[Victor Davis Hanson is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow in Residence in Classics and Military History at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, a professor of Classics Emeritus at California State University, Fresno, and a nationally syndicated columnist for Tribune Media Services. He is also the Wayne & Marcia Buske Distinguished Fellow in History, Hillsdale College, where he teaches each fall semester courses in military history and classical culture.]

Nobel Prizes from Lala Land

Norway is a tiny country that was born lucky. It is weak and defenseless (and was quickly overrun in World War II [while neighboring, neutral Sweden sold the Third Reich 40% of its iron ore, that went for everything from Tiger tanks to kill Americans to the ovens at Auschwitz — with free shipping across the Baltic included as a favor]. In the late 1940s it would have been Finlandized during the Cold War, if not for American-led NATO. And the world’s largest military is still pledged to its defense, in case any of the nations, to whose icons it bestows awards, some day decides to send terrorists or nukes its way

Second, it sits on or near enough to oil to allow what is otherwise a rather insignificant country to be the wealthiest per capita oil producer in the world, and enjoy the influence that many in the Gulf have grown accustomed to. Throw in minerals, natural gas, timber, and fish and the nation sits on a bonanza of natural wealth. No wonder there are philosophers who ponder how to dispense the largess and absenteeism is a national crisis (one receives almost ad infinitum the same cash whether “sick” at home or well on the job). The population of under 5 million is largely homogeneous (90% Nordic), and is thus stable, and both rich and safe beyond its wildest dreams. It does not border a Third World country; “difference” and the “other” — even with recent Islamic immigration — is still defined as speaking Swedish or Danish.

Hollywood Nation

In other words, Norway has the leisure to be utopian, and cannot quite understand why other countries are not as liberal as it has proven. So Norway loves to give award to all sorts of right-thinking frauds (Menchu), scoundrels (Elbaradei), terrorists (Arafat), Stalinists (Le Doc Tho), Elmer Gantrys (Jimmy Carter) and hucksters (Gore) — as it sits in judgment of others from Lala land.

Remember, though, the Norwegians privately would not like to live under Central American communism of the Ortega brand, or right next to nutty nuclear Iran, or have Palestinian terrorists on their borders, or in general live the real life that the nation sanctimoniously advocates in the abstract. It sees what happens to neighboring Denmark’s cartoonists when they exercise free speech. It once saw what Neville Chamberlain wrought for its own neighborhood.
Norway is, in other words, the Hollywood nation. Imagine it is as the son or daughter of a movie star, one who grew up in Malibu, and feels so terribly about it that he lectures the U.S. about everything from global warming to George Bush’s assorted sins — confident that he will never have to work at Ace Hardware, and never have to live near South Central LA. That’ sums up Norway.

T-Ball Awards

Effort and intention, not achievement, matter to these pious Europeans. We should honor preseason favorites, not 20-game winners; praise dazzling book proposals, not best sellers; gush about on-the-shelf Pentagon plans not battle victories. Don’t dare end the Cold War, or save millions in Africa from AIDs, or get rid of Milosevic; but most certainly do dare to convince the world that the Muslims jump-started the Renaissance. For that brave assertion, global peace will surely follow.

Norway on the Potomac

More seriously, the Obama Prize represents two recent larger Nobel trends: 1) an effort to curtail American foreign policy in favor of international deference (as in the case of rewarding Carter and Gore for their defamation of Bush in their opposition to Iraq); 2) a general disconnect from accomplishment in favor of leftist intentions, as in the case of Elbaradei or Rogaberta Menchu who accomplished essentially nothing (and spoke or wrote about that nothing in suspect fashion), but were a hit among international Western elites as authentically anti-Western non-Westerns.

Anyone who has taught in the university over the last thirty years has witnessed dozens of mini-sorts of Nobel Prizes each year handed out to faculty on the basis of what they represent or said rather than accomplishment; but it is still remarkable to see such postmodernism hit the world stage, where reality is virtual and constructed on language and expressed intent.

Think of the tiny Norway’s Machiavellianism: A utopian American President is now supported for his rhetoric — and yet also sent a signal that brave new Nobel Prize laureates simply don’t support Israel, pressure Iran, stay in Afghanistan or Iraq, or keep open Guantanamo. It is as if that Oslo is saying ‘our man in Washington’ is, well, now really ‘our man in Washington.’

The vision of Norway is now to be the aspiration of the world, albeit with the understanding that in the era of cap-and-trade someone will still buy Norway’s oil to power their carbon-foot-printing cars, and its timber for their ungreen homes, and still offer icky planes, rockets, nukes, and carriers to ensure Norway is safe in a fashion that it was not sixty-five years ago. Quisling is still its chief loan word to the English Language...

[David Cesarani is research professor in history at Royal Holloway, University of London.]

We are going through another of those odd periods when corners of our daily newspapers look as if they are reporting things that happened over 65 years ago. There are rows over what the Latvians did or did not do in the second world war, arguments about why the German Luftwaffe bombed Coventry and, most recently, Stephen Fry has upset the Poles with a careless remark about Auschwitz. What all of these spats show is that history matters.

Versions of the past remain central to a country's national identity and how its citizens think about themselves. The way that history, especially national history, is told and taught is a matter of public policy, and hence inevitably a political issue. It can even intrude into international relations, as demonstrated by the response of much of the international community to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's proclivity for denying that millions of Jews were systematically murdered by the Germans and their allies between 1939 and 1945. The saga of the Bloody Sunday inquiry cannot be disentangled from the resolution of the conflict in northern Ireland and the long-term future of the province.

Fry's remarks, however, reveal something more specific. They exemplify the time lag between scholarship that demolishes historical myths and the more slowly shifting public understanding of the past. Fry, who admits to knowing "a little history", seems to think that Auschwitz was in wartime Poland and was, in some way, connected to "rightwing Catholicism". The camp was, in fact, in a part of Poland annexed to Germany and was a German creation. Before it was expanded and adapted to include a death camps devoted to the mass murder of Europe's Jews, tens of thousands of Catholic Poles died there. The camp's initial function was to terrorise the Polish population.

Fry also seems blissfully unaware of the research into Polish-Jewish history that has transformed our knowledge of that conflicted and tragic relationship. Over the last 20 years, beginning roughly with the debate over Claude Lanzmann's film Shoah in 1985-86, Poles have confronted the history of Polish antisemitism and the stance of the population towards the persecution of Polish Jewish citizens during the German occupation. There are now flourishing centres for the study of Polish Jewish history at several Polish universities, and a major Jewish museum is under construction in Warsaw.

Many Jewish historians, meanwhile, have shown the closeness between the two communities and challenged the stereotype that Jews and Christians on Polish soil lived in separate worlds. Relations between them, especially in small towns and villages, were more cordial and intimate than was once thought to be the case. The knowledge of the slaughter of the Jews in Poland and the bitter aftermath, including the attacks on survivors by rightwing Poles in 1945-7, created a distorting lens through which the past was viewed for decades. Fry is, evidently, still squinting backwards through these blood-coloured spectacles...

[Jonathan Tremblay is a historian and is currently an intern for History News Network]

For many years, the Egyptian director of Antiquities, Mr. Zahi Hawass has called upon worldwide museums for the return of his country’s archaeological heritage. In this case, Egypt petitioned Paris’ Louvre museum to return some frescoes that were stolen from the Valley of the Kings in the 1980s. Indeed, Hawass claims that the Louvre knew of the artefacts’ stolen origin and nevertheless purchased the frescoes in 2000 and have displayed them ever since. As a result, Egypt declared an end of relations between itself and the Louvre, ending a 200 year “partnership”. Although similar measures have been taken by Greek and Egyptian authorities in the past, this time it actually worked. France has announced the imminent return of the frescoes to Cairo. As a result, we may see increased political pressure to return mountains of stolen archaeology in the coming years.

From New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art to London’s British Museum and Berlin’s Egyptian Museum, thousands of pieces have been plundered or otherwise acquired since the Renaissance to adorn the walls of the once-great empires. From Napoleon’s wholesale acquisition of Egyptian antiquities in the late 1700s to Henrich Schliemann’s violent plunder of Troy in the late 1800s, pieces of Ancient history were whisked away to great museums at the expense of national ownership. Some would say that Ancient Athens and Sparta have as much to do with modern-day Australia as with modern-day Greece but regardless, the legendary cultures trace their nationalism back to these Antique city-states and statesmen.

Now that Egypt has established a precedent for archaeological restitution, the door is opened for the return of much more.

The Rosetta Stone made in 196 BC was quite a mundane boasting of the Greco-Macedonian Pharaoh Ptolemy V and of his new taxation regulations; it was Jean-François Champollion who made the 760 kilogram stone famous. Highly reminiscent of Ptolemaic Egypt’s culture, the stone melded ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, the more familiar Egyptian demotic dialect and finally the Greek alphabet known to our scholars. This is how the Frenchman translated the stone and eventually broke the code of hieroglyphics in 1822, finally revealing the true patrimonial treasure of Egypt. On display at the British Museum since 1802, Egyptian authorities have vainly tried to repatriate it but may have new methods of obtaining restitution.

More famous still is the Bust of Nefertiti made c. 1400 BC (or 1912 depending on its authenticity). The royal consort of pharaoh Akhenaten and possibly the mother of Tutankhamun, her only detailed portrait has been preserved on a plastered-covered bust found in the early XXth century. It has been essential for art historians, elucidating ancient Egyptian style and artistic influences; it has furthermore been hailed as a representative model of ancient beauty. Several specialists now affirm it is a fake or perhaps a copy of a once true bust. Nonetheless, Mr. Hawass, has demanded its return to Egypt from Berlin's Altes Museum directors, whom have categorically refused. It remains Berlin’s crowning jewel as a world-famous artefact but Cairo may soon use the political leverage they have discovered to repatriate the bust.

Finally, a relatively obscure yet poignant example of the quest for archaeological restitution remains the tale of the Elgin Marbles. In the early 1800s, Thomas Bruce, Earl of Elgin carved and wrapped up approximately half of the Parthenon’s frieze relief and many of the sculptures in Athens’ acropolis. Following a decade-long boat-ride back to England, the priceless treasures vandalized and carefully looted from Greece were proudly displayed in the British Museum where they are still today for all to enjoy. Greek officials have lobbied for the return of their heritage without much success or indeed any response of any kind for many decades. In protest, Greece’s new Antiquities museum was built with a very large room with virtually nothing in it safe for one sign that says “Elgin Marbles”. To remind visitors of the perceived theft and to be ready for an eventual return, Greece has not given up and may now follow in Egypt’s footsteps to involve political pressure in the process.

In the end, it will not matter who displays the artefacts as long as they are intact. They predate nationalism and national affiliation by millennia and will continue to represent the collective cultural legacy to all of western civilization and indeed to the world. That being said, it is inevitable that the more we move them, the greater the risk of loss and damage. And a stolen relic on display in Paris is better than no relic at all.

[Max Mendel Holland (born December 9, 1950, in Providence, Rhode Island) is a journalist, author, and the editor of Washington Decoded, an online newsletter from the nation's capital that began publishing March 11, 2007.]

Under the editorship of Graydon Carter, Vanity Fair has become the most reliable purveyor of Camelot nostalgia.

Over the last decade, either the glossy magazine or vanityfair.com has published 19 articles, book excerpts, or photo spreads about the Kennedys. In the last three years alone, Kennedys (Jack, Bobby, Jackie, or some combination thereof) have three times graced Vanity Fair’s cover, one of the most sought-after pieces of magazine real estate in the business. Single-handedly, Graydon Carter seems bent on extending what Garry Wills once called “the Kennedy time in our national life.”[1]

The latest cover story in the October 2009 issue is unlike its predecessors though. It’s neither a JBK syrupy excerpt from a fawning book, nor an amply-illustrated puff piece. Instead, Sam Kashner’s “A Clash of Camelots” purports to be a serious, original piece of journalism about the 1966-67 “Manchester affair,” the first episode to tarnish the Kennedys’ escutcheon following the 1963 assassination of JFK. As the table of contents states, “[VF contributing editor] Sam Kashner unearths the story behind [William Manchester’s The Death of a President,] a best-seller that captivated the nation, divided the Kennedys, and nearly destroyed the author.”

Far from unearthing the story, or even shedding new light on it, the article mostly recycles what has long been known. Newspapers, especially The New York Times, covered the so-called “battle of the book” in agonizing detail for months. Afterwards, the heavily publicized struggle was the subject of three books, two of them authored by Times-men. Eventually, even Manchester had his unabridged say, publishing a 60-page chapter about the controversy in a compilation of his essays.[2]

Still, there wouldn’t be much to criticize—and it would be churlish to do so—if this boast were only the issue. The genuine problem is the article’s many errors of commission and omission, including Kashner’s uncritical acceptance of clichés and untruths in Manchester’s own narrative that have been circulating for 42 years. Some of these issues have long been points of dispute, while the truth about others has only become known recently, through the release of such sources as the once-secret Lyndon Johnson tape recordings.

The VF editors’ note says Kashner’s interest in the Manchester story was first aroused in 1984, when John F. Kennedy, Jr. told Kashner that The Death of a President was the “only book he would ever read about his father’s assassination. This revelation piqued Kashner’s obsession with the controversial history . . . ” If so, Kashner’s obsessiveness is strictly limited to sources that conform to a flattering portrayal of William Manchester and his book, which Kashner considers a “masterpiece.”

Here are some of the outstanding errors of fact, interpretation, and history in “A Clash of Camelots.”

• And [Manchester] would have one crucial source that the [Warren] Commission did not: Jacqueline Kennedy.

This assertion reflects one of the themes in Kashner’s article: that Manchester’s work was superior to that of the supposedly discredited Warren Commission, even though the author and that panel happened to agree on who killed President Kennedy.

It is true that Manchester enjoyed unlimited access to the president’s widow. It is definitely untrue, however, that the Warren Commission had no access at all. On June 5, 1964, Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren and the panel’s general counsel, J. Lee Rankin, interviewed Mrs. Kennedy at her Georgetown home in the presence of Robert Kennedy.[3] That the interview lasted only 10 minutes had everything to do with the Warren’s desire not to make the former First Lady recount her husband’s violent death in any more detail than necessary.

Besides being inaccurate, Kashner’s assertion is also misleading. What Mrs. Kennedy had to say was of a widely different value, given that the Warren Commission andWmman Manchester had distinct assignments (which Kashner acknowledges). The Commission’s primary task was not to write a history, but to determine insofar as possible who had killed President Kennedy. For that purpose Jacqueline Kennedy’s testimony turned out to be wrenching, but of marginal probative value—the Zapruder film of her reactions conveyed more information than her testimony. To anyone writing a narrative account, however, Mrs. Kennedy’s recollections were not only vital but indispensable. Her refusal to be interviewed by anyone but Manchester was precisely why (as noted by Kashner) author Jim Bishop, Manchester’s arch-rival, complained, “She’s trying to copyright the assassination.”[4]

• With [Jacqueline Kennedy’s] style, her youth and beauty, her intelligence, she was one of the president’s most formidable assets.

Kashner looks back at JBK with rose-colored glasses, his view influenced by her dazzling and steely performance after the assassination. In that he is hardly alone. In truth, however, reviews of Jacqueline Kennedy’s behavior and value as a political spouse were very mixed before November 22, 1963. Her distaste for retail politics was a poorly kept secret, if not the subject of venomous gossip.[5] She was often aloof, like a modern-day Marie Antoinette, and frequently inconsiderate of the needs of other political wives. On the morning of November 22, for example, JBK didn’t bother to inform the other political spouses of her wardrobe selection, as any thoughtful First Lady would do, especially one as fashion-conscious as Jackie. Consequently, Nellie Connally was deeply chagrined at breakfast to find that she “had chosen wrong”—she had also donned a pink wool suit.[6]

While First Lady, Jacqueline Kennedy regarded the repetitive dreariness of politicking as beneath her, making her far from a formidable campaigner, though the “charm of her shyness” made her a vivid attraction.[7] The president’s sisters (and sister-in-law, Ethel) were always far more visible on the campaign trail than Jacqueline, and there were rumblings of discontent among many Democrats over her common refusal to participate in party functions.[8]

• Manchester later showed [Jacqueline Kennedy] still frames of dress manufacturer Abraham Zapruder’s film, which had caught the entire assassination on 8mm Kodachrome.

The notion that the assassination was captured in full on the Zapruder film is a fallacy, one of the oldest factoids about the Kennedy assassination. Manchester wrongly accepted it and Kashner repeats it without hesitation, even though the film’s first few frames reveal Secret Service agents already reacting to the first shot.[9] That means the film captured the assassination after it commenced, as this New York Times oped from 2007 explained, and these two articles lay out in abundant detail.[10]

• [Manchester] discovered deep political enmities that had simmered at the time of the assassination, not just against the Kennedys, but among the Democrats as well. Indeed that’s what had compelled Kennedy’s trip to Dallas in the first place . . . Kennedy didn’t want to lose the state in the upcoming ’64 election so he’d agreed to go to Dallas in an attempt to heal the rift.

The suggestion that Manchester “discovered” the rift among Texas Democrats would be laughable to any self-respecting Texas political reporter from the early ‘60s. The bitter postwar struggle for the soul of the Democratic Party in Texas (there was no Republican Party, except in name, until the late ‘60s) had provided fodder for local political journalists for years. Even Manchester, who was quite proud of his extensive research for the book, never claimed to have made such a discovery.
It is true that in the immediate aftermath of the assassination, Kennedy aides put out the cover story that the president went to Texas to “heal” the state Democratic Party—but that’s because the truth, which has been known since at least 1967, was a lot less appealing. President Kennedy had gone to Texas for the same reason Willie Sutton frequented banks: that’s where the money was. As Charles Caldwell, a long-time aide to then-Senator Ralph Yarborough (D-Texas), recalled about Kennedy’s visit, “Is Texas a place to go for [campaign] money? It sure is! That’s what you do. You go to Texas to raise money.”[11]

A month before the trip to Texas, the president had kicked off his personal fund-raising efforts with a mammoth, $100-a-plate dinner at the Commonwealth Life Armory in Boston that enriched party coffers by as much as $680,000.[12] The next logical site was Texas because of Lyndon Johnson’s place on the ticket, which gave Kennedy entrée to well-heeled Democrats, of whom there were many in Texas. The president had begun prodding Texas’s reluctant governor, John Connally, to organize a big fund-raiser since mid-1962. But Connally, acutely aware that the president was not particularly popular in Texas, and that a presidential visit would put a strain on the state’s seriously riven Democratic Party, had continually made excuses, until the president finally pinned him down in June 1963.[13]

“If we don’t raise funds in another state, I want to do so in Massachusetts and Texas,” Kennedy told Connally as they planned the trip in June. “If we don’t carry another state next year, I want to carry Texas and Massachusetts.” Indeed, President Kennedy’s initial impulse was to have fund-raisers in four Texas cities. Connally only fended him off by arguing that Kennedy would be seen as “trying to financially rape the state” after having made few appearances there during his first term.[14]

Once it was decided to hold the fund-raiser in “neutral” Austin—the rivalry between Houston and Dallas being second only to the split in the state’s Democratic Party—a three-day tour of the state’s four largest cities was added in recognition of Texas’s vital electoral role, as well as the general slide in the president’s ratings in the South and West.[15] Some of the Confederate states he had relied on in 1960 were undoubtedly going to be lost to him in 1964, making it more vital to hang onto more diversified and growing Southern states like Texas and Florida. Yet the trip’s primary purpose remained fund-raising.

After the assassination, Kennedy aides wanted to obscure that the president had gone to Texas for something as crass as raising money. So they invented the notion that he was on a mission to heal the state’s Democrats and perform a kind of political triage. That was “pure hogwash,” as John Connally put it 1978, and there is plenty of evidence to back him up.[16]

But William Manchester bought into the fable, as does Kashner. Indeed, to this day one can find the story repeated credulously and endlessly in publications ranging from The Nation to The Washington Post.[17] That doesn’t make it true though.

• Though he would eventually come to share [the Warren Commission’s] conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald had been the sole gunman in the assassination . . . [Manchester] was not overly impressed by the men on the Commission, especially as much of their research fell to junior staff. (“I have more investigative experience than any of them,” he felt.) And Robert Kennedy remained skeptical of [the Warren Commission’s] findings for the rest of his life, which would be ended by another assassin’s bullet five years later.

Perhaps Kashner is merely trying to be sophisticated here, since it isn’t fashionable to admit the Warren Commission did a good (though not perfect) job. The findings of the “junior staff,” to which Manchester allegedly felt superior, have withstood the most important test of all, the test of time. On the most critical forensic issue—the shooting sequence in Dealey Plaza—the Commission’s junior staffers realized that the FBI’s initial analysis was impossible, and correctly found that one shot fired by Oswald had actually struck both President Kennedy and Governor John Connally.[18]

Meanwhile, Manchester—the supposedly more experienced investigator who “watched the Zapruder film close to 100 times,” according to Kashner—both relied heavily on the Commission’s work, and also offered his own scenario that made even less sense than the admittedly confused explanation offered in the Warren Report.[19] The majority of reliable witnesses heard three shots, and three expended cartridges were found in the assassin’s nest. Manchester’s own bias, however, led him to believe that only two shots were probably fired.

As a fellow ex-Marine, and because of the distances involved, Manchester decided that three shots were unlikely because Oswald “could scarcely have missed.” Consequently, Manchester alone suggested that Oswald was such a bungler that he might have started out with an expended cartridge in the rifle’s breech, thus accounting for the three cartridges on the floor.[20] Simultaneously, and to mollify critics who might note that most witnesses heard three shots, Manchester suggested that Oswald could have fired his rifle three times in less than six seconds, and still have managed his feat of arms of hitting the president in the back (and then Connally) with one shot, and then mortally wounding JFK in the head with another, while missing with a third. But three shots in that time-span and with that degree of accuracy are all but impossible to achieve in real life.

In short, while the Warren Commission’s explanation was less than ideal, Manchester, who had the luxury of almost two more years to research the assassination, did even worse.

Kashner’s assertion that Robert Kennedy “remained skeptical” is also an exaggeration, Wrnrpt or at very least, woefully misleading. While many critics of the Warren Commission, ranging from Kennedy hagiographer Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. to the shyster Mark Lane, have alleged that RFK privately harbored deep reservations about the panel’s verdict, the one and only time Robert Kennedy spoke publicly about the Commission he endorsed it without qualification. After declaring for the presidency in 1968, Kennedy stated that he was against reopening the investigation into his brother’s assassination and “stands by the [Warren] Report.”[21] If Kennedy harbored any private doubts, they undoubtedly stemmed from his own complicity in the CIA’s attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro, and from the constraints on the Commission’s investigation of possible Cuban involvement. The Commission did not state that there was no foreign complicity—only that it had been unable to find evidence of a foreign-directed (Soviet or Cuban) conspiracy.[22]

Left Unsaid

Kashner’s errors of commission are compounded by several errors of omission. One would not know from reading the article that many of the poignant, heart-tugging episodes rendered in The Death of a President were simply not true, as the tape recordings from the Johnson presidency underscore. One of the most infamous smears, of course, was the “deer-hunting incident.” According to Manchester, Lyndon Johnson had shamed a reluctant President-elect Kennedy into going deer-hunting on the LBJ Ranch in November 1960, and then later, pestered an “inwardly appalled” JFK until the president finally displayed a mounted deer head in the White House. The “memory of the creature’s death had been haunting” to JFK, wrote Manchester, “and afterward he had relived it with his wife . . . to heal the inner scar.”[23] Manchester actually opened his book with this episode until wiser heads prevailed. Supposedly, it was a graphic illustration of Texans’ penchant for violence, the same propensity that would later stoke Lee Harvey Oswald into action. It mattered not that the incident didn’t happen, at least not the way Manchester depicted it.[24]

Manchester’s description of the hunt was not an isolated mistake, but one of many inaccuracies and apocryphal tales. And in every significant instance, the errors ran inSwear only one direction—against Lyndon Johnson. They all tended to cast him in the worst possible light, almost as if he embodied the forces of violence and irrationality that allegedly incited Oswald. And when Johnson wasn’t the personification of Texas blood lust, he was the boorish and impatient usurper, so anxious to get his hands on the levers of power that he could not bear to wait to be sworn in.

In essence, The Death of a President attempted to reverse what was rightly seen as Lyndon Johnson’s finest hour, and recast it to the Kennedys’ perceived advantage. Nor was Manchester shy, at least before the controversy erupted, about admitting what he had done. As he wrote Mrs. Kennedy in July 1966, “though I tried desperately to suppress my bias against a certain eminent statesman who always reminds me of somebody in a Grade D movie on the late show, the prejudice showed through.”[25] Little wonder why Garry Wills, writing in 1994, called William Manchester “the Parson Weems of the Kennedy cult.”[26]

Near the end of Kashner’s article, he openly regrets that Manchester’s masterpiece is out of print and hints at something untoward. This claim, too, is misleading because it is hardly unusual for a book published in 1967 to be out of print. Indeed, a majority (12) of Manchester’s 18 titles are out of print, and with one exception, the ones in print were all published in 1978 or later.

If there is something to lament, it’s that Manchester’s powerful, but romantic and at times malignant mytho-drama, in print or not, still defines how many Americans remember the assassination.

[Mr. Sorley, a military historian and retired Army Lieutenant Colonel, is the author of "A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America's Last Years in Vietnam" (Harcourt, 1999).]

More than 30 years have passed since North Vietnam, in gross violation of the 1973 Paris Peace Accords, conquered South Vietnam. That outcome was partly the result of greatly increased logistical support to the North from its communist backers. It was also the result of America's failure to keep its commitments to the South.

Those commitments included promises to maintain a robust level of financial support, to replace combat materiel, and even the use of air power to support the South in case of aggression by the North. That failure was the doing of a U.S. Congress that had tired of the country's long involvement in a war in Southeast Asia and cared nothing for the sacrifices of its own armed forces or those of the South Vietnamese people.

Since then, whenever America has entered into other military actions abroad or contemplated such commitments, the specter of Vietnam has been raised. It is entirely appropriate that earlier military experiences be examined for such "lessons learned" as they may yield. But it is equally essential that those prior campaigns be accurately understood before any valid comparisons are made. When it comes to the Vietnam War, much skewed or inaccurate commentary has impeded our understanding of that conflict and its outcome.

All the better-known early works on the Vietnam War—by Stanley Karnow, Neil Sheehan, George Herring—concentrated disproportionately on the early period of American involvement when Gen. William C. Westmoreland commanded U.S. forces. As a consequence, many came to view the entirety of the war as more or less a homogeneous whole, and to apply to the whole endeavor valid criticisms of the early years, ignoring what happened after Gen. Creighton Abrams took command soon after the 1968 Tet Offensive.

William Colby, who headed American support for the South Vietnamese pacification program (and was later director of the CIA), once remarked that the prevalence of such truncated treatments of the Vietnam War was like what Americans would know about World War II if the histories of that conflict had stopped before Stalingrad, the invasion of North Africa and Guadalcanal.

We now know, or should, that virtually everything changed when Abrams took command. The changes grew out of his understanding of the nature of the war, and of his conviction that upgrading South Vietnam's armed forces and rooting out the enemy's covert infrastructure in rural hamlets and villages must be accorded equal priority with combat operations. Even combat operations were radically reconfigured...

[Fred Siegel is a visiting professor at St. Francis College and a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute's City Journal. Dan DiSalvo is a professor at City College of New York.]

Ever since the 1972 Democratic convention nominated George McGovern over the objections of the AFL-CIO, the standard wisdom has been that organized labor's power in American politics has declined dramatically. The failure of the current Democrat-dominated Congress to pass labor's highest legislative priority, the Employee Free Choice Act ("card check"), is taken as indicative of unions' political incapacity. But the picture looks very different on the state and local level where public sector employee unions have gone from one victory to another. Indeed, they are the one group, besides Goldman Sachs executives, that's done well during the current Great Recession. Public sector unions have become political powerhouses in New York, New Jersey, Washington, California, and a host of other states. They have become so powerful as to threaten the Madisonian system set up to constrain any one faction from overwhelming the public interest.

Once upon a time public sector workers received less pay than their private sector counterparts in return for better benefits and greater job security. But that bargain has been breached. Public sector wages have more than caught up, while the differential between public and private sector benefits has increased so much that public sector work, particularly for the unskilled, is greatly coveted. To protect such benefits, the unions have tenaciously opposed Senator Max Baucus's plan to tax expensive health insurance plans to finance an extension of coverage. Supporters of public sector union power have developed a rationale for the government employees' gold-plated perks. The argument is that public employees are the vanguard of the working class. As such, the benefits they achieve will eventually have to be matched by private sector employers. As Carla Katz, the leader of New Jersey's Communications Workers of America, explained to Paul Mulshine of the Newark Star-Ledger, reformers embrace "the progressive theory that unless you create a substantial wage and benefits package that reflects good jobs and the ability to have a middle-class life style, there will be a perpetual race to the bottom."

Katz not only represents thousands of state employees, she is also the richly rewarded former girlfriend of New Jersey governor Jon Corzine. Katz's influence on Corzine became clear in 2006 when the impassioned governor spoke to a Trenton rally of roughly 10,000 public workers and shouted out: "We will fight for a fair contract." Corzine was of course management in that situation, not labor. But with the power of the public sector unions to drive election outcomes, they now sit on both sides of the bargaining table. Unlike private sector unions, the sheer number of workers represented is not the linchpin of their influence. Private sector unions have a natural adversary in the owners of the companies with whom they negotiate. But public sector unions have no such natural counterweight. They are a classic case of "client politics," where an interest group's concentrated efforts to secure rewards impose diffused costs on the mass of unorganized taxpayers. Also unlike private sector unions, those in the public sector can achieve influence on both sides of the bargaining table by making campaign contributions and organizing get-out-the-vote drives to elect politicians who then control the negotiations over their pay, benefits, and work rules. The result is a nefarious cycle: Politicians agree to generous government worker contracts; those workers then pay higher union dues a portion of which are funneled back into those same politicians' campaign war chests. It is a cycle that has driven California and New York to the edge of bankruptcy.

Consider what happened in Washington State. After helping Democrats win full control of the legislature in 2002, the state affiliate of the Association of Federal, State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) and other unions persuaded lawmakers to lift the collective bargaining restrictions. Within three years the number of union members had doubled. With more state employees paying dues, the amount of union dollars flowing into the coffers of Democrats running in state elections also doubled. A prime beneficiary of such union generosity was Christine Gregoire, who became governor in 2004 after one of the closest elections in the state's history. (AFSCME gave $250,000 to the state Democratic party to help pay for the recount that handed her the election by 129 votes). Once in office, Gregoire negotiated contracts with the unions that resulted in double-digit salary increases, some exceeding 25 percent, for thousands of state employees. In 2007, J. Vander Stoep, an adviser to Republican Dino Rossi, Gregoire's 2004 opponent, prophetically remarked that the unions' arrangement with the Democrats was "a perfect machine to generate millions of dollars for her reelection. .  .  . They are building something that conceivably can never be undone--at taxpayer expense." In their 2008 rematch, Rossi lost again to Gregoire, this time by 194,614 votes.

Public sector unions with political influence can negotiate detailed work rules in which they largely exempt themselves from accountability in return for providing political support for their nominal managers. In New York City, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) have created a cartel to advance their own interests at the expense of the citizens and students. The teacher's contract is over 200 pages of small print. Reminiscent of the 12,000 United Auto Workers (UAW) who were paid not to work in the heyday of the UAW, nearly 800 Gotham "rubber room" teachers who have problems on the job are being paid not to work. The UFT has also negotiated with Bloomberg, mistakenly called an education reformer, a reduction in the number of days they must work to prepare for classes before school begins in September at the same time as their salary increases have been running at better than twice the rate of inflation.

But the teachers are not the only politically powerful labor force in New York, the nation's most-unionized state where 69 percent of public sector workers belong to collective bargaining units. In the nominally private health care sector, employees depend heavily on government programs, principally Medicare and Medicaid, for their livelihood. In the 1970s and 1980s, the local 1199 Drug, Hospital and Health Care Employees Union fought a running battle with New York's largely state and federally funded voluntary hospitals. Under the brilliant leadership of Dennis Rivera, 1199 built a top-notch political operation, and with the hospitals, which were barred from political activity, formed a partnership to maximize the flow of government revenue. The union-hospital alliance has been so successful in aligning itself with politicians, Democrat and Republican alike, that not only has 1199 been largely untouched by the downturn, but New York spends as much on Medicaid as California and Texas combined. And come boom or bust, hospital and health care employment in the state keeps growing. Rivera, who merged his local with the SEIU (Service Employees International Union), has now brought his political acumen to Washington as the SEIU's point-man on health care reform.

The combined power of the teachers and health care workers has made the New York state legislature a wholly owned subsidiary of the public sector unions. The law mandates that all new legislation be evaluated for its fiscal impact. In recent years those calculations were performed by an actuary named Jonathan Schwartz. In 2008, when Schwartz found that a piece of bipartisan legislation allowing city workers to retire early with full pension benefits would impose no new costs, the New York Times blew the whistle. Schwartz, who had been fired from a city job, worked not only for the state assembly but also, it turned out, for District Council 37 of the SEIU. When asked which other unions he had worked for, he replied, "How many unions are there?" His client list included the teachers, firefighters, detectives, correction officers, and bridge and tunnel officers. Not surprisingly New York State has the highest per-employee pension costs in the country.

Prior to World War II, a New York State Supreme Court justice neatly summarized the prevailing attitude toward public sector unions: "To tolerate or recognize any combination of Civil Service employees of the government as a labor organization or union is not only incompatible with the spirit of democracy but inconsistent with the spirit of democracy and inconsistent with every principle upon which our Government is founded." Laws permitting collective bargaining for public employees were virtually nonexistent. Even labor-friendly economists thought organizing most public sector employees was illegitimate. AFL-CIO president George Meany believed it was "impossible to bargain collectively with the government."

What produced the enormous expansion of public sector unions? In a case of unintended consequences, government unionism ironically developed from actions taken by those hostile to it. Many of the icons of the labor-left like New York's great mayor Fiorello LaGuardia and President Franklin Roosevelt were adamantly opposed to public sector unions. LaGuardia, who pledged to make New York a "one hundred percent [private sector] union" town, had a civic vision of public employees as the people's workers, exemplars of the common good. Famed for dropping in unexpectedly on city offices and dressing down slackers, LaGuardia explained that he did "not want any of the pinochle club atmosphere to take hold" in his city government. "The right to strike against the government," he insisted, "is not and cannot be recognized."

In 1935, Roosevelt signed the Wagner Act, the first peacetime effort to support the growth of private sector unions. Its aim in the words of its sponsor, New York senator Robert Wagner, was "encouraging the practice and procedure of collective bargaining." But like his close ally LaGuardia, Roosevelt drew a definite line when it came to government workers. "Meticulous attention," the president insisted, "should be paid to the special relations and obligations of public servants to the public itself and to the Government. . . . The process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service." Both men feared that liberalism would be compromised by the unavoidably self-serving nature of public sector unionism.

But the mayor and the president opened the door to just what they opposed. In the bad old days of Tammany Hall, which had fought both LaGuardia and Roosevelt, the average tenure of a cop or teacher or garbage collector was five years. But with the rise of civil service reform backed by both men in the 1930s, public employees both in New York and the federal government began to gain lifetime security. Civil service reform, it turned out, was the precondition for unionization because it gave workers a long-term interest in their jobs and facilitated their capacity to express collective concerns. In 1958, New York mayor Robert Wagner, son of the senator behind the 1935 federal act, issued an executive order generally known as "the little Wagner Act." It gave city employees bargaining rights and provided their unions with exclusive representation. The city was soon turning over the dues from its workers to the union. Those dues soon provided political action funds to support union-backed candidates.

Running for reelection in 1961, Wagner faced a Democratic party revolt. The party's five borough chiefs were supporting his opponent, and Wagner made the unions the basis of his winning campaign. It was a turning point. Looking back in the wake of New York's mid-1970s fiscal crisis, Alex Rose, the head of the once powerful (and now defunct) New York Liberal party and a former labor leader, concluded that "the little Wagner Act" had proven a dreadful "mistake." Rose, who had also led the private sector clothing workers, explained that public sector "workers are not extracting a share of the profits but rather a share of taxes." Ultimately, he noted, his workers would be among those "footing the bill."

Ten weeks after Wagner's victory, President John F. Kennedy, who had been elected by the narrowest of margins in 1960, decided to mobilize public sector workers as a new source of political support. In mid-January 1962, he issued Executive Order 10988 giving federal workers the right to organize, though not to collectively bargain. Kennedy's action and Wagner's victory set off a wave of local union activity across the nation's major cities.

In states with laws favorable to unionism, public sector organizing has flourished; in states without such laws, it has not. If there is a specific point from which to mark the beginning of the current looming fiscal crisis in many blue states, it would be the wave of local strikes by public employees that were set in motion by Kennedy's executive order. His strategy succeeded beyond his wildest expectations. Like entitlement programs, the expansion of public sector unionism produced a self-generating dynamic for continual expansion. Public sector unions would occasionally experience temporary setbacks--as in the New York fiscal crisis of 1975--but they had the political clout to claw back any concessions made under duress.

During the Reagan years, the growth in local and state jobs was double the rate of population growth. In the downturn of the early 1990s, the New York Times warned that the states faced a "fiscal calamity." In 2002, during the next serious downturn, the National Governors Association insisted that the "states face the most dire fiscal situation since World War II." But in each case the growth of government and public sector pay packages merely stalled. It resumed as soon as the economy recovered.

There is broad agreement among economists that public sector unions' political power increases government spending. As reported in the New York Times, public-sector wages and benefits over the past decade have grown twice as fast as those in the average private-sector. An Empire Center for New York State Policy study found that in 2006 state and local government employees in New York were paid higher average salaries in eight out of ten regions of the state. If one excludes jobs in finance in New York City and the Southern Tier, private sector employees earned slightly less than government ones statewide.

The downturn has been very tough on private sector workers. But the public sector, particularly when it comes to pensions for uniformed workers, has been a different matter. In New York City, where public sector union benefits have grown twice as fast as those in the private sector since 2000, firefighters may retire after 20 years at half pay. Pension benefits for a new retiree averaged just under $73,000 (all exempt from state and local taxes). Many also collect an annual $12,000 "Christmas bonus." To top it off, they receive a health insurance policy that is worth about $10,000 annually. New York City is also paying benefits to 10,000 retired police officers under 50 years of age.

Such cases abound. According to the Boston Globe, 225 of the 2,338 Massachusetts state police officers made more than Governor Deval Patrick's $140,535 annual salary in 2006. Four state troopers received more than $200,000, and 123 others were paid more than $150,000. The Chicago Sun-Times reports that in suburban Chicago, there are school administrators--a unionized profession--who are making over $400,000. California teachers are represented by one of the country's most powerful teachers' unions and earn 25 percent more than the national average. Forbes has reported that there are California prison guards making $300,000 a year.

While the wage parity between public and private sector workers is largely unchanged since 2002, public sector benefits are a different matter. For every $1-an-hour pay increase, noted Dennis Cauchon in USA Today, public employees have gotten $1.17 in new benefits. Private workers have gotten just .58 cents in benefits for every $1 raise. This gap worries left-liberal labor economist Barry Bluestone. The price of state and local public services increased by 41 percent nationally between 2000 and 2008. Private services only increased by 27 percent. The benefit growth has continued unabated into the Great Recession, and Bluestone says the gap will inevitably produce a backlash.

Like banks, but with even less self-control, state governments make long-term promises in boom times while depending on the short-term flow of revenues. But when the boom ends, the benefits that have been ratcheted up have to be paid for out of a declining private sector economy. Barring a sharp recovery, state and local government tax-funded pension contributions in New York are likely to triple over the next five years in order to pay out the pension benefits guaranteed by the state constitution. (This is equally true in Illinois.) California's public pension fund liability has already topped $200 billion, and in cities such as Oakland, Vallejo, and Rio Vista bankruptcy looms.

In the states and cities where government workers' unions are strong, they have formed alliances with nonprofit advocacy groups such as ACORN and foundations committed to greater government involvement in the economy and society. The Manhattan Institute's Steven Malanga argues that this constellation of forces is in effect a new Tammany Hall. It is, says Seymour Lachman, a former New York state senator who now heads a center for government reform at Wagner College, "the ward heeler system of Boss Tweed's Tammany Hall wrapped in some kind of progressive disguise." The old Tammany, however, was subject to electoral defeats. The new Tammanies have proved self-perpetuating. In California, Governor Schwarzenegger's ill-organized effort to roll back public sector union power in 2005 led to the muscleman's first defeat, then his political evisceration, and now the Golden State's fiscal humiliation. New York City and State are on a similar course. Across the country the new political machine has mostly been aligned with the Democratic party. Some individual unions, however, such as California's prison guards and New York's hospital workers, have been protected and advanced by Republicans. Still others play a pragmatic balance-of-power game, forging short-lived marriages of convenience with either political party.

Public sector unions are beginning to strike out on their own, too. If the recent primary elections in New York are any indication, it is only a matter of time before, using the vehicle of the Working Families party (WFP), they take control of New York City government. New York allows third parties on the ballot, and the Working Families party--organized in 1998 as an alliance between labor unions and ACORN--cross-endorses allies in the Democratic party. Yet the WFP is thriving while New York's Democrats atrophy. In last week's New York City primaries, WFP candidates for city council won easily, as did the party's candidates for the city's second and third highest offices: comptroller and public advocate. Those are the best platforms from which to make a run for mayor of New York City when Bloomberg finally gives up his throne.

Public sector unions bring to the fore what James Madison called "the violence of faction" and its threat to the "permanent and aggregate interests of the community." This can't be blamed on the unions; they're advancing their members' interests. The fault lies with politicians, particularly those governors and mayors who have been willing to sabotage the public interest to smooth the path to their own reelections.

In the absence of tough-minded reform leaders who will take on the public sector unions, the fiscal future of states and localities is bleak.

I was listening to National Public Radio on the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to President Barack Obama, and they brought on some nonentity from one of Rupert Murdoch's faux "magazines," who delivered himself of the remark that when he heard the news, he broke out laughing. He laughed at Obama. He is being paid by the Aussie media monopolist, the billionaire bully, to laugh at Obama.

The Right in the US objected to Obama getting the peace prize on the alleged grounds that he had not yet done anything to deserve it. But the Right in the United States is to peace as velociraptors were to vegetarianism. They don't believe in the ideal for which the award stands in the first place. And they find President Obama laughable, so they can't imagine him getting any awards. They have underestimated him badly and will probably pay a price for that. They misunderstand the Nobel Peace Prize and its history, and the Rupert Murdoch Right (he pays for a lot of this pollution of our airwaves) would not have agreed with any of the past awards.

Alfred Nobel outlined in his will the grounds on which the Peace Prize was to be given, saying it should go annually to the person who "shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding of peace congresses." The modern committee considers work toward the reduction of nuclear arsenals in the same light as the reduction of standing armies, hence its award to Linus Pauling.

The American Rightwing would not have approved of Woodrow Wilson getting the prize for helping found the League of Nations. They do not believe in international cooperation or multilateralism in the first place. They think America should cowboy it. They are the tribe of 'bring'em on' and 'wanted dead or alive.' They are about trapping the country in quagmires so as to throw cash to their cronies in the military-industrial complex. They like wars, not peace. They don't care how many people they kill in the global south. A million Iraqis dead? They deny it or justify it or blame it on someone else. They are bottom feeders.

They would have considered Frederic Passy, the first peace Nobelist, as woolly-headed dreamer and laughed at a Universal Peace Conference organized just a little over a decade before the mass slaughter of World War I. They would have dismissed Jane Addams as a "socialist." And what would have provoked them to more gales of laughter than the 1935 award to the German pacifist Carl von Ossietzky. How'd that work out, they'd snicker as they elbowed each other (with any luck breaking some of each other's ribs). If there is anyone they find more laughable than Barack Obama, it is Jimmy Carter (the greatest ex-president in American history), the 2002 awardee. Mohammad Elbaradei of the International Atomic Energy Agency repeatedly got in the way of the American Right's war plans, so presumably they didn't rejoice at his 2005 prize. They don't believe in climate change or global warming and want us to switch to the dirtiest coal possible, so Al Gore's 2007 prize set them giggling, as well.

Matt Corley explained at the time how Murdochians insisted that Al Gore had no accomplishments worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize and that it should have gone to Gen. Petraeus instead. I admire both men, but by the criteria outlined in Nobel's will, it was Gore who had a claim on the prize.

Barack Obama was given the prize because he is a game-changer. Obama has dedicated himself to reducing and ultimately scrapping the nuclear arsenals that threaten the world with nuclear winter or a destruction of the ozone layer; either event would be catastrophic for human beings' existence on the planet. Obama has already made a substantial change in relations between the US and the Muslim world. Two years ago we were talking about whether Cheney could convince Americans to go to war on Iran. Now Washington is engaging in direct talks with Tehran that have eased tensions.

Whether she or he actually achieves peace or not is unpredictable, but game changers are clearly visible to everyone. The hand shake between Rabin and Arafat in the early 1990s was potentially a game changer, and the Oslo deal would have profoundly enhanced world peace if it had worked (it might even have averted 9/11 and the subsequent wars). Al Gore's campaign for the environment was a game changer. Shirine Ebadi's dedication to a rule of law in Iran is a game changer, and she gives hope to many otherwise cynical youth and women.

For those who are giggling and demanding concrete improvements, it is worth noting that most of the recipients have been idealists rather than practical persons. Obama is both, and therefore he has a real shot at vindicating the social worth of his policies in future. Rightwing policies were tried for 8 years and they failed. Miserably.

[John Milton Cooper, a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin, is the author of the forthcoming “Woodrow Wilson: A Biography.”]

PRESIDENT OBAMA’S surprise Nobel Peace Prize is only the second in the last century that a sitting president has received. The first was presented in December 1920, when the Nobel Committee of the Norwegian Parliament awarded Woodrow Wilson the peace prize for 1919. Beyond the coincidence of both men residing in the White House, however, Presidents Obama and Wilson look like the starkest study in contrasts in when and how each received this prize.

For example, while Mr. Obama is being honored at the beginning of his presidency and while his popularity is high, Wilson’s prize came three months before the end of his presidency and at the lowest point in his personal and political life. It came a year and a half after the signing of the Treaty of Versailles, which ended World War I. The intervening months had witnessed a series of defeats and disasters for Wilson and his policies.

He had returned home from Paris to face a spite-filled, partisan deadlock over ratification of the peace treaty, which would carry with it membership in the new League of Nations — the international organization Wilson had played the central role in creating. In the Senate, some of his Republican opponents rejected league membership altogether, while others, most notably Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, would accept membership only under severe restrictions that many believed would cripple America’s ability to help the organization fulfill its mission.

Wilson first tried negotiating with the senators, and when they rebuffed his efforts, he took his case to the people, mounting a whirlwind campaign-style speaking tour across the country. He never completed that tour. His doctor, seeing him exhausted and showing symptoms of impending collapse, rushed Wilson back to the White House, where he suffered a stroke. He never fully functioned as president again, and his remaining time in office saw the worst instance of presidential disability in the nation’s history.

Physically, Wilson’s stroke left him partly paralyzed and enfeebled; psychologically, it unhinged his emotional balance and impaired his judgment. Faced with Lodge’s reservations, Wilson from his sickbed rejected all talk of compromise and ordered Democratic senators to accept virtually unconditional approval of the treaty. After an initial defeat of the treaty in November 1919, a bipartisan group of senators tried to find a middle ground, only to fail in the face of intransigence by both Lodge and Wilson. The treaty went down to a second defeat in March 1920, prompting the president to tell his doctor, “the Devil is a busy man.” As a result of those votes, the United States never ratified the Treaty of Versailles and never joined the League of Nations.

Still worse humiliation followed for Wilson. Public opinion largely turned against him. The Republican nominee in 1920, the handsome, mellifluous Warren Harding, called for “not heroics but healing, not nostrum but normalcy, not revolution but restoration, not agitation but adjustment, not surgery but serenity” — all ways of drawing a sharp line between himself and Wilson. Not surprisingly, the Republicans won one of the biggest popular and electoral victories ever; Cordell Hull, then a just-defeated member of Congress but later Franklin Roosevelt’s secretary of state, called it “a tidal wave.”

Coming just a month after that repudiation at the polls, the peace prize offered balm to Wilson’s wounded body and soul. The news surprised him, but it should not have. With the Great War over, the leading peacemaker and author of a bold new plan to rid the world of war was the logical, well-nigh inescapable choice

Yet the prize was a case of a prophet enjoying greater honor among others than among his own people. Abroad, reactions were generally approving, even among some figures from the defeated Central Powers. At home, Republicans in general and Lodge in particular ignored the event, while privately they were itching to take power and have a chance to show what they trumpeted as their better approaches to peace and security — plans that did not include the League of Nations...

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