Roundup: Talking About History

David Brooks: The Follower Problem

David Brooks is a columnist for the NYT.If you go to the Lincoln or Jefferson memorials in Washington, you are invited to look up in admiration. Lincoln and Jefferson are presented as the embodiments of just authority. They are strong and powerful but also humanized. Jefferson is a graceful aristocratic democrat. Lincoln is sober and enduring. Both used power in the service of higher ideas, which are engraved nearby on the walls.The monuments that get built these days are mostly duds. That’s because they say nothing about just authority. The World War II memorial is a nullity. It tells you nothing about the war or why American power was mobilized to fight it. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. memorial brutally simplifies its subject’s nuanced and biblical understanding of power. It gives him an imperious and self-enclosed character completely out of keeping with his complex nature.

Amity Shlaes and David Pietrusza: Calvin Coolidge Persisted, in Deed If Not in Word

Amity Shlaes, a Bloomberg View columnist, is the author of the forthcoming “Coolidge”; David Pietrusza is the author of “Silent Cal’s Almanack.” The opinions expressed are their own.The White House messed up its history. That’s the contention of critics who pointed to references recently appended to the biography pages of past presidents on the White House website.Scholars of Calvin Coolidge, the president who is our focus, found an error. The Coolidge “Did You Know?” item says that “On Feb. 22, 1924, Calvin Coolidge became the first president to make a public radio address to the American people.”

Ted Widmer: Reagan at the Wall

Ted Widmer, who was a speechwriter for President Bill Clinton, is the director of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University and the author of “Ark of the Liberties: America and the World.”ON June 12, 1987, the cold war entered a terminal phase, in ways that few could have anticipated, and in fact, almost no one did — with the exception of a president down on his legendary luck.If in 1984 Ronald Reagan had proclaimed that it was “morning again in America,” three years later the evening was coming fast for a presidency that had spent most of its energy. The Iran-contra scandal had damaged him, and in March 1987 only 42 percent of Americans approved of the job he was doing. Reagan’s diary reveals a president losing focus, with entries registering more enthusiasm for old videos than the crushing business of state. On May 23, 1987, a good day: “Ran a movie about Big Foot & to my surprise I was in it — a shot of me & Bonzo on a TV set.”

Max Holland: What Director Alan Pakula’s Papers Reveal About Watergate

Max Holland, a contributing editor at The Nation and the Wilson Quarterly, is the author of Leak: Why Mark Felt Became Deep Throat.The New Journalism wave was cresting when Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward published All the President’s Men in 1974. Yet the book, curiously, was not considered an outstanding exemplar. The two were hailed, rather, as New Muckrakers, befitting the emphasis on them as Washington Post reporters rather than Simon & Schuster authors.

David Greenberg: The Watergate Wars Just Ended

David Greenberg, a contributing editor to The New Republic, teaches history at Rutgers University and is at work on a history of presidents and spin. This article appeared in the June 28, 2012 issue of the magazine.IN MARCH 2011, the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in Yorba Linda, California, opened its new Watergate Gallery—the portion of the museum devoted to the constitutional crimes for which President Nixon will always be known. For years, visitors had seen an extended apologia for Nixon, which absurdly suggested that Democrats planned to impeach him in order to make House Speaker Carl Albert president. That exhibit, drawn up with Nixon’s involvement, was always best understood not as credible historical interpretation but as a campaign in the former president’s lifelong quest for rehabilitation. But now, in its place, stands a meticulously researched and beautifully displayed multimedia exhibit that draws upon recently videotaped oral histories, newly unearthed archival documents, and excerpts from the roughly 4,000 hours of tape recordings that Nixon surreptitiously made as president. The exhibit traces an array of White House–sponsored crimes that began well before and extended well after the famous break-in of June 17, 1972, the fortieth anniversary of which occurs this month.

R.M. Douglas: The European Atrocity You Never Heard About

R.M. Douglas is an associate professor of history at Colgate University. This essay is adapted from his new book, published by Yale University Press, Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans After the Second World War....Between 1945 and 1950, Europe witnessed the largest episode of forced migration, and perhaps the single greatest movement of population, in human history. Between 12 million and 14 million German-speaking civilians—the overwhelming majority of whom were women, old people, and children under 16—were forcibly ejected from their places of birth in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia, and what are today the western districts of Poland. As The New York Times noted in December 1945, the number of people the Allies proposed to transfer in just a few months was about the same as the total number of all the immigrants admitted to the United States since the beginning of the 20th century. They were deposited among the ruins of Allied-occupied Germany to fend for themselves as best they could. The number who died as a result of starvation, disease, beatings, or outright execution is unknown, but conservative estimates suggest that at least 500,000 people lost their lives in the course of the operation....

Rob Goodman: Behind Historic Preservation, a Surreal History

Rob Goodman is co-author of Rome's Last Citizen, a book on Cato the Younger and the Roman Republic, to be published in October by Thomas Dunne Books."One entered the city like a god. One scuttles in now like a rat."Almost 50 years ago, when a demolition project reduced New York City's Penn Station from a monumental vaulted hall full of air and light to a stifling underground maze, the Yale historian Vincent J. Scully Jr.'s lament came to be the last word on an act of architectural sacrilege. It stood for the belated realization of an incalculable loss, and the conviction that we ourselves had been reduced in the process.But as pithy as the line is, it's not immediately clear why it should be true. Isn't a god a god anywhere? Isn't a rat a rat even on Olympus? What exactly do buildings have to do with it?

Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein: 40 years after Watergate, Nixon was Far Worse than We Thought

Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward are the co-authors of two Watergate books, “All the President’s Men,” published in 1974, and “The Final Days,” published in 1976. This is their first joint byline in 36 years.As Sen. Sam Ervin completed his 20-year Senate career in 1974 and issued his final report as chairman of the Senate Watergate committee, he posed the question: “What was Watergate?”Countless answers have been offered in the 40 years since June 17, 1972, when a team of burglars wearing business suits and rubber gloves was arrested at 2:30 a.m. at the headquarters of the Democratic Party in the Watergate office building in Washington. Four days afterward, the Nixon White House offered its answer: “Certain elements may try to stretch this beyond what it was,” press secretary Ronald Ziegler scoffed, dismissing the incident as a “third-rate burglary.”History proved that it was anything but. Two years later, Richard Nixon would become the first and only U.S. president to resign, his role in the criminal conspiracy to obstruct justice — the Watergate coverup — definitively established....

Jeffrey Lord: Bill Clinton and the Reagan Consensus

Jeffrey Lord is a former Reagan White House political director and author. "I thought Bill Clinton was a great President. The first two years were really bad. Then he changed the tune and became even more Reagan than Reagan. He did the '97 Capital Gains Tax Act, he did welfare reform, he appointed Greenspan twice, he pushed NAFTA through Congress, how wonderful was that. "He cut Government spending as a share of GDP by 3½%. He left us with surpluses. This man did a fantastic job for the country. He was a very good President." -- Economist and Reagan aide Arthur Laffer, father of "The Laffer Curve" Scott Walker wins, while Bill Clinton regales Democrats with boasts of his own economic successes. The Reagan Consensus Lives. Bill Clinton is to Ronald Reagan as Dwight D. Eisenhower was to Franklin D. Roosevelt. And as the Wisconsin Recall recedes into history's rearview mirror, Barack Obama and the Stealth Socialism he represents is nowhere but in trouble. Which is exactly why all of these stories about the sub rosa rivalry between ex-President Clinton and President Obama are so relevant, not to mention important to understand. First, Ike and FDR... 

Clancy Sigal: The Bloody Consequences of Military Hubris

Clancy Sigal is a screenwriter and novelist in Los Angeles. D-Day – 6 June 1944, when Allied forces stormed into Hitler's Fortress Europa in Normandy – is rightly celebrated for the valor of the American and British citizen soldiers who scaled the fearsome cliffs of Pointe-du-Hoc and other dug-in Wehrmacht concrete bunkers on Omaha, Utah, Sword, Gold and Juno beaches. Most of us have seen Saving Private Ryan, or have movie memories of The Longest Day or TV's Band of Brothers. That's because D-Day is photogenic and "iconic". The "longest day" is preserved in popular and institutional memory as a thrilling military success, which, as we know, has many fathers, while failure is an orphan. D-Day's message is that US military strength and pluck overwhelm, and always will. But what happens after Matt Damon's Private Ryan is saved and John Wayne, with his broken ankle, takes Sainte-Mère-Église?.. .....

Lilia Shevtsova: End of the Affair ... Why Russian Liberals No Longer Look Up to America and the West as a Model

Lilia Shevtsova, an AI editorial board member, is senior fellow at the Carnegie Moscow Center. These are ruminations of a Russian liberal, and they would have never been written if not for one simple fact: the concerns described herein are beginning to dominate the Russian liberal community (and not just the Russian one, I’m afraid). We are dealing with a phenomenon that until recently was unthinkable: emerging anti-Western and anti-American liberalism. Of course, I don’t mean to suggest that Russian liberals are rejecting liberal principles. They are just increasingly critical of the way the Western elites—political and intellectual—adhere to these principles, both inside and outside of Western societies. Are these criticisms a reflection of the usual tension between non-Western dogmatism and Western revisionism? Could be. But I’d rather not be presumptuous: I am only describing how Western developments and Western policies are seen from the outside by those who have traditionally looked to the West as an example and even an icon. One could all too easily shrug and dismiss this phenomenon as ludicrous. It would be arrogant, after all, for those who have failed to achieve a liberal agenda in their own country to accuse those who have succeeded of normative inconsistency and structural ineffectiveness!

Gerald M. Steinberg: The Myths of 1967 and Today’s Realities

Gerald M. Steinberg is professor of political science at Bar-Ilan University and president of NGO Monitor. The 1967 Six Day War was the result of the renewed Arab effort to "wipe Israel off the map" – a renewal of the 1948 war that ended in a temporary cease-fire, with no interest among most Arab leaders in a long-term peace agreement with Israel. This is the reason that there were never any pre-1967 borders between Israel and the west bank of the Jordan River – one of many myths that distort the international perception of the conflict.Another myth is the belief that in this war, Israel occupied the "Palestinian east Jerusalem and the West Bank." In fact, this territory had been occupied by Jordan in the 1948 war, and from these positions, Israel was repeatedly attacked. Sacred and historic Jewish Jerusalem was systematically closed off and desecrated during this period – and in 1967, the Jewish presence was restored.

Jon T. Coleman: Not Quite Bulletproof, Or How to Rise in Academia

Jon T. Coleman is a professor of history at the University of Notre Dame. His latest book, "Here Lies Hugh Glass: A Mountain Man, a Bear, and the Rise of the American Nation," is just out from Hill & Wang.To rise in academe and reach the high ground where review committees stop questioning your record and deans quit pondering your trajectory, where students applaud when you close out the semester with your lecture on the War of 1812 and Stephen Colbert invites you on his Report to plug your book, one must cultivate an entry-level superpower.Save your supersonic speed, your laser-beam eyeballs, and your ability to communicate with sea life for emergencies and holiday parties. Instead concentrate on blocking projectiles. To get a job, to surmount third-year review, to receive tenure, to advance to full professorship, to merit a Wikipedia page that you didn't write yourself, all you need to be is bulletproof. And if you want a Kevlar career, do as I say, not as I did. For while I excelled at thwarting some bullets, I had zero talent for dodging the countless shots I administered to myself.

John P. Rossi: Midway Set Stage for U.S. Win in World War II

John P. Rossi is a professor emeritus of history at La Salle University.The Duke of Wellington said his victory at Waterloo was "the nearest run thing you ever saw." Seventy years ago today, the United States fought a naval battle against Japan that, like Waterloo, was both close and decisive.The battle of Midway, which began on June 4, 1942, set the tone for the Pacific war and launched the United States on the path to eventual victory. It ended a six-month series of Japanese victories dating back to Pearl Harbor that had plunged the American public into a state of despair. The fall of the Philippines, with its horrific "Bataan Death March," and the capture of Guam and Wake Island, left the United States with no bases west of Hawaii.Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto, the man who had planned Pearl Harbor, believed the Japanese had created a defensive perimeter far out into the Pacific. But two events during the string of Japanese victories convinced him that he must draw the United States into a major battle....

Susan Hattis Rolef: The Importance of History in Israel

Susan Hattis Rolef teaches at the Max Stern Yezreel Valley College and was a Knesset employee for many years. Last Tuesday Channel 10’s investigative TV program Hamakor (The Source) broadcast a report on the syllabi being taught in the national school system, with a special emphasis on history.The report concluded that the history syllabi are antiquated and lopsided, and that the graduates of the education system are completely ignorant with regard to many important world developments, events and personalities, but highly proficient (at least until two minutes after the matriculation exam) regarding rather esoteric details from Jewish history, such as the dispute between the Pharisees and Sadducees in the period of the Second Temple on when one starts counting the Omer.Of course, in a complex society such as ours it is no simple matter to reach agreement as to the balance that should be struck between world history and Jewish history, as to what is important and relevant and what is not, or what life lessons one ought to draw from the study of history.But what is still worse is that too many people think that with so much information available, it is more important to teach children how and where to f

Charles L. Newhall: Teaching Students to Construct Historical Narratives

Charles L. Newhall is a history teacher at St. John's Preparatory School in Danvers, Massachusetts, and co-editor of the Common School column. His research focuses on the intellectual and cultural history of the early national republic.The advent of narrative history in the popular press makes engaging history students seem like a simple task. However, as teachers we are up against myriad competitors that shape our students' historical sense. From the History Channel, to MythBusters, to Disney's Pocahontas, students come to class with preconceived notions of what should constitute engaging approaches to history. And for most, analytic articles on Puritan theology or Native American animism will not do. Sam Wineburg, a Stanford professor of education and observer of history teachers, reminds us, "historical thinking, in its deepest forms, is neither a natural process nor something that springs automatically from psychological development. Its achievement … actually goes against the grain of how we ordinarily think. … The odds of achieving mature historical understanding are stacked against us in a world in which Disney and MTV call the shots." Coaching students to develop these critical and analytical thinking skills is one facet of my teaching. Another is to engage my students' imaginations.

Russ Baker: What Gets Declassified?

Russ Baker, an award-winning investigative journalist, is founder and editor-in-chief of WhoWhatWhy.com.Next year will be a half-century since the death of JFK. And the Obama Administration thinks we need to keep secret the records on the matter … a little longer yet.Believe it or not, more than 50,000 pages of JFK assassination–related documents are being withheld in full. And an untold number of documents have been partially withheld or released with everything interesting blacked out. But why?Since the government and the big media keep telling us there was no conspiracy and that it was all Lee Harvey Oswald acting on his own, why continue to keep the wraps on?We don’t have an answer, but in understanding this and any number of other mysteries, we can begin looking for patterns in the way the administration handles information policy....

Jeffrey Lord: JFK and the Death of Liberalism

Jeffrey Lord is a former Reagan White House political director and author. 

David Grann: The Yankee Comandante -- A Story of Love, Revolution, and Betrayal

David Grann has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2003. He is the author of “The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon,” and his stories have appeared in several anthologies, including “What We Saw: The Events of September 11, 2001”; “The Best American Crime Writing,” of 2004, 2005, and 2009; and “The Best American Sports Writing,” of 2003 and 2006. A 2005 finalist for the Michael Kelly Award for the “fearless pursuit and expression of truth,” Grann has also written for the New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, and the Wall Street Journal.

Abigail Perkiss: From Policy to Practice: Remembering Brown II

Abigail Perkiss is an assistant professor of history at Kean University in Union, New Jersey, and a fellow at the Kean University Center for History, Politics and Policy.Two weeks ago, we commemorated the 58th anniversary of one of the most foundational legal decisions in contemporary American history.This week marks another milestone in the civil-rights movement: the Supreme Court decision known as Brown II.On April 17, 1954, in Brown v. Board of Education, the nation’s highest court declared segregation in public schools to be unconstitutional.Chief Justice Earl Warren, writing for a unanimous bench in Brown I, held that “in the field of public education, the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place.  Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.”The first Brown verdict was no doubt momentous.  But it was also largely symbolic.  It would take more than a year for the Supreme Court to determine how to implement this new integrationist mandate.It was 57 years ago tomorrow that the same court delivered a decision that would chart the course of public education in the United States for more than half a century.