Big Tent Extra

Flags of Our Fathers Review - full version

2006-10-18T21:05:00.000-07:00

First off, it’s been a couple of years since I read the book, but I do remember that it was not an easy story to tell in a narrative, and that comes through in movie. It’s clear the filmmakers struggled to resolve the two main storylines, that of the Battle of Iwo Jima and the flag-raising, and that of the surviving flag-raisers’ Victory Bond tour several months later. What they came up with was to interweave the two stories, jumping back and forth between them at points of connection. At times, this technique works very well, showing how the Marines could not leave the war behind, even when ensconced in luxury and waited on hand and foot. It can also be a useful way to stress the emotion of what the men had to go through, both on the island and back in the States. At other times, however, it’s jarring and disorienting, even for someone like me who has a pretty good knowledge of the battle and the war in general. My companion, who does not have that advantage, found herself constantly unable to follow the movie, and basically checked out as a result. The biggest problem here, I think, is that the filmmakers don’t just jump around between the two storylines, but also within the storylines, making it all that much harder to know exactly where and when you are watching. After a while, you begin to wonder if maybe they should have just gone with a chronological storyline, and let everything else play out on its own.

This editing becomes more problematic towards the end of the film, as the Iwo Jima storyline falls away, and the post-war storyline then peters out. The result is one of the more common complaints among moviegoers lately: a movie that you keep expecting to end, but that keeps going. After about 20 minutes, you find yourself looking for them to just up the epilogue in text at the end, like we’ve seen a million times. Instead, they batter the audience with more emotional scenes, heaping it on in obvious ways, right down to a bedside confession of inadequacy as a father (I checked; it's not in the book). I was determined to stay to the end, but it really wasn’t easy. In fact, the credits have more emotional punch, using pictures of the Marines on Iwo Jima along with the names of the actors who portrayed them.

Before it sounds like I absolutely hated the movie, I didn’t. In fact, overall, I’d say I liked it, but at least the final third left an unpleasant taste in my mouth. Before that, however, there was much to like about it. The visual effects during the war scenes are outstanding. The use of CGI is about as seamless as I’ve ever seen it, and as a result, the experience of the battle scenes is striking. It easily approaches the experience of Saving Private Ryan, and at times might even surpass it. And like I said before, the connection the film makes between what the men experienced on Iwo Jima, both before and after the flag-raising, and what they experienced trying to get on with their lives after their return is very powerful at times. And finally, the movie reminds us that World War II was not always seen as the “Good War”, even as victory was in sight. The need to have the surviving flag-raisers go around the country to sell war bonds in order to keep the war effort supplied is one of the centers of the movie and will probably come as a shock to some viewers. Whether or not the U.S. would have had to accept Japanese terms if the 7^th bond drive failed might be questionable, but the movie certainly shows how hard it was to keep the American public behind the war just three years in (one wonders what a Brit, Russian, or German would have thought about that situation, having at that point been through five years of more devastating war themselves), as well as what effect the picture of the flag-raising had on the public, from politicians down to the families the flag-raisers who did not survive the battle.

So while the movie may have been a disappointment (OK, I had pretty high expectations going in, so maybe that was inevitable on some level), I would still recommend seeing it, especially for the historical perspective. Just be prepared to have to pay close attention to the various storylines, and to suffer a bit towards the end.

On Age and Authority

2006-08-17T07:12:00.000-07:00

A note: this entry really isn’t about me. Really. It's about the punditocracy taking themselves very seriously, and who are taken seriously by others. So stick with it.

This is something I think about quite a bit; it's something about which Derek and I have commiserated many times. Those occasions have usually been triggered by the odd tendency among our journalistic friends, the opinion manufacturers at prominent and not-so-prominent websites, magazines, and newspapers, to ignore, utterly ignore, anything we send them for consideration. Derek and I both hold Ph.D.s; we both have been published in a number of formats. We're reasonably well-informed individuals who write reasonably well. And we can’t even get an acknowledgement of receipt for an op-ed to, say, any mid-level newspaper in the continental United States. Mind you, we’re not necessarily asking for a comment on the op-ed, let alone a clear decision on whether they will try to publish. All we want, for now, is for some sort of proof of life for our baby—evidence that it arrived in one piece. This is frustrating, because for the few minutes out of the day when we’re not talking about shotgunning beer and tossing midgets, we are serious people who want to be taken seriously.

Now look at the list of columns at Townhall.com. Most days I peruse this list, read two or three of the columns, maybe link one, and ignore the rest. The same goes for Real Clear Politics. Townhall and RCP are more conservative sites, but the same could go for any list of daily or weekly columns. For a variety of reasons, most opinion pieces by established opinion writers simply aren’t very good. Maybe they have been at it for so long that they feel like everything is a repetition. Maybe they lose clarity in their pursuit of the clever turn of phrase. Maybe they just don’t have anything new or different or interesting to say about the issues of the day.

Look, writing a column is not shoveling coal or plowing fields or anything like that, but it can’t be easy, especially over the long term. So I am more than willing to cut columnists some slack for writing boring pieces, especially when the columnists are older. I assume, perhaps out of naivete, that established columnists did hard work back in the day to earn their relatively comfortable current jobs. No doubt that is the case for many of them.

But I wonder. Folks like Ben Shapiro, Megan Basham, and Ross Douthat make me wonder. Stephen Glass gives me, and should have given everyone, pause. I'm a big fan of Jonah Goldberg, and he obviously was in the midst of a productive career when he got his big break, but it is worth noting that his current position stemmed from the notoriety that came from his mom telling Linda Tripp to record her conversations with Monica Lewinsky. Obviously, and as with anything, there is quite a bit of luck and who you know in entering the land of the pundits.

This sounds petty, and truthfully there is no small amount of sour grapes to what I've written. I would love to know the right people. A little luck wouldn't be bad either. But--here's where it gets interesting, maybe--who the hell am I to tell people what to think about the most important issues facing the world today?

Sure, I have a Ph.D. And I am certainly an expert in my areas of study and research. That means a lot, but I am also well aware that my degrees did not bring unlimited knowledge. In fact, one of the most important lessons I learned in graduate school was just how little I knew and know. On the practical side, the everyday life stuff, I'm married with kids, I've got a house, and I've lived and traveled and worked all over the country. I still feel like I haven't experienced anything. And I seriously doubt that there will ever come a time when I'll wake up and my education sand experiences will have combined to reach the level where I'll feel like I've got it all figured out. But I could be wrong.

So I wonder sometimes about the authority with which younger pundits, especially those in my age range, speak. Again, I'm only going after conservative types here, but what did Ben Shapiro pick up at UCLA and Harvard Law that I do not know about to give him the confidence to assert unequivocally that Israel's ceasefire with Hezbollah was "the most ignominious defeat in Israeli history"? Did something in Meghan Basham's personal experiences or education at Arizona State give her the confidence to be so sure that the movie Old School was an assault on the institution of marriage? Is a Harvard undergraduate degree so thorough that Ross Douthat can so blithely judge the approaches of two popes to Christian morality in the modern world? Does Tom Bruscino really think that reading about events on computer screens in Ohio, Washington D.C., and Kansas gives him the wisdom to insist that we are winning the war in Iraq?

Obviously speaking with authority is part of the game--people will only pay attention if you sound like you know what you are talking about. That said, I can only speak for myself, but no matter what happens and no matter where my work gets published and no matter how much authority with which I seem to speak, I want to make one thing very clear: I am always well aware that I could be wrong.

No education, no experiences, and no age will ever give me absolute authority. Just a humble call to remember humility when bouncing around the opinion world.

Follow Up

2006-02-12T10:27:00.000-08:00

The "Blaming the Victim" post from Friday has garnered a bit of attention and has encouraged me to add an addendum to my point. Mark Grimsley has put up multiple responses to the post on his blog. The latest comes from Nicholas Palar, a very well-read junior history major at Purchase College SUNY.

Mr. Palar is a self-proclaimed victim-blamer, because military historians have not developed a "coherent “military theory” to explain wars and battles." He continues: "I say this because the center of the canon of military history needs to be a model through which military victory, defeat, and change can be explained." The problem, Palar writes, is that,

There is a primacy given to major battles and negotiations between leaders that is important but fundamentally at odds with everything we have learned from social history in recent years.

History is made through many actors, not just the elites, and history as a process must be examined in a comprehensive manner. Some works indeed have tackled the question of Confederate defeat in a more sophisticated manner; e.g., Why The South Lost The Civil War by Beringer, Hattaway, Jones, and Still. However, the prevailing notion by military historians is to simplify military history into major battles and diplomatic relations.

Well, we can certainly disagree about whether or not more theory will help us understand the outcomes of wars. It seems to me that it is pretty easy to poke gaping holes in most theories that purport to offer standard explanations to complex topics involving humans (see, for example, Marxism). Perhaps that is why the myriad studies on the theory of war, including Clausewitz, Mahan, and both volumes of the Makers of Modern Strategy, have ultimately failed to satisfy. Let's turn the question around: how has any comprehensive theory (on the order of the one Mr. Palar is calling for in military history) been applied to make other historical fields so definitive compared to military history?

In fact, I would venture a guess that more theories have been floated and shot down in military history than in any other field. That is because theories inform good historical study, they do not guide it.

It is interesting, also, that Mr. Palar brings up the example of explaining the defeat of the rebellion in the Civil War, because it refutes his point. Sure, most books on the Civil War focus on battles--I'll get back to this point in a second--but there is a sizable literature on the fall of the rebellion that looks into all aspects of both sides. The titles include Why the North Won the Civil War, How the North Won, The Confederate War, and Why the Confederacy Lost. Remember that several of these books are collections of essays, which means that many of the themes therein have been expanded upon in larger studies. And guess what? Almost every one of the authors is or was an academic military historian with a Ph.D.

Which brings me to my more important point, something that is explained a bit more clearly in another one of Professor Grimsley's replies. He quotes Kenneth P. Werrell, writing in the preface to his book on the bombing of Japan:

[M]ilitary history is regarded with suspicion by a segment of the public and by some academics. Certainly, it reveals man at his worst, with much blood and brutality, and despite the 'new military history' that emphasizes non-combat aspects, military history is still basically about wars and battles. To make matters worse, the good guys do not always win. Nevertheless, military history continues to be of interest to the public. As the English writer Thomas Hardy put it so well, "War makes rattling good history; but peace is poor reading."

If the content of military history is a problem, so, too, is its writing. Unlike other fields of history, it is written mainly by journalists, who tend to sensationalize, and by former military men, who tend to justify. Most academics shy away from it, since they are uncomfortable with the content, unfamiliar with the technology, and unsympathetic with the military ethos. To be perfectly honest, academia's intellectual bias is not only against war, but also against the warriors and the study of war. As a consequence, a lower percentage of books in the field of history are written by academics, and myth-making, hero worship, romance, and glory are more the stuff of this branch of history than of any other.

That may be true, but it has little or nothing to do with military history as an academic field. Since when do we judge an academic field by the standard of work produced by people outside of the academy? Why should academic military historians have to suffer for bad or limited books written by non-academics? When I was talking to my friend Derek about this the other day, he was horrified by the idea that as an academic historian of civil rights his field would be in some way responsible for the limitations in all the nonacademic books out there on civil rights. It is a good analogy--I'm not a civil rights historian, but it seems to me that Taylor Branch, Juan Williams, and Diane McWhorter are a whole lot more famous than Steven Lawson, Clayborne Carson, and Anthony Badger. (I've got a feeling that when I mention the name David Chappell, you don't think of this guy.) That is not to say that non-academics cannot write excellent, informative, even definitive books, but I've taught all sorts of advanced military history courses, and with the exception of Max Boot, The Savage Wars of Peace, (which has its problems) I've always assigned books that were written by academics or those with terminal academic degrees.

The point is that popular histories written outside of the academy might inform the academic field, but they do not define it. If academic military historians write five percent of the thousands of books on military history published in any given year, then the field must be judged on that five percent. Here is a rule that academics seem able to apply to every field but military history: when you see a new military history title, pick up the book and look at the binding and the author's bio. If an academic press published the book and/or the author is a professor or Ph.D. in history, then the book is probably an academic title. It's not tricky. If well-educated folks are unable to make the distinction, then I humbly suggest that it isn't military historians who have the problem.

Blaming the Victim

2006-02-09T09:56:00.000-08:00

Some time ago, I wrote a blog entry about military history and the academy. The overall idea was entirely self-serving: military history is important and therefore universities need to hire more military historians. I hoped my cri de coeur would lead to a flood of job offers from America's most prestigious universities. I work for the U.S. Army, so we see how that worked out.*

But ever since I wrote that entry, there have been a few points about it that I thought needed elaborating. A recent request on the message boards of H-Net has inspired that elaboration. On January 30, Professor Victor Macias-Gonzalez of the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse queried the members of H-LatAm (Latin America):

I'm a fish out of water . . . help! I am teaching my historiography seminar, and two of my 8 students want to work on Military History. My knee-jerk reaction, of course, was to object, but I want the students to work on topics that are close and dear to their hearts . . . any suggestions for germinal works on military history?

The request was cross-posted on H-War (War), and Professor Macias-Gonzalez received all sorts of replies. On H-LatAm, he elaborated on what he was looking for:

Thanks to everyone for their many, many suggestions. I may not have been clear on my comment, however.... What I would like is a historiographical article on US military history, as in, moving beyond strategy, guns, uniforms, and the like. Dare I think there may be something in U.S. military history similar to what we have witnessed in our own field over the last 15-20 years with the influence of cultural history and gender?

***

In my entry, I wrote about the efforts of academic military historians to broaden their field beyond battle narratives, to show why military history is relevant to other fields. In the midst of that explanation, I threw in a parenthetical note:

(Still, since when has the standard for fields addressing issues in the past in an academic setting been how well the practitioners of one field explain the importance of that field to all other fields? That is a pretty high standard to which to hold military historians, especially considering that it is patently obvious how important wars have been to history without even broadening the field.)

I did not draw out this point because it seemed contentious in a post that was meant to build bridges. But no one has ever sufficiently answered the question. Battle narratives, strategy, tactics, why one side lost and another won--all of these are incredibly complex issues, as complex as, say, defining who the progressives were, explaining why the New Deal failed to end the depression, or figuring out which side of the women's suffrage movement was more important in getting the 19th Amendment passed.

Here's an utterly not random example to illustrate the point: whether or not you think we are winning or losing in Iraq, the primary explanations will come from strategy, tactics, weapons, logistics, and battle accounts--all topics that are in the traditional province of military historians. It will be military historians who ultimately sort out the issues of the Iraq war. That is no small thing--look at all the smoke and fire and confused and confusing first drafts of what is happening right now.

Another example, one that should resonate with folks who teach modern U.S. history: how much time do you spend in your classes on the war in Vietnam, not the protests at home, after the Tet Offensive in 1968? How much time does your textbook spend on the war on the ground in Vietnam after 1968? The Tonkin Resolution was in 1964, Tet was less than four years later. The American portion of the war went on until 1973, another five years after Tet, and the war went through all sorts of changes in that time. But most accounts go something like this: Tet, Cronkite, LBJ doesn't run, protests at home pick up, Nixon bombs Cambodia, U.S. withdraws. You know why? Because only recently have military historians started to sort out what happened on the ground in the last half of the war.

Military history, even the traditional stuff, shouldn't have to prove anything to other historical fields to be considered a viable part of the academy. That said, academic military history has expanded, as I wrote, to "include all manner of discussions on race, class, gender, social life, cultural issues, memory, and politics." It is right and good that this is so. The inclusion of these considerations makes the study of military affairs even more complex and more interesting. It must continue apace.

***

Lots of military historians, usually those outside the academy, just throw up their hands at their field being tossed from academic departments. But many who actually engage the issue all too often resort to blaming the victim. These blamers fall into two groups: the enablers and the ignorant (dear God, I'm starting to sound like Dr. Phil). The enablers are military historians themselves. I was one of them in my entry. They are usually people in the academy who want to reason with their colleagues. Enablers make comments disparaging the supposed narrowness of their field so that they can get conversations started with the ignorant. "Sure, there has been too much drum and bugle military history." "Who needs another study of Napoleon?" "Of course in part it is our own fault. Military historians have at times been far too caught up in the traditional end of our field--discussions of battles from the perspective of generals." It is pathetic and we know better.

Take my sentence: "Military historians have at times been far too caught up in the traditional end of our field--discussions of battles from the perspective of generals." First, as I explained already, there is nothing wrong with being caught up in the complexities of the traditional end of the field, at least when it comes to military history being a viable part of the academic world. Second, and more troubling, is that the spirit of what I wrote is not true. Sure, "at times" military historians (implying military historians as a whole) have been caught up in the traditional end of the field, if by "at times" I meant "at times prior to thirty years ago." Maybe I seem like I'm being too hard on myself, but this sort of quasi-diplomatic nonsense only enables the ignorant. And reinforcing the ignorant, especially this ignorance, does not create knowledge.

Take Professor Macias-Gonzalez: "What I would like is a historiographical article on US military history, as in, moving beyond strategy, guns, uniforms, and the like. Dare I think there may be something in U.S. military history similar to what we have witnessed in our own field over the last 15-20 years with the influence of cultural history and gender?"

First off--I'm getting repetitive--there is nothing wrong with strategy as an area of historical study. Second, academic military history has never been about "guns, uniforms, and the like" in the sense that he most likely means. Academic military history journals like the Journal of Military History and War and Society and even official military journals are not for gun collectors and guys whose primary concern are the buttons on a nineteenth century cavalryman's coat. Aw heck, check the current contents for yourself.

Third, Professor Macias-Gonzalez wonders whether there have been changes in U.S. military history over the last 15-20 years. The answer is "Yes! For the love of God, Yes!" Only it began more than 15-20 years ago. Check out the titles of these military history historiographical essays cited by Professor Mark Grimsley. There are two articles about the "new military history" from 1984. For the uninitiated, and put simply, the new military history is what military historians called the effort in the field to get off of the battlefield and into other issues of military affairs. (As a corrollary, there is also the new combat history, which looks at war from the bottom-up, that is, from the soldier's perspective.) Lest you think the two essays on the new military history sprung from the aether in 1984, note that in 1975, Professor Dennis Showalter wrote an article entitled "A Modest Plea for Drums and Trumpets." Professor Showalter was worried about the trend in academic military history away from important studies of generals and battles--over thirty years ago. The late Russell Weigley expressed the same concern in the preface to his 1981 book Eisenhower's Lieutenants.

I'm being harsh toward Professor Macias-Gonzalez. At least he asked. But the way he asked says so much. Say I were to have a job interview for a position teaching American history with a focus on women's history, and I had to give a lecture on the passage of the 19th Amendment. I would go to women's historians for help. I would not say, "I've been asked to give a lecture on the 19th Amendment. My knee-jerk reaction, of course, was to object, but I want departments to teach subjects that are near and dear to their hearts. Is there a historiography on women's history that goes beyond burning bras?" I would not make unsubstantiated implications about the field. No, I would go hat-in-hand, honestly announcing my own ignorance, and assuming that there was a well-developed and serious academic literature.** I have no problem with honest ignorance and an honest effort to learn.

***

Here is the problem: military historians have been doing the enabler thing for decades now. Obviously, it doesn't work. It only emboldens the ignorant to be offensive about their ignorance. It only reinforces their stereotypes and keeps them comfortable with all their false assumptions. Military historians continue to struggle in the academy--in large part because the ignorant think that anyone can teach advanced courses and write academic books in military history. It's time to educate the ignorant.

What should military historians do?

For one thing, I don't know what the statute of limitations is on calling something "new," but the new military history was new long before there was a New Coke. It was new when "That 70s Show" was just "That 70s." A modest suggestion: it's not new anymore; come up with a better name, or better yet, just call the field military history, and assume that it covers these other issues.

More importantly, stop enabling. Military historians have no need to apologize for the history and historiography of their field. When other academic historians say or imply that military history is for History Channel buffs, gun collectors, and reenactors, correct them. Point them to the Journal of Military History and War and Society and the graduate reading lists in military history from Duke and Ohio State (the Ohio State one is being updated).

Academic military history, from the traditional works to the latest topics of study, is a dynamic, complex, interesting, and important field of study. Stop playing the victim. If we won't stand up for ourselves, no one will.

__________

* I like my job.

** True story.

A Seattle Story (Night Before the Super Bowl Edition)

2006-02-04T21:26:00.000-08:00

It is not often that someone can claim that they are less than a day away from the biggest sporting event in a city and region's entire history. Yet that is exactly what tomorrow's Super Bowl between the Seattle Seahawks and Pittsburgh Steelers (sorry, Tom--Pittspuke)is for the entire Pacific Northwest. It really is that big of a deal. Lest I be accused of hyperbole, it is worth keeping in mind that the history of Pacific Northwest sports (especially professional sports) is quite short when compared with most other areas of the country. Only two professional sports championships have ever been won in the Pacific Northwest, by the 1977 Portland Trail Blazers and the 1979 Seattle Supersonics (no, the WNBA championship won last year by whatever team plays in Seattle does not count). Both of these took place B.A.S.S. (Before All Sports Stations) and before the NBA went MegaNational, so most people outside the Pacific Northwest don't remember those championships unless they watch ESPN Classic religiously.

Those championships also came at a time when the only pro football and baseball teams in the region--the Seahawks and Mariners--were in their infancy and, unknown by locals at the time, well on their way to defining "mediocrity" and "abysmal" ('Hawks the former, M's the latter) in the Unofficial Yet Universally Recognized As Authoritative Sports Dictionary. As a result, since 1979 Pacific Northwest professional teams have not won a championship in any major sport, and thus for the most part have been off the national sports radar screen. And with the exception of the Sonics, no post 1979 Northwest team has even played for a championship (and that 1996 Sonics team had no chance against Michael Jordan and the Bulls).

But to me and most other Pacific Northwest sports fans, the NBA pales in comparison with football and baseball. And that is why tomorrow is such a big deal--none of us have ever celebrated a Lombardi or a World Series trophy. I know that the longevity of this drought does not compare to cities like Cleveland, but for this 32 year old who does not remember not having the Seahawks and Mariners to beat my head against the wall about, this remains a lifetime drought.

Not that there have not been opportunities, particularly for the M's. But despite their success between 1995 and 2003, the M's have only broken hearts and caved in groins with their playoff runs (no more so than in 2001, when 116 wins in the regular season culminated with a collective five-game pants wetting against the Yankees). Yet if the M's were death by bludgeoning, then the Seahawks have until this year been death by boredom. Or slow asphyxiation. Never downright awful, but never downright good, either, despite having had some great players over the years. Steve Largent may remain the best wide receiver most football fans never saw. Curt Warner was one of the better running backs of his era. Jim Zorn and Dave Krieg were constantly reliable, if not dominating. Ricky Watters had some great years here, as did Warren Moon. Unfortunately, the one Seahawk most people outside the Northwest do remember well is Brian Bosworth, and usually the accompanying memory is of Bo Jackson implanting the Nike logo on the bottom of his cleats across Boz's chest. The 'Hawks' biggest NFL stage came back in 1984, with their loss to the Raiders in the AFC Championship. And since then, not much to talk about. Other than a number of 9-7, 8-8, and 6-10 seasons. In short, Seattle sports teams have mirrored the city's weather--mostly cloudy, damp, and dull.

So forgive me and every other Northwest sports fan for treating these past two weeks like a giant sun break--marveling at it and just standing in it to make sure it is real; or just to enjoy it before it disappears. Claims that the Seahawks are "just happy to be there" in Detroit apply more to their fans than to the team. We just don't know what to do with ourselves. This is new to us. But unlike the rest of the country, we know this Seahawk team. And we love this Seahawk team. Unlike the rest of the country, we saw this team play every week. Unlike the rest of the country, we have seen how much this team has matured since week four of the season (after a loss at Washington). Unlike the rest of the country, we have seen every team that lost to the Seahawks underestimate their O-Line, their running game, their QB, their Middle Linebacker, their pass rush; they accurately found the weaknesses in the secondary and special teams, however (these are big liabilities, ones that could hurt them in XL). But, unlike most of the rest of the country, we still think that these 'Hawks can win this game (special thanks to Dcat the Pats fan for thinking the same.... Solidarity, brother).

A few other points warrant mentioning. Many Seahawks fans have been complaining way too much about the lack of "respect" or the "bias" of the media against the 'Hawks. They whine about all the latte cracks, rain cloud jokes, and "suburb of Alaska" blasts. Guess what? The only possible way to stop all of that is to win. So until that happens, expect more of the same. But, don't be surprised if there is more of the same if the 'Hawks do win.

And if they do win, and the barbs keep coming, who cares? I, for one, am not interested in the 'Hawks (and M's) winning in order to get national respect. I want them to win for us, their fans. For our enjoyment. I could care less what people like Skip Bayless and Rick Reilly think. Sure, it would be nice if a Super Bowl win or perhaps a future World Series win (surely that will be the first sign of the coming Apocalypse) made Seattle a "legitimate" sports town in the eyes of the rest of the country. But if that doesn't happen, so what? I'm interested in the hardware, the peace of mind, the sense of reward, and the commemorative T-Shirts, not national love. They can call my teams (and their fans) any name in the book--someday (hopefully tomorrow) I just hope those names include "champions."

Strangely, I feel more at ease before this game then I did before the NFC championship (though my wife is taking 9-1 odds that this doesn't last once my eyes open on Super Bowl Sunday morning. I know she's right). I have no idea what this means, but I do know that one way or another, tomorrow night about this time I will be shedding tears for one reason or another. And having a(nother) beer for one reason or another. And talking to my dad about the game, no matter what happens. And looking back on one hell of an enjoyable year, no matter what happens. And looking forward to another run next year, no matter what happens.

Now, if you will excuse me, I have to go throw up.

Go Seahawks. No matter what happens.

Big Tent Holiday Reading List - 2005

2005-12-15T07:03:00.000-08:00

Here it is: a list of books that we all read in the last year or so (but weren't necessarily published in the last year) and recommend for the holiday season. Believe it or not, we did not share notes on the list yet there were no repeats. Considering our areas of interest and expertise, it should come as no surprise that twentieth century history, especially military history, dominates. But there are a few surprises, and quite a few bargain books. Enjoy. (Of course you must first purchase and read Derek Catsam's, Bleeding Red: A Red Sox Fan's Diary of the 2004 Season.)

Mark:

The Fifty Year Wound: The True Price of America's Cold War Victory, by Derek Leebaert. An interesting argument on the Cold War, with some provocative points about some of the accepted truths of American policy.

A Song of Ice and Fire, by George R.R. Martin [series]. Very good fantasy series that combines fantasy elements with a story (loosely) based on the Wars of the Roses. Martin doesn't shy away from sex and graphic violence, and isn't afraid to kill off his heroes, which is rare in fantasy books.

Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter, by Steven Johnson. An intriguing argument, whether you think it's right or not, and it makes me feel better about watching so much TV.

Ren:

Utah Beach by Joseph Balkoski. Building on his previous works of Beyond the Beachhead and Omaha Beach, this book gives an excellent one-day look at American military forces in WWII. With a little luck and good leadership, the Americans were virtually unstoppable.

Arabs at War by Kenneth Pollack. Good for two reasons. First, he provides a larger cultural explanation for poor Arab military performance in the 20th century. Second, it provides, in one place, detailed accounts of almost all Arab military actions between 1948-1991.

The Cold War edited by Robert Cowley. Consisting of 27 separate essays, it gives a much deeper understanding of the military background to numerous Cold War events. Many of the essays make use of recently available documents from the East bloc countries, and many give glimpses of paths untaken in the Cold War.

JD:

Visions of Victory: The Hopes of Eight World War II Leaders, by Gerhard L. Weinberg. The newest book from the foremost living historian of Nazi foreign policy and the author of the magisterial World at Arms, this short book looks at how the most important leaders of the Second World War understood the war, and how they envisioned how the postwar order would emerge after their nation proved victorious. Each chapter explores an individual leader (Hitler, Mussolini, Tojo, Chiang Kai-Shek, Stalin, Churchill, De Gaulle, and FDR are his subjects) and Weinberg provides excellent citations for other studies of these men and their exploits. Weinberg's excellence as a writer and historian are on fine display here, and this one is just as accessible for general readers as it is for scholars. An excellent read.

The Myth of Hitler's Pope, by Rabbi David G. Dalin. A controversial book, and one that does not quite accomplish what it wants to, but nevertheless an important contribution to the still-vociferous debates over Pius XII's response to Nazism and the role of traditional anti-Semitism in Catholic responses to the Holocaust. Dalin's book does not break a lot of new ground as far as source material goes, but it does summarize well the opposing viewpoints by scholars about Pius, and does an excellent job illustrating why those who demonize Pius go way too far. The polemical nature of studies of Pius XII is clearly illustrated, though Dalin does not do enough to make his own book an exception to this trend. But, for anyone wanting to read a fine book that summarizes the issues and makes a strong case for those who consider Pius to have done good things for Jews despite his other flaws, then this book is a must read. (Note: for what I consider to be one of the best treatments of this issue, see Martin Rhonheimer's 2003 article from First Things.)

Endkampf: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Death of the Third Reich, by Stephen G. Fritz. This book focuses on the interactions between American GIs and German civilians during the American push into the heart of Germany in 1945. Focusing mostly on American forces moving through Franconia, Fritz examines the initial contacts and points of difficulty that emerged between conquering forces and conquered. Of particular interest to me are his discussions of the initial attempts by American military forces to govern areas under their control. The clear ideological divide between the victorious Americans and citizens whose own ideas about their nation (and its enemies) had proven to be so utterly wrong gives this study a poignancy not seen in a lot of other studies that explore the immediate days after Germany's defeat.

The Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean GULAG, by Kang Chol-Hwan. This is a crushing book. The author, now a journalist in South Korea, provides a searing firsthand account of his own experience in the Gulags of North Korea. Though much of his story will sound familiar to those who have read memoirs of victims of Stalin's Gulag (i.e. Gulag Archipelago, Man is Wolf to Man, etc.), Hwan's account is all the more important because it illustrates clearly the true nature and threat of the North Korean regime. I am assigning this book for the students in my Totalitarianism in History course this spring.

A Church Divided: German Protestants Confront the Nazi Past, by Matthew J. Hockenos. An excellent study of how German Protestant leaders in the postwar years confronted their dubious history under the Nazis. This serves as an excellent corrective for any who think that only German Catholics and the Vatican have to explain their past interactions with Hitler. In fact, as Hockenos makes clear, German Protestants have as much--indeed, more--to confront than their Catholic counterparts. Just a tremendous book.

Tom:

First Great Triumph, by Warren Zimmerman. An engaging account of the efforts of Theodore Roosevelt, Alfred Thayer Mahan, John Hay, Henry Cabot Lodge, and Elihu Root to make America into a world power. Zimmerman's conclusions are sound and he has a keen eye for anecdotes. For example: "Yet even in his decline Hay's humor remained as sharp as ever. He described to a friend a meeting during the Boxer Rebellion with the Chiense minister Wu Ting-fang, who was not noted for clarity of expression: 'Minister Wu came by this morning and stayed for two hours, at the conclusion of which Wu was Hazy and Hay was Woozy.'" At the very least, you will find great material for lectures.

Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the Comic Book, by Gerard Jones. Men of Tomorrow is a history of the origins of the Golden Age of comic books. That might not sound too interesting, but Jones does biographies of the great names, and in so doing touches on all sorts of topics, including Jewish American culture in the 1920s and 1930s, prohibition, gangsters, World War II, and some of the key issues of the 1940s and 1950s. I don't agree with all of Jones's conclusions, but I learned something new on every page (for example, did you know Charles Atlas--the guy who made skinny weaklings strong--was an Italian immigrant born Angelo Siciliano?)

The Americans at D-Day and The Americans at Normandy, by John McManus. These are really two parts of one large study. I reviewed the two books, and even though I am familiar with the material I found McManus's writing and use of original sources compelling. Individually, the Normandy volume is fresher because the D-Day material has been gone over many times. But together, the two books are as good and readable account as you can get of the American war effort in Northern Europe in the summer of 1944.

Harry Potter (all of them), by J.K. Rowling. Resistance is futile...and unnecessary. I'm not saying the Potter books are as good as The Lord of the Rings or The Chronicles of Narnia. But they are in the neighborhood, and I can't really think of a better compliment

Stephen:

My reading turns out to be pretty humdrum. I went to my Amazon.com purchase history and saw the new(ish) books I have purchased in the last few months. Some of them turned out to be quite good:

Team of Rivals, by Doris Kearns Goodwin. Much better than I expected. Great book for the non-specialist who hasn't read the book from the 1930s that covers much of the same material. She is a very good writer. I have already pulled material from this book to put in my lectures.

The World Was Going Our Way: The KGB and the Battle for the Third World, by Christopher Andrew. Spies, documents, the third world... what's not to like. I haven't tried to read this book from beginning to end, but I pull it off the shelf at least once/week to look something up. I am not sure what that says about my life.

Henry Adams and the Making of America, by Garry Wills. Another book I wasn't expecting to like as much as I did. Wills is a good writer and an interesting thinker. I was impressed at what he was able to draw out of a story about the writing of a story. Making intellectual history this much fun to read is a pretty impressive feat.

The American Presidency: An Intellectual History, by Forrest McDonald. Some critics say that the first half of this book is better than the second half. Who cares? McDonald is one of our greatest living historians. Even when I disagree I am glad to hear what he has to say.

Restless Giant: The United States from Watergate to Bush vs. Gore, by James T. Patterson. So much great material here. Patterson has a good eye for the best line, best quotation. Again, a must read for anyone who writes
lectures.

Morning in America: How Ronald Reagan Invented the 1980s by Gil Troy. This book will not be the final word on the Reagan years, but it is a damn good start. At least he takes Reagan seriously.

World War I and Soldier Motivation

2005-11-13T08:24:00.000-08:00

From a paper given at the 2005 SMH:

...As Peter Kindsvatter has pointed out, it is a mistake to describe the soldiers in any war by universal clichés—the enthusiastic doughboy, the resigned World War II GI, the resentful Vietnam soldier. In World War I, despite the federal government bombarding them with great causes—beginning with President Woodrow Wilson’s declaration that it would be a war “to make the world safe for democracy”—some American fighting men began to exhibit skepticism toward idealistic declarations of why they fought. According to doughboy Lt. Howard V. O’Brien, “A soldier, toting a 100 kilo pack and cleaning harness, tends to get cynical and bored about ‘making the world safe for democracy’ and all that. He wants to clean up the Boche and get home….” Another man noted, “In truth I have not heard more than a half dozen times during my year in the army a discussion among the men or even the officers, of the principles for which we fight. We read of them here, there and everywhere but the men of their own accord and in an informal way seldom or never talk of them.”

Still, it would simply be untrue to declare that the doughboys ignored ideology in their descriptions of why they fought. Historian Ronald Schaffer has noted that various men wrote home to describe how they were, “engaged in a crusade,” and that their efforts would, “…save Liberty for the world…,” or “…save the world for democracy,” or provide, “…freedom and justice to all.” Lt. O’Brien, who talked of the cynicism and boredom of the soldier with making the world safe for democracy, also wrote, “Consciously or not, we are here to fight for democracy even if we make ribald remarks when you mention it.” In addition to this idealistic talk about causes, many of the men said that they went to war for a great adventure, or as a chance to get away from their ordinary lives. And, like those who came before and after, they also discussed comradeship.

An ambiguity had entered into the overall picture of how American soldiers described their reasons for fighting. These men were torn between a collective memory of Civil War soldiers divorced from causes but valiant and enthusiastic in combat and an all-out effort on the part of the federal government to make World War I an ideological crusade. However, the war would come to have a less ambiguous effect on the next generation of American fighting men. The memories of the Civil War and Great War would combine to shape the way the American fighting man in World War II described his reasons for fighting.

World War I all but completed the trend begun after the Civil War. The veterans themselves, much like their Civil War predecessors, individually went through a variety of feelings about their service. Some became disillusioned with the war, some did not. But in the decade following the armistice, the First World War grew less and less popular overall with the American people. This popular disillusionment began when the peace settlements that ended the war seemed to do anything but lead to a world safe for democracy. The unsatisfying peace led Americans into to a period of isolationism, during which many began to question why the United States entered the war in the first place. A popular view arose, backed by academics and intellectuals, that greedy financiers and munitions makers—the so-called merchants of death—had driven America to war to turn a profit. By the mid-1930s, Congress even convened a committee under Senator Gerald Nye to look into the issue. The Nye Committee’s proceedings supported the merchants of death view, entrenching that image into the American understanding of the war and effectively killing the notions of liberty, freedom, justice, and democracy that had seemed so important less than two decades earlier. Popular culture supported these conclusions. One teen from the 1930s later remembered that movies of the era taught that big business and war generally were the “siren call of the devil.” A poll taken in 1937 found that seventy percent of all respondents thought the United States should have stayed out of the war.

Although the ideological reasons for American entry into the war had been discredited, the veterans of the fight stood apart. Their intentions, at least, remained pure. Still, the understanding of their service also changed in the memory-making of the 1920s and 1930s. The most acute transformation occurred in high culture. There the American war experience could not be separated from the European. The war had been devastating for that generation of Europeans, and the literature and poetry of era reflected the devastation. Most famously, European veteran authors and poets like Wilfred Owen, Robert Graves, and Erich Remarque treated the war as a total catastrophe, with no redeeming qualities. American veteran writers like Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos mirrored the theme in their work, and thus became part of the so-called Lost Generation. For them not only did war have no great causes, but it did not lead to valor or heroism or any other noble traits in the fighting men. At least one World War II veteran discussed the influence of this literature, “My generation, brought up on A Farewell to Arms, All Quiet on the Western Front, and plays such as Journey’s End, was not easily persuaded that modern war made any sense at all. Most certainly none of us thought any longer of glory or military heroics.”

The influence of the Lost Generation conception of the soldiers’ war can be exaggerated, both in Europe and the United States. For one thing, as David Kennedy has written, “The postwar writers of disillusionment protested less against the war itself than against a way of seeing and describing the war.” The romanticism of their work portrayed the war as a personal escape for individual soldiers from the monotony of civilian life. And interwar American popular culture still exhibited plenty of romanticism for the fight. Although the film version of All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) was popular in the United States and repeated the same disillusionment themes as Remarque’s book, other widely-seen films took a different tack. Movies such as What Price Glory? (1926) and The Road to Glory (1936) emphasized the valor and bravery of the common fighting man in the war, and films on the air war treated individual pilots like latter-day knights.

My Diary

2005-10-27T05:58:00.000-07:00

Lileks pointed out this site on the Bleat the other day. It is just a page with hundreds of cassettes. Many of them are familiar, but for the life of me I cannot place any of them individually. All that time spent in front of a tape dubber--remember when high speed dubbing became a cheap and common? how exciting that was?--all that time recording from cd to tape, timing songs, adding up minutes, all to make a mix tape to put in the car because no one had a cd player in the car yet. (Even if you did it skipped every time you ran over a pebble. I'm surprised I never killed anyone, as much as I slalomed around bumps in the road that would halt PM Dawn mid-song.)

Still, I can't place any of those cassettes to any specific event or a specific set of music. But there are memories there, snapshots that lead to other places and emotions, some simple, some a bit more complicated: *trying to fit a tape into it's case the right direction (remember how some were upside down?)* *getting a ride in high school from one of the older guys on the football team and having to take caution not to crush any of the cassettes on the passenger side floor* *sitting in the basement and listening to a song over and over again so many times that I could rewind it to the exact spot every time.*

It's funny how just some pictures of a cassette can bring back things like that. How one thing can trigger a buried memory. Yesterday I was painting a board for a coat hanger for the new baby's room. The World Series played on the TV in the other room. As I rinsed the brush in the utility tub, another memory struck me. It was art class in third grade. The teacher was a gentle lady, older and white haired--though I realize more and more that old means something very different now. When we were finished painting, we would clean our brushes in a tub not unlike the one I have now. The water would run and the we'd push the bristles against the bottom of the tub, letting the paint run off. That year the teacher, I don't remember her name, taught us a simple way to draw a large cat sitting, facing out from the paper. That's not the memory, this is: one day early in the school year we went off to art class and took our seats. On the board she had drawn a picture of a rose and next to it written the number 4,192. She asked us what it meant. This was the kind of thing I loved, puzzles that no one else could figure out, but for the life of me I could not make sense of it. Then she told us: the night before, one Pete Rose had got his 4,192 career hit, breaking the record held by Ty Cobb. Of course.

***

I don't keep a diary. I've tried a few times, but I never seem to have the constancy to maintain. No discipline, you see. (And John Quincy Adams used to chide himself daily, in his diary, for some perceived failing, like only reading the Bible in Latin that day instead of Latin and Greek.) As a historian I chide myself for this all of the time. When my paternal grandfather died, part of what made it so painful was that I had planned on interviewing him about his experiences in World War II, and never got around to it. Now his service as a Seabee is lost, all except a picture or two and the scraps of memories we picked up from Grandpa over the years. I never got in the car and drove the three and a half hours to Cleveland to have him tell his story, the story he remembered so well, even when he would confuse the names of his kids and grandkids. John Quincy Adams ain't got nothing on me.

This impulse to save memories, to preserve lives in a more durable form extends beyond me, that's for sure. The frantic efforts on the part of the Library of Congress and others to record the recollections of the passing World War II generation are proof enough of that. I wonder if I am failing in not recording my experiences in some sort of diary. Should I bother? Is there anything about my perfectly mundane life that would interest folks in the future? Whenever I think yes, if only because I would love to read the diary of my great grandparents and because historians write about incredibly boring crap like parlor rooms and handkerchief manufacturing, I also think that it is too late. I should have started years ago. Now so many good memories are lost, or worse, they are unclear, vague, possibly wrong.

But are they lost? Should there ever be a reason to write a memoir--whether it be just for the family or because I've decided that the world just can't go on without me rambling on about me the historian in a multivolume autobiography (paging Mr. Schlesinger)--I wonder if it would be possible to cobble together enough of those memories triggered by cassettes and paint brushes and diesel engines to do a credible job. The Pete Rose story isn't as pointless as it seems at first blush: one of the reasons I remember it is because I was so pissed that I couldn't figure it out. I remember sticking my head in a mud puddle after a huge thunderstorm when some older kids gave me a dollar and my dad rightly called me an idiot. I remember the names of no one I went to second grade with, except a girl named Elizabeth, and that is because she was the only person in the class who ever got higher grades than me on anything. Surely the fact that my failures and my stupidity created the clearest memories says something.

Maybe I should start a diary, something I write on everyday or nearly everyday. Maybe I could use that diary to record these memories when they come up.

Oh. Ha.

(Forgive the indulgence, but thanks for reading.)

Comparative relief-blogging

2005-09-05T17:16:00.000-07:00

By way of several other sites, I came across this post by the Commissar on the Political Diktat: Bloggers on Hurricane Katrina. It shocked me at first that there could be such a discrepancy between those on the Left and those on the Right. And since I don't consider myself that right-wing (especially in the American sense), I became sceptical. After all, aren't these posts rather random samples? Surely the actual larger context does not show such a discrepancy, and calls for donations have been about even. So I decided to do a little (semi-scientific) investigating. I took the first two blogs on either side - Wonkette, Daily Kos, Instapundit, and Power Line - since it seems that they're at roughly equal positions in their respective camps, and are relatively equal in notoriety. I looked through all of the posts going back through September 1st, since that is about the time that the need for donations became apparent (and made it easier to go through blog archives). I counted and recorded those posts that called for donations or volunteers, or had links to donation sites. I tried to keep that definition as narrow as possible, but there may be some quibbles with my results. Here they are (and yes, I do know that I have too much time on my hands today):

Wonkette: 4 posts mentioning donations or benefit events (including links to the Truth Laid Bear donation log site and Instapundit. However, one of those links is questionable, since it's mainly used to make fun of Bush and his dog)

Kos: 4 posts mentioning donations or with links to donation sites

Instapundit: 9 posts mentioning donations or calls for volunteers (including a huge list of dozens, possibly hundreds, of sites for making donations, and another post with a link to MoveOn.org's housing contribution site)

Power Line: 1 link calling for donations and another of an excerpt of an article asking for clothing donations

As you can see, the Right seems to come out a little better, although much of that is due to Glenn Reynolds personal efforts. However, the discrepancy grows when I looked further. First, all of the blogs contain ads linking to donation sites. Both Instapundit and Power Line have banners to Mercy Corps, while Wonkette has an ad for the Red Cross and Kos has a banner for the Red Cross. However, the Wonkette ad is a small text ad overshadowed by other banners. And the Kos ad is truly fascinating, since instead of mentioning the Red Cross, it is for something called the "Liberal Blogosphere for Hurricane Relief". So presumably if you want to contribute through the link, you should be someone who only supports liberal blogs.

The discrepancy also grows when I looked at the nature of the other posts on each blog. Most of the hurricane-related posts on Wonkette and Kos are vitriolic attacks on the Bush administration, along with some more constructive criticism of the relief effort's failures. Most of the hurricane-related posts on Instapundit and Power Line are either explanations (or apologias, depending on your interpretation) for relief effort problems, or constructive criticism of the administration. It seems as though many on the Left have let their hatred of Bush so overwhelm them, that they cannot take time off to focus on more worthy endeavours. More than a few times while scanning the posts, I found myself again hoping that they would just shut up (I think I may have to include myself soon, but people just keep saying stupid things). Of course, some of the posts on the Right blogs had me hoping the same, but they were the exception rather than the rule. Overall, the tones of the Left blogs were far less complimentary (to the blogs themselves I mean) than the tones of the Right blogs. I think these leading blog-pundits on the Left had better start looking in the mirror and asking if their approaches are benefiting their fellow citizens and their country at large. Because from my perspective, they're not, and that problem could further damage the Democratic appeal leading into next year and 2008.

One more thing. A little more empirical measurement of the response from the readers of the four blogs. From the Truth Laid Bear log of blog donations (which currently has 1738 blogs of all persuasions on its list): Wonkette: $75; Kos: n/a; Instapundit: $184,825; Power Line: $12,336. (Big Tent is not on the list, so I'm feeling the guilt myself)

Privileging Families, by Tom

2005-08-24T10:20:00.000-07:00

Americans have a real problem with privileging families in storytelling and politics. Take September 11. Thousands of Americans (and others, but I'm talking about the U.S.) lost family members that day. I nearly joined those thousands. Was it not for a late ride that awful morning, my sister would be a widow, my niece and God daughter would have lost her father, and nephew and another niece would not exist. It makes my stomach turn just to think of it--it is powerful emotional stuff. Their pain is their own, but we feel for those who lost family members at a very gut level because it is not hard to imagine being them and losing someone we love. The same goes for the family members of American service men and women who have died performing their duties.

That said, the stories of family members are a very limited thing. A widow or widower can tell us how it felt to her or him to lose a spouse in a terrorist attack. A grieving mother can share her unique experience with losing a son in battle. These are important stories to tell--they remind us of the human side of the collapsing building; they remind us of the human cost of every war. We should, and I think mostly do, embrace those lessons. But when it comes to understanding events historically or forming policy, those stories can ultimately tell us little more than what it was like for specific individuals to lose loved ones. This is nothing new--it is the difficulty of social studies and social history, and the reason social scientists and historians so often turn to statistics to make sense of their subject(s). As someone who is a fan of overwhelming anecdotal evidence as part of diverse sources, I nevertheless recognize this serious weakness and limited utility of individual accounts of any event.

Yet journalists and politicians consistently give the stories and opinions of grieving families far more weight than they merit in politics and telling stories. The families of those killed on 9/11, as individuals who lost family members on 9/11, have no special insight into why it happened. Their killers did not target their loved ones as individuals, they targeted them as Americans. As such, it is not callous to say that any American had as much of a reason to testify before the 9/11 Commission as any of the individual 9/11 family members. As an American I took the attacks personally. And I have very strong opinions about why and how it happened and what we should do in response. Yet here I am, blogging in my pajamas, and no one asked me to testify at or even sit in on the 9/11 Commission hearings. Nor does anyone seem to care who I am endorsing in the presidential campaign.

Likewise, while I think the parents, spouses, and children who lose loved ones in battle should often have their story told and deserve our sympathy, they are extremely limited sources in telling the story of a war. Yet journalists have made a habit out of asking parents what their son or daughter was fighting for. The answers are hearsay, and can only be deemed credible if they are supported by plenty of other evidence like letters, diaries, the accounts of fellow service men or women, and so on. Pat Tillman is a prime example of this. When he was killed in Afghanistan, he left no personal account of why he had passed on a big NFL contract to join the military and fight in the war. Journalists and reporters interviewed anyone they could find who knew him. Everyone had an opinion, but Tillman wanted his decision to be his own, and that ultimately is exactly what it is. Obviously, he felt in some way that he had to join the military in wartime, but why—his country? his family? the flag? the cause? to see the spectacle of war? to kill? curiosity at how he would react? family tradition?—went with him to his grave.

It doesn’t take genius to know that people do not always tell the truth or the whole truth to their parents, children, and spouses. But reporters and politicians can get folks crying and score political points, so they privilege the opinions of family members far too much. The result is that we are drawn into the story of poor Samantha who lost her husband Jimmy in the war. “I loved my Jimmy,” she tells us, “and he loved his fishing boat. He joined the Army to pay for his fishing boat.” The serious reporter asks, “Do you think Jimmy would be pleased with Fred Politician’s efforts to close Local Lake for fishing? Is that what he was fighting for?” It’s a stupid example, I know, but circle one of the versions to the statements below to see what I’m getting at:

“Jimmy joined because he needed the money to pay for college/loved his country and felt it was his duty.”
“Jimmy never/always thought he would fight.”
“Jimmy never/always supported the president and liked/disliked the president’s policies.”

It seems to never occur to journalists that these questions may have meant far less to twenty year old Jimmy than how many beers he could take at a time from a beer bong, and the answers they are getting are solely the opinions of the parents, wives, or children. If a historian or biographer relied just on the word of loved ones to tell a story, it would mean that they wrote a very, ahem, limited history or biography. This should be common sense. Can you imagine what kind of biography Ron Reagan would write about his father? It would be as, ahem, limited as Margaret Truman’s book on her dad.

The scary part is that it seems reporters are starting to believe their own nonsense—that family members really are good sources on what other people think. Last night I saw Newsweek’s Howard Fineman on Joe Scarborough’s show on MSNBC—yes, I’m the one who was watching—and they were discussing the CBS, Dan Rather, forged documents issue. Fineman thought that all the scientific proof that the documents were forged was interesting. But to him the most devastating evidence against the documents were the opinions of the purported author’s wife and son. Apparently, both say it was out of character for him to write memos to himself, that he never typed, and he had a high opinion of Lt. George W. Bush. Fineman thought it was unforgivable that CBS had overlooked this powerful evidence. Huh? I can think of about a thousand scenarios right off the top of my head where that Lt. Colonel’s wife and kid would have no idea what he was doing at work, or what his opinions of George W. Bush were thirty years ago. Put it this way, if the documents could pass muster as authentic, would we even take seriously the word of the wife and kid? No way. At best, their accounts support a wide variety of other evidence. That is it.

It should tell us all something that the chief political correspondent for one of the major news weeklies believes that solid evidence is what one person says about what another person thinks.

Maybe I’m being harsh, but I think I’m right about this one. My wife thinks the same thing, and my dad, and cousin, and former college teammate who is a Marine in Iraq, and the lady playing the banjo I passed on the street today, and the guy who yells “We Must Protect This House!” in the UnderArmor commercials, and my dog….

(This post originally appeared at the now inactive Rebunk, and has been edited slightly.)

Great Raid, Great Movie?

2005-08-09T11:22:00.000-07:00

The Great Raid, a movie based on the 1945 U.S. Army Ranger mission to rescue some 500 Allied prisoners from a Japanese prison camp in the Philippines, will be in theaters August 12.

There are problems with the movie. It is off visually. I don’t pretend to understand the technical aspects of movie making, but the lens they use to filter the color just doesn’t feel right. The movie is in the same grayed down tones of Saving Private Ryan and Band of Brothers, but the effect is not the same. Gritty and gray works for northern Europe, not the tropical Philippines. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe Luzon in January is all bleached light and earth tones, but even if that is so, the color does not set the right tone for the movie. The strange coloring might contribute to the strange effect that at times The Great Raid feels more like a TV movie than a feature film.

The casting of one character, Major Gibson, played by Joseph Fiennes, is also a problem. Fiennes is a solid actor; he did a great job as the slightly befuddled bard in Shakespeare In Love. But he was wrong for this part. The character he plays was a prisoner of war from the earliest stages of the war. He was an officer in the Regular Army, he fought to defend the Philippines, he survived the Bataan Death March, he contracted malaria, and he lived for almost four years in the camps. The story has him as the leader of the men in the camp, the rock, the guy who everyone else looked to for strength to get through the horror of it all. Joseph Fiennes is not that guy. Fiennes is too doe-eyed and sincere, more of a sympathetic weakling than a proud warrior worn down by the war. This bit of miscasting is more of a problem because so much of the movie is set in the camp at Cabanatuan. Those scenes seem to drag, and not in a good way—stuff is happening, but it just not as compelling as it could have been.

It is too bad that the camp scenes slow things down, because the rest of the movie is very well done. Fiennes’ love interest, Margaret Utisky, played by Connie Nielson, is a nurse in Manila who worked with the Filipino resistance and helped get food and medicine into the camp. Her story is remarkable, and portrayed well in the film. As is the tale of the raid itself. The high point of the film is Benjamin Bratt’s performance as Colonel Mucci, the leader of the mission. The dynamic between Mucci and the men is perfect—he is the demanding officer who is personally distant and temperamental, the kind the men would follow anywhere. Franco pulls off the taciturn Captain Prince, the man who planned and led the actual raid on the camp. And the raid itself—despite a little Hollywood flair—is a top notch depiction of combat in World War II. It would have been nice to see a bit more of these guys—their motivation, their trials, and their mission—rather than so much of the camp.

But perhaps that is an unfair criticism, and one that misses the larger importance of the movie and its role in our understanding of the Second World War.

As everyone knows, World War II is where we look for historical lessons; it is our handy source for illuminating analogies. Need to make a point about appeasement? There are those isolationists and the statesmen at Munich. Want an example of everyone playing their part? Talk about rationing on the home front. Have to find a generation to emulate? Call them the greatest. Need an example of absolute evil? The Second World War gave us the Nazis.

I’m not necessarily arguing with these positions, but the last one, especially, deserves comment. The Nazis were bad, no doubt—terrible, awful, deserving of our utmost scorn. But, we seem to forget, so were the Japanese. Not because they were Asian, or because they launched the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor (were they supposed to announce it?), but because of what they did, because of the horrible crimes they committed everywhere they went. The minions of Imperial Japan murdered civilians by the hundreds of thousands, they performed vivisections, they tortured prisoners of war, they burned people alive, they killed, raped, and plundered across China, Southeast Asia, and the Philippines. They did so in support of a racialized ideology of militant nationalism—one not all that different from Hitler’s. There’s a reason they were allies with the Nazis.

And we seem to give them a pass in this country. We have come to ignore the brutal aspect of the enemy in the Pacific War by either leaving them out (see the movie version of The Thin Red Line) or treating them as noble warriors (see, for example, Tora! Tora! Tora!). No doubt many of the men who fought in the Pacific rarely saw the enemy, and no doubt there were plenty of noble warriors within the Japanese military, but there is something more going on here. Perhaps it is because the Japanese embraced defeat after the war (to use John Dower’s phrase). Perhaps it is because we needed them as an ally in the Cold War. Perhaps, in our racialized worldview, we expected more of the civilized Germans and we sympathized more with the white victims of Germany than the Asian victims of Japan. Or perhaps now it is because we don’t want to seem racist in our depictions of the Japanese at war. As with anything, the answer is probably a combination of those factors.

That is one thing that makes The Great Raid so remarkable. It is a Hollywood movie, made by a guy in Harvey Weinstein who has been pretty active from the left of American politics. If it is politically incorrect to portray a negative vision of the Japanese in World War II, then there would seem to be no way that Miramax was going to do it.

But the Great Raid is unflinching in its depiction of Japanese crimes. Japanese police torture and execute Filipinos and others who may or may not have been in the resistance. The movie begins, as did the book Ghost Soldiers, with Japanese guards herding POWs into an air raid trench, dousing them with gasoline, and lighting them on fire. Japanese guards beat, purposefully starve, and summarily execute prisoners throughout the film. This brutality is central to the film: the Japanese were going to execute all of the roughly 500 prisoners in the Cabanatuan camp—that’s why the Americans had to stage the raid. The movie does not sugarcoat the reality; it sticks as close to the truth as possible.

That is ultimately what makes The Great Raid compelling and watchable: it is so damn sincere. They wanted to get it right. They wanted to do justice to the story. Why wouldn’t they? If it was not real, if it did not actually happen, you wouldn’t believe it. That true story overcomes any shortcomings in the film, it overcomes political correctness, it overcomes the cynicism that says great and good cannot come out of something so ugly as war.

What those men actually did made an otherwise okay movie great. Behold the power of awe.

President Grant, by Stephen K. Tootle

2005-08-05T05:50:00.000-07:00

A review of

Ulysses S. Grant, by Josiah Bunting III

Ulysses S. Grant: The Unlikely Hero, by Michael Korda

Two publishers have recently touted their new, short biographies of President Ulysses S. Grant as "revisionist." Grant's reputation certainly needs a little revising. The CSPAN Survey of Presidential Leadership ranked Grant as our 33rd greatest President. Historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.'s 1996 survey of historians ranked him as a failure. Proving that this scholarly ambivalence toward Grant is not strictly political, the Federalist Society-Wall Street Journal Survey on Presidents ranked Grant "Below Average." Not content merely to look with disdain on Grant's service in office, his critics ignore it completely. History has not been kind to President Grant.

Josiah Bunting's Ulysses S. Grant addresses the mystery of how Grant could be among the most beloved men of his time, yet receive so little respect from subsequent generations. His account of Grant's life and presidency is well paced and based on the best of recent scholarship. The first problem, he argues, is that Grant's military career has overshadowed his time in politics. Indeed, the American Civil War has produced a seemingly infinite flood of history books, but literature on Grant's political life is scarce—the last major scholarly work to focus exclusively on his presidency was William B. Hesseltine's Ulysses S. Grant: Politician, published in 1935—70 years ago.

The second problem is that Grant's character, although noble and great, is inherently unattractive to modern historians. As president, Grant demonstrated that he was as courageous and steadfast as he had been in battle, but he was never a graceful or a stylish man. He was not cultured or educated. He never mastered the give-and-take of political intrigue. He seemed to be, in short, a simple man, lacking the character that makes for scandal.

Thirdly, says Bunting, Grant's reputation has suffered because of the prejudices of scholars who have examined his presidency. Among earlier scholars, racism certainly kept many from praising Grant's efforts on behalf of black Americans, and the massive casualties of World War I reminded many people of the old charge that Grant was a "butcher" of his own men during the Civil War. Scandals in the Oval Office are still compared with corruption during Grant's years in office. He has been a perfect target for progressive historians and Southern sympathizers alike.

To Bunting, A former superintendent of the Virginia Military Institute, Grant's youth and early military career suggest some redeeming qualities. As a young man, Grant was direct, practical, and fair. He had a fatalistic streak that led him to accept tasks without worry or reflection. Although a mediocre student at West Point, Grant did not lack intellectual gifts. He was a quick study, a good writer, and an intellectually curious student who fed his curiosity with a steady diet of serious fiction. His horsemanship was legendary among his contemporaries. As a young officer in the Mexican-American War, Grant was steadfast and shocked at his own calmness under fire. He mastered logistics and learned the value of tactical improvisation. He studied his commanders and learned how to lead men effectively. Grant emerged from the war more confident in his own abilities, loyal to his friends and superiors, and dedicated to the idea that action is more definitive than talk.

* * *
Peacetime military service, however, was difficult for Grant. A quartermaster during peacetime was little more than a clerk, and Grant had no interest in clerking. He hated being away from his family and his time at isolated Fort Humboldt in the Pacific Northwest was the bleakest in his life. He turned to the bottle. He would slur his speech after one glass of whiskey; any more would leave him staggering. Rumors circulated that he was a drunk and the peacetime army was small enough that rumors spread quickly. Grant's depression-induced drinking problem led to his resignation from the army in April 1854 and six years of odd jobs before the Civil War brought him back to his calling.

Only eight months passed between the start of the Civil War and the victory at Fort Donelson that brought Grant national fame. In that short time, he proved himself a tactically aggressive and able leader. He gained a powerful political ally in President Lincoln who protected him from jealous rivals with the now-famous remark, "I can't spare this man; he fights." His views on slavery evolved quickly—initially drawn to the war solely for the sake of preserving Union, Grand soon decided that the war was necessary for the destruction of slavery.

During the Civil War, Grant faced the persistent charge that he was too willing to sacrifice his own men. For this, Bunting blames a culture that praised commander of the Army of Northern Virginia Robert E. Lee excessively. While Grant had a reputation for being "slouching, rumpled, stooped, sloppy, stubby, grubby, slovenly, dusty," and "shuffling," Lee garnered praise in both the North and the South as a humble gentleman. Bunting's analysis of casualty rates demonstrates that the losses the two generals were roughly comparable. In fact, Bunting notes, if one measures casualty rates as a percentage of the number of troops engaged, Grant was the more humane commander.

With the war's end, Grant realized that peace in the South would come only after the federal government protected black suffrage. He had little interest in politics, but he ran for president because he believed himself to be the only person able to protect the Union's gains from the Civil War. Grant's inaugural address reassured his fellow citizens that he would continue the process of healing the wounds between the regions, protect and promote voting rights for all citizens, and pay off the national debt as quickly as possible.

Bunting claims that historians have undervalued or ignored Grant's handling of Reconstruction, leaving the worst images of Grant to linger. Instead, he finds Grant's policy during Reconstruction to be noble, and notes that many of the problems he faced had no viable solutions. These problems were "more severe than those that have greeted all American presidents save only two (Lincoln and Roosevelt) at their inaugurations," he argues. The North was tired after the war and frustrated with what seemed like an unending series of demands and challenges. Republicans were divided among themselves while Democrats were united against them. Nevertheless, Grant pushed hard for the ratification of the 15th Amendment, crushed the Ku Klux Klan, and held the devoted support of Frederick Douglass. His crusade for union during Reconstruction became more determined with each passing year. Additionally, he became more partisan; he associated the Democratic Party with systematic attempts to destroy the rights of blacks. As Grant put it, "I am a Republican because I am an American, and because I believe the first duty of an American—the paramount duty—is to save the results of the war…."

* * *
As President, Grant faced an immediate financial crisis brought about by the speculative ventures of the now-infamous Jay Gould and Hamilton Fisk. Bunting finds Grant's leadership in the "Black Friday" episode to be honest if "uncertain" at first, but "culminating in decisive action." He tackles the scandals of the Gilded Age (commonly blamed on Grant) systematically and finds that Grant had little to do with them.

Grant also faced crises in foreign affairs and handled them with skill. He settled the Alabama claims that charged the British with prolonging the Civil War by putting a commerce raider to sea. He avoided war with Spain over the Cuban insurgency. Most notably, Grant attempted to annex the Dominican Republic in order to provide freed slaves with economic leverage. He wanted "to secure a retreat for that portion of the laboring classes of our former slave states, who might find themselves under unbelievable pressure."

Bunting finds Grant's policies toward "the original inhabitants of this land" to be humane in intent, if ultimately tragic in consequence. Grant wanted to protect Native Americans in the short-run and assimilate them into the larger culture over time. Bunting finds this policy to be "generous in instinct and intent, [and] far ahead of the conventional cultural and political wisdom of its day."

In total, Bunting finds Grant to be a calm, honest, and effective general—neither a drunk nor a butcher. As president, Grant worked for justice for blacks and Indians, a sound economy and peace with Britain. Bunting's work is part of the American Presidents series published by Times Books. The same Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. whose poll ranked Grant a failure is the general editor of the series. Perhaps some of the historians who ranked Grant a failure will read Bunting before the next survey.

* * *
Another sign of just how much rehabilitation Grant's reputation needs is that Michael Korda's incorrect and ill-informed Ulysses S. Grant: The Unlikely Hero is considered "revisionist" at all. Unlike Bunting, he does not even begin to address several important issues during Grant's presidency, and some of the errors in his biography are laughable. Korda, Simon and Schuster's editor in chief, demonstrates his ignorance of both the Eisenhower and the Grant administrations when he claims that "Grant was unwilling—again very much like Ike less that a hundred years later—to use federal force to defend the rights of blacks or challenge the southern status quo..." On the contrary, Eisenhower did in fact send in the U.S. military to protect the rights of blacks and challenge the Southern status quo. Grant became president precisely because he wanted to preserve what had been gained in the Civil War and used military force to crush Southern terrorism on more than one occasion.

Korda is also a master of distracting or pretentious analogies and foreign references. He compares Grant to "Byron's famous lines about George III." New York's Upper West Side is the "equivalent of Paris's sixteenth arrondissement." Korda twice describes Lee as a "beau sabreur." He and his wife Julia had "un coup de foudre" and he was her "beau ideal." Grant's method of beginning a battle was like Napoleon's: "On s'egage, et puis on voit." In two remarkable sentences, Korda describes Grant using the words of Homer, Shakespeare, and Twain. The references to Twain make sense, given the relationship between Twain and Grant, but it should be possible to write a book about Grant without mentioning The Horse Whisperer, Tennessee Williams, marriage customs in the British army, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, or Kevin Costner in Dances with Wolves.

Korda's sources are a less frustrating but more serious flaw. The endnotes include only eighteen citations for ten chapters. Most of Korda's account is based on two books: Grant by William S. McFeely (1997) and W.E. Woodward Meet General Grant (1928). He relies on "the Ulysses S. Grant homepage" for most of his information on the Grant presidency, except for the account of "the Santo Domingo fiasco," which comes from McFeeley. He makes no mention of prominent recent scholars of the Grant Administration such as Brooks Simpson, Jean Edward Smith, or Frank Scatturo, and there is no evidence in his book that Korda consulted their work.

Korda and Bunting demonstrate the potential and the danger of revisionism. Bunting gives us hope that it is now possible to consider the Grant presidency in a new light, while Korda reminds us that old lessons and prejudices die hard. Bunting's good work is only a beginning, though. Perhaps the upcoming volume from Brooks Simpson will force historians into a deeper reexamination and new appreciation of the Grant presidency. Surely it is time.

(Originally published by the Claremont Institute.

Memorials

2005-08-05T05:46:00.000-07:00

We do not make great or grand memorials anymore. The Vietnam Memorial is right, but it is not great or grand. There is something sadly off about the Korean War Memorial, as if someone held up a fuzzy mirror to the Vietnam wall across the way. The Franklin Roosevelt Memorial is a train wreck of epic proportions—an architecturally inconsistent celebration of our crippled, environmentalist, pacifist president (who, the designers might have taken note, also happened to have given hope to a nation in despair and done the major work in winning the Second World War). If a country could not properly honor one of its greatest presidents, there was little hope for the World War II Memorial.

The World War II Memorial sits in a place of prominence in the National Mall, but it is not all that prominent. By the standards of most memorials in the capital, it lies low to the ground, not obscuring the sight-lines of the Mall. That’s not to say it isn’t big. It spreads out over a large area. Stone columns inscribed with the names of states and territories line the perimeter. Two larger columns flank the memorial. One side is dedicated to the Pacific theaters; the other to the Atlantic. A low-lying wall emblazoned with four thousand gold stars is meant to symbolize the ultimate sacrifice made by over 400,000 Americans.

Perhaps most striking about the memorial is all the water. In front of the wall of stars sits a still pool. On either side, small waterfalls flow from another pool. In front of both major columns sit identical small pools, with water running here and there. And a massive fountain and pool dominates the middle of the monument. Jets of water continuously spray upward and diagonally. Not exactly like a fountain in Las Vegas, but if you’re thinking Oceans 11 (the new one) you’re not too far off. On a hot day like this past Saturday—a hot summer day in Washington! Gasp!—people gather around the central pool and dip their feet in the water.
It’s all very noisy. All the flowing water is like one of those relaxation CDs with the volume turned way up. Then there’s the people. In order to be heard over the water, they have to talk louder. In order to be heard over one another, they have to talk louder still. And they are taking pictures. With so spread out a memorial, there are lots of pictures to take.

The result is that the World War II Memorial is more like a carnival than a memorial. It’s a regular clamor, a cacophony, a hullabaloo. There is none of the melancholy sense of loss that accompanies the Vietnam Memorial; none of the overwhelming grandeur of the Jefferson Memorial; none of the stark power of the Washington Monument; none of the throat-catching solemnity of the Lincoln Memorial.

People gab away. They get together for group pictures. They splash their feet in the water and chase children who want to go in deeper. They smile and talk and soak up the sun. Tourists and locals, citizens and visitors from abroad, organized groups and unorganized humanity, all stomping through a monument to those who fought and died in the world’s greatest war.

There is nothing grand or great about it. It’s perfect.

(Originally posted at Rebunk.)