Garry Wills, in the NY Review of Books (August 12, 2004):

So far, most readers of President Clinton's book seem to like the opening pages best, and no wonder. Scenes of childhood glow from many memoirs —by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Henry Adams, John Ruskin, John Henry Newman, and others. It is hard to dislike people when they are still vulnerable, before they have put on the armor of whatever career or catastrophe lies before them as adults. In fact, Gilbert Chesterton advised those who would love their enemies to imagine them as children. The soundness of this tactic is proved by its reverse, when people become irate at attempts to imagine the childhood or the youth of Hitler—as in protests at the Menno Meyjez film Max. So it is hard, even for his foes, to find Clinton objectionable as a child. Yet the roots of the trouble he later had lie there, in the very appeal of his youth.

Another reason we respond to narratives of childhood is that first sensations are widely shared by everyone— the ways we became aware of the world around us, of family, of school, of early friends. One might expect Clinton's pineywood world to be remote from people who did not grow up in the South. But since he experienced neither grinding poverty nor notable privilege, there is an everyman quality to what he is writing about. His relatives were not blue-collar laborers but service providers—as nurse (mother and grandmother), heavy equipment salesman (father), car dealer (first stepfather), hairdresser (second stepfather), food broker (third stepfather). This was no Dogpatch, as one can tell from the number of Clinton's childhood friends who went on to distinguished careers. (The daughters of one of his ministers became, respectively, the president of Wellesley and the ombudsman of The Washington Post.)

Admittedly, Clinton's family was notably fissiparous, with a litter of half-relatives filling the landscape— but even that is familiar to us in this time of frequent divorce and divided custodies. It may seem out of the ordinary for Clinton's father to have been married four times by the age of twenty-six, his first stepfather to have been married three times (twice to Clinton's mother), his second stepfather to have been married twice (with twenty-nine months in jail for fraud bridging the two). His mother, because of the mortality rate of her husbands, was married five times (though two of the times were to the same man). Clinton, who has had the gift of empathy throughout his life, remained astonishingly close to all the smashed elements of this marital kaleidoscope —even to his stepfather, whose abuse of his mother Clinton had to stop with physical interventions and calls to the police. He took time from college to give his stepfather loving care at the end of his life. The most recurrent refrain in this book is "I liked him," and it began at home.

Clinton usually looked at the bright side. What the jumble of marriages gave him as a boy was just more relatives to charm and be cosseted by. Later the same people would be a political asset. The first time he ran for office, "I had relatives in five of the district's twenty-one counties." Later still, he could rely on "a big vote in south Arkansas, where I had lots of relatives." One might think he was already preparing for a political career when he got along so well with all his scattered families. But he was, even then, a natural charmer, with an immediate gratification in being liked, not looking (yet) for remoter returns from politics. Clinton won others' affection for a reason Aristotle famously gave— we enjoy doing things that we do well....

... Some would say that the late Stephen A. Ambrose is the finest model of a historian writing for the public at large. Ambrose did fine work but, toward the end, his books had difficulties (beyond plagiarism). First, he came gravely close to ancestor worship, a pro b l e m also coloring the work of some baby boomers who, embarrassed by their earlier opposition to the Vietnam War and to their fathers, now write excessively laudatory biographies of the “ greatest generation.” But Ambrose was perhaps guilty also of what we might call pandering, that is, telling the public only what it wants to hear: a lucrative but intellectually destructive “dumbing down” of scholarship. This has also affected the quality of some university presses whose first criterion for publication of a manuscript is no longer quality of content but marketability.

Civil War writing provides an example. Although thousands of volumes continue to be produced on that conflict, relatively few chart new paths or examine the less glamorous aspects of the struggle, such as widespread economic and social distress among the dependents of soldiers, or the role of disease in affecting the course of the war, a subject still relegated to “medical histories.” To humor the book buyers who see the war as a diverting board game, we have accounts that chart the actions of Company A of Regiment B during the third hour of the first day at Gettysburg .

This pandering, although perhaps the easiest route to influence with the public at large, is in some danger of making historians, along with theater and literature faculties, into the c o u rt jesters of academe, seen only as good for entertainment value and not vital to the healthy development of our society in the sense that science and business colleges are seen as pivotal to our cultural strength and well-being. This definition of humanists as e n t e rtainers comes at a time when our real participation in serious public dialogue about today’s issues has never been more vital. Take again my field of military history. The military actions of the U.S. impact every nation on the planet and drastically alter how Americans themselves think, live, and die. Yet the closer we come to the present on the timeline of history, the more “innocent” Americans are of the actual nature of warf a re. By innocence I mean a deliberate, cultivated refusal to look at the reality of conflict: many people are better informed about the Alamo than they are about the war in Iraq.

This posture of innocence about the current nature of war predates the sanitizing of the Vietnam War, which wrote out the startling truth about the mutual savage destru ctiveness of that encounter between alien cult u res. In World War II, for example, civilians objected to the publishing of pictures of America’s dead and mutilated soldiers; they did not wish to read or hear about the detailed nature of combat. One result of this closemindedness is that combat veterans often feel they cannot talk honestly about their experiences, what they have seen and what they have done, with a resultant cost to them in physical and mental health. This innocence also means that we can accept oxymorons like “humane bombing in Kosovo”—inexplicable when applied to a B-52 carpet bombing run—and a whole vocabulary of complacent euphemisms such as “collateral damage.” Body bags are brought home in the night and cameras are not allowed; the president carefully avoids the funerals....

Howard Zinn, in the Progressive (August 2004):

As I write this, the sounds of the World War II Memorial celebration in Washington, D.C., are still in my head. I was invited by the Smithsonian Institution to be on one of the panels, and the person who called to invite me said that the theme would be "War Stories." I told him that I would come, but not to tell "war stories," rather to talk about World War II and its meaning for us today. Fine, he said.

I made my way into a scene that looked like a movie set for a Cecil B. DeMille extravaganza--huge tents pitched here and there, hawkers with souvenirs, thousands of visitors, many of them clearly World War II veterans, some in old uniforms, sporting military caps, wearing their medals. In the tent designated for my panel, I joined my fellow panelist, an African American woman who had served with the WACS (Women's Army Corps) in World War II, and who would speak about her personal experiences in a racially segregated army.

I was introduced as a veteran of the Army Air Corps, a bombardier who had flown combat missions over Europe in the last months of the war. I wasn't sure how this audience would react to what I had to say about the war, in that atmosphere of celebration, in the honoring of the dead, in the glow of a great victory accompanied by countless acts of military heroism.

This, roughly, is what I said: "I'm here to honor the two guys who were my closest buddies in the Air Corps--Joe Perry and Ed Plotkin, both of whom were killed in the last weeks of the war. And to honor all the others who died in that war. But I'm not here to honor war itself. I'm not here to honor the men in Washington who send the young to war. I'm certainly not here to honor those in authority who are now waging an immoral war in Iraq."

I went on: "World War II is not simply and purely a 'good war.' It was accompanied by too many atrocities on our side--too many bombings of civilian populations. There were too many betrayals of the principles for which the war was supposed to have been fought.

"Yes, World War II had a strong moral aspect to it--the defeat of fascism. But I deeply resent the way the so-called good war has been used to cast its glow over all the immoral wars we have fought in the past fifty years: in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Grenada, Panama, Iraq, Afghanistan. I certainly don't want our government to use the triumphal excitement surrounding World War II to cover up the horrors now taking place in Iraq.

"I don't want to honor military heroism--that conceals too much death and suffering. I want to honor those who all these years have opposed the horror of war."

The audience applauded. But I wasn't sure what that meant. I knew I was going against the grain of orthodoxy, the romanticization of the war in movies and television and now in the war memorial celebrations in the nation's capital.

There was a question-and-answer period. The first person to walk up front was a veteran of World War II, wearing parts of his old uniform. He spoke into the microphone: "I was wounded in World War II and have a Purple Heart to show for it. If President Bush were here right now I would throw that medal in his face."

There was a moment of what I think was shock at the force of his statement. Then applause. I wondered if I was seeing a phenomenon that recurs often in society--when one voice speaks out against the conventional wisdom, and is recognized as speaking truth, people are drawn out of their previous silence....

Diana McCurdy, in the New Zealand Herald (July 10, 2004):

Every week, 19 researchers and historians at the Waitangi Tribunal painstakingly unearth new information about New Zealand's disappearing past.

As they investigate Maori claims against the Crown, the researchers document aspects of history never before recorded on paper.

In an improbable twist, the tribunal - one of New Zealand's more controversial institutions - has become a nursery for the rewriting of New Zealand's history.

It seems a laudable enterprise. But questions are emerging about the academic validity of the history the tribunal is producing.

In a new book, The Waitangi Tribunal and New Zealand History, Victoria University historian Dr Giselle Byrnes lays damning charges against the tribunal, describing its attempts to write history as a "noble, but ultimately flawed experiment".

The tribunal, she says, is not writing "objective history". Rather, the reports it produces are deeply political and overwhelmingly focused on the present. It commits the ultimate faux pas of judging the past by the standards of the present.

"As an historian, I believe history is inherently political, but the tribunal does not acknowledge that it has a philosophy or even that it is writing history, instead repeatedly saying it is simply issuing a report as a Commission of Inquiry."

In some cases, the political bent of the tribunal is strongly evident. In its 1996 Taranaki report, for example, the tribunal openly responds to the Government's fiscal-envelope policy of the previous year.

"It was clearly saying in that report ... that this claim is just going to blow that kind of thinking apart. It really tried to challenge that mentality that there should be a cap on treaty settlements."

Tribunal history also has a strong Maori bias, Dr Byrnes says. Maori characters and stories are given much more emphasis and weight than Pakeha characters and stories. "The reports increasingly champion or advocate the Maori cause."

This is not the first time an historian has questioned the academic integrity of the history produced by the Waitangi Tribunal. Other historians - including Keith Sorrenson, Michael Belgrave and Bill Oliver - have raised similar concerns.

Other academics are also concerned, but reluctant to say anything publicly, Dr Byrnes says.

"I know that many historians have felt some kind of disquiet about the sort of history the tribunal has been producing over the past few years. They haven't spoken out about it because most historians have liberal political leanings and they don't want to be seen as undermining or criticising the whole process."...

Steve Crawshaw, in the (London) Independent (July 13, 2004):

For 60 years, Germany has been feeling worried. Worried by its own criminal history, worried by the judgement of others - and worried that the lure of Adolf Hitler is not yet dead. Few Germans would seriously argue that modern German democracy is endangered. None the less, the just- in-case taboos remain in place, above all when it comes to the dictator himself.

Elsewhere in Europe, it is easy to find copies of Mein Kampf on the shelves. In the words of the English-language edition, "It remains necessary reading for those who care to safeguard democracy." In Germany, where it was once compulsory reading, it is considered too sensitive to put on sale. Even the dictator's image is subject to powerful taboos. English-language books on the Third Reich often have photographs of the Fuhrer on the cover. When those same books are translated into German, the pictures of Hitler and the swastikas vanish, to be replaced with something more anodyne. Several decades after the war, a German commentator explained why he believed the ban on Mein Kampf to be essential: "The bacillus is too lively, the danger of infection too acute." Even in the 21st century, that fearful logic - though rarely made so explicit - remains in place.

Now, however, remarkable change is on the way. Two new German films both put the Fuhrer unashamedly centre screen. Heinrich Breloer has filmed a huge documentary drama focusing on the role of Albert Speer, Hitler's star architect. Speer and He will be screened on German television in the spring, on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of Hitler's death.

As Der Spiegel points out, Breloer's three-part, EUR12m (pounds 8.5m) documentary series breaks with a long German tradition: "If the dictator appeared at all, then only for a few seconds and usually without words." Demystification is the key. In preparation for the role, Tobias Moretti, who plays Hitler, listened for hours to a unique tape recording, secretly recorded by a Finnish radio technician in 1942: Hitler not as the demagogic orator, but speaking in the voice of an ordinary human being. A second film, Bernd Eichinger's The Downfall, focuses on the last days in the bunker. Bruno Ganz, star of Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire, takes the role of Hitler.

As Frank Schirrmacher, the publisher of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, has noted, the release of the films will mark an important turning point. "A type of pictorial fear was at work here; a dread of turning the man who has dominated German imagination to the present day into a product of artistic imagination. This is over now." Schirrmacher suggests that these are "the most important historical projects in many years".

These changes do not take place in isolation. Germany's new relaxation is everywhere - in film, literature, and politics. The old taboos are crumbling month by month, day by day. Confrontation with the past, and confrontation with German worries about the past, are inextricably intertwined.

The story of Germany since 1945 has, in many ways, been a story of changing taboos with regard to Hitler and his legacy. Initially, those taboos sought to avoid acknowledging the depth of the crimes that so many Germans had, by their action or inaction, allowed to take place. Reading the West German school- books of the 1950s and 1960s is to expose oneself to a tissue of half-truths, at best. Hitler himself is portrayed in an almost rosy light - the peacemaker, whose efforts were thwarted by a war-hungry Churchill, to whom Hitler "offered peace in vain". (Churchill "knew that England had time, and that the United States would help".)

Where Hitler's crimes are alluded to in passing, the reader is constantly assured that Germans knew little or nothing of what was happening - and that they could, in any case, have done nothing even if they had known. The mass murder of millions, planned with such unique thoroughness, is often passed over in barely a sentence. The German resistance movement, so terribly isolated, receives copious coverage, as does German suffering. Thus, a long catalogue of casualties in the Second World War in a 1956 schoolbook (including, for example, the number of Germans who lost a limb) concludes with the brief postscript: "In addition came the victims who were killed in the concentration camps, the labour camps, the death chambers etc." Whereupon the author returns to safer ground, telling us how much property was destroyed. One book talks at length of the "horrific suffering, such as the world no longer believed possible in the twentieth century". The reference is not to the Holocaust or any other aspect of Nazi crimes, but to what the Germans themselves had gone through.

The fathers-and-children revolution of 1968 and the years that followed - a generational confrontation more dramatic in Germany than anywhere else in Europe or the United States - began to chip away at the lies. The 1968 effect was by no means immediate. (The Baader-Meinhof terrorism of the 1970s, which theoretically demanded more openness about the past, perhaps slowed down the process of change.) When Basil Fawlty goosestepped his way past the German guests in the Fawlty Towers dining room, muttering (not quite sotto voce) "Don't mention the war", he was partly right, despite his buffoonishness, to believe that the Germans were still in denial at that time, in 1975.

Only at the end of the Seventies did the greater openness began to be real. In 1977 came the publication of What I Have Heard about Adolf Hitler, a 350-page book consisting of quotations from a series of school essays on the above theme. The answer to the question was: not much. Hitler was Swiss, Dutch, or Italian; he lived in the 17th century, the 19th century, the 1950s; he was a First World War general, the founder of the East German Communist Party, a leader of German democracy. The ignorance was easily explained. The subtitle of the book, which had a dramatic impact when it was published, was simple: "Consequences of a Taboo." Two years later, the screening of Holocaust - a US television mini-series derided elsewhere as "genocide shrunken to the level of Bonanza with music appropriate to Love Story" - brought the human impact of Hitler's crimes into German homes for the first time. In the words of one of several German books devoted to the extraordinary Holocaust effect: "A whole nation began - as a result of a television film - suddenly to discuss openly the darkest chapter of its history."

The underlying reason for this new openness, which grew through the 1980s, was the change of generations. The children of those who had committed crimes, or who had stood by while crimes were committed, were eager to confront the past in a way that their parents were so reluctant to do....

Richard Steven Street, in the Chronicle of Higher Ed (July 16, 2004):

[Richard Steven Street is a journalist and historian. This article is adapted from his book Photographing Farmworkers in California, just published by Stanford University Press. He is also the author of Beasts of the Field: A Narrative History of California Farmworkers, 1769-1913 (Stanford University Press, 2004).]

Scholars are sometimes vague about the exact origins of a book, especially when the research and writing span more than half their lifetime. Not me. Although I devoted 30 years to this study, I can still recall its violent and bloody birth.

On Tuesday, July 31, 1973, while beginning my career as an agricultural photographer, I followed the United Farm Workers Union (UFW) in the Coachella and San Joaquin valleys of California. The year had been a disaster for the UFW. In January, the union had held more than 150 contracts covering 50,000 workers. Seven months later, it was down to 12 contracts and 6,500 workers. Now striking grape pickers were engaging in massive civil disobedience. They intended to win back lost contracts and overturn the way courts and law-enforcement officials used injunctions to restrict picketing, and they were putting their bodies on the line, submitting to mass arrests and clogging rural jails. During one of those confrontations, I witnessed the aftermath of two deputies dragging a 16-year-old farmworker named Marta Rodriguez out of a vineyard. She was struggling to free herself and screaming for help.

Photographers and news crews were everywhere. A news helicopter hovered overhead. But only one photographer, a tall, blond man named Bob Fitch, was in a position to get Marta's picture. Crouched behind the fender of a car, where police billy clubs could not reach, he recorded a sequence of images, several of which focused on Marta. Here was a photographer bearing witness, fully engaged, with minimal time to react, firing off a string of pictures. Both high art and on-the-spot photojournalism, the dramatic photographs of Marta -- and several equally dramatic shots of other farmworkers being arrested and dragged out of the vineyards -- haunted me for weeks thereafter. While covering the continuing strikes and the funerals of two murdered farmworkers, I could not forget that terrified young woman.

As I pondered that image, I became consumed by the goal of attempting a comprehensive inquiry into the photographic history of California farmworkers. It seems odd now that it did not occur to me or someone else even earlier. ...

One of the more intriguing theories has been put forth by students who assert that the Soviet system's fall was assured when the Czechoslovakian experiment with a more humane and tolerant form of Marxism was crushed by a Soviet military invasion.

In the Spring of 1968 the Government of Alexander Dubcek proclaimed that it wished to have what it described as"Socialism with a human face" in Czechoslovakia, and began to tolerate greater freedom of expression and even limited forms of political dissent. While Czech society reveled in its new found freedom and Dubcek became immensely popular, the other communist governments in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union became alarmed at the prospect of their citizenry demanding similar rights Dubcek, who was a dedicated communist, asserted that his reforms would serve to strengthen the communist system by making it more open, and believed that he could persuade the Soviet leadership to tolerate his policies as a result. But he was mistaken, and the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia and installed a hard lime communist government that was more to its liking.

If Dubcek's experiment had been permitted to continue it is possible that Czechoslovakia would have evolved, some historians believe, into a pluralist communist state that could have served as a model for the Soviet Union's own evolution towards political pluralism. When Mr. Gorbachev sought to reform Soviet society in a manner that was consistent with what Dubcek had attempted in Czechoslovakia, the Soviet system could not be saved by piece meal reforms at that time, and soon began to implode.

And it may be that the reasons for America's victory over the Soviet Union was rooted in the natures of their respective societies. Soviet society penalized individual initiative and restricted its citizens freedom in a variety of ways, while America was on the whole a tolerant society that permitted individual expression....

On a recent bright, muggy morning in Manhattan, the screenwriter David Franzoni was reclining in a low-slung chair in the tapestry-strewn barroom at the Ritz-Carlton hotel, across from Central Park, talking about history. Franzoni, who writes big clanging period pictures like"Gladiator" and"Amistad," was wearing jeans, an open-collared shirt and a loose jacket, and waving about a mop of thick black-gray hair (the last time he seems to have put a comb to it was when he accepted the Oscar for"Gladiator").

He was cursing copiously. Reverence was nowhere in sight. Everything was up for revision.

Franzoni on former presidents:"Jefferson -- what a jerk that guy was. Jefferson was an animal." Years ago Franzoni wrote a biopic of George Washington in which he dismantles the third president.

Franzoni on famous battles of yore:"So I'm beginning to think maybe Scipio actually got the crap kicked out of him at Carthage." He is working on a script about the Carthaginian general Hannibal, who is commonly thought to have lost to Scipio.

On the Greatest Generation:"I can't find any stories I like in World War II." And Camelot:"These guys were the Wild Bunch, not some shiny little cans of metal cruising around the countryside rescuing bored housewives from distress. These guys were killers."

Franzoni, who is 55, was especially animated on this last topic. He was in New York for the premiere of"King Arthur," his latest film, a $100-million-plus Jerry Bruckheimer-produced retelling of the legend of Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. Lerner & Loewe this is not:"I like to think about these knights as guys who came back from 'Nam. My description to Jerry was 'The fall of Saigon, the last chopper's on top of the embassy and they have to go, and these guys can't get out. They have to go up to the DMZ for one more run. Merlin's Ho Chi Minh, up there with his Viet Cong. We don't have him flying through the air talking to chipmunks.'"

Living the paradox of Hollywood's muckety-muck screenwriters, Franzoni, for all his clout, has seen his name in the credits of only a few films over his 25-year career, so premieres are always exciting for him. He'd brought along his wife and son, with whom he lives in Malibu.

Still, he was bothered. Disney had just cut"Arthur" to get a PG-13 rating, and he had no idea what the new print looked like."Here's what [ticks] me off about PG-13 -- you don't see the blood. You have people dying like in old Ronald Reagan movies again -- gloriously. PG-13 is like this '50s lobotimization of kids again. So a kid is from Iraq, and his family's been killed and he's lost a leg -- can he see an R-rated film?"

Lost legs -- this is how Franzoni sees history. His characters, when they're not busy being shackled in chains or declaiming on the rights of man, are usually dismembering each other. Franzoni believes that Arthur, for instance, was not a chivalrous medieval king but rather a tragic Roman mercenary with a weakness for humanist philosophy whose lot it was to be stuck in Britain while his empire fell around him. Assorted British cultural groups are objecting to the portrayal, as are some historians.

"The Celts despise our theory. We have a Celtic advisor on board, and he's always under fire." Franzoni was taking it in stride."Historians -- they're just drunk idiots in tweed." He likes to take a fatalist's view. In his eyes, America, like the Rome of"Gladiator," is an empire in decline."Ultimately we're going to fall," he said."This Patriot Act is the tenuous beginnings of the erosion of free speech. Rome fell -- it took a long time. We're going there, but it's a slow process. CNN was taken over by the Caesars a long time ago. You're not getting anything out of these people."

Franzoni may get his fascination with war from his father, a veteran who owned several companies, a gun maker among them, in Vermont, where Franzoni grew up. As a kid, he watched John Ford and Roger Corman movies."One night I stayed up really late, and 'All Quiet on the Western Front' was on. And I remember it was like I was hit with a hammer."

He studied paleontology at the University of Vermont and after college traveled to Germany, where he bought a cheap motorcycle. He rode it across Europe and western Asia. In Baghdad, he traded a book on the Irish Revolution with a traveling companion in return for"Those About to Die," a book about the Roman games. He was in thrall."The Romans had this unique vision of themselves -- they were born monsters and proud of it.

"Somewhere in India I decided I wanted to be a screenwriter," he added....