Roundup: Talking About History

Peter Reddaway and Stephen F. Cohen: Dishonoring Stalin's Victims and Russian History

Peter Reddaway is professor emeritus of political science at George Washington University. Stephen F. Cohen is professor of Russian studies at New York University.Many Western observers believe that President Vladimir Putin's authoritarian regime has in effect banned a Russian edition of a widely acclaimed 2007 book by the British historian Orlando Figes, "The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia." A professor at London's Birkbeck College, Figes himself inspired this explanation. In a 2009 interview, he suggested that his first Russian publisher dropped the project due to "political pressure" because his study of Stalin-era terror "is inconvenient to the current regime." Three years later, his explanation continues to circulate. We doubted Figes' explanation at the time — partly because excellent Russian historians are themselves publishing so many uncensored exposes of the horrors of Stalinism — but only now are we able to disprove it.

Paul R. Pillar: The Vietnam War and Lessons of History

Paul R. Pillar is director of graduate studies at Georgetown University's Security Studies Program and a former national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia. Every generation has its own defining historical events that shape its attitudes toward current events. Members of later generations easily become disdainful of what they regard as preoccupations with the past. This pattern comes through in an article by James Mann about the different generations represented in the Obama administration's foreign policy apparatus. Mann divides the administration team into a Vietnam generation, which does not want to repeat the misery of that war, a post-Vietnam generation that believes the first generation's reaction to the war made the Democratic Party look too wimpy and naïve about the use of military force, and a still-younger generation that believes both of the previous two cohorts have over-reacted in their different ways to a long-ago and increasingly irrelevant conflict. The attitude of the third group is bluntly expressed by the ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice.

Eliot Cohen: How the Battle of Plattsburgh Changed Amerian History

Eliot Cohen, a former counselor of the U.S. Department of State, teaches at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and is the author of Conquered into Liberty: Two Centuries of Battles along the Great Warpath That Made the American Way of War, from which this essay is adapted. On September 10, 1814, John Quincy Adams, son of the second president of the United States and destined to become its fifth, the most accomplished American diplomat of his generation (and perhaps the most able in American history), conversant in half a dozen languages, was, as usual, dissatisfied with his colleagues, his compatriots, his predicaments, and most of all, himself. He had just turned forty-seven, noting in his diary that "two-thirds of the period allotted to the life of man are gone by for me." As he contemplated the days of his life, his remorseless New England conscience informed him, "I have not improved them as I ought to have done." Nonetheless, on this autumn day he continued conscientiously to discharge one of the many duties that gave structure and meaning to his life.

James Mann: Obama and the ‘Vietnam Hangover’

James Mann is author in residence at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. This article is adapted from his new book, The Obamians: The Struggle Inside the White House to Redefine American Power. Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, was seeking to describe what makes the Obama administration’s foreign policy distinct from that of its predecessors — not just the George W. Bush administration, but also the Democrats of the Bill Clinton years. Her comments hinged on the Vietnam War. “We just don’t have that Vietnam hangover,” Rice told me in an interview last year. “It is not the framework for every decision — or any decision, for that matter. I’m sick and tired of reprising all of the traumas and the battles and the psychoses of the 1960s.” With every president and administration, journalists and analysts embark on a quest to identify a doctrine or set of principles defining the group’s foreign policy. Are they realists? Internationalists? Neocons? Do they go it alone or lead from behind?..

David Leavitt: Happy 100th, Alan Turing

David Leavitt is a professor at the University of Florida and the author of The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Origins of the Computer.

John O’Sullivan: Forgive IRA Terror?

John O’Sullivan is editor-at-large of National Review.

Elizabeth Gritter: Lockard Scaled Barriers Faced by Blacks in TN

Elizabeth Gritter, Ph.D., teaches U.S. history at Middle Tennessee State University and is an expert on the civil rights movement.The Hon. H.T. Lockard would have turned 92 tomorrow. When he passed away last December in Memphis, he received little statewide or national attention despite his service as the first African-American Cabinet member in Tennessee and as a key player in the civil rights movement.I had the privilege to conduct interviews of Judge Lockard and correspond with him from 2000, when I was an undergraduate, until shortly before his death. His interest and encouragement of me as a young scholar mirrored how he mentored young lawyers, especially African-American ones, throughout his career.Born in Lauderdale County, Tenn., Judge Lockard served in the Army during World War II, including a stint in France, where he studied at the University of Paris, Sorbonne. Afterward, he completed his undergraduate education at LeMoyne College in Memphis before attending Lincoln University Law School in St. Louis, because no law schools in Tennessee would accept him because of his race....

Eamon Duffy: The Story of the Reformation Needs Reforming

Eamon Duffy is Professor of the History of Christianity at Cambridge. His latest book, 'Saints, Sacrilege and Sedition: religion and conflict in the Tudor Reformations’, is published by Bloomsbury.For five centuries England has been in denial about the role of Roman Catholicism in shaping it. The coin in your pocket declares the monarch to be Defender of the Faith. Since 1558 that has meant the Protestant faith, but Henry VIII actually got the title from the Pope for defending Catholicism against Luther. Henry eventually broke with Rome because the Pope refused him a divorce, and along with the papacy went saints, pilgrimage, the monastic life, eventually even the Mass itself – the pillars of medieval Christianity.To explain that revolution, the Protestant reformers told a story. Henry had rejected not the Catholic Church, but a corrupt pseudo-Christianity which had led the world astray. John Foxe embodied this story unforgettably in his Book of Martyrs, subsidised by the Elizabethan government as propaganda against Catholicism at home and abroad. For Foxe, Queen Elizabeth was her country’s saviour, and the Reformation itself the climax of an age-old struggle between God, represented by the monarch, and the devil, represented by the Pope.

Steven A. Cook: The Pharaoh's Legacy

Steven A. Cook is the Hasib J. Sabbagh Senior Fellow for Middle Eastern Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. He is the author of The Struggle for Egypt: From Nasser to Tahrir Square.

Carole Fink: Killing Rathenau

Carole Fink, currently a Distinguished Fulbright Scholar in Israel and Humanities Distinguished Professor Emerita at The Ohio State University, is the author of three books and more than fifty articles on 20th-century European and Jewish history.Walther Rathenau was neither a typical German Jew nor a traditional German statesman.  Born into a wealthy industrialist family that had disowned its Jewish beliefs and practices and gaining political office late in life, Rathenau was the quintessential outsider.  He was also a man of contradictions: outgoing and solitary, ambivalent about his Jewishness and German-ness, a technocrat who embraced spiritualism but advocated state regulation to achieve the common good.

E.O. Wilson: Why Nations Fight

E.O. Wilson is a Harvard sociobiologist.  His latest book is  The Social Conquest of Earth.

Edward Mortimer: Setting the Record Straight on Kofi Annan’s Legacy

Edward Mortimer was director of communications at the office of the U.N. secretary-general from 2001 to 2006.  For months we have been told that Syria is "on the brink of civil war." Now the head of United Nations peacekeeping has admitted the obvious. Civil war of the most ruthless kind is already there. President Bashar Assad is not ready to leave, and still has significant support – both inside the country, mainly among minorities who fear that the sequel to his fall will be similar to what Iraq has gone through since 2003, and among foreign powers ranging from Russia to Iran and its satellites in Iraq and Lebanon. The Syrian opposition, for its part, believes things have gone way beyond the point where dialogue with the regime is possible or acceptable – and it too has powerful foreign backers in the region (Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar) as well as more hesitant ones in the West. So the mediation attempt of the United Nations-Arab League envoy, Kofi Annan, came too late to prevent civil war, and too soon to end it. But Annan himself is not to blame.

Khalil Gibran Muhammad: Rodney King's Legacy Was to Blast Away the Myth of a Post-Racial US

Khalil Gibran Muhammad is director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, part of the New York Public Library. For a man of humble origins who might have lived life as most do – without fame or notoriety – Rodney King will go down in history as a seminal figure in the evolution of America's criminal justice system. He died yesterday, only hours before thousands marched silently to protest against abusive police practices in New York City; even in death, he found himself in the midst of an historic moment. In 1991, the 25-year-old construction worker with a drink problem and a tendency to drive too fast was severely beaten by several white Los Angeles police officers. The attack was caught on videotape, the beating was seen round the world and overnight King became the poster boy for black victims of police brutality in the post-civil rights era.

Robert D. Kaplan: What's Wrong with Pakistan? Geography.

Robert D. Kaplan is chief geopolitical analyst at Stratfor. This article is adapted from his forthcoming book, The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate. Perversity characterizes Pakistan. Only the worst African hellholes, Afghanistan, Haiti, Yemen, and Iraq rank higher on this year's Failed States Index. The country is run by a military obsessed with -- and, for decades, invested in -- the conflict with India, and by a civilian elite that steals all it can and pays almost no taxes. But despite an overbearing military, tribes "defined by a near-universal male participation in organized violence," as the late European anthropologist Ernest Gellner put it, dominate massive swaths of territory.

Fred Thompson: The Lessons of Watergate

Fred Thompson is a former senator, presidential candidate, and minority counsel to Senate Republicans during the Watergate scandal.

E.J. Dionne Jr.: Why History Matters to Liberalism

E.J. Dionne Jr. is the chair of the Democracy Editorial Committee and a columnist for The Washington Post. He is also a professor at Georgetown University and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. This essay is drawn from his new book, Our Divided Political Heart.Progressives should ask why conservatives are so eager to paint themselves as the true heirs of the American tradition, and why those on the left side of politics—usually ready to do battle with the right on many fronts—have not felt the same sense of urgency when it comes to popular understandings of the American story.I emphasize the word “popular” because many superb American historians, simply by virtue of their efforts to present the American story accurately, have brought home the flaws in partisan readings of our story even as they challenged the conservative claim to a moral and intellectual monopoly on the meaning of the American idea.

Peter Oborne: Remembering Enoch Powell A Century After His Birth

Peter Oborne is the Daily Telegraph's chief political commentator.

R. Emmett Tyrrell: Nixon v. Johnson ... A Watergate Footnote You Won't Read About in Woodward and Bernstein

R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. is the founder and editor in chief of The American Spectator.  One of my favorite controversialists is back, Bob Woodward with his sidekick Carl Bernstein. Sunday in the Washington Post they wrote that Richard Nixon was more hideous than we have heretofore known. The 37th President conducted five wars while in office, according to the boys, and those do not even include his minor fracases, the Cold War against the Soviet Union and the Vietnam War. I say Woodward is a controversialist. You might recall his controversial "interview" with CIA Director Bill Casey conducted on Bill's deathbed when no one was watching. It made it into Woodward's book Veil, saving its author from the embarrassment of admitting that Bill had kept Woodward utterly in the dark about Iran-Contra and so much else during their more conventional interviews earlier. This time Woodward somehow circumvented Bill's CIA guards, his doctors and nurses, his wife and daughter -- one of whom was in the hospital room at all times -- to get his incomparable interview. Moreover, Bill had completely lost the power of speech, his face being a mask of terrible deformity, as his friend Bert Jolis reported within days of the so-called interview.

Conrad Black: The War on Nixon

Conrad Black is the author of Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom, Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full, and, just released, A Matter of Principle. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein (Woodstein for our purposes) now claim, in a Washington Post piece, that Nixon was "far worse than we thought," and accuse him of conducting five "wars": against the anti-war movement, on the media, against the Democrats, on justice, and on history.

Jane Mendelsohn: Amelia Earhart, Found and Lost

Jane Mendelsohn is the author of “I Was Amelia Earhart” and “American Music.”THERE was a picture of Amelia Earhart in the newspaper. Actually, it was in this newspaper. I read the accompanying article while riding on a train from New Haven to New York when I was in my mid-20s. Although I had graduated a few years earlier, I was still living in the town where I’d gone to college. New Haven was cheap, and book reviews paid money back then. This was in the early ’90s. The train was quiet. No one had a cellphone. The article in the newspaper said that a search party believed it had found a piece of Earhart’s plane on an atoll in the Pacific. And maybe a piece of her shoe.