Roundup: Talking About History
This is where we excerpt articles about history that appear in the media. Among the subjects included on this page are: anniversaries of historical events, legacies of presidents, cutting-edge research, and historical disputes.
SOURCE: National Archives: Prologue (Fall issue) (10-1-07)
[Samuel W. Rushay, Jr., is supervisory archivist with the Truman Library in Independence, Missouri, where he also worked from 1993 to 1997. From 1997 to 2007, he was an archivist and subject matter expert at the Nixon Presidential Materials Staff at the National Archives at College Park, Maryland. A Columbus, Ohio, native, he holds a doctorate in U.S. history from Ohio University.]
Earlier this year, on July 11, 2007, the privately run Nixon Library in Yorba Linda, California, was turned over to the federal government and made part of the system of presidential libraries operated by the National Archives and Records Administration, with a staff of federal employees.
However, the review of the Nixon White House tapes—recordings made between 1971 and 1973 in the Oval Office and other locations—will continue at the National Archives at College Park, Maryland, until all the tapes have been reviewed.
There is a scene in the 1974 movie The Conversation in...
Earlier this year, on July 11, 2007, the privately run Nixon Library in Yorba Linda, California, was turned over to the federal government and made part of the system of presidential libraries operated by the National Archives and Records Administration, with a staff of federal employees.
However, the review of the Nixon White House tapes—recordings made between 1971 and 1973 in the Oval Office and other locations—will continue at the National Archives at College Park, Maryland, until all the tapes have been reviewed.
There is a scene in the 1974 movie The Conversation in...
Friday, November 30, 2007 - 12:57
Comments
SOURCE: Moscow Times (11-29-07)
[Leon Aron, resident scholar and director of Russian studies at the American Enterprise Institute, is the author of "Russia's Revolution: Essays 1989-2006."]
Twenty years after Mikhail Gorbachev initiated glasnost, it is clear that, like every fateful "tipping point" in human history, the change has furnished enough material for scholars to plumb for many years. It may be too early to appreciate what glasnost has contributed, its depth, its passions and, yes, even its significance. But we can try.
Glasnost, or openness, goes at least as far back as 1841, when Russia's first great liberal reformer, Count Mikhail Speransky, invoked this word among his recommendations for the "governing of Siberia" in an article published two years after his death.
What was this phenomenon -- entirely nonviolent but so deadly for the Soviet regime -- all about in 1987? Lines around the block for newspapers and magazines? People signing up on...
Twenty years after Mikhail Gorbachev initiated glasnost, it is clear that, like every fateful "tipping point" in human history, the change has furnished enough material for scholars to plumb for many years. It may be too early to appreciate what glasnost has contributed, its depth, its passions and, yes, even its significance. But we can try.
Glasnost, or openness, goes at least as far back as 1841, when Russia's first great liberal reformer, Count Mikhail Speransky, invoked this word among his recommendations for the "governing of Siberia" in an article published two years after his death.
What was this phenomenon -- entirely nonviolent but so deadly for the Soviet regime -- all about in 1987? Lines around the block for newspapers and magazines? People signing up on...
Thursday, November 29, 2007 - 14:13
SOURCE: WaPo (11-25-07)
President Lincoln's health has long fascinated medical historians, and now a California doctor has come up with a new theory after exhaustive research that, he argues, explains all of Lincoln's known features and symptoms. He concludes Lincoln had a rare genetic cancer syndrome that might have killed him within six months had he not been assassinated. Read more of the story: Is Lincoln Earliest Recorded Case of Rare Disease? (The Post, Nov. 26)
Join Washington Post staff writer David Brown and John G. Sotos, the author of this study, for an online discussion on Tuesday, Nov. 27 at 11 a.m. ET.
***
David Brown: Greetings fans of Abraham Lincoln, medical history, and retrospective diagnosis. We have an interesting subject today, namely the hypothesis that Lincoln had MEN 2B, a rare genetic cancer syndrome. We are lucky to have on the chat the author of the hypothesis, John G. Sotos, a physician and occasional author on topics of presidential health....
Join Washington Post staff writer David Brown and John G. Sotos, the author of this study, for an online discussion on Tuesday, Nov. 27 at 11 a.m. ET.
***
David Brown: Greetings fans of Abraham Lincoln, medical history, and retrospective diagnosis. We have an interesting subject today, namely the hypothesis that Lincoln had MEN 2B, a rare genetic cancer syndrome. We are lucky to have on the chat the author of the hypothesis, John G. Sotos, a physician and occasional author on topics of presidential health....
Tuesday, November 27, 2007 - 20:47
SOURCE: American Scholar (10-1-07)
[Gorman Beauchamp, associate professor of humanities at the University of Michigan, is the author of a book on Jack London and essays on subjects ranging from Shakespeare to science fiction.]
We live amid a veritable tsunami of apology. The Catholic Church, which, of course, has much to apologize for, has, of late, offered mea culpas to Galileo, the Jews, the gypsies, Jan Hus, whom it burned at the stake in 1415, even to Constantinople (now Istanbul) for its sacking 800 years ago by the knights of the Fourth Crusade, an event for which the late John Paul II expressed “deep regret.” No wonder that a group in England, claiming descent from the medieval Knights Templars, is asking the Vatican to apologize for the violent suppression of the order and for torturing to death its Grand Master Jacques de Molay in 1314, an apology timed to commemorate the 700th anniversary of that fell deed. In America, the National Council of Churches apologized to Native Americans for Europeans’...
We live amid a veritable tsunami of apology. The Catholic Church, which, of course, has much to apologize for, has, of late, offered mea culpas to Galileo, the Jews, the gypsies, Jan Hus, whom it burned at the stake in 1415, even to Constantinople (now Istanbul) for its sacking 800 years ago by the knights of the Fourth Crusade, an event for which the late John Paul II expressed “deep regret.” No wonder that a group in England, claiming descent from the medieval Knights Templars, is asking the Vatican to apologize for the violent suppression of the order and for torturing to death its Grand Master Jacques de Molay in 1314, an apology timed to commemorate the 700th anniversary of that fell deed. In America, the National Council of Churches apologized to Native Americans for Europeans’...
Tuesday, November 27, 2007 - 20:42
SOURCE: WSJ (11-26-07)
[Mr. Yushchenko is Ukraine's president.]
Seventy-five years ago the Ukrainian people fell victim to a crime of unimaginable horror. Usually referred to in the West as the Great Famine or the Terror Famine, it is known to Ukrainians as the Holodomor. It was a state-organized program of mass starvation that in 1932-33 killed an estimated seven million to 10 million Ukrainians, including up to a third of the nation's children. With grotesque understatement the Soviet authorities dismissed this event as a "bad harvest." Their intention was to exonerate themselves of responsibility and suppress knowledge of both the human causes and human consequences of this tragedy. That is reason enough for us to pause and remember.
During the long decades of Soviet rule it was dangerous for Ukrainians to discuss their greatest national trauma. To talk of the Holodomor was a crime against the state, while the memoirs of eyewitnesses and the accounts of historians like...
Seventy-five years ago the Ukrainian people fell victim to a crime of unimaginable horror. Usually referred to in the West as the Great Famine or the Terror Famine, it is known to Ukrainians as the Holodomor. It was a state-organized program of mass starvation that in 1932-33 killed an estimated seven million to 10 million Ukrainians, including up to a third of the nation's children. With grotesque understatement the Soviet authorities dismissed this event as a "bad harvest." Their intention was to exonerate themselves of responsibility and suppress knowledge of both the human causes and human consequences of this tragedy. That is reason enough for us to pause and remember.
During the long decades of Soviet rule it was dangerous for Ukrainians to discuss their greatest national trauma. To talk of the Holodomor was a crime against the state, while the memoirs of eyewitnesses and the accounts of historians like...
Monday, November 26, 2007 - 17:29
SOURCE: The Current (Fall 2007) (11-1-07)
[James R. Russell is Mashtots Professor of Armenian Studies, Harvard University.]
Is this Columbia University? A professor of anthropology calls for a million Mogadishus, a professor of Arabic and Islamic Science tells a girl she isn't a Semite because her eyes are green, and a professor of Persian hails the destruction of the World Trade Center as the castrating of a double phallus. The most recent tenured addition to this rogues' gallery is to be an anthropologist, the principal thrust of whose magnum opus is the suggestion that archaeology in Israel is a sort of con game meant to persuade the unwary that Jews lived there in antiquity.
I could refute the claims that Nadia Abu El-Haj makes in her book, but respected specialists have done so already in Isis, the Journal of Near Eastern Studies, and elsewhere. Facts on the Ground fits firmly into the postmodern academic genre, in which facts and evidence are subordinate to, and mediated by, a "discourse....
Is this Columbia University? A professor of anthropology calls for a million Mogadishus, a professor of Arabic and Islamic Science tells a girl she isn't a Semite because her eyes are green, and a professor of Persian hails the destruction of the World Trade Center as the castrating of a double phallus. The most recent tenured addition to this rogues' gallery is to be an anthropologist, the principal thrust of whose magnum opus is the suggestion that archaeology in Israel is a sort of con game meant to persuade the unwary that Jews lived there in antiquity.
I could refute the claims that Nadia Abu El-Haj makes in her book, but respected specialists have done so already in Isis, the Journal of Near Eastern Studies, and elsewhere. Facts on the Ground fits firmly into the postmodern academic genre, in which facts and evidence are subordinate to, and mediated by, a "discourse....
Monday, November 26, 2007 - 15:37
SOURCE: WSJ (11-24-07)
[Mr. Piereson is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and author of "Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism" (Encounter Books, 2007).]
This week is the anniversary of the tragic day in 1963 when John F. Kennedy was assassinated on the streets of Dallas. Looking back, we can see that Kennedy's death marked a turning point, when the political consensus of the time gave way to the confrontational politics that we associate with the 1960s. The upheavals that followed -- along with the bitter partisanship that disfigured political life in the last third of the century, and whose echoes we still hear today -- can be traced back to that day in Dallas.
The terrorist attack of Sept. 11, 2001, is the only other event in the modern era that compares with the Kennedy assassination in terms of its shattering impact on public opinion. And there are parallels: The 9/11 attacks, like the...
This week is the anniversary of the tragic day in 1963 when John F. Kennedy was assassinated on the streets of Dallas. Looking back, we can see that Kennedy's death marked a turning point, when the political consensus of the time gave way to the confrontational politics that we associate with the 1960s. The upheavals that followed -- along with the bitter partisanship that disfigured political life in the last third of the century, and whose echoes we still hear today -- can be traced back to that day in Dallas.
The terrorist attack of Sept. 11, 2001, is the only other event in the modern era that compares with the Kennedy assassination in terms of its shattering impact on public opinion. And there are parallels: The 9/11 attacks, like the...
Saturday, November 24, 2007 - 19:07
SOURCE: Times (UK) (blog) (11-21-07)
[Mary Beard is a wickedly subversive commentator on both the modern and the ancient world. She is a professor in classics at Cambridge and classics editor of the TLS.]
There’s lots in the news this morning about Italian archaeologists having found the very cave where “according to legend” the famous wolf suckled the abandoned twins – Romulus and Remus – who went on to found the city of Rome. Or at least Romulus did; he murdered Remus in the process.
It’s one of those funny returning news stories, because it was first announced way back in January. Presumably it didn’t get enough attention then, so it’s now being re-run, backed by Mr Rutelli, ex-mayor of Rome and now the Minister of Culture, as triumph for the Italian nation (“ a mythological place...
Friday, November 23, 2007 - 19:27
SOURCE: http://adamholland.blogspot.com (11-1-07)
Here's another story concerning what appears to be a trend: purported"peace activists" promoting Holocaust denial and anti-Semitic conspiracy theory. In this case, a University of Oregon peace organization called Pacifica Forum, which was founded and is led by a retired professor and a retired administrator from that university, is marking Kristallnacht with two days of speeches and conferences this weekend conducted by Mark Weber director of the Holocaust denial group Institute for Historical Review. Weber, the former editor of the National Vanguard, the main publication of the neo-Nazi National Alliance Party, has spent the past 30 years as a professional advocate of Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism. His opening lecture on Friday is entitled:"Free Speech vs. Zionist Power". Advertisements for the event feature the image of a snake in the shape of a Star of David with...
Friday, November 23, 2007 - 19:19
SOURCE: Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI) (11-20-07)
[Williamson Murray is Professor Emeritus at The Ohio State University and co-author of The Iraq War: A Military History (Harvard, 2003). This essay is based on his address at FPRI’s History Institute for Teachers, “Teaching Military History, Why and How,” held at the First Division Museum in Wheaton, Illinois and co-sponsored by the Cantigny First Division Foundation. Core support for the History Institute is provided by The Annenberg Foundation; support for this weekend conference was provided by a group of FPRI trustees including W. W. Keen Butcher, Robert L. Freedman, Bruce Hooper, and John Templeton. A conference report, videotapes, and other papers are available at: www.fpri.org/education/teachingmilitaryhistory.]
No detached observer of 1450 would have picked Western Europe as the most likely group to break out from their isolation and become dominant among the world’s civilizations. The Ottoman...
No detached observer of 1450 would have picked Western Europe as the most likely group to break out from their isolation and become dominant among the world’s civilizations. The Ottoman...
Friday, November 23, 2007 - 19:17
SOURCE: Deborah Lipstadt at her blog (11-20-07)
A couple of months ago there was a rumor floating around about the UK [as in United Kingdom... you will see shortly why I mention the obvious] dropping the teaching of the Holocaust from its curriculum
It was completely false and was scotched by many people, including then Chancellor Gordon Brown.
Well, proving that nothing absurd ever disappears [hence the persistence of antisemitism], the rumor is back, except now it is about the University of Kentucky [UK, get it??].
And it comes with a completely absurd call for action. The newly added paragraph reads:
It was completely false and was scotched by many people, including then Chancellor Gordon Brown.
Well, proving that nothing absurd ever disappears [hence the persistence of antisemitism], the rumor is back, except now it is about the University of Kentucky [UK, get it??].
And it comes with a completely absurd call for action. The newly added paragraph reads:
It is now more than 60 years after the Second World War in Europe ended. This e-mail is being sent as a memorial chain, in memory of the six million Jews, 20 million Russians, 10 million Christians and 1,900 Catholic priests who were murdered, massacred, raped, burned, starved and humiliated while the German and Russian peoples looking the other way!
Now, more...
Friday, November 23, 2007 - 19:15
SOURCE: Slate (11-19-07)
Anyone who has ever had to listen to foodies argue over which wine pairs best with turkey knows that Thanksgiving can inspire vehement—and tiresome—disagreement. But of all the questions connected with our celebration of Thanksgiving, none provokes as much heat as the debate over religion's place at the table.
A few years ago, some Christians began to sound the alarm about a "war on Christmas," alleging that schools, courts, and local governments were transforming a sacred holiday into a secularized winter festival. Now, much as the 24-hour Christmas music on the radio seems to start earlier each year, a few believers are voicing their worry about the secularization of our society in November instead of December. Concerned about the eroding religious dimension of Thanksgiving, they urge a return to a more sacred holiday. If the war-on-Christmas crowd asks us to put Christ back into Christmas, these Thanksgiving religionists urge us to celebrate Thanksgiving with...
A few years ago, some Christians began to sound the alarm about a "war on Christmas," alleging that schools, courts, and local governments were transforming a sacred holiday into a secularized winter festival. Now, much as the 24-hour Christmas music on the radio seems to start earlier each year, a few believers are voicing their worry about the secularization of our society in November instead of December. Concerned about the eroding religious dimension of Thanksgiving, they urge a return to a more sacred holiday. If the war-on-Christmas crowd asks us to put Christ back into Christmas, these Thanksgiving religionists urge us to celebrate Thanksgiving with...
Friday, November 23, 2007 - 19:12
SOURCE: Telegraph (UK) (11-22-07)
There was a time, not so long ago, when the idea of a photographic history of black Britain would have seemed an absurd proposition. What would be its contents? A picture of the Jamaican passengers disembarking from the SS Empire Windrush in 1948; a few Picture Post covers advertising shock-horror features about high birth rates among impoverished immigrants; riotous inner-city youths on the streets of Brixton and Toxteth; and then, perhaps, a few celebratory shots of Daley Thompson atop an Olympic podium or Paul Boateng being elected as an MP.
This stock archive, as likely as not, would illustrate a narrative about British racism or about the successes of an ever-more confident second generation of Afro-Caribbeans.
It's a tribute to the diligence and thoughtfulness of the sociologist and cultural historian Paul Gilroy that such curatorial clichés are absent from the volume of images drawn from the Getty library that he has assembled on this topic. Early on, he...
This stock archive, as likely as not, would illustrate a narrative about British racism or about the successes of an ever-more confident second generation of Afro-Caribbeans.
It's a tribute to the diligence and thoughtfulness of the sociologist and cultural historian Paul Gilroy that such curatorial clichés are absent from the volume of images drawn from the Getty library that he has assembled on this topic. Early on, he...
Friday, November 23, 2007 - 19:08
SOURCE: Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI) (11-10-07)
[Martin van Creveld is Professor, Institute of Arts and Letters, Hebrew University and author of Supplying War: Logistics from Wallenstein to Patton (Cambridge, 2004). This essay is based on his address at FPRI’s History Institute for Teachers, “Teaching Military History: Why and How,” held at the First Division Museum in Wheaton, IL and co-sponsored by the Cantigny First Division Foundation. Core support for the History Institute is provided by The Annenberg Foundation; support for this weekend conference was provided by W. W. Keen Butcher, Robert L. Freedman, Bruce H. Hooper, and John M. Templeton, Jr. For the conference report, videotapes, and other papers, see www.fpri.org/education/teachingmilitaryhistory.]
War and technology have always been linked very closely. Indeed, without technology, there would probably have been no war. After all, without technology, if only in the form of sticks and stones,...
War and technology have always been linked very closely. Indeed, without technology, there would probably have been no war. After all, without technology, if only in the form of sticks and stones,...
Friday, November 23, 2007 - 19:05
SOURCE: Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI) (11-15-07)
[Walter A. McDougall is co-chair, with David Eisenhower, of FPRI’s History Institute for Teachers and, with James Kurth, of FPRI’s Center for the Study of America and the West. He is also the Alloy-Ansin Professor of International Relations at the University of Pennsylvania. His books include The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age, which won a Pulitzer Prize; Promised Land, Crusader State: The American Encounter with the World Since 1776; Let the Sea Make a Noise: A History of the North Pacific from Magellan to MacArthur; and Freedom Just Around the Corner: A New American History, 1585–1828, the first volume of a trilogy on the history of the United States. McDougall wishes to acknowledge the hospitality and briefings he received earlier this year from Dr. Steven J. Dick, the NASA Chief Historian, and his staff, Roger D. Launius, curator at the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum, and Blaine Baggett, Director of Communications at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory...
Friday, November 23, 2007 - 19:03
SOURCE: Minnesota Review (Spring) (5-1-07)
[John H. Summers is editor of"The Politics of Truth: Selected
Writings of C. Wright Mills," to be published in 2008 by Oxford
University Press. He lives in Andover, Massachusetts.]
[HNN Editor: Irving Louis Horowitz claimed to be the protector of the legacy of C. Wright Mills and wrote or edited numerous books about him. In this piece Mr. Summers argues that Horowitz mangled Mills's ideas and in places committed egregious scholarly mistakes.]
... From the first, Horowitz played fast and loose with facts. The first line of the obituary he wrote for the American Journal of Sociology misstated Mills's age at the time of his death. The preface to The New Sociology misstated the date of his death. In the introduction to Power, Politics, and People, Horowitz stated that Mills had finished his Columbia career as associate professor. In fact, Columbia College had promoted him to full professor on July 1, 1956, a month before he turned forty. This information anybody...
[HNN Editor: Irving Louis Horowitz claimed to be the protector of the legacy of C. Wright Mills and wrote or edited numerous books about him. In this piece Mr. Summers argues that Horowitz mangled Mills's ideas and in places committed egregious scholarly mistakes.]
... From the first, Horowitz played fast and loose with facts. The first line of the obituary he wrote for the American Journal of Sociology misstated Mills's age at the time of his death. The preface to The New Sociology misstated the date of his death. In the introduction to Power, Politics, and People, Horowitz stated that Mills had finished his Columbia career as associate professor. In fact, Columbia College had promoted him to full professor on July 1, 1956, a month before he turned forty. This information anybody...
Friday, November 23, 2007 - 18:49
SOURCE: London Review of Books (11-29-07)
[Greg Grandin teaches history at New York University. He is the author of The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War.]
After Nixon’s resignation, Reagan set his bid to steal the 1976 Republican nomination from Gerald Ford. He attacked Kissinger for bargaining away US interests in the Panama Canal and betraying friends in southern Africa and Taiwan. At the same time, Donald Rumsfeld, Ford’s secretary of defense, and Dick Cheney, the White House chief of staff, joined forces to undercut Kissinger and derail a new Salt treaty with Russia. Cheney inserted a ‘morality plank’ into the Republican platform, repudiating the ‘undue concessions’ made in ‘secret agreements’ with the Soviets and calling for a foreign policy motivated not by power politics but by a ‘belief in the rights of man, the rule of law, and guidance by the hand of God’. In 1976, Ford banned Kissinger from giving a series of foreign policy speeches in California for fear he would accelerate the...
After Nixon’s resignation, Reagan set his bid to steal the 1976 Republican nomination from Gerald Ford. He attacked Kissinger for bargaining away US interests in the Panama Canal and betraying friends in southern Africa and Taiwan. At the same time, Donald Rumsfeld, Ford’s secretary of defense, and Dick Cheney, the White House chief of staff, joined forces to undercut Kissinger and derail a new Salt treaty with Russia. Cheney inserted a ‘morality plank’ into the Republican platform, repudiating the ‘undue concessions’ made in ‘secret agreements’ with the Soviets and calling for a foreign policy motivated not by power politics but by a ‘belief in the rights of man, the rule of law, and guidance by the hand of God’. In 1976, Ford banned Kissinger from giving a series of foreign policy speeches in California for fear he would accelerate the...
Friday, November 23, 2007 - 17:44
SOURCE: Nation (12-10-07)
Bill Moyers gave the following remarks at the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute's twentieth-anniversary Four Freedoms ceremony, where he received the Freedom of Speech award. --The Editors
Thank you for this recognition and the spirit of the evening. Thanks especially for giving me the chance to sit here awhile thinking about my father. Henry Moyers was an ordinary man who dropped out of the fourth grade because his family needed him to pick cotton to help make ends meet. The Depression knocked him off the farm and flat on his back. When I was born he was making two dollars a day working on the highway to Oklahoma City. He never made over $100 a week in the whole of his working life, and he made that only when he joined the union on the last job he held. He voted for Franklin Roosevelt in four straight elections, and he would have gone on voting for him until kingdom come if both had lived that long. I once asked him why, and he said, "Because the President's...
Thank you for this recognition and the spirit of the evening. Thanks especially for giving me the chance to sit here awhile thinking about my father. Henry Moyers was an ordinary man who dropped out of the fourth grade because his family needed him to pick cotton to help make ends meet. The Depression knocked him off the farm and flat on his back. When I was born he was making two dollars a day working on the highway to Oklahoma City. He never made over $100 a week in the whole of his working life, and he made that only when he joined the union on the last job he held. He voted for Franklin Roosevelt in four straight elections, and he would have gone on voting for him until kingdom come if both had lived that long. I once asked him why, and he said, "Because the President's...
Thursday, November 22, 2007 - 20:31
SOURCE: Sunday Times (UK) (11-18-07)
Rape, says Joanna Bourke, used to be understood as the act of sex with a woman who does not “belong” to the perpetrator. In the 19th century it was widely thought that an unwilling woman could not be raped because “merely by vibrating”, a vagina “could ward off attack”. A victim of rape was, therefore, a contradiction in terms. Some thought that if the woman had experienced orgasm in the act, or had finally succumbed, then she could not claim to have been raped. The belief that women were prone to lie about rape to gain attention was, of course, widespread, and rape trials were notorious for their prurient investigations into a woman’s past. In the past 50 years or so, western feminists have argued – with some success – that rape is more about power than sex. In British courts these days, rape does not have to involve violence to justify the name. Lack of consent (which is itself potentially ambiguous) suffices.
As Bourke shows in her scholarly historical survey of rape...
As Bourke shows in her scholarly historical survey of rape...
Wednesday, November 21, 2007 - 01:44
SOURCE: NYT (11-18-07)
[Lou Cannon is the author of five books on Ronald Reagan and a co-author of the forthcoming “Reagan’s Disciple: George W. Bush’s Troubled Quest for a Presidential Legacy.”]
POLITICAL mythologies endure. One myth that is enjoying a revival in a year when Republican presidential candidates are comparing themselves to Ronald Reagan, their iconic hero, is the notion that Mr. Reagan defeated President Jimmy Carter in 1980 by a coded appeal to white-supremacist voters.
The core of this myth is the claim that Mr. Reagan scored a political masterstroke when he spoke on Aug. 3, 1980, at the Neshoba County Fair in Mississippi. At the fair, Mr. Reagan told a cheering and mostly white audience, “I believe in states’ rights” and that as president he would do all he could to “restore to states and local governments the power that properly belongs to them.”
He had been talking this way for two decades as part of his pitch that the federal government had become too...
POLITICAL mythologies endure. One myth that is enjoying a revival in a year when Republican presidential candidates are comparing themselves to Ronald Reagan, their iconic hero, is the notion that Mr. Reagan defeated President Jimmy Carter in 1980 by a coded appeal to white-supremacist voters.
The core of this myth is the claim that Mr. Reagan scored a political masterstroke when he spoke on Aug. 3, 1980, at the Neshoba County Fair in Mississippi. At the fair, Mr. Reagan told a cheering and mostly white audience, “I believe in states’ rights” and that as president he would do all he could to “restore to states and local governments the power that properly belongs to them.”
He had been talking this way for two decades as part of his pitch that the federal government had become too...
Tuesday, November 20, 2007 - 18:06
