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.

My first complaint with the book might be seen as overly picky. Basically, I just thought the narrative was distracted and ill-constructed. You would think I had written it or something. Beschloss retells the stories of how a handful of presidents flew in the face of popular opinion and powerful adversaries to do what they saw as the right thing. Sounds good, but typically fails to build toward a dramatic moment. In a large number of cases I reached the end of the chapter and thought, “Oh, I guess that was the act of courage.” Meanwhile, there are what seem to me to be a lot of asides because they are interesting factoids, not because they drive a compelling story. In other words, I had to work to finish this book, but a long, boring plane flight saw me through it. That said, who really cares? I’m an academic and the one sin that is easily forgiven in academia is being boring. So though I think Beschloss could really tighten his stories, it’s not a mortal sin by any means.

What I found most troubling about the book is the unstated premise. It is not merely about presidents who stand up to their adversaries, risking their reputation in order to do what’s right. It is specifically about presidents who acted so and then were judged correct by history. So what’s wrong with that? Simply this: it creates the impression that it is a good thing for a president to do what he sees as right even when there is overwhelming opinion to the contrary. So though we hear about Kennedy pushing for civil rights (albeit after a long period of foot-dragging), we do not hear about Herbert Hoover failing to act in the face of bank failures and growing Depression. Hoover did not fail to act because he was was utterly incompetent, but because he was a Coolidge Republican who believed that the market was self-regulating and should be left alone. History has judged that harshly, but wasn’t his inaction an act of presidential courage? I remember reading a book by the founder of Delta Force who praised Jimmy Carter for the courage he showed in planning the hostage rescue in Iran and dealing with the aftermath of its failure. Carter is, of course, pilloried as the very picture of the bumbling president and so his act of courage is inconsequential.

So what’s wrong with the selection Beschloss makes? Well, we happen to be living under a president now who has made some very unpopular decisions in the face of great opposition and criticism. Of course, it is shameful how little criticism there was of those decisions early on, but that’s beside the point. Bush shows great courage in staying the course. Reading Beschloss, we would assume that every courageous but unpopular president is eventually vindicated. By implication, we should perhaps stand by George Bush because history will vindicate him? I don’t think so. Beschloss never mentions Bush, his terrible environmental, diplomatic and military policy, or the war in Iraq, so the unwritten message of the book might slide by unnoticed, but it’s dangerous. Yes, strong medecine is often as unpopular as it is necessary. But the fact is that poison is also pretty unpopular. The argument that it is laudable for presidents to fly in the face of popular opinion is, I must say, a troubling one for a democracy.

Finally, Beschloss looks only at one case where a president makes an unpopular decision to avoid war (Washington’s unpopular treaty with the British). Up against that are the decisions of three presidents to choose the path of war and conflict (Lincoln, Roosevelt and, I would say, Reagan who is profiled for his bellicose stance against the Soviets). Were these bad decisions? Not necessarily, but again, I think the unsaid message is that presidents who lead us into war end up being vindicated by history. So that would include, presumably, Lyndon Johnson and George W. Bush? I don’t think so.

Overall, I find it troubling that Beschloss writes in a climate that mirrors those he writes about, and yet he reflects on it not one bit. Is it in hopes that we won’t notice? Maybe. So I leave this comment here in hopes that if anyone reads the book (maybe you’ll like it more than I did), at least you can be aware of the subtle undercurrent that drives the narrative.

On the plus side, we have regained our future. When I was a kid, everyone looked 30 years ahead, hypothesizing about what the world would be like in 2000, usually choosing between a techno-utopia (think TV and film), an irradiated planet (think the novels of Philip K. Dick and the Civil Defense training in fifth grade), or perhaps a totalitarian society that seduced us with amusements and bribes (think Brave New World or Neil Postan’s Amusing Ourselves to Death).

I noticed in the 1990s, that everyone still talked about the world in 2000. It was at that point that I first realized that I had been cheated and that I was never going to get my own spaceship. In fact, as warnings about climate change grew, I realized they might even take away my gravity-bound car and perhaps my electron-consuming computer too. For the most part, though, climate change was barely on the radar and everyone talked about the Y2K global collapse that threatened (remember that?). It was then that I discovered the remarkable book by Stewart Brand (founder of the Whole Earth Catalog and early organizer of Earth Day), Clock of the Long Now. The book is about a project to build a clock that would go round once every 10,000 years. The project came out of an observation by Danny Hillis, one of the architects of the Cray Supercomputer. Hillis noticed, as I did, that over hsi entire life, the future always meant the year 2,000. He came up with the brilliant observation that for every year he had been alive, we had lost one year of future.

The Long Now project is an attempt to prompt people to think over the longer term. The clock is just the means to get people thinking, not important in and of itself. The book is a fascinating read on the problems and benefits of planning for the long term. For example,

• When they were doing a restoration of one of the colleges at Cambridge some years ago, they realized that they didn’t have oak beams big enough to replace the historic beams in the building. In searching the records, they realized that the builders had thought of that. The oak grove near the college had been planted specifically to replace the beams centuries later.
• In Sweden, the navy realized that they would eventually run out of trees big enough to make masts for giant ships. In the late eigtheenth century, they asked the royal forester to plant some trees for delivery in 200 years. In the 1980s, the forester contacted the navy to say that their trees were ready. Stewart Brand points out that the trees were useless to the navy, but the effort to preserve a disappearing resource had an unexpected payoff in that, though we now place a low value on giant trees for masts, we place a high value on old-growth forests.

It occurred to me recently that the growing awareness regarding climate change, however, may once again turn us into long-term thinkers. As the number of sceptics decreases, there will be an increasing tendency for people to project their actions further and further into the future. As a historian, I see this as a good thing. Now that climate change gets so much publicity, I think that the last few years are the first time in my life that I have seen the future extend out in front of me rather than retract. The inability to look over long distances into the past and the future prevents us from solving any major problem. So though for the time being the bad news continues to pile up with regard to climate change, the turn toward looking into the future and thinking about consequences is a first step to finding solutions.

“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

Was Appeasement Bad in 1938?

Rumsfeld takes it as axiomatic that it was a mistake to appease Hitler in 1938 when he retook the Sudentland for Germany. However, the situation was relatively complex. Britain had suffered incredible losses in World War I, both in blood and treasure. The Great War had drained the British treasury and Winston Churchill himself had cut military spending dramatically through the 1920s, which meant the the British weren’t really armed and ready to go toe to toe with the Germans. Only a year passed before the Allies declared war and within the year after that, the disasterous performance of the French and British underscores that they were not ready to go to war in 1938. True, in 1938 the Germans were still limited in their buildup by terms of the Treaty of Versailles, but one can’t forget that though the Germans used the intervening time to rearm, so did the British and it isn’t clear that an earlier strike against the Germans would have gone any better.
From a political perspective, it was clear that the Treaty of Versailles was unfair to the Germans. President Wilson had forseen that it would lead to a future war, but could not stop the French from foisting it on the Germans. So it was not entirely unreasonable to think that the Germans were within their rights to try to redress the inequity of the treaty and that they might stop there. In other words, Chamberlain wasn’t completely delusional, but reasonably believed that it was better to give a tyrant an inch to avert a war and to leave war as a last resort. Not a bad lesson for Rumsfeld and Bush.
Furthermore, psychologically, the British were still recovering from the Great War and had a deep aversion to going to war except in absolute necessity. Americans had developed this healthy perspective in the wake of Vietnam, but unfortunately that mentality waned in the face of the smashing success of the first war against Iraq. Unfortunately, the debacle in Somalia did little to brace Americans to the reality of war.
So in short, Chamberlain could see that war with Germany was no slam-dunk in terms of military capability, political will and foreign policy. He preferred to wait until war was unavoidable before spending British blood and treasure on a gamble (war is always a gamble). The idea that much blood and treasure could have been saved by going to war with Germany in 1938, that is to say declaring war just one year earlier, would have changed anything is purely hypothetical. Furthermore, it is based on certain knowledge that appeasement did not work, and that knowledge was of course unavailable to British diplomats of the period. All in all, I would much prefer to be ruled by Chamberlain than by Bush.

When Appeasement Works

Churchill and Roosevelt are often seen as the opponents of appeasement, the strong leaders as opposed to the weak Chamberlain. They were, however, practical men who chose to appease Stalin at the Yalta conference and essentially tell him that they would let him take the Baltics and other regions into the Soviet orbit and we would do nothing to oppose him. Certainly Stalin was no less cruel, tyrannical and dangerous than Hitler. He had visions of world domination, hoped to overthrow the US and UK, and mercilessly starved millions of “his own people” (as they always say about Saddam poisoning the Kurds) to death on purpose. These were undoubtedly the most deadly intentional famines in history. The famines under Mao were larger, but it seems that Mao’s advisors hid from him the extent of the problem until it was too late. In other words, Mao was essentially delusional, whereas Stalin instituted famine as policy to get rid of the “reactionary” elements in his society at the cost of millions of death. Ultimately, Stalin also killed as many people in the Gulags as Hitler killed in the death camps (actually, twice as many by Solzhenitsyn’s reckoning in The Gulag Archipelago if I remember correctly; by the way, Gulag is still a great read and an important book for all free people, though I would recommend the abridged edition).
So was it a mistake to appease Stalin? Should we have gone straight from WWII into an invasion of the Soviet Union, though the greatest armies of the modern world had destroyed themselves and bled their countries dry on the Russian plains? It seems to me that Churchill and Roosevelt made the right call there, a call to appease a tyrant in hopes that the tyranny would eventually crumble under its own corruption. We could make a long list of successful appeasement. Should we have attacked Mao? I don’t think so. In fact, “detente” and opening relations with China were great successes. If Nixon had not been a complete paranoiac and power monger himself, he would probably be remembered primarily for his great statesmanship that laid the groundwork for winning the Cold War without going to full-scale total nuclear or conventional war. What about Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Pik Botha, Pinochet, why didn’t we overthrow them? Well, of course in the last case it’s because we put him in power and in the second to last case a segregated America couldn’t really go to war on that issue… but I digress. The point is that tyrants eventually fall under their own weight. Isolating them diplomatically and economically (which eventually worked in South Africa), in short appeasement, has in fact typically been more successful than pre-emptive strikes.

So let’s take the lessons that history offers, but please quit make universal axioms from one tired old canard.

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).

Those are excerpts from William Lederer’s 1961 account of how the United States almost went to war in Laos in 1959, which he took to be “an omen with the most frightening implications.” His book, A Nation of Sheep (only $0.47 from Amazon at last check and well worth it), was intended to be a call to action, a warning to the American people so that such foolishness would not result in war. Of course, it has on at least two occasions now: 1) Vietnam, which went to full-scale US involvement because of faked “intelligence” about the so-called Gulf of Tonkin incident and 2) the WMD fiasco in Iraq. It’s frightening to read Sheep and realize that in most cases, if the dates and countries were changed, it could have been written today.

Lederer details how the US ignorance of foreign affairs and foreign languages was playing into the hands of the communists in Vietnam and playing against us in Taiwan. For example, he notes that the US educational exchange programs usually only targeted those students with a decent command of English and typically only the privileged sons of the powerful who used their crony connections to get scholarships for their children. Furthermore, we doled out scholarships as a means to reward loyalty. Meanwhile, the communists offered a full scholarship to the top student from every village in Vietnam, regardless of language skills (Russian or Chinese) and party affiliation. These students, not surprisingly, often returned to their villages as ardent communists and thus it was that we lost the battle for the hearts and minds. That, of course, was unknown to Lederer in 1961 and rather than predict that it would happen, he suggested how it could be stopped. Nobody listened and, in case you weren’t paying attention, we lost that war.

The book is about Southeast Asia rather than the Middle East, about communists rather than Islamic fundamentalists, political schools rather than madrasas, about the 1950s rather than the 2000s, but there would not be much real difference in the message if it were written today. He details how Americans threw away our good money and good will for little return in nations we didn’t bother to understand. Sure, in retrospect our industrial resources allowed us to spend the Soviets into the ground and win the Cold War, but Lederer shows how poorly that money was spent and how much more effective we could have been had we bothered to send diplomats and journalists who actually knew the local language rahter than ones that had to depend utterly on translators who often fed them a line of bull, as just one example.

Lederer then outlines how our government uses misinformation and secrecy to keep information from citizens. At that time, he warned that the cult of secrecy was growing and that one out of every 180 Americans had the ability to classify information as secret. Frequently this was done, as it is today, for the most specious of reasons, often simply to protect politicians and bureaucrats. For example, Lederer discovered that “pictures of plush furnishings inside military transport planes, requested by Rep. Daniel J. Flood, were stamped ‘secret’ and then even the Congressman’s letter of request was stamped ‘secret’”. In other words, the secret was that taxpayer money was being misspent.

Not even guessing at where we would be today with an army of press secretaries and lobbyists and fewer and fewer resources for investigative journalism, Lederer noted that there were twice as many government public relations men as there were journalists in Washington. “Officials try by selective information releases to have us accept what they believe is proper; as if fearing the decisions we might make on our own if we had all of the truth.”

On the leading edge in his time, Lederer feared then, as most thinking people fear now, that the cult of secrecy and the spin in Washington is killing democracy. The American government seems to fear its own people, which is a hallmark of a failing democracy. It has gotten worse. Recall that the Clinton administration gave the order to declassify as much material as possible and not to classify materials unnecessarily. One of Bush’s first actions was to rescind that order. Of course, it is a matter of degree and there was still far too much spin and secrecy under Clinton, but at least things were headed in the right direction. Lederer envisions a future which could save democracy in America (and I’m not exaggerating, Lederer believed that the cult of secrecy and government by press release was edging us toward totalitarianism).

The President should assume that his fellow countrymen are tough-minded and patriotic. We will not become timorous or demoralized if told the truth about our blunders, failures and defeats. Quite the contrary, we will respond with strength and intelligence. But first we must have the truth.

Lederer is not, of course, suggesting that truly sensitive strategic of purely personal information be released to the public, but merely that the people should be kept informed rather than having to wait for the scandalous photos to appear on the internet, smuggled out by some insider, before the government fesses up to what happened.

All of this is rather old hat at this point. What Lederer showed to a Nation of Sheep in 1961 has become commonplace knowledge among thinking people (but what percentage is that?). The troubling aspect is that 45 years on, we still appear to be a Nation of Sheep, led into conflicts we don’t understand for reasons that turn out to have been false. Maybe it’s time to look at Lederer’s advice seriously:

• Badger your Senators and Representatives and make sure that they understand that you don’t think secrecy for secrecy’s sake is okay.
• Badger the same and perhaps local university officials to build scholarhips programs that include English-language instruction and target promising kids from lost villages throughout the Middle East. True, some will fail and some will stay here, but some will return and the overall cost will be cheaper than sending standing armies over there, not to mention that fewer people get killed.
• Demand that our diplomats speak the local language. No more ambassadorships handed out as political favors. When ambassadors come up for confirmation, if they don’t speak the local language, (or at least one local language) write your politicians and tell them to block the nomination, simple as that!

Some obvious quips from the past are things like:

• Lincoln in the Gettysburg Address: “conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal” and how wrong was he when he added “The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here”.
• Coolidge : “After all, the chief business of the American people is business”. That, by the way, is the correct version and it is nicely set in context by a writer I normally dislike, Robert Novak, in a nevertheless interesting article on Coolidge (The Ranter outed – he sometimes reads Novak and Will and Buchanan, disagree with them though he may).
• Roosevelt gets two of the great quotes of the twentieth century: 1) “We have nothing to fear but fear itself” and 2) “This is a day that will live in infamy.”
• Truman must have something better than “Dewey wins!” but I can’t think of it.
• Eisenhower and Truman have to share the McCarthy quotes: 1) “I have here in my hand a list of 205 people that were known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party” from February 1950 (attributed, but somewhat disputed) and 2) the famous rejoinder four years later “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?” asked of McCarthy by Joseph Welch in 1954 at the Army-McCarthy hearings (verified and freely online as an mp3).
• In his farewell speech to the nation on January 17, 1960, Eisenhower, the only great military leader to occuppy the White House in the twentieth century, noted a growing danger in the nuclear age: “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.” Dan Briody, by the way, opens his book The Iron Triangle: Inside the Secret World of the Carlyle Group with this quote because, he says “I think that that is exactly what we’re seeing today.”
• Kennedy is a hard one, because he had such command of the language. Without doubt, the most famous quote is from his Innaugural Speech: “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.” I think there are two others, though, that fit better in the theme of this list:
  • His Cold War call to arms, also from the Innaugural Speech: “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”
  • And his announcement of his intention to put a man on the moon: “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard…”
• I’ll skip Johnson, because only a couple of days ago I went on at length about his quote about Vietnam
• Nixon has no shortage of material, but here I get into the type of quote I’m really thinking of: Nixon’s own pronouncement: “I am not a crook” and Howard Baker’s question: “What did the president know and when did he know it.”
• Gerald Ford, unfortunately and unfairly, will always be associated with one quote from Lyndon Johnson: “The trouble with Jerry Ford is that he used to play football without a helmet” (in fact, that may well be Johnson’s most famous quote and I believe that is the correct version).
• For all his greatness as an ex-president, I think Carter will always be associated with “Hi, I’m Jimmy Carter” and “I have lusted in my heart.”
• Reagan, of course, has to be associated with killer trees and other inanities beyond recollection and recall (see There He Goes Again: Ronald Reagan’s Reign of Error available on Amazon for $0.31 as of this writing! Great book). Still, much as I hated Reagan, I think two other quotes will stick out from his administration:
  • “Mr Gorbachev, take down this wall” obviously.
  • The other one that sticks in my mind, though, goes to the arrogance of the first Bush administration, but also taints Reagan, and comes from the Iran-Contra hearings. At that time, known felon Ollie North, who only avoided jail time on a technicality, was holding forth lecturing Senator Daniel Inouye on patriotism and defending one’s country. Yes, that Inouye, the Medal of Honor winner who lost an arm in combat. I can’t find the actual quote, though I would love to, but Inouye said something like “Son, do not presume to lecture me on patriotism.” Like I say, that’s not exact, but it is for me a defining moment the first time a Bush rode roughshod over the US Constitution in the name of patriotism.
• Clinton spared our Constitution, but not our dignity with “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.”

So now the question is, what will be the quote that, for me, defines the Bush years? I think it’s one I mentioned the other day where John McCain said “It’s not about who they are. It’s about who we are.” We are, as it turns out, a nation that condones torture, that turns the clock back on civil protections associated with wiretaps, that (like father like son) runs roughshod over that pesky Constitution and, but the way, secrets individuals off to prisons in foreign lands where, perhaps, they will be lucky to be charged and tried, a right that is now frequently denied in America. As crass as the quotebook legacy left by Clinton is, I think that history will judge Bush more harshly. I suspect that only a few of us will be stuck with the McCain quote floating in our heads every time Bush is mentioned though.

Our efforts in that regard came back to haunt us during the Cold War with distasters in Vietnam, Iran and South and Central America. The narrow lesson that we should have taken away, was that supporting repressive dictatorships in the name freedom is inane. The broader lesson we should have taken away was that putting noble ideals into action is the most effective weapon in a war of ideals. Where insurgents rallied to the communists during the Cold War, it was usually because the United States had shamefully compromised the essence of our founding principles by supporting repressive regimes and human rights violators in those places. In places where the United States stood on its principles and respected human rights and basic freedoms, human rights activists and freedom-loving people rallied to the United States.

It is a challenge to believe that just principles will beat weapons in the end and, during the Cold War, having lost faith in that belief, we often allowed ourselves to choose expendiency, and that came back to bite us. Now, we see the Bush adminsitration behaving in the same way – wire taps, illegal detentions, torture – all fundamental violations of the founding principles of our democracy, all of which give lie to the idea that we care about democracy at all. Will freedom fighters in Islamic countries rally to a country with powerful weapons and impotent ideals, ignored at home and abroad?

All of that is neither here nor there and it has been said a million times. More surprising to many Christians and atheists alike is that the great-grandfather of religious fundamentalism, John Calvin, was himself a soldier in the war against Christmas. Like most educated Christians, Calvin knew that the birth of Jesus did not correspond in any meaningful way to December 25th, and that it was in essence a pagan holiday that had been absorbed and coopted by early Christians. Calvin, however, went the next step in believing that only holidays specifically mentioned in the Bible should be celebrated. Essentially, this boiled down to holidays of the Easter cycle (Easter, Ascension, Pentecost, et cetera) as well as Sundays.

The war on Christmas was joined in 1537, when, under the influence of John Calvin, Christmas passed without celebration. Unfortunately, Geneva’s allies, the Bernese insisted on celebrating Christmas, Circumcision, Annunciation and a few other holidays and demanded the Genevans do the same. Calvin, refusing to give into Bernese demands, was exiled from Geneva and the celebration of Christmas reinstated. When Calvin came back to Geneva in 1541 after a period of exile, he began militating for the abolition of the non-Biblical holidays. In 1545, he achieved limited success in seeing the feasts of the Circumcision and Annunciation suppressed, but the war on Christmas was a tougher fight. Finally, in 1550, Calvin managed to get the Genevan authorities to outlaw Christmas and to mandate that communion would be celebrated only on Sundays, and not on “superstitious” pagan dates like December 25. Indeed, on Devember 25, 1550, the city council sat for business as usual, the courts were in session and businesses were all open under penalty of fine. Calvin, as usual, gave his weekday sermon on a book of the Old Testament and noticed something that upset him: there were more people in church than on a typical weekday. A committed soldier in the war on Christmas, Calvin boomed from the pulpit:

I see more people than usual at sermon today. And why? It’ s Christmas day. And who told you? It seems so [to be a holy day] to poor beasts. There’ s the fitting label for all who came to sermon today in honor of the feast… But if you think that Jesus Christ was born today, you are beasts, indeed, rabid beasts.

Once again, I am compelled to agree with Calvin and declare that Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity and John Gibson are, indeed, rabid beasts. As such, I join Calvin in the war on Christmas. Amen!

Sources

• War on Christmas (20th century version)
  • What War on Christmas? by Ruth Marcus, Washington Post, December 10, 2005, p. A 21.
  • O’Reilly: “War” on Christmas part of “secular progressive agenda”, interview with O’Reilly and Gibson.
  • How the secular humanist grinch didn’t steal Christmas, by Michelle Goldberg, Salon.com, November 21, 2005.
• War on Christmas (Calvinist version)
  • The quote is from Supplementa Calviniana, volume 5, sermons on Micah, p. 172, lines 20ff, translated from French by The Ranter.
  • On the general context, Preaching, Praying and Policing the Reform in Sixtheenth-Century Geneva, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation by Thomas A. Lambert, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1998.

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.

A few quick quotes from the book speak volumes.

We are losing support in this country. The people just do not understand the war.

   — Lyndon Johnson (p. 187).

[The embassy has developed a plan to] demonstrate to the press and the public that we are making solid progress and are not in a stalemate… [T]he enemy is losing control of the people for his side. His recruitment has dropped off sharply…

   — Eugene Locke, deputy ambassador to South Vietnam (p. 187).

If we don’t stop them in Vietnam, we are going to be fighting them in the streets of Lodi [a town near Madison].

   — Bob Hope (p. 315).

We should shoot them if necessary. I would. I would. Because it’s insurrection.

   — WI Senator Leland McParland regarding student protesters (p. 397).

In October 1967, General Westmoreland, President Johnson and the hawks in the administration still believed not only that the war was winnable, but that we were actually winning. Westmoreland felt that if he just had more troops, he could turn the tide. His strategy was one of attrition: if he could kill enemy soldiers faster than the enemy could replace them, he woudl eventually win. Westmoreland demonstrated that victory was at hand with the most specious of statistics. In the book’s main battle, the Americans get ambushed and kill 22 to 25 enemy soldiers. Westmoreland and Hay, general of the First Division, insist despite all evidence that there was no ambush and that the enemy lost 103 men. Not only was this not born out by the men in the field or the military investigator sent in to do the followup to the battle, Maraniss also managed to track down two of the commanders from the other side, who confirm that Westmoreland’s analysis and body count were tragically wrong.

In fact, the drop off in enemy activity was due to reasons that Westmoreland could not even suspect: they were gathering strength for the major Tet offensive. The only reason that the North Vietnamese did not stay put to wipe out the entire US battalion, was that they were being counted on for another battle and were in a hurry to get to their appointed rendez-vous. The vicious battle that caught up Delta Company and the Black Lions was just a shape of things to come.

Meanwhile, back on the home front, students in Madison had decided that 1967 was the year to get serious about stopping the war. Dick and Lynne Cheney, though they were on campus, were not among the protesters, but Dick was happy to stay in grad school on military deferment while he supported sending other young men off to fight, which seems to be a deeply ingrained MO for Cheney. In 1967, the protests in Madison transitioned from peaceful to violent, setting the campus on the trajectory that would end in the bombing of the Army Math Research Center which killed a grad student working there.

I don’t believe that history repeats itself, so there are only so many lessons one can take from Vietnam, but the clear one from Maraniss is that the generals on the ground and the president in the White House can be foolishly optimistic about their war effort.

This is, by the way, a fun read. Maraniss does a great job of introducing you to the cast of characters and getting you attached to men you know will die (or go on to be mayor of Madison, as the case may be). At times the book drags and feels like it was written by a historian, rather than a journalist, but the “action scenes” (the battle in Vietnam and the battle in the Commerce building) are gripping and well worth the read.