Republican presidential nomination. “Mitt learned at an impressionable age that in politics, authenticity kills,” historian Rick Perlstein wrote in Rolling Stone earlier this year. “Heeding the lesson of his father's fall, he became a virtual parody of an inauthentic politician.”

Graham Allison: Closer Than You Thought to World War III

Graham Allison is director of Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and author of “Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis.”“My fellow Americans, with a heavy heart, and in necessary fulfillment of my oath of office, I have ordered – and the United States Air Force has now carried out – military operations with conventional weapons only, to remove a major nuclear weapons build-up from the soil of Cuba.”

Sidney Blumenthal: Abraham Lincoln ... The Great Campaigner

Sidney Blumenthal, journalist, author, historian, and former senior adviser to President Clinton, is completing a book titled The Man Who Became Abraham Lincoln: How He Won the Civil War and Was Assassinated . The latest Lincoln boom—kicking off with the bicentennial of his birth in 2009 and the continuing sesquicentennial of the Civil War—shows no sign of abating. It may not even reach its apogee with the release immediately post-election of Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, a biopic starring Daniel Day-Lewis in the title role. Spielberg, according to a source familiar with the production, has deliberately withheld the film until the current, divisive presidential campaign is over in order to prevent Lincoln from being seized upon to score political points. But lifting Lincoln above the fray doesn’t remove him from politics. While the political Lincoln may be difficult for us to acknowledge at a time when politics and partisan commitments are widely denigrated, Lincoln’s presidency demonstrates that partisanship and political ruthlessness can be used to advance the highest ideals. And there were no clearer cases than during his 1864 battle for reelection (without which the slave-owning South would almost certainly have triumphed) and subsequent effort to pass the 13th Amendment, which at long last purged slavery from the Constitution.