Review of Michael Beschloss, Presidential Courage

I had high expectations of Michael Beschloss’ Presidential Courage: Brave Leaders and How They Changed America 1789-1989, but must say that I was disappointed. I had expected stirring narratives of cases where presidents stuck to their guns in the face of criticism and opposition. That’s more or less what’s here, but still, I found the book more like a snack than a meal. Beschloss is a commentator for the Lehrer News Hour on PBS and for NBC News. Now, those aren’t necessarily great credentials for a historian — the most famous news broadcast historians, like Doris Kearns Goodwin and Stephen Ambrose are best known in academic circles not for their ground-breaking research, but for their plagiarism. Outside of academia, though, they’re known for books that are fun to read. I expected more or less the same from Beschloss, but somehow he didn’t deliver.

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Popularity: 12% [?]

The last couple of days, I’ve been listening to the radio and there has been a lot of reporting on the space shuttle taking a module to the space station: the launch, the arrival of the astronauts, the mission. Every time I hear something like this, I feel cheated. In 1969, when I was six years old and Neil Armstrong made one small step for man, one giant step for mankind, it seemed pretty obvious that we would all be visiting the Moon for vacation by the year 2000. Arthur C. Clarke, the author of Space Odyssey: 2001, said a few years back when we landed the rover on Mars that, back in 1969, he would never have believed that in 2001 we would land a toaster-sized unmanned rover on Mars and consider it a technological and scientific triumph.
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Popularity: 14% [?]

“An evil exists that threatens every man, woman and child of this great nation. We must take steps to insure our domestic security and protect our Homeland.”

This quote, according to hundreds of pages on the web, is by Adolf Hitler from a 1933 (or 1932 or 1922 on some pages) announcement of the creation of the Gestapo. These pages all have two things in common:

1. They all compare Bush to Hitler
2. They never cite their source

As a geeky historian, I find the second more troubling than the first. In fact, the creation of the Gestapo (note the presence of uncited quotes in this article), which began piecemeal around Germany, culminated in the so-called Reichstag Fire Decree, which among other things

placed severe limitations on personal freedom, the right of free expression, the freedom of the press, and the freedom of assembly; it permitted the authorities to spy on people’s private communications through the post, telegraph, and telephone; it allowed the police to conduct search and seizure operations in private homes; andit enabled the police to arrest people and put them in protective custody without charging them with a specific offense[1]

It is, indeed, hard to avoid seeing the parallels with our government’s behavior since September 11. We have allowed our government to eavesdrop on phone conversations. We have permitted our elected officials to pass laws permitting the government to demand our purchasing records from bookstores (illegal search and seizure), which was largely solved by the bookstores refusing to make the information available, but the parallel is significant. We have also arrested people without charging them with a specific offense and we have allowed them to be tortured even if not guilty of a specific offense, because they might spill the beans about other threats to public security. So it is not amiss to compare the Gestapo to measures by the Bush administration. Obviously, one should not belabor the comparison: Bush is no Hitler. Bad as he is, Bush is nevertheless closer to Roosevelt than he is to Hitler. However, the utility of the comparison is not to paint Bush as a modern Hitler, which is ridiculous, but to point out how willing his is as a president and we are as a people to go down the same road that the Germans went down in return for a little security. A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, so it behooves us to make sure that the first step is in the direction of freedom, not totalitarianism. It is most certainly useful to see how dictators have taken control in the past so we can guard against it in the present, and in that light, Bush should make us afraid.

But what about the quote? It isn’t so far from the text of the special law of 26 April 1933 for the creation of the Secret State Police Office (Gestapa) that said it was necessary to create such a police force “In order to assure the effective struggle against all the efforts directed against the existence and security of the state.”[2] That gets at the essence of the quote, but it comes up short of being a parallel with the supposed Bush quote.

It may well be that the quote that is all over the net is accurate, but I would like to see one citation. Just one. At this point, most people object to my historian geekiness and say that the special law is “close enough” to the version on the net. But when we let the accuracy of our facts slide, we are also taking one step in the wrong direction. That journey of 1000 miles also ends in totalitarianism. The most important bulwarks we have against tyrants is that we do not let them control history. Stalin tried by airbrushing cosmonauts in and out of photos. The Roman Inquisition tried it by burning books. Open discourse based on verifiable facts is the bane of tyrants. Ultimately, it is more important than force of arms, because if you can twist history so that the people believe the Big Lie, you have no need of arms, but when the illusion of the Big Lie is broken on a broad enough scale, no amount of arms can restore the illusion.

When we parrot quotes that are parroted on the web by authors who are parroting others who can never cite their actual source, we go down that slope where we leave the realm of facts and enter the realm of myth, and the realm of myth is the favorite homeland of tyrants and demagogues everywhere. The land of myth is the one where we have a virtual paradise on earth if we could just get rid of the Jews. The land of myth is the one where Chinese peasants under Mao were living in a workers’ paradise and, as Jung Chang talks about in her wonderful memoir Wild Swans : Three Daughters of China, ended with Chinese children saving their pennies to send to the poor starving children in capitalist countries. The realm of fact is the one where at that very time, Mao was letting over one hundred million peasants starve to death in the name of an ideology. That’s why it matters whether your facts are checked or accepted on faith, whether your history is accurate and documented, or just “close enough”.

Sources

1. Eric A. Johnson, Nazi Terror : The Gestapo, Jews, and Ordinary Germans, p. 87. This is more or less a paraphrase of the decree itself, the text of which and translation is on the Wikipedia.
2.Robert Gellately, The Gestapo and German Society: Enforcing Racial Policy 1933-1945 (Clarendon Paperbacks), p. 29

Popularity: 26% [?]

Before finally being deposed and right up to his final moments, Donald Rumsfeld frequently argued that those who did not support the war in Iraq had failed to learn the lessons of history. He said that it had been a mistake to appease Hitler in 1938 when the Germans retook the Sudetenland, and that it was a similar mistake to treat with Saddam Hussein. The problem, of course, is that Rumsfeld takes one example from history, and a more ambiguous example than many think, and makes it a universal principle of statesmanship. That wouldn’t be so bad if Rumsfeld hadn’t been in a position to persuade the president and others and, in fact, might not be that bad if there had been a little analysis of the idea itself. Since I’ve been preoccuppied with other things lately, I haven’t written about this, but just because Rumsfeld is gone, the Rumsfeld mentality is not and it bears some examination.
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Popularity: 23% [?]

In the summer of 1959 there occurred a series of events which demonstrated our national ignorance in a shameful and nearly fatal manner. Briefly, the United States threatened intervention in a foreign country for reasons which, it turned out, had no basis in fact… Our Secretary of State called the situation grave; our ambassador to the U.N. called for world action; our press carried scare headlines; our senior naval officer implied armed intervention and was seconded by ranking Congressmen, including the Chairman of the National Committee of the Republican Party, which was then in power (p. 12-13)…. In the eyes of the world, the United States looked very foolish at best, and very dangerous at worst (p. 28)…. We have thrown away our good will and political strength by an ignorance which led to false confidence and corruption. We have clumsily alienated potential supporters by neglecting them for a few “pets” and have repelled others by maladroitness (p. 30).

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Popularity: 18% [?]

It seems that every great president says or provokes a succinct quote or two that somehow define his administration for years to come, catchphrase that “tag” their time in power and their era. My memory only goes back so far, and I’m a European not American history, so I’m sketchy on pre-Nixon examples. But I’ve been thinking of it lately, because I think I know the phrase that will, for me, characterize Dubya and his time in my mind. Do you have one in mind? Think before you read and see if you agree.
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Popularity: 8% [?]

One would think that, having spent the second half of the twentieth century fighting one protractrated struggle against an implacable ideological enemy, we might have learned something. The Bush administration’s actions would seem to indicate that we did not. What should we have learned? That in a war of ideals, ideals that are not practiced do not triumph.
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Popularity: 10% [?]

NEWSFLASH: The Ranter has declared war on Christmas! Or at least Bill O’Reilly and John Gibson and the other genius right-wingers at Faux News believe that liberal, left, secularists like The Ranter have declared war on Christmas. I hate to disappoint, so I have created a “Make war on Christmas, not Iraq” bumper sticker. Joining me in this anti-crusade is John Calvin, the famous Reformer of Geneva, father of the Puritan movement and one of the original soldiers in the war on Christmas.
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Popularity: 100% [?]

No, that’s not a quote from The Ranter’s close friends Dubya or Rummy. That’s from David Maraniss’ book They Marched Into Sunlight (Simon & Schuster, 2003). Maraniss follows two parallel stories, that of a battle in Vietnam and that of a student protest in Madison, Wisconsin. The two stories converge on October 19, 1967, when they appear side by side on the front page of the paper. For Maraniss, that was the beginning of the real slide in public opinion in favor of the war. Why bring this up now? Because the administration’s assessment of the situation in Vietnam in 1967 appears chillingly like the current administration’s assessment of Iraq today.
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Popularity: 15% [?]