Robin Toner, in the NYT (May 9, 2004):

In the summer of 1988, Republicans rolled out a carefully tested, meticulously planned campaign aimed at turning Michael S. Dukakis, the Democratic nominee, into an utterly unacceptable choice for president.

The message was simple: Mr. Dukakis was a liberal, "outside the mainstream," who let murderers out of prison on weekend furloughs, would not require schoolchildren to say the Pledge of Allegiance and was soft on defense.

Mr. Dukakis, who found it hard to believe that the charges would stick, resisted fighting back. His negatives soared. A generation of Democratic political operatives, many of them now working for Senator John Kerry, swore never again. A generation of Republican operatives, some of them now working to re-elect President Bush, took notes.

So how relevant is the Dukakis model for 2004? How hard is it for a challenger today to introduce himself to the American people, pass a threshold of credibility as a potential commander in chief and at the same time beat back relentless efforts by the opposition to define him first? As harrowing as Mr. Dukakis's experience was 16 years ago, the task facing modern challengers may be even rougher in the blindingly fast world of 24-hour cable and Internet warfare.

There are, at times, eerie echoes of 1988 on the campaign trail these days. For two months, many Democrats have watched, queasily, as the Republicans roll out another disciplined campaign against their nominee as a flip-flopping Massachusetts liberal who is soft on defense, with a huge wave of paid advertising backed up by legions of Republicans and surrogates, all firmly on message. The commercials rattle off some weapon systems Mr. Kerry opposed financing at one time or another, just as they did against Mr. Dukakis in 1988.

Moreover, Democrats have discovered - once again - that a candidate can win a party's nomination, make the covers of the national magazines and still be unknown to many voters, who are only intermittently paying attention right now. With a $25 million advertising campaign launched last week, the Kerry forces are scrambling to fill in the blanks, before the Bush campaign does, and to regain control of the candidate's story - "a lifetime of service and strength," as they put it.

But many Republicans share the view, or hope, of Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House, who says of Mr. Kerry: "The country really doesn't know him, unlike Reagan, who'd been around awhile. And the country is being introduced to him more by the Bush campaign than by the Kerry campaign."

Maura Reynolds, in the LAT (May 3, 2004):

President Bush styles himself as the first CEO president, applying the rigor and authority of his MBA education to the job of chief executive of the nation.

But that's not the picture that emerges from three recent insider accounts of the workings of the Bush administration, experts in decision-making and presidential management say. On the contrary, they say, the president appears to have a highly personal working style, with little emphasis on systematic analysis of major decisions.

"There seems to be almost an absence of any analytical or deliberative process for mapping the problem or exploring alternatives or estimating consequences," said Graham Allison, a professor of government at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

And Bush appears to give greater weight to his own instincts than to experts or other sources of advice and information. The president has a "bias for action," said Roderick M. Kramer, a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford's Graduate School of Business. "I've been struck by [how] Bush's sense of personal identity as a leader shapes his decisions," he said.

For the last three years, experts on the presidency have largely withheld judgment about how the Bush White House -- considered the most secretive since Richard Nixon's -- makes major decisions. The experts thought they had inadequate information to reach general conclusions.

That has changed. Scholars of management and government have begun to pore through this spring's crop of insider books and draw preliminary assessments of how Bush operates as president. And their main conclusion is that he makes decisions primarily on instinct, not analysis.

Kramer, for example, said: "I would contrast his style to someone like [Nixon's former Secretary of State] Henry Kissinger, who looked at decisions more in terms of a balance of power and what is realistic to achieve, thinking about how the rest of the world will respond."

For Bush, by contrast, "emotion and vision and instinct are his view of the world." That can be a good thing, Kramer added. "He bases his decisions on a few principles, but if those principles are good principles, that can lead to good decisions."

The three insider books are as different as the insiders who wrote them. The first, "The Price of Loyalty," reflects the experience of former Treasury Secretary Paul H. O'Neill, the former Alcoa chief executive who was forced out for dissenting over economic policy.

The second, "Against All Enemies," was written by career bureaucrat and former counterterrorism chief Richard A. Clarke, who thought the administration was inattentive to the dangers of terrorism. And the third, "Plan of Attack" by Bob Woodward, is a journalist's account of the war on Iraq based on interviews with the president and his advisors.

In addition, two books by Bush loyalists -- advisor Karen Hughes' "Ten Minutes from Normal" and former speechwriter David Frum's "The Right Man" -- are also insider accounts, though they shed less light on the White House decision-making process. Frum left the White House early in the administration, and Hughes, a longtime supporter, offers only a few, unfailingly flattering glimpses of her boss in action.

The O'Neill, Clarke and Woodward accounts have strengths and weaknesses, reflecting the experience, access or bias of the authors, scholars say. But by looking at all the books, they say they can begin to overcome the inadequacies of any single account.

"Triangulate is an excellent image," said Fred I. Greenstein, a presidential historian at Princeton University. "These books certainly tell you things."

Greenstein said that one striking thing about all three books was what they don't show. There are few examples, for instance, of Bush presiding over meetings in which subordinates presented problems, weighed evidence and aired differing views.

"I think a lot of policy is made on the fly," he said. "It isn't a process in which people assemble and go back and forth in a rigorous way."

Another thing largely missing from the books was any indication that documents or memos weighing policy alternatives are circulated and discussed. Harvard's Allison said one of the few documents the administration did prepare in advance of the Iraq war -- the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate that concluded that Iraq probably had weapons of mass destruction -- was quickly compiled and not very well done.

"The more it's examined, it seems quite sloppy," he said. "At this point, if there had been some good analysis of the issues on paper, we would have seen some evidence of it....

In the Woodward book, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell is depicted as attending an National Security Council war planning meeting on Aug. 5, 2002, and realizing that the president and his top advisors were discussing details such as troop deployments and targets in Iraq without ever having held an NSC meeting on the question of whether to go to war in the first place.

"I really need to have some private time with [the president] to go over some issues that I don't think he's gone over with anyone yet," the book quotes Powell as telling national security advisor Condoleezza Rice.

According to the book, Powell never took part in a debate over whether to go to war, only talks on how to attack....

Greenstein said that when weighing an important decision such as whether to go to war, specialists in the presidency generally think it is better for presidents to hold meetings in which dissenting views are heard and weighed. That way, the president is seen as considering all the angles.

"It is generally seen as less desirable to see your advisors individually" as Bush appears to have done before deciding to wage war on Saddam Hussein, Greenstein said. "That will raise the question of, does the person who talks to the president last have undue influence? And it also gives influence to those who are better at bureaucratic turf battles."

Of course, every president operates differently, and each administration reflects the personality of the chief executive. President Eisenhower was formal and bureaucratic, scholars say, reflecting his military background. President Kennedy was more informal or even haphazard, but he cast a wide net for information before settling on an answer, as did President Clinton.

In practice, Bush appears closest to the style of Reagan, said Bert A. Rockman, director of the School of Public Policy and Management at Ohio State University.

"The decisiveness part is certainly there," he said. "The imperviousness to facts and analysis is also there. So what we have is someone who is going on raw instinct."

"Decision makers are influenced by historical comparisons, and he may be overcorrecting, trying not to be like his father," Kramer said.

So far at least, scholars say, it appears that Bush's personality -- not his staff, and not his organizational structure -- is the key to understanding his presidency. Kumar of the University of Maryland said that was similar to her analysis of previous presidents.

"We often think that a White House staff is going to fill in, to compensate for a president's weaknesses. But it doesn't really work that way," she said. "White Houses reflect their president's strengths and also reflect his weaknesses."

Corey Robin, in the Wash Post (May 2, 204):

In 2000 I spent the tail end of the summer interviewing conservative patriarchs William F. Buckley and Irving Kristol. I was writing about the defections to the left of several younger right-wing intellectuals and wondered what the conservative movement's founding fathers thought of their wayward sons. But Buckley and Kristol were less interested in these ex-conservatives than they were in the sorry state of the movement and the uncertain fate of the United States as a global imperial power.

The end of communism and the triumph of capitalism, they suggested, were mixed blessings. Americans now possessed the most powerful empire in history. At the same time, they were possessed by one of the most anti-political ideologies in history: belief in the free market as a harmonious international order of voluntary exchange requiring little more from the state than the enforcement of laws and contracts. This ideology promoted self-interest over the national interest -- too bloodless a notion, Buckley and Kristol argued, upon which to found a national order, much less a global empire.

"The trouble with the emphasis in conservatism on the market," Buckley told me, "is that it becomes rather boring. You hear it once, you master the idea. The notion of devoting your life to it is horrifying if only because it's so repetitious. It's like sex." Kristol confessed to a yearning for an American empire: "What's the point of being the greatest, most powerful nation in the world and not having an imperial role?"

But because of its devotion to prosperity, he added, the United States lacked the fortitude and vision to wield imperial power. "It's too bad,"
Kristol lamented. "I think it would be natural for the United States . . . to play a far more dominant role in world affairs. . . to command and to give orders as to what is to be done. People need that. There are many parts of the world -- Africa in particular -- where an authority willing to use troops can make . . . a healthy difference." But not with public discussion dominated by accountants. "There's the Republican Party tying itself into knots. Over what?" he said. "I think it's disgusting that . . . presidential politics of the most important country in the world should revolve around prescriptions for elderly people."

Since 9/11, I've had many opportunities to recall these conversations. Sept.
11, we have been told, has restored to America's woozy civic culture a sense of depth and seriousness, of things "larger than ourselves." It has forced Americans to look beyond their borders, to understand at last the dangers that confront a world power. It has given the United States a coherent national purpose and a focus for imperial rule. A country that for a time seemed unwilling to face up to its international responsibilities is now prepared once again to bear any burden, pay any price, for freedom. This changed attitude, the argument goes, is good for the world. It is also good, spiritually, for the United States. It reminds us that freedom is a fighting faith rather than a cushy perch.

To understand this reaction to 9/11, we must examine the state of mind of American conservatives after the end of the Cold War. For neoconservatives, who had thrilled to the crusade against communism, all that was left of Ronald Reagan's legacy after the Cold War was a sunny entrepreneurialism, which found a welcome home in Bill Clinton's America. While neocons favor capitalism, they do not believe it is the highest achievement of civilization. Like their predecessors -- from Edmund Burke, Samuel Coleridge and Henry Adams to T.S. Eliot, Martin Heidegger and Michael Oakeshott -- today's conservatives prize mystery and vitality over calculation and technology. Such romantic sensibilities are inspired by questions of politics and, especially, of war. It is only natural, then, that the neocons would take up the call of empire, seeking a world that is about something more than money and markets.

Immediately following 9/11, intellectuals, politicians and pundits seized upon the terrorist strikes as a deliverance from the miasma Buckley and Kristol had been criticizing. Even commentators on the left saw the attacks as stirring a sleeping nation; Frank Rich announced in the New York Times that "this week's nightmare, it's now clear, has awakened us from a frivolous if not decadent decade-long dream."

What was that dream? The dream of prosperity. During the 1990s, conversative David Brooks wrote in Newsweek, we "renovated our kitchens, refurbished our home entertainment systems, invested in patio furniture, Jacuzzis and gas grills." This ethos had terrible consequences. It encouraged a "preoccupation with one's own petty affairs," Francis Fukuyama wrote in the Financial Times. It also had international repercussions. According to Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby, the cult of peace and prosperity found expression in President Clinton's weak and distracted foreign policy, which made it "easier for someone like Osama bin Laden to rise up and say credibly, 'The Americans don't have the stomach to defend themselves. They won't take casualties to defend their interests. They are morally weak.' "

But after that day in September, the domestic scene was transformed. America was now "more mobilized, more conscious and therefore more alive," wrote Andrew Sullivan in the New York Times Magazine. Writers welcomed the moral electricity coursing through the body politic, restoring patriotism and bipartisan consensus....

The fact that the war against terrorism has not yet imposed the sacrifices on the population that normally accompany national crusades has provoked occasional bouts of concern among politicians and cultural elites. "The danger, over the long term," wrote the New York Times's R. W. Apple, "is loss of interest. With much of the war to be conducted out of plain sight by commandos, diplomats and intelligence agents, will a nation that has spent decades in easy self-indulgence stay focused?"

The Bush administration initially looked for things for people to do -- not because there was much to be done, but because it feared that the ardor of ordinary Americans would grow cold. The best the administration came up with were Web sites and toll-free numbers that enterprising citizens could contact if they wanted to help the war effort. But the numbers were for groups such as Freedom Corps, enabling volunteers to become rural health workers, or Citizen Corps, which bolstered household emergency preparedness and expanded Neighborhood Watch groups. Now, with the war in Iraq going awry, the administration talks less about active involvement from ordinary Americans, happy to settle for their tacit support instead.

We thus face a dangerous situation. On the one hand we have neoconservative elites whose vision of American power is recklessly utopian. On the other hand we have a domestic population that shows little interest in any far-flung empire. The political order projected by Bush and his supporters in the media and academia is just that: a projection, which can only last so long as the United States is able to put down, with minimum casualties, challenges to its power. We may well be entering one of those Machiavellian moments discussed by historian J. G. A. Pocock a quarter-century ago, when a republic opts for the frisson of empire, and is forced to confront the fragility and finitude of all political forms, including its own.

Richard Pyle, Associated Press (May 6, 2004):

... From the Confederacy's notorious Andersonville prison of the Civil War to the Hanoi Hilton, where American POWs were held in Vietnam, military history is rife with grim stories of brutality, starvation and humiliation in captivity.

Few such tales stir such immediate and profound public revulsion and anguish as the recently disclosed mistreatment of Iraqi detainees by U.S. troops at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

A key reason, say experts, is a built-in resistance among Americans to the idea that U.S. troops or other military pesonnel would so such things.

"We're always the white hats in military affairs, the ones who hand out the Hershey bars and pat the kids on the head, not the ones who sexually abuse POWs, so we don't believe it," says military historian Douglas Brinkley. "We love our armed forces so much - in a country that has no sustainable political heroes, we honor the military as the men and women of democracy."

In addition, said Brinkley, cameras were not present to record abuses of the past as they were at Abu Ghriab. "Only someone who's a real wingnut could not be aghast at those images," he said in a phone interview.

The mistreatment has brought to mind other grievous episodes involving prisoners of war.

Among them: the slaying of war chief Crazy Horse, who was bayoneted while in Army custody in 1877, the year after he helped lead the Indian victory over Lt. Col. George Custer's 7th Cavalry at Little Big Horn.

The last time Pentagon officials were at such a loss to explain unsoldierly conduct involving prisoners was in 1969, when eight U.S. Special Forces members, including their commander in Vietnam, were accused of murdering a Vietnamese double agent by shooting him and dumping his chained corpse from a boat. The sensational "Green Beret Murder Case" ended before trial when then-Defense Secretary Melvin Laird dropped the charges.

Another major uproar in Vietnam concerned the "tiger cages" at Con Son island prison, where political prisoners incarcerated by the U.S.-backed Saigon regime were confined and allegedly tortured. While there was no direct U.S. involvement in the reported abuse, the cages themselves had been built by RMK-BRJ, a Texas military contractor and antecedent to the Halliburton Co. subsidiary KBR.

But Americans also were subjected to "tiger cage"-type abuse; 29 captured by the Viet Cong in South Vietnam were held in primitive jungle camps that included cages. About half were killed or died in captivity, according to "Honor Bound," the most comprehensive book on the Vietnam POW experience.

Former Army intelligence specialist John Giannini, who spent a year interrogating prisoners in Vietnam, said Americans there did not mistreat captives, because "it was counter-productive; If you abused them, they would tell you anything, just to get you to stop."

All prisoners taken by U.S. forces in Vietnam were under Saigon's control, which proved helpful in interrogations, Giannini said in an interview.

"We knew the South Vietnamese abused them," Giannini said, "and the best way to get someone to talk was to say, 'Look, if you don't cooperate with me I will have no choice but to turn you over to the South Vietnamese. Don't force me to do that.'"

Along with the massacre of hundreds of Vietnamese civilians at the village of My Lai by American troops in 1968, the Green Beret and "tiger cage" scandals helped turn U.S. public opinion against the war.

The Vietnam incidents pale next to many prisoner-related atrocities of World War II, which including the 1942 Bataan Death March, in which 7,000 to 10,000 POWs died or were killed by their Japanese captors during the 55-mile trek to prison camps, and the Malmedy Massacre of dozens of captured GIs by Nazi troops at Malmedy, Belgium, in 1944.

Japan's particularly abhorrent record of mistreating POWs stemmed in part from its samurai-based warrior code, called "bushido," in which surrender was deemed dishonorable.

That code led to such incidents as the execution of eight American fliers captured at the South Pacific island of Chichi Jima in 1944, a story told in James Bradley's 2003 best seller, "Flyboys."

Years after the war, details also surfaced about the Japanese Imperial Army's Unit 731, which conducted grisly physical and germ warfare experiments on captured Chinese soldiers and civilians, Russians and some Western POWs in Manchuria from 1936 to 1945.

Some 9,000 were believed to have died before the laboratory's chief ordered it destroyed in the last days of the war.

Katharine Q. Seelye, in the NYT (May 3, 2004):

It was 1959 when Dick Cheney, then a student at Yale University, turned 18 and became eligible for the draft.

Eventually, like 16 million other young men of that era, Mr. Cheney sought deferments. By the time he turned 26 in January 1967 and was no longer eligible for the draft, he had asked for and received five deferments, four because he was a student and one for being a new father.

Although President Richard M. Nixon stopped the draft in 1973 and the war itself ended 29 years ago on Friday, the issue of service remains a personally sensitive and politically potent touchstone in the biographies of many politicians from that era.

For much of Mr. Cheney's political career, his deferments have largely been a nonissue.

In an increasingly vituperative political campaign, Mr. Cheney this week again questioned the credentials of Senator John Kerry and his ability to be commander in chief. Mr. Kerry, who was decorated in Vietnam and has made his service there a central element of his campaign, fired back.

Putting Mr. Cheney's record in the spotlight, Mr. Kerry said that he "got every deferment in the world and decided he had better things to do."

Steve Schmidt, a spokesman for the Bush-Cheney campaign, dismissed the criticism, saying that Mr. Kerry was delving into a subject that he had said he would not touch. Mr. Schmidt said that Mr. Kerry was trying to divert attention from what the spokesman said was Mr. Kerry's reversals on other topics.

While Mr. Cheney's deferment history was briefly an issue when George W. Bush picked him as his running mate in 2000, the Democrats did not focus on it after Al Gore, the Democratic presidential nominee, who had served in Vietnam, picked as his running mate Senator Joseph Lieberman, who also had not served.

The issue also received little attention during Mr. Cheney's Senate confirmation hearings as defense secretary in 1989 under the first President Bush, largely because the Armed Services Committee had just completed a bitter and protracted battle over the president's original choice, John G. Tower. Mr. Tower had faced questions about philandering, drinking and conflicts over defense contracts before he was rejected.

Senators of both parties were so eager to confirm Mr. Cheney quickly that they were relatively undemanding, not pressing him on the draft but merely asking him if he had anything to say about it.

He said he "never served" because of deferments to finish a college career that lasted six years rather than four, which he attributed to subpar academic performance and the fact that he had to work to pay for his education.

He added that he "would have obviously been happy to serve had I been called."

Away from the hearing room, he told the Washington Post that he had sought his deferments because "I had other priorities in the 60's than military service."

"I don't regret the decisions I made," he added. "I complied fully with all the requirements of the statutes, registered with the draft when I turned 18. Had I been drafted, I would have been happy to serve."

But others contend that Mr. Cheney appeared to go to some length to avoid the draft.

"Five deferments seems incredible to me," said David Curry, a professor at the University of Missouri in St. Louis who has written extensively about the draft, including a 1985 book, "Sunshine Patriots: Punishment and the Vietnam Offender."

Susan Page, in USA Today (April 26, 2004):

Allan Lichtman, a historian at American University in Washington, D.C., who created a formula to predict presidential elections, says that the"very odd recovery" has made the political repercussions of individual economic statistics less reliable than in the past [as a guide to the election outcome].

Lichtman is the author of The Keys to the White House, which identifies 13"keys" that he says can be used to project the winner of a national election. Two keys are economic. His short-term measure is whether the economy is in recession. His long-term measure is whether real per-capita economic growth during the term is at least as good as the average of the last two terms.

In November, Bush is likely to hold the advantage on the first economic key but not the second. In contrast, Clinton held both keys in 1996. The elder Bush held neither in 1992.

"We no longer can simply look at economic growth and then say this will help one or the other candidate," says Sung Won Sohn, chief economic officer at Wells Fargo Banks and a White House economist in the Nixon administration."We have now economic growth, the jobs situation, terrorism concerns and a lot more variables in the equation. The traditional analysis of simply looking at the unemployment rate to gauge election outcome is not workable anymore."

In this economy, middle-class Americans can face very different situations:

* Times can be good for a family that has benefited from Bush's tax cuts and has refinanced a mortgage to take advantage of low interest rates. Both things can feel like a pay raise even if income is flat. And since the stock market began to recover, investors have fewer qualms about opening quarterly statements for their 401(k) retirement accounts.

* Times can be bad for a family that includes someone who has lost a job and had a hard time finding another one with comparable pay and benefits; long-term unemployment rates are the worst in at least 40 years. People with jobs have been hit by rising health insurance premiums. Those with kids in college have seen tuition bills climb much faster than inflation, too.

How miserable?

When the Kerry campaign unveiled a"misery index" this month, it used seven statistics that generally show middle-class families under pressure: household income, private-sector job growth, bankruptcies, home ownership, and the costs of health care, college tuition and gas.

The Bush campaign quickly released its calculation of the traditional"misery index," a formula devised by Arthur Okun, an economic adviser to President Johnson. That index combines the unemployment and inflation rates.

By Kerry's"misery index," the economy is the worst it has been for any president running for re-election since Carter. By the old-style"misery index," the economy is the best it has been for any president running for re-election since then.

Commerce Secretary Don Evans calls it" clearly one of the strongest economies in my lifetime." He says,"You can lead by looking at the glass being half-full and seeing all the positive trends in our economy."

Democrats say administration officials are mistaken if they don't recognize the economic strain many Americans still feel."When people hear that the economy is supposedly getting better and they feel incredibly uncertain about where the new middle-class jobs are and they find themselves squeezed by the run-of-the-mill costs of life, it's led to a palpable anxiety," says Gene Sperling, a White House economic adviser for Clinton who advises the Kerry campaign.

Sperling says"anxiety" is the word that best describes the current economy. White House economic adviser Gregory Mankiw says he'd choose the words"on track." He says,"We're not where we want it to be, but it's heading in the right direction."

Edward Epstein, in the San Francisco Chronicle (April 28, 2004):

The special committee formed to investigate what the president called an"unprovoked and dastardly attack" on the United States waded deep into controversy, interviewed dozens of witnesses and produced a 10 million-word record.

It issued a final report, blaming many involved in U.S. national security for failing to do their jobs and recommended sweeping changes to prevent a similar attack in the future.

In many ways, this sounds like the current bipartisan commission investigating the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, which is due to report by late July. But it's the tale of Congress' Joint Committee on the Investigation of the Pearl Harbor Attack, which in 1945-46 conducted the last of a host of inquiries, and the most complete, into Japan's Dec. 7, 1941, bombing of the U.S. Pacific fleet in Hawaii.

The similarities between the reports of the two commissions are striking. If a reader substitutes the words"Sept. 11" for"Pearl Harbor," at times the voluminous final report of the Pearl Harbor inquiry can induce a serious case of deja vu, raising the question of how much a nation caught napping in 1941 -- and again 60 years later -- has really learned.

"The committee has been intrigued throughout the Pearl Harbor proceedings by one enigmatical and paramount question: 'Why, with some of the finest intelligence available in our history, with the almost certain knowledge that war was at hand, with plans that contemplated the precise type of attack that was executed by Japan on the morning of December 7 -- why was it possible for a Pearl Harbor to occur?'" the final report asked.

The committee's report told a tale of complacency, poor communications between government agencies and officials' stubborn refusal to contemplate the seemingly impossible, even though an attack on Pearl Harbor had been the subject of military war games.

Flash forward to 2004, and the 10-member bipartisan commission has heard what previous inquiries into the Sept. 11 attacks learned -- that the FBI and CIA failed to share information with each other or within their own agencies, that investigators in the field were frustrated in getting their concerns heard by higher-ups, that Presidents Bill Clinton and George Bush might not have done all they could to pursue al Qaeda and its leader, Osama bin Laden, and that virtually everyone ignored indications that commercial planes could be hijacked and used as flying suicide bombs.

"We were drowning in a sea of intelligence both times," said Stanley Weintraub, author of"Long Day's Journey Into War: Pearl Harbor and a World at War."

"It was a matter of connecting the dots," he added.

The intelligence failure was much greater on Sept. 11 because"there were rather specific threats and the FBI knew of people training to fly planes, but not land them or take off," said Weintraub, a professor emeritus of history at Penn State University.

In contrast, Washington knew in 1941 that Japan was planning military action somewhere in the vast Pacific because Tokyo's diplomatic code had been broken. But no specific intelligence about the attack on Pearl Harbor was captured. Despite that, on Nov. 27, 1941, the commanders at Pearl Harbor, Navy Adm. Husband Kimmel and Army Gen. Walter Short, were sent a"war warning."

A series of inquiries that began just days after the attack found that the two didn't do enough to prepare for the attack that eventually killed 2,395 Americans and wounded 1,178.

In the face of the warnings,"the Japanese attack was a complete surprise to the commanders and they failed to make suitable dispositions to meet such an attack. Each failed properly to evaluate the seriousness of the situation. These errors of judgment were the effective causes for the success of the attack," the joint inquiry said. President Franklin D. Roosevelt sacked the two men days after the attack.

In interim reports and questioning by members, the current commission has been highly critical of the FBI and CIA, but it isn't clear yet what the panel's final report will say about the agencies or their leaders. The 1945-46 inquiry panned the government's performance before Dec. 7 but went out of its way to praise top leaders.

"The president, the secretary of state and high government officials made every possible effort, without sacrificing our national honor and endangering our security, to avert war with Japan," the report said.

As has happened since Sept. 11 with the criticism of Bush, conspiracy theories about what Roosevelt might have known before the attacks surfaced after Pearl Harbor and have become a cottage industry ever since.

Stanford historian David Kennedy, in his book"Freedom from Fear, The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945," had a simple explanation for such theories after Pearl Harbor, one that could just as easily apply to Sept. 11, 2001.

"Conspiracy theories proliferate, as they often do in the face of the improbable," he wrote.

The Pearl Harbor congressional inquiry dealt with the theories head-on.

"The committee has found no evidence to support the charges, made before and during the hearings, that the president, the secretary of state, the secretary of war or the secretary of Navy tricked, provoked, incited, cajoled or coerced Japan into attacking this nation in order that a declaration of war might be more easily obtained from the Congress," the report said.

One big difference between today and the 1940s is that none of the Pearl Harbor inquiries, which included a 1942 commission headed by Supreme Court Justice Owen Roberts, ever asked Roosevelt to appear before them, on or off the record.

In contrast, after protracted wrangling, Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney are scheduled to appear Thursday before the Sept. 11 commission in a private White House session."Roosevelt was such a Godlike figure," Weintraub said, that no one would think to question his judgment.

Since FDR had died in April 1945, the joint inquiry couldn't have questioned him anyway. In an arrangement that appears positively quaint by today's standards, the inquiry allowed Grace Tully, FDR's secretary, to go through White House files and"furnish the committee all papers in these files for the year 1941 relating to Japan, the imminence of war in the Pacific and general Far Eastern developments," it said.

Eric Posner, professor of law at the University of Chicago, in the NYT (April 28, 2004):

The decision by the Coalition Provisional Authority to ease its policy barring former Baath Party members from Iraqi government jobs has generated widespread criticism in Iraqi political circles. Ahmed Chalabi, America's onetime favorite member of the Iraqi Governing Council, said that giving jobs to former Baathists was like "allowing Nazis into the German government immediately after World War II." But that's precisely the point — the history of the last 50 years shows that countries trying to make transitions to democracy must inevitably bring back at least some members of the ousted regime.

After World War II, the allies resolved not only to punish Nazi war criminals but also to purge Nazism from German public life. Yet even before the Nuremberg trials had concluded, the Americans realized that they could not rebuild Germany without the help of at least some former Nazis who had dominated the bureaucracy, industry and the military. Although the worst Nazis were punished, most others were eventually given amnesty and went to work on reconstruction.

Simultaneously in Japan, transitional justice was even more perfunctory. From the beginning, the Americans decided that Emperor Hirohito would have to be retained so that the United States could exert control over the populace through him. His absence from the Tokyo trials of war leaders weakened that tribunal's impact, and soon enough many members of the wartime regime were allowed to help get the country back on its feet.

In both cases, the decisions to ease the purges were partly, but not entirely, realpolitik. Yes, America needed Germany and Japan as allies against the Soviet Union. But it also realized that neither place could become a functioning liberal democracy without the cooperation and expertise of the vast majority of those tainted by the previous governments. An endless occupation was not an attractive prospect — just as it is not in Iraq now. The compromise in both Germany and Japan was a series of high-profile trials of the worst war criminals, followed by amnesty for most everyone else, many of whom were not only complicit in the old regime but responsible for some of its ugliest decisions.

This set the pattern for the next several decades — in Spain, Greece, Portugal, Argentina, Chile, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, the former East Germany, the Philippines, South Africa and elsewhere. Although in some cases moderate transitional justice measures were carried out — including truth commissions, reparations, purges of leaders and collaborators, and trials of some lower-level officials like border guards — most holdovers from the old regime were permitted to take part in the new.