Roundup: Talking About History

Michael Oren: What Happened to Israel's Reputation?

Mr. Oren is Israel's ambassador to the United States. This year Israel is celebrating . . . a series of accomplishments that have surely exceeded the expectations of its most visionary founders. It is one of the most powerful small nations in history. . . . [It] has tamed an arid wilderness [and] welcomed 1.25 million immigrants. . . . The Israelis themselves did the fighting, the struggling, the sacrificing in order to perform the greatest feat of all—forging a new society . . . in which pride and confidence have replaced the despair engendered by age-long suffering and persecution. So Life magazine described Israel on the occasion of its 25th birthday in May 1973. In a 92-page special issue, "The Spirit of Israel," the magazine extolled the Jewish state as enlightened, robustly democratic and hip, a land of "astonishing achievement" that dared "to dream the dream and make that dream come alive." Life told the story of Israel's birth from the Bible through the Holocaust and the battle for independence.

George Friedman: France's Gaullist Foreign Policy

George Friedman is an American political scientist and author. He is the  founder, chief intelligence officer, financial overseer, and CEO of the private intelligence corporation Stratfor. New political leaders do not invent new national strategies. Rather, they adapt enduring national strategies to the moment. On Tuesday, Francois Hollande will be inaugurated as France's president, and soon after taking the oath of office, he will visit German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin. At this moment, the talks are expected to be about austerity and the European Union, but the underlying issue remains constant: France's struggle for a dominant role in European affairs at a time of German ascendance. Two events shaped modern French strategy. The first, of course, was the defeat of Napoleon in 1815 and the emergence of Britain as the world's dominant naval power and Europe's leading imperial power. This did not eliminate French naval or imperial power, but it profoundly constrained it. France could not afford to challenge Britain any more and had to find a basis for accommodation, ending several centuries of hostility if not distrust. The second moment came in 1871 when the Prussians defeated France and presided over the unification of German states.

Peter Godwin: A Landmark Ruling in South Africa

Peter Godwin is the president of the PEN American Center and author, most recently of “The Fear: Robert Mugabe and the Martyrdom of Zimbabwe.”For the past decade, South Africa has been the preferred vacation spot, shopping destination and international transit hub for members of the tyrannical and murderous government ruling its northern neighbor, Zimbabwe — a government that has rigged elections, beaten and killed opposition activists and ruined a once thriving economy. All of this could now change because of a landmark legal decision.Last week, the High Court in Pretoria, South Africa’s administrative capital, handed down a historic judgment. It ordered South African authorities to investigate and prosecute members of Robert Mugabe’s government who had tortured their political opponents. Under South African law, the police are obliged to investigate evidence of a crime against humanity, wherever it occurs, if the rule of law does not exist there, as is the case in Zimbabwe.

Uri Friedman: Dictators With Mommy Issues

Uri Friedman is an associate editor at Foreign Policy. The Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud, who was very close with his mother, once remarked that "people who know that they are preferred or favored by their mother give evidence in their lives of a peculiar self-reliance and an unshakeable optimism which often seem like heroic attributes and bring actual success to their possessors." Whether you subscribe to Freud's theories or not, it's certainly true that some of the world's most powerful rulers have had fascinating relationships with their mothers -- some surprisingly loving, others ambivalent or just plain bitter. Alexander the Great's power-hungry mother, Olympias, is thought to have been a driving force behind her son's ascension to the throne of Macedonia.

Tom Hayden: The Port Huron Statement: A Manifesto Reconsidered

Tom Hayden, a longtime activist and former member of the California Legislature, taught a UCLA class on student-led democracy movements this year."We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit."Those were the opening words of the Port Huron Statement, which I helped draft 50 years ago this summer as the founding document of Students for a Democratic Society. The statement, written in the idealistic early days of the New Left, laid out a vision for a nation in which racial equality would be finally achieved, disarmament embraced and true participatory democracy would become the norm....

Stephan J Kramer: Let Germans Read Mein Kampf

Stephan J Kramer is General Secretary of the Central Council of Jews in Germany. Contrary to what some people may think, there is, at present, no general prohibition against the publication of Adolf Hitler's book. The reason it has been possible to ban new editions is purely technical. After World War II, the state of Bavaria became the owner of parts of Hitler's property which had been confiscated by the occupying powers - including the copyright to the dictator's publications. Thus Bavaria has been able, so far, to use its discretion and block new editions. However, the copyright expires in 2015. The only imaginable way to continue the existing ban beyond 2015 would be explicit legislation to this effect - a complicated process which might even run into constitutional difficulties and fail to clear the hurdle of the Constitutional Court. What a triumph for the Nazis this would be...

Arthur Herman: The FDR Lesson Obama Should Follow

Mr. Herman is a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. His newest book, Freedom's Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II, was published this week by Random House. If President Obama still wants to turn our economy around, it's time for him to act more like Franklin Roosevelt—but not in the way he might think. It takes a special kind of courage for a president to abandon a failed approach to economic policy and then embrace its opposite. Yet, faced in May 1940 with America's greatest foreign policy crisis since the nation's founding, that's exactly what Franklin D. Roosevelt did. FDR—architect of the New Deal and outspoken opponent of Big Business—was forced by the collapse of Europe's democracies under Hitler's blitzkrieg to turn to the corporate sector to prepare America for war. Roosevelt had almost no choice. In 1940, the United States had the 18th-largest army in the world, right behind tiny Holland. While not so small, its Navy was totally unprepared to face a determined invader. Gen. George Marshall, Army chief of staff, warned Roosevelt that if Hitler landed five divisions on American soil, there was nothing he could do to stop them. Neither the War nor Navy Departments had a clue how to mobilize a $100-billion civilian economy for war.

Pat Murphy: If Eisenhower Had Married Kay Summersby

Troy Media columnist Pat Murphy worked in the Canadian financial services industry for over 30 years. Originally from Ireland, he has a degree in history and economics. TORONTO, ON, May. 9, 2012/ Troy Media/ – There was a time when it was fashionable to think of history in terms of the influence of great men. The 19th century Scottish essayist and historian Thomas Carlyle was clear on this, noting that “The history of the world is but the biography of great men.”It’s a view that no longer prevails. Still, individuals can make a significant impact in specific situations. So let’s ask a question: What, if anything, would have been different had Dwight Eisenhower gone ahead with his plan to divorce his wife and marry Kay Summersby?...Given the prevailing values, Eisenhower’s image as the All-American war hero would certainly have been tarnished. And absent that special status, it’s difficult to see how he could have been elected president. In fact, he wouldn’t even have been the 1952 Republican candidate....

Megan Garber: Abraham Lincoln Did Not Invent Facebook: How a Guy and His Blog Fooled the Whole Wide Internet

Megan Garber is a staff writer at The Atlantic. She was formerly an assistant editor at the Nieman Journalism Lab, where she wrote about innovations in the media.It started with a headline I saw pinging around Twitter yesterday afternoon. Abraham Lincoln, my friends' tweets informed me, had invented a 19th-century version of Facebook.Yes! This previously unknown tidbit, it turns out, was the discovery of a guy in Milwaukee who had happened to take a day off work -- and then happened (serendipity!) to visit a circus graveyard in Delavan, Wisconsin -- and then happened (serendipity again!) to visit the Lincoln Library in Springfield, Illinois -- and then happend (serendipity some more!) to discover that Mr. Lincoln had once filed a patent application for a newspaper that would, via profiles and updates, "keep People aware of Others in the Town."...

Andrew Cohen: Nicholas Katzenbach, Unsung Hero of America's Desegregation

Andrew Cohen is a contributing editor at The Atlantic and legal analyst for 60 Minutes. He is also chief analyst and legal editor for CBS Radio News and has won a Murrow Award as one of the nation's leading legal analysts and commentators.

Robert Zaretsky: The Changing Symbolism of the Bastille

Robert Zaretsky teaches French history at the Honors College of the University of Houston and is coauthor of France and its Empire Since 1870.

John T. Shaw: The Legacy of Richard Lugar

John T. Shaw is a vice president and congressional correspondent for Market News International. He is the author of Richard G. Lugar: Statesman of the Senate: Crafting Foreign Policy From Capitol Hill, recently released by Indiana University Press.

Sven Böll, Christian Reiermann, Michael Sauga and Klaus Wiegrefe: Helmut Kohl's Chancellery and the Euro Birth Defects

Sven Böll, Christian Reiermann, Michael Sauga and Klaus Wiegrefe write for Der Spiegel. It was shortly before his departure to Brussels when the chancellor was overpowered by the sheer magnitude of the moment. Helmut Kohl said that the "weight of history" would become palpable on that weekend; the resolution to establish the monetary union, he said, was a reason for "joyful celebration." Soon afterwards, on May 2, 1998, Kohl and his counterparts reached a momentous decision. Eleven countries were to become part of the new European currency, including Germany, France, the Benelux countries -- and Italy. Now, 14 years later, the weight of history has indeed become extraordinary. But no one is in the mood to celebrate anymore.

Scott Galupo: Getting Nixon Right

Scott Galupo is a writer and musician living in Virginia. Un homme serieux. The phrase, found in a Newsweek column written by Joseph Alsop after Richard Nixon’s second inauguration, recurs frequently in Thomas Mallon’s engaging new historical novel, Watergate. Alsop believed that Nixon was un homme serieux in at least three senses: The literal meaning is, of course, ‘serious man.’ Less literally, but more accurately, it means a man who has to be taken seriously. Less literally still, but more accurately in terms of the President’s thinking, it means a tough man, a hard man, a man not to be pushed around. Each of these shades of meaning was intensely present in Nixon. He was a man of high intellect, an accomplished statesman—also something of, well, a crook. What accounts for this whiplash-inducing quality of Nixon’s—this ability to mingle high purpose with common thuggery?..

Michael Miner: Sometimes a Sophoclean Melodrama is Just a Flowerpot

Michael Miner has been a Chicago journalist since 1970.BradleeThe excerpt from a new biography of Ben Bradlee that ran the other day in New York magazine is a long story that turns on a small remark about Watergate. As far as the history of Watergate is concerned, what Bradlee apparently said in 1990 is revisionism of utter insignificance. Besides, history is constantly being tinkered with. But among journalists, Watergate is mostly myth, and in myth the quests are forever noble, the deeds forever daring, and virtue forever triumphant. If you’re remembered as a slayer of dragons, you won’t want it to come out that you used rat poison.The story is called "The Red Flag in the Flowerpot." The cast of characters consists of Ben Bradlee, editor of the Washington Post at the time of Watergate and father figure to Bob Woodward, young and relentless reporter who made his name uncovering Watergate scoops; and Jeff Himmelman, Woodward’s protege at the Post who, thanks to Woodward, was invited by Bradlee to sort through boxes of Bradlee’s old papers with an eye to writing a book about him.The text is extracted and adapted from that book—Himmelman’s new biography of Bradlee, Yours in Truth.

Peter Berkowitz: Why Colleges Don't Teach the Federalist Papers

Mr. Berkowitz is a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. His latest book is Israel and the Struggle over the International Laws of War (Hoover Press, 2012).

Jacob Heilbrunn: Did Stalin Murder Lenin?

Jacob Heilbrunn is a senior editor at The National Interest.

Steve Chapman: Every President is a War President ... Politics Protects the Garrison State

Steve Chapman is a member of the Tribune's editorial board. Ninety-six years ago, when President Woodrow Wilson ran for re-election, two notable things happened: 1) His campaign used the slogan "He kept us out of war," and 2) he won.   It has been a long time since any president could seek a second term while making that boast. Looking at recent history, you would conclude not that the Constitution allows the president to make war, but that it requires him to do so. Modern leaders don't brag about keeping us out of war but about getting us in.   Barack Obama reinforces that truth more than any president of our era. He owed his victory in the 2008 Democratic primaries partly to his record of opposing the invasion of Iraq — which Hillary Rodham Clinton and John Edwards supported.   "We've had enough of a misguided war in Iraq that never should have been fought — a war that needs to end," he said during the campaign. He proclaimed, "Now is the time to start bringing our troops out of Iraq — immediately." His opponents, Democratic and Republican, portrayed him as gullible and weak. But the voters were willing to elect someone who might be slightly averse to war.   Or, rather, someone they thought might be slightly averse...

Ronald Radosh: Another Central American Tyrant Passes from the Scene: Farewell to Tomás Borge

Ronald Radosh is an Adjunct Senior Fellow at The Hudson Institute, and a  Prof. Emeritus of History at the City University of New York, Queensborough Community College.I cannot let this day pass without noting the death of one of Central America’s greatest tyrants, Tomás Borge. The obituary notice in today’s New York Times hardly lets readers know the kind of moral monster that Borge was. Perhaps the mourning by Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro is enough to let people understand how vile he was.Borge was one of the original group of Sandinista rebels who had been imprisoned by the authoritarian ruler of Nicaragua, Anastasio Somoza. He had been in prison for one year when in 1978 a raid by Sandinista troops (disguised in Nicaraguan army uniforms) seized the National Palace and held the leaders of Somoza’s regime hostage. The government gave into the raiders’ demands, released fifty of those they had incarcerated, paid the FSLN (the initials of the Sandinista National Liberation Front) a half million dollars in ransom money, and provided a plane to fly them out of the country to safety.

Stephen Green: A Photo Essay Rebuttal to May Day

Stephen Green began blogging at VodkaPundit.com in early 2002, and has since been featured in publications as diverse as Guard Experience Magazine, The New Individualist, TCS Daily, and right here at PJ Media. Along with frequent appearances on PJTV, he was also the host of PJM Political on Sirius-XM Satellite Radio. Steve lives with his wife and son in the hills and woods of Monument, Colorado, where he enjoys the occasional lovely adult beverage.Will Collier found an amazing essay from photographer Stefan Koppelkamm. He toured East Germany just after the Wall was knocked down (it did not “fall”) — and then went back this century to shoot the same locations. The before-and-afters will shock you....Do yourself a favor and click the link to see them all.I’d like to add a few words to compliment Koppelkamm’s photos.