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Entries by Gil Troy

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Friday, March 3, 2006

The Dubai deal and our tendency to overlook structural conflict in history

With a media addicted to the Democrat-Republican, red-blue paradigm, how can we possibly follow the politics of the Dubai deal? Some Congressional Republicans are attacking their Republican president, while columnists from the left like Richard Cohen and from the right like David Brooks have defended the deal. Could it be, could it possibly be, that sometimes people free themselves from their partisan straitjackets? Moreover, could it be that President Bush is looking at things from his vantage point as an Executive, and that his Congressional critics are looking at things from their vantage point as Legislators – or representatives of angry constituents – and they are coming to different conclusions? And if this role conflict occurs on this deal, maybe, just maybe, it occurs in other contexts. And then, maybe, we need to view politics, current events, national security, in a more complicated, multi-dimensional way … Nah, won’t make for good headlines. We better stick with the red state-blue state stuff…

Posted on Friday, March 3, 2006 at 12:32 PM | Comments (3) | Top

Thursday, February 16, 2006

Who Gives a Hoot About the VP Shoot?

As headlines continue to rage – no, not about the continuing Katrina catastrophe or the Iraq challenge – but about Vice President Cheney’s unfortunate hunting accident, I, for one, seem to have vague recollections about all these pious lectures from Democrats just a few years back about presidential (and presumably) vice-presidential privacy. To echo – and apply -- one of the lessons I was supposed to learn during the Lewinsky episode, how Dick Cheney hunts – or bonds with his pals in his off time – has nothing to do with his official performance….

Posted on Thursday, February 16, 2006 at 1:17 PM | Comments (2) | Top

Monday, February 6, 2006

The Bane of Partisan Historians

Walter Isaacson, in his careful New York Times review of State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration,' by James Risen offers the reasonable warning that this work, based on many anonymous leakers, may only be 80% accurate, which he points out would be pretty darned good. He then, welcomes the reader “to the new age of impressionistic history. Like an Impressionist painting, it relies on dots of varying hues and intensity. Some come from leakers like those who spoke to Risen. Other dots come from the memoirs and comments of the players. Eventually, a picture emerges, slowly getting clearer. It's up to us to connect the dots and find our own meanings in this landscape.” This is actually a beautiful description of the way waves of historical interpretations and findings wash one upon each other, as we gain historical perspective and get closer, we hope, to the truth. The only bizarre thing about Isaacson’s pronouncement is that he treats this as some kind of new insight for a new epoch – with the disturbing implication that once upon a time, both journalists and historians worked under clearer conditions with more objective Truths.

Posted on Monday, February 6, 2006 at 12:57 PM | Comments (4) | Top

Thursday, January 26, 2006

Where are the historians? Another take....

Underlying Jeffrey Kimball’s eloquent posting about “firebells in the night” is an interesting dilemma about what role historians should play in discussing modern politics and thus, necessarily, plunging into partisan discourse. But here is another variation on the question – on even firmer ground which gets to the heart of our professional responsibilities – and historians are silent here too.

Posted on Thursday, January 26, 2006 at 12:53 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Friday, November 11, 2005

Another Case of Promiscuous Analogizing: Iran-Contra and Libby Leakgate...

The hot historical analogy of the moment seems to be the desire to use Ronald Reagan's response to Iran-Contra as some kind of model for George W. Bush. Aside from the fact that the phenomenon that probably helped Reagan's second term most was the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev and the decline of the Soviet Union, there is another reason why this analogy is so problematic. The Reagan White House was not sure it wanted to run away from the Iran-Contra scandal. In White House memoes from the time, Pat Buchanan again and again flails at Republicans and Reaganites who are apologizing for the mess. Even though the White House didn't quite follow Buchanan's strategy, at the end of the day, many Reaganites were not that exercised about Iran-Contra because they thought the Boland Amendment and Congressional restrictions on funding the Contras were wrong, and many just did not mind the kind of cowboy dynamic at the NSC which created the scandal. Moreover, while negotiating with terrorists went against Reagan's core message, the support for the Contras certainly did not.

Posted on Friday, November 11, 2005 at 12:50 AM | Comments (1) | Top

Monday, October 10, 2005

Bush's speech and the historian's dilemma

Love ‘im or hate ‘im, historians have to be grateful for President George W. Bush for at least one thing – he generates a mean historical document. Once again, in his speech to the National Endowment for Democracy last Thursday, the President set out his broad vision for the future – in response to 9/11 and the scourge of terrorism. Once again, the President delivered an address which will be great for use in the classroom. Paragraph after paragraph invites discussion, debate, historical analysis, philosophical speculation, contemporary assessment, and good old fashioned argument.

Posted on Monday, October 10, 2005 at 1:45 AM | Comments (1) | Top

Sunday, October 2, 2005

Is Tom Delay in a Starr Chamber?

Let me, as Richard Nixon used to say, make one thing perfectly clear, I hold no special affection for Tom Delay, nor do I agree with many of his positions and tactics. Yet reading the New York Times Week in Review article, “The War Against Tom Delay,” triggered something in the deep, deep recesses of my memory – maybe someone else can recall it more fully. It seems to me that there once was a politician, he might even have been a President of the United States, who clearly crossed ethical and legal lines. The opposition party at the time, I believe it was the Republicans, went after him with full guns blazing. I seem to recall much Democratic anger directed, not at the President who betrayed his supporters, the nation, and his oath of office, but at the Republicans. I even seem to recall hundreds of historians mobilizing to protest against the prosecutors – and rationalizing or pooh-poohing the actions of the guilty. We heard much about vast conspiracies, the politics of personal destruction, ethical nitpicking, hijacking the legal system to advance political goals, prosecutorial excess, politics by other means, and the desirability of hashing out issues via the political system rather than reducing the legal system to a political truncheon. Naively, foolishly, some of us hoped that if and when the proverbial shoe was on the other foot, when the Democrats were out of power, they might not replicate such tactics, and we could all hope for a return to some civility.

Posted on Sunday, October 2, 2005 at 10:18 AM | Comments (5) | Top

Tuesday, September 6, 2005

All Those Wonderful Memos Roberts Wrote!

Too much of the coverage surrounding the John G. Roberts, Jr. Supreme Court nomination resembles the work of a graduate student who discovered a treasure trove of archival documents but failed a basic methodology course. Thrilled by thousands of Roberts-related pages in the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, reporters have had a field day providing “inside” glimpses into how Roberts supposedly thinks, acts, and writes. (See, for example, "In Re Grammar, Roberts's Stance Is Crystal Clear.") Taking all these revelations too seriously, opponents have built their case against President Bush’s nominee referring to 20-year-old records: “A review of John Roberts’ record and the tens of thousands of pages of documents so far released by the Administration show that confirming John Roberts would endanger much of the progress made by the nation in civil rights over the past half-century,” People for the American Way warn.

Posted on Tuesday, September 6, 2005 at 7:32 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Sunday, September 4, 2005

Isn't It Better to Fix New Orleans than to Burn Bush?

President Bush must be scratching his head these days, pondering the mysterious physics of presidential popularity, which often defy the laws of gravity. Early on in his administration, John F. Kennedy was equally confused when he and his administration failed in the Bay of Pigs -– yet his popularity increased!

For Bush, the illogic seems to go like this –- after September 11, Bush’s popularity soared, even though the tragedy may have been preventable had Bush in his first eight months -– and Bill Clinton in his entire eight years -– been more vigilant on the terrorism question in general and the Osama Bin Laden file in particular. Now, with New Orleans devastated by what we used to call, in more believing times, an “act of God,” Bush seems to be bearing the brunt of the blame –- and may see his popularity plummet as a result!

Posted on Sunday, September 4, 2005 at 1:50 PM | Comments (10) | Top

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