Sam Wineburg, professor of education at Stanford, in the Journal of American History (subscribers only) (March 2004):

Results from the 1987, 1994, and 2001 administrations of the National Assessment of Educational Progress ( NAEP , known informally as the"Nation's Report Card") have shown little deviation from earlier trends. In the wake of the 2001 test came the same stale headlines ("Kids Get 'Abysmal' Grade in History: High School Seniors Don't Know Basics," USA Today ); the same refrains of cultural decline ("a nation of historical nitwits," wagged the Greensboro [North Carolina] News and Record ); the same holier-than-thou indictments of today's youth ("dumb as rocks," hissed the Weekly Standard ); and the same boy-who-cried-wolf predictions of impending doom ("when the United States is at war and under terrorist threat," young people's lack of knowledge is particularly dangerous). Scores on the 2001 test, after a decade of the"standards movement," were virtually identical to their predecessors. Six in ten seniors"lack even a basic knowledge of American history," wrote the Washington Post , results that NAEP officials castigated as"awful,""unacceptable," and"abysmal.""The questions that stumped so many students," lamented Secretary of Education Rod Paige,"involve the most fundamental concepts of our democracy, our growth as a nation, and our role in the world." As for the efficacy of standards in the states that adopted them, the test yielded no differences between students of teachers who reported adhering to standards and those who did not. Remarked a befuddled Paige,"I don't have any explanation for that at all." ...

Pointing to the latest NAEP results, the Albert Shanker Institute, sponsored by the American Federation of Teachers, claimed in a blue-ribbon report,"Education for Democracy," that"something has gone awry.... We now have convincing evidence that our students are woefully ignorant of who we are as Americans," indifferent to"the common good," and"disconnected from American history." ...

Historical memory shows an especial plasticity when it turns to assessing young people's character and capability. The same Diane Ravitch, educational historian and member of the NAEP governing board, who in May 2002 expressed alarm that students"know so little about their nation's history" and possess"so little capacity to reflect on its meaning" did a one-eighty eleven months later when rallying Congress for funds in history education:

Although it is customary for people of a certain age to complain about the inadequacies of the younger generation, such complaints ring hollow today.... What we have learned in these past few weeks is that this younger generation, as represented on the battlefields of Iraq, may well be our finest generation.

The phrase"our finest generation" of course echoes the journalist Tom Brokaw's characterization of the men and women who fought in World War II as the"greatest generation." Those were the college students who in 1943 abandoned the safety of the quadrangle for the hazards of the beachhead. Yet only in our contemporary mirror do they look"great." Back then, grown-ups dismissed them as knuckleheads, even questioning their ability to fight. Writing in the New York Times Magazine in May 1942, a fretful Allan Nevins wondered whether a historically illiterate fighting force might be a national liability."We cannot understand what we are fighting for unless we know how our principles developed." If"knowing our principles" means scoring well on objective tests, we might want to update that thesis.

A sober look at a century of history testing provides no evidence for the"gradual disintegration of cultural memory" or a" growing historical ignorance." The only thing growing seems to be our amnesia of past ignorance. If anything, test results across the last century point to a peculiar American neurosis: each generation's obsession with testing its young only to discover—and rediscover—their"shameful" ignorance. The consistency of results across time casts doubt on a presumed golden age of fact retention. Appeals to it are more the stuff of national lore and wistful nostalgia for a time that never was than a claim that can be anchored in the documentary record.

David Shaw, writing for the Los Angeles Times (March 7, 2004)

Early in my career, I had a city editor -- an otherwise reasonable man, a talented journalist and a good friend -- who nonetheless spun the most astonishingly farfetched conspiracy theories about the assassination of President Kennedy. In one of his more fevered imaginings -- spun over his desk at work and over bourbon and poker in his home -- my friend told a conspiracy tale in which a police officer in Long Beach was murdered, in the police station, to cover up his role in the assassination and its coverup.

But not even my friend went as far as a History Channel documentary broadcast in November that argued -- no, insisted -- that Lyndon Johnson"murdered John Kennedy to become president and to avoid prison," as one Texas lawyer said in the opening moments of"The Guilty Men," one program in a 12-hour series called"The Men Who Killed Kennedy."

The series, which covered various Kennedy assassination theories and was part of the History Channel's coverage of the 40th anniversary of the event, attracted virtually no media attention at the time, although outraged relatives and former colleagues of President Johnson did protest and demanded an opportunity to rebut the charge -- and got nowhere.

When that protest intensified last month, the History Channel agreed to appoint a panel of three historians to"discuss the controversial theory and to review the program." When their examination is complete, the History Channel has promised to broadcast another program featuring their conclusions about"America's fascination with the Kennedy assassination, [including] the credibility of this particular theory and the way it was presented."...

..."The Men Who Killed Kennedy" aired in somewhat different forms in England in 1988 and again in 1995, and producer Nigel Turner was criticized both times for some of his assassination theories.

Executives at the History Channel say their program was"original" and was subject to"a review" beforehand. But they won't say who conducted that review and they won't answer specific questions on the program, pending the outcome of the examination by their panel of historians (Robert Dallek, author of biographies of Johnson and Kennedy; Stanley Kutler, professor of American Institutions at the University of Wisconsin and author of two books on Watergate; and Thomas Sugrue, history professor at the University of Pennsylvania)...

...It's true that nine times in the course of the one-hour, independently produced program, the History Channel's resident historian, Steve Gillon, reminded viewers that it offered"just one of the many theories about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy." But that's as close as the station came to a disclaimer.

I've long, albeit reluctantly, accepted the Warren Commission conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in killing Kennedy. It's not that I find the commission's arguments so persuasive. But while I remain open to -- indeed eager for -- a better explanation, every alternative I've heard so far seems even less persuasive.

One need not accept the Warren Commission findings, though, to be horrified by the History Channel broadcast of"The Guilty Men." One need not even have been an admirer of Lyndon Johnson.

Johnson could be -- and often was -- ruthless in pursuit of his objectives. It would not be difficult to make the case that the concept of corruption was not entirely foreign to Johnson's experience. But murder? Johnson as a presidential assassin -- not the trigger man but the man who ordered and organized the killing?

Wait, there's more."The Guilty Men" said Johnson ordered seven other murders -- including that of his own sister. Johnson as a serial killer?...

...The show went on to"document" what it called Johnson's"murderous cycle" and posited the theory that he had help in the Kennedy assassination from the CIA (allegedly fearful that Kennedy would abolish it), the FBI (whose boss feared that Kennedy would fire him), the military-industrial complex (supposedly worried that Kennedy planned to withdraw American forces from Vietnam), and various Texas oil billionaires (alarmed that Kennedy would end or reduce the oil depletion allowance that had helped make them billionaires).

The show also said Johnson feared imprisonment because of his association with Bobby Baker, a Johnson protege and Senate aide who was forced to resign after accusations of illegal activities and was later imprisoned after being found guilty of theft, fraud and income tax evasion. ...

...I hope their expert historians move quickly in their review, and when they return -- as they inevitably will -- with a report that there isn't a shred of evidence linking LBJ to the JFK assassination, I hope the History Channel -- and its parent companies, Hearst, Disney's ABC Cable and General Electric's NBC -- will have the good sense to make a public and abject apology.

If not, I've got this script I'm working on and I figure they'll be interested in it. It reveals the dark secret about how Harry Truman conspired with Mr. Blackwell and Elvis Presley's tailor"Nudie" to poison President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and make the cause of his death look like a cerebral hemorrhage -- all because they thought a wheelchair-bound president did not inspire American men to buy fine clothing...

Charles Lane, in theWash Post(March 5, 2004):

The reputation of the Supreme Court of the United States depends heavily on the public's belief that it is not only an independent branch of government, but almost a world apart -- where, unlike Congress or the presidency, the law, not politics or personality, holds sway.

Yet, from the inside, that is not exactly how it looked to Harry A. Blackmun.

Rather, by the end of his 23-year-career as an associate justice of the court, the liberal Blackmun was stewing about what he saw as attempts by court conservatives to manipulate the court's docket for political advantage. And he was inclined to see his colleagues' occasionally flip-flopping votes as driven partly by principle, partly by personal concerns.

"I have often suspected that Justice [Sandra Day] O'Connor has been uncomfortable . . . because of the possibility that she might have to become the fifth and deciding vote [on abortion]," Blackmun mused in a 1995 videotaped oral history made available yesterday as part of the Library of Congress's release of the late justice's papers. "She is a believer in states' rights. . . . On the other hand, she is a woman and may fear somewhat any accusation of being a traitor to her sex. Some women's organizations would so conclude."

The existence of a gap between the court's carefully cultivated image and the more complex reality inside its white-columned building on Capitol Hill hardly comes as a shock to lawyers, historians and other close observers of the court. Still, the contrast seems sharper when voiced by a former member of the court itself.

Among the most eagerly awaited information in Blackmun's papers concerns Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the 1992 case in which the court decided by the narrowest of margins, 5 to 4, to uphold the constitutional right to choose abortion that Blackmun himself had first articulated in the 1973 case of Roe v. Wade.

Casey came to the court in the fall of 1991, a supercharged political moment. With a presidential election looming in November 1992, President George H.W. Bush -- eager to shore up his support among conservatives -- was pushing hard for the court to overrule Roe.

For their part, abortion rights advocates had little hope, given that Justice Clarence Thomas, the fifth Republican appointee since 1981, had just joined the court.

The Casey story has been told before, notably in "Closed Chambers," a 1998 book by former Blackmun law clerk Edward Lazarus. But Blackmun's papers add new details to the picture of a court beset by ideological differences, intrigue and personal angst....

...[Blackmun] came to suspect that Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, a conservative foe of Roe v. Wade, was deliberately delaying the court's consideration of the case so that it would not be heard until after the election.

"The obvious reason" for the chief justice's repeated postponements of a vote on hearing the case, Blackmun wrote, was to avoid "the political repercussions of a decision by this Court in the midst of an election year." Blackmun cited no specific evidence for that claim.

Blackmun threatened to go public with this protest, but it became moot when Rehnquist agreed to a vote. Seven of the nine justices voted to hear the case, according to Blackmun's notes.

Roe survived in Casey because Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, a Reagan appointee, switched his vote and agreed to join two other Republican appointees, O'Connor and David H. Souter, in crafting an opinion that also garnered the support of Blackmun and Justice John Paul Stevens.

Kennedy, O'Connor and Souter initially kept their collaboration a secret, Blackmun recalls.

Chief Justice Rehnquist, blindsided when Kennedy announced his switch after Rehnquist circulated his proposed majority opinion on May 27, took Kennedy on a series of walks to try to talk him out of it.

Jonathan Brent, in the Chronicle of Higher Education (March 10, 2004):

You cannot compromise with revanchists," Alexander Nikolaevich Yakovlev tells me as we sit and talk in his office at the International Democracy Foundation, in a renovated mansion located on Malaya Gruzinskaya Street in Moscow, not far from the city center.

Yakovlev is 80; his gray hair is swept neatly back, revealing jagged lines of thought that converge on his forehead like a geological formation. He limps from a World War II injury and possesses penetrating black eyes. Formerly the Soviet ambassador to Canada and educated at Columbia University, he speaks good English, but there is a practiced distance in his manner. His tone of voice turns easily to irony, deflecting familiarity.

After some topics of general conversation, such as America's intentions in Iraq, its isolation from Europe, and the crisis of leadership throughout the world, he gestures with his hand. "Now let's return to our own lambs," he says in Russian, thus drawing us back to the purpose of my visit, which is to clarify my press's commitment to copublish, with his foundation, seven or eight volumes of documents that he is preparing from what is termed Stalin's Personal Archive. The architect of perestroika during the Gorbachev years, Yakovlev was granted the high privilege of publishing the material by Boris Yeltsin, soon after the then-president took office in 1991, for his exceptional service in helping to engineer the collapse of totalitarian rule.

Culled from a vast number of documents, the first volume of more than 900 pages, published in a Russian-language edition last year, chronicles Stalin's seizure of supreme power through his co-optation and manipulation of the security services from 1922 to 1936, and the onset of the Great Terror. It helps explain why the system, established by Lenin, inevitably instituted strakh -- fear -- as the ruling element in the psychology of the Russian people.

That fear, Yakovlev believes, continues to this day in all but the youngest generation. His publishing project is despised by the revanchists, who would like to see a return to the old Communist system. It will, Yakovlev hopes, help stave off such a return. He is desperate to get the material out as quickly as possible because, as he has repeatedly told me, the windows of reform have been closing gradually over the last several years.

Gleb Pavlovsky's recent statement in Expert suggests why Yakovlev is anxious. Pavlovsky, a political adviser to the presidential chief of staff, has asserted that President Vladimir Putin governs only with the indulgence of forces greater than himself. Yakovlev points out that Pavlovsky could not have made that statement without permission. But permission from whom? Was it a provocation? A warning? A poll in September 2003 indicated that 77 percent of the Russian population would vote for Putin's removal, suggesting that underlying the present apparent stability of the country, contradictory forces of destabilization remain at work. Putin's recent abrupt dismissal of his prime minister, which some observers see as a victory for the security services over reformers, further hints at the direction of the regime. Putin seems intent on restoring the personnel and prestige of the security services, and the governmental muddle that has resulted from the cabinet shuffle will give him additional opportunities.

From the NYT (March 7, 2004):

Twice members of the Supreme Court have played a decisive role in choosing an American president. In the 2000 Bush-Gore race a vote by five justices, including Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, halted a recount of Florida's popular vote, giving the presidency to George W. Bush.

The other, lesser-known race was the 1876 contest between Rutherford B. Hayes and Samuel Tilden. An electoral commission of five senators, five congressmen and five Supreme Court justices gave disputed votes to Hayes in Florida and other states, in effect awarding him the presidency.

In his new book,"Centennial Crisis" (Alfred A. Knopf), Chief Justice Rehnquist, who played such a powerful role in the 2000 election, revisits 1876, inevitably evoking parallels between the justices' actions in the two races. Here are excerpts from a conversation about the book between Chief Justice Rehnquist and Dinitia Smith.

The book seems to argue that in times of crisis the Supreme Court should take a strong role in settling political impasses.

I don't think so. Because to me some of the other extrajudicial services the judges have been put in are probably not good for the court. I think you can argue back and forth about [Justice Robert H.] Jackson's role in Nuremberg, I think you can argue back and forth about Earl Warren's role in heading up the Warren Commission, and Owen Roberts's heading up the Roberts Commission right after Pearl Harbor.

I don't think you can say it's desirable that individual justices get into things simply when asked by the president. I don't think it's desirable for the court to wade into something just because it seems to be very controversial. I do think that in this particular instance in 1876, what they probably did was not good for the court, but I think it was good to the country. It probably averted a situation that could have resulted in violence.

It seems that in the 2000 election the court took a markedly more proactive role.

I don't really want to discuss the ins and outs of Bush against Gore.

In the book you mention Bush versus Gore a couple of times in the context of the severe criticism that some people directed at the court, your court, in the 2000 decision. What role did public outrage play in your writing this book?

None. We frequently get strong criticism of our decisions. But we certainly don't change our minds because of public criticism. Otherwise a lot of very important cases would come out the other way.

There is a forthcoming review in The Nation by Eric Foner, a professor at Columbia University.

He's a recognized historian.

One of the things that he says about your book is that it is"an elaborate though indirect apologia" for the court's decision in Bush versus Gore.

I really don't think they have anything to do with each other. But I'm glad to know the book is being reviewed someplace.

Tracy Early, in the Catholic News Service (March 8, 2004):

Pope Pius XII, who was elected to the papacy in 1939 after service as a Vatican diplomat and then secretary of state, should be evaluated in the context of the international situation in which he worked, a Catholic historian said in a lecture March 4.

Jesuit Father Gerald P. Fogarty, professor of religious studies and history at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, said Catholics should not react to criticism of the pope with defensiveness.

But he said they also should not"jump on the bandwagon" to join in the condemnation that has come to Pope Pius XII from the authors of a number of recent books and articles. These critics have emerged only since Rolf Hochhuth's 1963 play,"The Deputy," and present a picture different from that given by historical sources of the pope's own time, he said.

Father Fogarty said the Catholic public was"extremely ill-informed," and ought to wait until it can base its judgments on historical evidence.

Recounting his own research in the historical archives of various nations, he said he mostly found"shades of gray."

Father Fogarty delivered his lecture at the New York archdiocesan seminary, St. Joseph's in Yonkers, under the sponsorship of the Cardinal Francis Spellman chair in church history.

In citing various personal relationships that influenced the Vatican role in international affairs, he gave special attention to Cardinal Spellman, who was appointed archbishop of New York in April 1939, the month after Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli became Pope Pius XII.

Father Fogarty noted that much of the criticism of the pope centered on his"silence" regarding the Jews and the Nazi persecution that culminated in the Holocaust. But as Vatican secretary of state he was calling on Germany from the early years of Nazi rule to respect the rights of Jews who were baptized Catholics and to give humane treatment to those who were not baptized, Father Fogarty said.

As pope, he said, Pius XII showed in diplomatic actions and language that he rejected the racism of the Nazis and favored the Allies during World War II.

Although some reports of Hitler's extermination of the Jews had come out, people at the time found it difficult to imagine such horrors could be true, and remained cautious because reports of German atrocities during World War I were subsequently found to be largely propaganda, Father Fogarty said.

Cardinal Avery Dulles, who teaches at St. Joseph's Seminary as well as at Fordham University in New York, asked Father Fogarty during a question period after the lecture whether there was anything Pope Pius XII could have done that would have saved more Jewish lives."No, I don't think so," he replied.

Regarding the"silence" allegations, Father Fogarty also pointed out that during the Nazi period Pope Pius XII, calling himself"the pope of impartiality," was equally silent about Nazi treatment of Poland and about the Bolshevik rule in the Soviet Union. ...

Michael Kammen, on the subject of his forthcoming book, A Time to Every Purpose: The Four Seasons in American Culture; in the Chronicle of Higher Education(March 8, 2004):

...The four-seasons motif arrived in America in the 17th century. Before industrialization, it remained largely derivative from European perceptions and rarely innovative. Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, for example, were spellbound by "The Seasons," written by the 18th-century Scottish poet James Thomson. Often considered the first book-length poem in English to feature nature, "The Seasons" saw in nature God's plan, helping to reconcile the existence of good and evil.

With the onset of industrialization and urbanization during the 19th century, as fewer Americans lived close to the land, what might be called a "flattening" of the seasons occurred. Seasonal change ceased to affect human lives to the same degree that it once did. The advent of canned foods at the turn of the 20th century transformed the American diet and liberated people from longstanding seasonal constraints. During the 1920s, the Caterpillar company advertised that, with its new snow-removal equipment, "January can be just like July" -- at least in terms of driving automobiles, and especially in American cities. I discovered, nonetheless, that engagement with the four-seasons motif did not diminish. Instead, its appearance in art, music, poetry, and other forms of literature, including the writings of naturalists, actually increased during the 20th century. I have tried to provide a window on the reasons why.

In the 19th century, national chauvinism mattered a great deal: Americans earnestly believed that the seasons and seasonal change were more spectacular in their country than anywhere else. The leading cultural journal at mid-century, The Crayon, quoted a representative response to Jasper F. Cropsey's dramatic painting, "Autumn on the Hudson": "They who know the aspect of Nature in the autumn in England only, have no notion of the glorious garb she elsewhere puts on at that time. In America, the woods are all ablaze." On the eve of the worst sectional struggle in American history, it was not surprising that national chauvinism enjoyed a great surge.

In an echo of the contradictory impulses that Smith and Marx had noted, nostalgia, and a sense of American loss, also mattered, because so many people felt increasingly out of touch with the natural world and with the lifestyle of preceding generations. Ambivalence about modernity played an important part in the attraction to seasonal invocations. Consider the pictorial splendors of Victorians like Cropsey (who created at least a dozen sets of seasonal images, more than any other American painter) and the beloved lithographs of Currier and Ives. The earliest of Currier's images in 1855 did not emphasize seasonal distinctiveness in the United States to an unusual degree, but, within a dozen years, new ones that highlighted romanticized scenes of rustic work and play did.

Consider, too, the seasonal essays of such Brahmins as Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. and James Russell Lowell, as well as the enormous popularity of books and essays by Burroughs and John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club. When Holmes lamented, in his 1868 essay on "The Seasons," that too few people paid adequate attention to seasonal change, he was primarily addressing urban dwellers like himself.

The advent of cultural modernism in America early in the 20th century offered fresh challenges and new ways to think about the seasons in metaphorical and allegorical terms. Whereas creative people had previously been most intrigued by the presentation of seasonal peaks, increasing attention came to be devoted to seasonal transitions. Allusions to change became a prominent metaphor. The pace of life seemed to accelerate as the 20th century progressed, and so did the production of books, essays, and art of every type depicting the seasons, quite often as a metaphor for the human life cycle. As in earlier periods, the changes were manifest in high as well as mass culture: in Charles Burchfield's vivid watercolors and the seasonal calendars of Norman Rockwell, in the challenging but moving poetry of Wallace Stevens and W.D. Snodgrass, in the nature writings of Hal Borland, Edwin Way Teale, and Joseph Wood Krutch.

When Jasper Johns completed his famous suite "The Seasons" in 1987, he allowed his dealer, Leo Castelli, to sell three of them. He retained "Autumn" for his personal collection, however, because he felt he had been in the autumn of his life when he created the series. In 1964 the magic realist Peter Blume began his seasonal suite, and in 1972 when Marc Chagall was persuaded to accept a commission to make a monumental mosaic block as public art for downtown Chicago, he selected the four seasons because of the universal appeal of the theme....

Thoreau's justly revered Journals, published in their entirety just a century ago, are jampacked with seasonal observations, including an entry on June 11, 1851: "No one, to my knowledge, has observed the minute differences in the seasons." A book that did so, he wrote, would be "a Book of the seasons, each page of which should be written in its own season & out-of-doors, or in its own locality wherever it may be." That is just what I have tried to do, except for Thoreau's admonition to write out-of-doors. My work required electrical outlets as well as aesthetic ones.

Michael Winerip, in the NYT (March 3, 2004):

IN 1987, Will Fitzhugh started The Concord Review, a scholarly publication that printed the best high school history research papers in America. His intent was simple: to recognize students who produced high-quality research, to show teachers and students what could be done, and to thereby raise the standard for high school writing.

On one level, he succeeded brilliantly. In 17 years, he has published 627 student papers in 57 issues of the quarterly, tackling some of history's most challenging questions. In a 6,235-word paper, Rachel Hines of Montgomery High in Rockville, Md., asked: Did Chaim Rumkowski, the Jewish leader of Poland's Lodz ghetto, do more good or harm by cooperating with the Nazis? Aaron Einbond of Hunter High in New York City explored to what extent John Maynard Keynes's economic ideas were truly revolutionary, and to what extent they were borrowed from others.

Jessica Leight of Cambridge Rindge and Latin in Massachusetts wanted to know why Anne Hutchinson suffered so much more at the hands of the Puritans than her brother-in-law, the Rev. John Wheelwright, when both attacked the leadership. Jennifer Shingleton of Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., questioned whether Abigail Adams really was a feminist, or was being taken out of 18th-century context by contemporary feminist historians.

Britta Waller of Roosevelt High in Kent, Ohio, wrote about the Ferris wheel."Fascinating," Mr. Fitzhugh says."The guy who invented it died brokenhearted. I tell people, the topic doesn't matter, it's the quality that matters, so a kid learns the joy of scholarship. If you learn what it means to go in depth, you also realize when you're being superficial."

Some of America's best-known historians - Arthur Schlesinger Jr., David McCullough, Shelby Foote - have praised the Review. And the published students - who often include their Review papers with their college applications - have prospered. Seventy-four went on to Harvard, 57 to Yale, 30 to Princeton.

And yet for much of the time, Mr. Fitzhugh has felt like a boatman on the Lewis and Clark expedition, paddling upstream on the Mississippi and making little headway. He fears the high school research paper is on the verge of extinction, shoved aside as students prepare for the five-paragraph essays now demanded on state tests, the SAT II and soon, the SAT."I'm convinced the majority of high school students graduate without reading a nonfiction book cover to cover," he says. Mr. Fitzhugh is offended that the National Endowment for the Humanities sponsors a $5,000 history essay contest with a 1,200-word limit."I have kids writing brilliant 5,000-word papers, and they're not eligible," he says. He is saddened by a letter from the chairman of the history department at Boston Latin, that city's premier high school."Over the past 10 years, history teachers have largely stopped assigning the traditional term papers," Walter Lambert, the chairman, wrote.

George Shadroui, in FrontPageMag.com (March 5, 2004):

Until the mid 1960s, it could be argued, the National Book Awards, a much heralded and sought after honor, was a fair recognition of great writing across different perspectives and genres – poetry, fiction, non-fiction, history, etc. But increasingly since the 1960s, the awards have been an exercise in political as much as literary judgment.

To refresh memories, during the 1950s and into the early 1960s a host of writers were honored who crossed the political and cultural spectrum. James Dickey, Wallace Stevens, John Crowe Ransom and Robert Penn Warren won in the arena of poetry. Walker Percy and William Faulkner took honors for their fiction. All were men of arguably conservative sensibilities, even if not notably political. Prominent liberals also were recognized, among them Rachel Carson, George Kennan, Ralph Ellison, Archibald MacLeish and William Shirer. Whether one agreed or disagreed with the choices, there was ecumenical representation that suggested the absence of political or cultural litmus tests.

Things began to change in the 1960s as the radical left began mobilizing against American power and the Vietnam War. In 1966, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. won for his adoring portrait of the short-lived Kennedy administration, A Thousand Days. In 1968, liberal icon George Kennan was honored for his memoirs. In 1969, Norman Mailer’s Armies of the Night, an anti-Vietnam war memoir, captured a National Book Award.

As we head into the 1970s, Erik H. Erikson is honored in 1970 for his work on Gandhi and his non-violent techniques, a politically correct stance in the midst of the anti-war movement. Other winners included former communist and leftist Lillian Hellman for her memoir, An Unfinished Woman; James MacGregor Burns for his flattering biography of Franklin Roosevelt: The Soldier of Freedom; Joseph Lash for Eleanor and Franklin; and France Fitzgerald for Fire in the Lake, a book that glorified the Viet Cong.

This trend toward liberal and leftist perspectives continued over the next two decades. Winners included Murray Kempton, Peter Gay, Joyce Carol Oates, Allen Ginsberg, Adrienne Rich, Irving Howe, Schlesinger again for another Kennedy portrait, Robert Jay Lifton, Peter Matthiessen, Malcolm Cowley, Barbara Tuchman, Susan Sontag, Edmund Morris, Ronald Steel, Victor Navasky of the Nation magazine, Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, Alice Walker, Alan Brinkley, etc.

Not only are many of these folks left or liberal in their views, so is the subject matter. We find biographies of Norman Thomas, the Kennedys, Huey Long, Walter Lippmann, FDR and Eleanor, Lyndon Johnson, etc. There are multiple studies on slavery and Western complicity in that sordid business. There are critical accounts of the dropping of the Atomic bomb at the end of World War II, and the failures of the American system to deal with seemingly intractable social ills, but very little that celebrates Western contributions to freedom and democracy. No prominent conservative or Republican person is even the subject of a winning book save Theodore Roosevelt, though a number of authors are honored in the non-fiction categories for their critical reviews of the U.S. role in Vietnam -- Fitzgerald and Mailer being joined by Gloria Emerson, for Winners and Losers, Neil Sheehan for The Bright Shining Lie, and James Carroll for An American Requiem.

As we move into the 1990s, virtually every nonfiction winner was written by liberals or noted leftists: Orlando Patterson, at Harvard, for his book Freedom (1991); Gore Vidal for his collection of essays, United States (1993); Tina Rosenberg, for The Haunted Land (1995); Carroll for An American Requiem (1996), Edward Ball, former Village Voice writer, for Slaves in the Family (1998); John Dower for his book, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (1999); and Robert Caro, for Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson (2002).

The question that must be asked of the NBA and those publishers who often drive nominations is this: were all of these books of such a high quality that they necessarily closed the door on those written by conservatives? Emerson’s book on Vietnam, for example, took a major hit not from the right but from fellow liberal Garry Wills, who criticized Emerson in the New York Review of Books in 1977 for inserting herself too often into the Vietnam story she was trying to tell.

Wrote Wills: “But Emerson herself shows a groupie tendency for all those connected with the war…. sees malice where there was little, and saintliness where there was little, and has no mind at all for sorting out various kinds of mindlessness on both sides.” Not the type of endorsement one expects for a National Book Award winner.

The skeptic might ask why it matters, particularly if the work honored is of high quality. The answer is obvious. Prestigious awards mean more attention, resources, and venues for discussing history, and ultimately more notoriety, which means greater book sales, more readers and more power in the debate over ideas.

And many of those who have won have not been shy about using their status to pronounce on the issues of the day. We all know that Mailer and Vidal are actively baiting the Bush administration, and they are hardly alone. James Carroll and John Dower, to pick two relatively recent winners, also have been given platforms for criticizing the Iraq war effort. In both cases, their credibility as witnesses to history are built upon their work and the recognition it has received.

Carroll, whose memoir on Vietnam is highly critical of the United States, has nothing good to say about the war in Iraq either. Writing in the Boston Globe in September 2003, Carroll opened with this riveting proclamation: “The War is Lost.” He goes on: “The Bush administration’s hubristic foreign policy has been efficiently exposed as based on nothing more than hallucination. High-tech weaponry can kill unwilling human beings, but it cannot force them to embrace an unwanted idea.” Carroll then argues: “Sooner or later, the United States must admit that it has made a terrible mistake in Iraq, and it must move quickly to undo it.”

It has to be observed that by most historical measures liberating 50 million people in a matter of months, with American losses totaling in the hundreds, would be called a remarkable success. Remember, we lost 3,000 people in 90 minutes on 9/11. Many of the war’s opponents certainly predicted much worse – thousands of dead soldiers, the unleashing of weapons of mass destruction, regional instability, etc. Instead, rogue regimes – Iran, Libya, Syria and North Korea – are beginning to cooperate on issues of arms proliferation and weapons of mass destruction, and known terrorists are sending missives lamenting the refusal of the United States to withdraw because our troops are suffocating the terrorist effort. Yes, the war continues and the terrorists are clearly undaunted by holy traditions (witness the most recent attacks in Baghdad and Karbala) that our critics insist we respect.

Dower, another scholar on the left, also is called upon to issue an indictment of Bush. Writing in the Manchester Guardian in November 2002, Dower argues that efforts to compare post-World War II Japan with Iraq are absurd. He observes that not a single attack was launched against American occupation forces in Japan after the cessation of hostilities in 1945, and he argued, rightly, that this would not be the case in Iraq. Then again, Japan had just been through almost a decade of war and had been totally defeated and threatened with decimation. So he is right that comparisons are not always instructive, but we might reach different conclusions as to why.

This past December, writing in the Los Angeles Times, Dower takes Bush to task again for trying to make the case that Iraq, like Japan and Germany, could be rebuilt and transformed. “What are we to make of this murky use of history? The truth is that what is happening in Iraq presents a stunning and fundamental contrast to what took place in occupied Japan and Germany over a half century ago – and not a positive one.”

Dower may be correct that an attempt to compare the situations has marginal value, but was Bush trying to draw a direct parallel? One thinks not. The situation in Iraq differs from the situation in Japan and Germany, but for many reasons Dower does not explore. The United States did not firebomb Baghdad the way allies did Dresden, for example. Is Dower complaining about that? We also did not drop an atomic bomb on Tikrit, though surely that would have reduced resistance from Al Qaeda and hard-core Baathists. Nor does Dower inform readers that in post-war Germany attacks against American troops continued for several years.

Sheehan, author of The Bright Shining Lie, took America to task in the 1980s for its arrogance in dealing with Vietnam. In an interview with Harry Kresler, Sheehan argues: “we didn’t understand the Vietnamese whom we were allegedly helping, and we didn’t understand the Vietnamese we were fighting.” He observes that the United States failed to grasp the historical enmity between China and Vietnam, a regional tension that transcended allegiance to communism. However, it remains true that despite the Sino-Soviet split, or the nationalism of the Vietnamese, both China and the Soviet Union were providing major support for the communists in the north and the insurgency in the south.

An article by Fox Butterfield (himself a National Book Award winner) that appeared in the New York Times magazine in the early 1980s demonstrated, if not that U.S. war policy was correct, that many of the assumptions of anti-war activists were flawed. Few leftists in the "peace" movement would have conceded that a North Vietnamese victory would result in millions of “liberated” Vietnamese fleeing in boats or being imprisoned or killed in “reeducation” camps, though no one is likely to win many awards for pointing this out.

On another front, after the collapse of the Soviet system, Tina Rosenberg went to Eastern Europe to document the aftermath of that historic transformation. One might have hoped she would focus on the obvious atrocities perpetrated by communist regimes. Instead, she wound up – in part -- romanticizing communism and its leadership and portraying the anti-communist sentiments of the new governments as a major problem confronting the newly liberated states.

In the final pages of her NBA winning book, The Haunted Land, she writes: “Fascism espouses repugnant ideas, but communism’s ideas of equality, solidarity, social justice, an end to misery, and power to the oppressed are indeed beautiful….Communism is lofty and grand, but human beings are flawed creatures, unwilling to pay communism the tribute of sacrifice it demands.”

Here we have clear evidence of Arthur Koestler’s claim that the poetry of communism remains seductive even as the reality of it leads to the nightmare of totalitarianism. But even the alleged “poetry” of communism is overstated. Reread The Communist Manifesto. It is not a hymn to brotherhood but a declaration of war on all save the working class, and particularly on those who do not embrace underlying Marxist assumptions. In her NBA acceptance speech Rosenberg, who is now an editorial writer for the New York Times, thanks Mikhail Gorbachav for making her work possible, but does not mention the United States or its role in liberating Eastern Europe (much less Ronald Reagan).

One could go on this way. Indeed, scanning the list of winners over three decades it is difficult to find more than a smattering of conservative writers, historians or thinkers. Robert Nozick in 1975 was honored for Anarchy, State and Utopia and Henry Kissinger in 1980 for White House Years. You could argue that Tom Wolfe, who won for Right Stuff, has conservative leanings. Certainly, he has shown up at National Review’s anniversary dinners and has had some fun at the expense of radicals. Likewise, though Fox Butterfield writes for the liberal New York Times, his book, China: Alive in the Bitter Sea, has been rightly praised for its honest portrait of life under communist rule. Carlos Eire, who won for his book, Waiting for Snow in Havana, did not hesitate to observe during his acceptance speech that he would be imprisoned for his writings were he still in Cuba. Bill Buckley won not for his political commentary, but for his mystery, Stained Glass. David Horowitz and Peter Collier managed a nomination for their book on the Rockefellers, but that was before their turn to the right.

This obvious political slant does a disservice to the marketplace of ideas and the notion of basic fairness. After all, if Gore Vidal deserved a National Book Award for his collection of essays, why not William F. Buckley, Jr. for his collection of speeches, Let Us Talk of Many Things, which traces the political and cultural landscape of our nation over four decades? If communist apologist Lillian Hellman’s memoir was instructive, what about Horowitz’s memoir, Radical Son, which documents his fascinating intellectual journey?

Other notable books by conservatives come to mind that not only did not win, but did not even warrant a finalist mention: Michael Novak for The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism, George Gilder for Wealth and Poverty, Charles Murray for Losing Ground and Stephen and Abigail Thernstrom for America in Black and White. These works were ground-breaking studies dealing with some of the most difficult issues of our day and surely compared with other books NBA judges chose to honor. While we are at it, how is it that the judges of the National Book Award have managed to overlook entirely Allan Bloom, Thomas Sowell, William Safire, George Will, Russell Kirk, and others.

Christopher Lasch is an interesting case. He has always been a good read, whether writing as a leftist back in the 1960s or 1970s, or as a reformed leftist in the 1980s and early 1990s. Though he won the National Book Award for The Culture of Narcissism, which was certainly a worthy effort, it could be argued that his most expansive and impressive book was The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics. Why did he not win or even get nominated again after embracing a more a more nuanced position toward progressive ideologies? That he had already won is not an argument against. After all, David McCullough and Schlesinger have both won twice.

One possible explanation could be the judges. Though I was unable to obtain a complete list over the years (the names are not readily shared or available), a review of the judges since 2001 turned up a disproportionate representation of writers with alternative or left to liberal perspectives: Richard Rodriguez, a liberal commentator for the Public Broadcasting System; Christine Stansell, a Princeton professor whose history on the Bohemians includes a romantic portrait of John Reed, Emma Goldman and other communists; Alex Kotlowitz, whose book, There Are No Children Here, documents life in a Chicago housing project; and Terry Tempest Williams, a prominent pro-environment activist from Utah. Others included Gail Buckley, author and daughter of entertainer Lena Horne, Mary Karr, a professor at Syracuse University, Jonathon Kirsch, book editor of the Los Angeles Times, Lawrence Jackson, professor at Emory University, and Michael Kinsley, one of liberalism’s leading lights. The only judge with any clear connections to conservatism was Terry Teachout, who has written for the Wall Street Journal and Commentary and who edited a collection of Whittaker Chamber’s journalism.

Whatever the talents of these writers, and in some cases they are significant, it can still be fairly observed that most are hardly immersed in the political or cultural mainstream of America. Is there any question that the institutional embrace of counterculture or alternative viewpoints amounts to a bias against those who celebrate business ingenuity, free enterprise or the dominant traditions of Western culture?

Unfortunately, favoritism in the direction of the liberal/left perspective is not limited to the National Book Awards. The folks over at the University of Georgia who bestow Peabody Awards have recognized Bill Moyers on eight occasions for his television work, including “The World of Ideas” and an MX Missile Debate he hosted in 1980. An on-line search of the Peabody winners discloses that Bill Buckley’s Firing Line, though it raised intellectual and policy discussion to the highest levels for over three decades, never won. Surely, a man considered one of our great public intellectuals should have been recognized for his lifetime contribution to debate and policy analysis, don’t you think? Oprah Winfrey has been.

Here is the raw fact. Since the 1960s, of the 90 writers (give or take a couple) honored by the NBA in nonfiction categories for books that dealt with historical, political or political culture matters, only three or four could be called conservative. More than 60 have had clear ties to leftist/liberal causes or concerns. In fact, it is difficult to find a conservative who has made the finalist list in the past 20 years. This is even less intellectual diversity that the faculties of American college campuses. It seems as though we have become so accustomed to an exclusionary culture that no one even notices anymore.