Gerald Nicosia, author of Home to War: A History of the Vietnam Veterans' Movement (Crown Publishers, 2001, forthcoming in a new edition from Carroll & Graf this August), in the LAT (May 25, 2004):

... The next big event by the VVAW [Vietnam Veterans Against the War] began in late January 1971, at a Howard Johnson's Motor Lodge in Detroit. [John] Kerry attended the Winter Soldier Investigation, reluctantly. Despite claims by recent Kerry-bashers, including Vietnam veteran Stephen Sherman in the Wall Street Journal (Jan. 26, 2004), that Kerry was the "emcee" of Winter Soldier, not a single FBI document concerning that event bears his name.

Winter Soldier "shattered" Kerry, he said to me in a 1988 interview. More than 100 veterans spoke. Kerry saw their discharge forms and talked with the vets enough, he said, to become satisfied that most were telling authentic stories—of torturing and murdering Viet Cong prisoners, raping village women, shooting villagers for target practice, cutting off ears and other body parts. These accounts were news to him and educated him, he said then. "It was a very, very heavy, difficult kind of thing to listen to, and it was painful."

Others wondered at the time if Kerry had made peace with his memories. Jack Smith, a veteran from Connecticut, says in a recent interview that he could see from Kerry's eyes that he was struggling as he listened to veterans telling painful war stories. Peggy Kerry says that her brother "had the anguish" shared by so many other vets just back from Vietnam; she says he suffered "indescribable pain" about the people who'd died in the war, and that he would sometimes wake up screaming from nightmares that continued even into his present marriage with Teresa Heinz Kerry. At a rally on Wall Street in April 1971, the files show, Kerry spoke of being "guilty" like everyone else in the country "for having allowed the war to go on"—a burden that, he said to me in a second interview, in 1989, could have "croaked" him if he had not been personally strong enough to deal with it.

Winter Soldier was held in Detroit because its sponsor, Jane Fonda, wanted to reach the "working class." By then, Kerry's public speaking had impressed two VVAW founders, Jan Barry and Sheldon Ramsdell. After Kerry's speech at Valley Forge, Ramsdell had told Peggy Kerry: "Whoa! He looks like Lincoln, and he sounds like a Kennedy. Get him on the road!" Kerry quickly became what the FBI calls several times "National Spokesman for VVAW."

But the Winter Soldier meeting received virtually no publicity, which bothered Kerry, and gave him an opening. He called upon VVAW leaders to demonstrate in Washington, a proposal that brought Kerry his first taste of the opposition that would drive him from the organization later in 1971. Many veterans, especially the grunts, were tired of being led by officers. Mike McCusker, a former Marine sergeant who was then VVAW Oregon coordinator, says the dispute was between the "top-downers versus the bottom-uppers." McCusker says he and the other bottom-uppers won—for the moment—but only by agreeing to go along with the demonstration in Washington, known as Operation Dewey Canyon III.

The next month, in February, McCusker recalls walking into VVAW's national office in New York and discovering to his dismay that Kerry was in charge of the meeting. Organization leaders were gathering for their first national steering committee meeting. Kerry looked "stiff and starchy," a "top-downer" if McCusker had ever seen one. But, he says, Kerry won him over in two ways. First, he saw that as the room filled with vets, Kerry loosened up, as if these truly were his brothers, people with whom he felt safe and comfortable. Second, Kerry began sounding unlike an officer, talking about his Paris trip to meet the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong delegates and about his great respect for the Vietnamese. Kerry and McCusker developed an immediate rapport.

After the New York meeting, Kerry began stumping the country to raise funds for the demonstration in Washington. FBI files show that the agency was unsure what to make of him, for despite his tailored suits, Gucci loafers and "JFK" monogrammed sweaters that other vets kidded him about, and despite the patrician manners and stock patriotic phrases, Kerry seemed to harbor, and at times openly express, some fairly radical beliefs. The files contain an array of his edgy political positions, including his statement in Philadelphia that "Ho Chi Minh is the George Washington of Vietnam." Southeastern VVAW coordinator Scott Camil says that he heard Kerry make the comment several times. Also in Philadelphia, according to the files, Kerry noted Ho Chi Minh's understanding of the United States Constitution and his efforts "to install the same provisions into the government of Vietnam."

Kerry also attacked President Richard Nixon as relentlessly as he praised Ho Chi Minh, but his criteria for both, Camil says, was honesty and sincerity. What Kerry held most against Nixon was that he had been elected in 1968 on a promise to end the war, yet by mid 1971, Nixon had extended the ground war into Laos and Cambodia and had begun plans to massively escalate the air war against North Vietnam. "Nixon ran 3 1/2 years ago saying, 'I have the secret plan for peace,' " the files say Kerry told one audience, "and now, the only promise he has kept is that the plan is still a secret."

Though Kerry at times lectured VVAW to stick to the single issue of ending the war, and to eschew attacks on racism, poverty and other broader issues, Kerry himself often condemned social injustices. He told an audience in Reno that, "The United States has become a society based on whose ox is being gored," and in Oklahoma City, he warned, according to a newspaper account, that the country must change its political power structure to avoid violent efforts to seize power.

Anyone who thinks, as some veterans do, that the young Kerry calculated his remarks with an eye toward running for president some day will have to deal with the many unequivocal charges he made against his own government and society as recorded in the FBI documents. At times, Kerry sounded more like Eugene Debs than today's typical Republicrat. One newspaper reported: "Kerry said it is wrong for some persons to make millions of dollars and pay no taxes while others barely making a living have to pay them," and that "of 234 congressmen's sons eligible for service in Vietnam, only 24 went there and only one of them was wounded."

Indeed, the files show that Kerry was far from politically correct even within his own organization. He joined in the dedication of Victor Westphall's Vietnam War memorial, an activity hardly prescribed for VVAW leaders, in Angel Fire, N.M., on May 18, 1971. Nixon sent a supportive letter about the memorial to Westphall that month. An FBI agent, apparently spotting the potential for embarrassing Kerry by putting him on the same side of an issue with Nixon, forwarded both texts to the bureau's Washington office.

The Kansas state coordinator for VVAW, John Musgrave, who spoke beside Kerry at a couple of colleges, says that Kerry impressed him by "always speaking directly from the pain and misery of a combat veteran. He adds, "I believed every word he said in those days." Musgrave, a Marine veteran who almost lost his life to three AK-47 rounds, recalls that Kerry touched hearts with his honesty and deep feeling—as though he were speaking for America's conscience. He believes that Kerry played a major role because "the nation needs to hear what combat vets have to say, and Kerry was able to tell them." Musgrave is angry at Kerry today mainly because he believes that Kerry "has stopped speaking that way, and he owes it to the American people to speak like that again—like a human being, not a politician."

Gregory Clark, a former Australian diplomat and vice president of the new Akita International University, in Japan Times (May 25, 204):

U.S. President George W. Bush says often that the American aim in Iraq is to promote something called "democracy." But what is this democracy?

The American philosopher Francis Fukuyama has gotten much publicity with his thesis that democracy, particularly the Anglo-Saxon version, is "The End of History" -- namely the last and final stage in humanity's efforts to establish the ideal political system.

Ideal? With the news of prisoner torture and abuse by U.S. forces in Iraq?

Few may realize this, but the origins of the Fukuyama thesis can be traced back to a 1980s visit to Japan by a Lawrence Harrison, a dedicated U.S. expert on aid to Latin America. His visit was part of a quest to discover why Latin American societies found it so hard to match the economic and social progress of North America. His hypothesis was that the "radius of trust" -- the extent to which individuals in a society cooperate with each other -- was much wider in North American and northern European than in Latin societies.

Where the northern peoples had networks of professional and trade groups, traditions of voluntarism, etc., Harrison saw the Latin radius of trust as confined largely to close relatives and the Church.

Why the difference? Harrison saw it as embedded in religion -- the Protestant ethic of the north as opposed to the Catholicism of the south. But this left him with the problem of explaining non-Protestant Japan, whose progress at the time seemed to exceed even that of North America and Europe.

Visiting Japan, Harrison found similarly wide networks of trusting relationships, and assumed that the Confucian ethic was the reason. He saw that ethic as matching the Protestant ethic. At the time, some of us tried in vain to convince him that Japan was not a very Confucian society and that traditional Confucianism was usually seen more as a brake than as an aid to progress. This flaw, plus the lack of hype, probably caused his otherwise valuable radius-of-trust concept to be overlooked.

Enter Fukuyama. With only slight attribution, he picked up Harrison's concept of trusting relationships as the key to social and economic progress. But Fukuyama saw the radius of trust in North America, North Europe and Japan as having little to do with any religious ethic. Rather he saw it as proof that these societies had moved much further than others down the path of history -- all the way to advanced industrialization and liberal democracy.

The Fukuyama thesis has had enormous influence. It coincided with the collapse of communism in East Europe. Today it provides much of the rationale for the fruitless U.S. push into Iraq. But with a U.S. president as blinded by messianic fundamentalism as any al-Qaeda suicide bomber, who owes his job partly to electoral manipulation and who plans to continue it with massive spending aimed at slandering his opponent, can anyone really talk of democracy being the final stage in humankind's political development?

Far from being the end of history, democracy is the middle of history, and a very temporary one at that....

This "middle of history" thesis could explain the sharp contrast between the relative honesty and cooperation found at home in Japan and the Anglo-Saxon societies compared with the clumsy deviousness of their foreign policies and the brutality of their soldiers abroad....

Jon Meacham, in Newsweek (May 31, 2004):

In the first days of the Bush Restoration in 2001, Karl Rove, the new president's senior adviser and in-house history buff, was dining at the British Embassy in Washington with the then ambassador, Christopher Meyer. In the grand building up on Massachusetts Avenue, Rove mentioned George W. Bush's fascination with Churchill. "He was a man who saved the world," Rove said of Churchill, "a wartime leader who charted his own course, and did it with wit and personal morality and courage." Meyer called Rove a few days later. "The P.M. has a spare bust or two of Churchill," Meyer said. Would the president like one? Absolutely, came the reply. Bush, who tells Oval Office visitors that he works at a desk once used by Franklin D. Roosevelt, loved the idea of adding the Churchill.

And so there the Last Lion sits, in bronze, next to the fireplace beneath a West Texas painting. Bush likes the juxtaposition. Churchill, the president said in accepting the bust, "knew what he believed, and he really kind of went after it in a way that seemed like a Texan to me... He charged ahead, and the world is better for it." Churchill's visage sometimes appears to take in the whole room. "He watches everything I do," Bush has joked.

What would Churchill make of what he's seeing? What would FDR think of the man sitting at his desk? By drawing on the drama of World War II in talking about his own war, Bush himself has invited the questions—and the comparisons. Charging ahead, we are learning, does not automatically make the world better. Given the faulty intelligence on weapons of mass destruction that justified the Iraq war, the peculiarities of the pre-emptive strike against Saddam's regime, the casualties in the aftermath and the poor planning for a post-Saddam order, invoking the Great Men of World War II is fraught, for their legacies are so large Bush risks seeming small in their long shadow.

Yet at a gathering to open a Library of Congress exhibit on Churchill this winter, Bush explicitly linked World War II to Iraq and the war on terror. "In their worship of power, their deep hatreds, their blindness to innocence, the terrorists are successors to the murderous ideologies of the 20th century," Bush said. "And we are the heirs of the tradition of liberty, defenders of the freedom, the conscience and the dignity of every person. Others before us have shown bravery and moral clarity in this cause. The same is now asked of us, and we accept the responsibilities of history." The "we" includes Tony Blair. "A majority of decent and well-meaning people said there was no need to confront Hitler and that those —who did were warmongers," Blair told the Guardian in March 2003.

Now, amid dark days for the American effort in Iraq, a wave of World War II commemoration is about to break over us. On Memorial Day comes the dedication of the World War II Memorial on the Washington Mall, where Bush will speak. Then, a week later, the president travels to Normandy to give an addreess marking the 60th anniversary of D-Day, the Allied landings that began the liberation of Europe. Bush's appearances at the ceremonies will, for many, raise a fundamental question about that most elusive and essential of gifts: war leadership. How does Bush measure up against the giants of old? What can he—and we—learn from the road to D-Day?

Trying to find the right historical frame for our current conflict has become a consuming intellectual exercise. Some—including NEWSWEEK, in a cover story in April—have sought clarity in comparing and contrasting Iraq to Vietnam. Others think of the French fight for Algiers; still others point to the aftermath of the Great War and Versailles, which created Iraq in the first place. No parallel is exact, but turning to history is the only way we can make sense of the present. "The farther backward you can look," Churchill once said, "the farther forward you can see."

Governing always looks easier from the visitor's side of the desk in the Oval Office, from the press room or from the historian's perspective in the archives. But there is no doubt that the early returns on Bush's war leadership are troubling. Despite the administration's claims, there is still no convincing evidence of Iraqi ties to terrorism; no weapons of mass destruction have been found; we have not been greeted as liberators, and more Americans have died in Iraq since Bush prematurely declared victory aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln a year ago than had died there before. So the president has a learning curve to master, and he should start with the Great Men of the Greatest Generation—or else he may face Churchill's political fate, defeat at the polls in the wake of a war. Bush has read the right books, from Martin Gilbert and William Manchester on Churchill to Michael Beschloss, James MacGregor Burns and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. on Roosevelt. Whether he has absorbed the lessons of such works is another question.

Bush eschews complexity; FDR and Churchill embraced it. Bush prefers to decide, not go into details or revisit issues; FDR and Churchill were constantly examining their own assumptions and immersing themselves in postwar planning. Bush is largely incurious about the world; FDR and Churchill wanted to know everything. It is not too late, however, for the president to reach back into their lives for guidance—they are not inaccessible figures. Steely and subtle, hawkish and gentle, fierce and forgiving, they were men before they were monuments. And in the debate over D-Day (or Overlord, as the cross-channel invasion was called), all of their gifts and quirks, genius and weaknesses, came into sharpest focus....

Bob Thompson, in the Washington Post (May 18, 2004):

To invade or not to invade, that was the question. Once again, you had a bunch of Washington pundits and insider types shooting off their mouths about a decision that would get thousands of people maimed or killed and poison international relations for the foreseeable future.

Fortunately, the eight panelists holding forth at the Shakespeare Theatre yesterday were talking about the 15th century, not the 21st. And the topic they were debating was King Henry V's decision to lead an English army into France in 1415, not President Bush's decision to send an American army to Iraq in 2003.

Or was it?

"Let's see what we have here. We have a king whose father had been a king. We have a king who spent a carousing youth," said industrialist and Shakespeare Theatre trustee Sidney Harman as he introduced the program. Harman went on to mention the "invasion of another sovereign nation" and to paraphrase the hoary advice of George Santayana that "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

Before long, Vanity Fair contributing editor Christopher Hitchens was quoting Henry IV's deathbed advice to the newly reformed future Henry V that in order to suppress domestic discontent, he should, in Shakespeare's words, "busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels." MSNBC hardballer Chris Matthews was referring to the English longbows -- used to great effect by young Henry's archers in his immortal victory at Agincourt -- as "weapons of mass destruction." And moderator Walter Isaacson, president and CEO of the Aspen Institute (which helped put on yesterday's panel), was citing a bon mot by panelist and New York Times columnist David Brooks in which he'd compared the neoconservative advocates of George W. Bush's war to the English churchmen who gave their blessing to Henry's.

"Theocons," Brooks had called them.

The audience roared.

Such contemporary resonance was exactly what Isaacson had been hoping for when he came up with the idea for yesterday's debate.

John McManus, in Grade the News (May 19, 2004):

New Yorker Editor David Remnick had the stage all to himself Monday evening. But Tuesday during the John S. Knight Journalism Symposium, he faced off against three prominent journalists, a history professor -- and the wisdom of Thomas Jefferson.

Mr. Remnick's critique of the American press for turning from expensive foreign news to "non-fiction show business" featuring celebrity trials elicited agreement. But when he blamed the public for failing to pay adequate attention to serious journalism, Stanford Professor David M. Kennedy demurred with a little help from the author of the Declaration of Independence.

Prof. Kennedy, who like Mr. Remnick has won a Pulitzer Prize, likened the editor's indictment of the public the night before to Jimmy Carter's infamous "malaise" address. He paraphrased the former president: "I'm a good leader, but you're not cooperating by being good, attentive citizens."

"It's absolutely fatal to democratic theory to believe the public is incompetent," said Mr. Kennedy. "To whom else can we turn?"

Mr. Kennedy, the Donald J. McLachlan professor of history, quoted an 1820 letter of Thomas Jefferson: "I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves, and if we think them not enlightened enough, the remedy is not to take it from them but to inform their discretion by education." News media, Mr. Kennedy said, must be more "clever" at making what's important compelling.

Editor Remnick responded: "I don't think at all people are incompetent. They are faced with a more difficult world than Thomas Jefferson faced." In Jefferson's time, he said, there was no "entertainment blizzard ... the narcotic effect of television at the end of a day.

"I feel sorry in a way for the news consumer," Mr. Remnick continued. "They are faced with a blizzard of choices and they are their own navigators."

Bob Egelko, in the San Francisco Chronicle (May 17, 2004):

Fifty years to the day after the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed school segregation, another court ruling will allow same-sex couples to marry in Massachusetts today.

There are many differences between Brown vs. Board of Education and Goodridge vs. Department of Health Services - for one, gays and lesbians have not faced the same historic level of discrimination as African Americans - but the two cases have more in common than a date.

Both the nation's high court and the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court used their constitutional power to protect a politically weak minority from state laws that the justices considered discriminatory, directing legal and societal changes from the bench that would not have happened in a state legislature.

In the intervening decades, the U.S. Supreme Court has followed much the same path in rulings that legalized abortion and interracial marriages, outlawed organized school prayer, suspended the death penalty nationwide from 1972 to 1976 and required police to tell suspects of their right to remain silent and consult a lawyer. Last year, the court overturned state laws against consensual sodomy, a ruling that laid the groundwork for the Massachusetts decision on same-sex marriage.

Following the Supreme Court's lead, lower courts have taken control of prisons and mental hospitals after finding that the state was failing to protect inmates, another vulnerable group, from abuse.

The model for each case was Brown, which set a modern precedent for the judiciary as the guardian of rights - some constitutionally specified, some not - for the outcast, the downtrodden and the unpopular. The extent to which courts can, and should, perform that role remains a topic of hot debate.

"When the court advances liberty or equality in a way that the legislature won't, I think the court's performing its highest mission," said University of Southern California Law Professor Erwin Chemerinsky. "I believe that the courts make a positive difference in society."

To take two prominent examples, he said, abortion was illegal in 46 states on the day before Roe vs. Wade was decided in 1973, and legal in all 50 states the day after; private homosexual conduct was illegal in 13 states before the Supreme Court struck down those laws last year.

But John Eastman, law professor at Chapman University in Orange, said courts raise questions about judicial legitimacy when they second-guess elected lawmakers - particularly on subjects that are not mentioned in the Constitution, like abortion and gay rights.

Even in the Brown case, whose equal-protection rationale he supports, Eastman said the court should have confined its ruling to individual students and districts and left broader changes to the democratic process, where they would have been "longer lasting and more stable."

Such critiques are not limited to conservatives like Eastman. Liberal scholar Mark Tushnet's 1999 book, "Taking the Constitution Away From the Courts," advocated relying on political rather than judicial action to protect individual rights. And University of Virginia Law Professor Michael Klarman argues that rulings like Brown and the Goodridge decision in Massachusetts often backfire.

"By outpacing public opinion on issues of social reform, such rulings mobilize opponents, undercut moderates, and retard the cause they purport to advance," Klarman said in a recent law review article. "... In the short term, Brown retarded progressive racial reform in the South" by generating a fierce backlash, and Goodridge appears to be having the same effect, he said.

Brown-style activism on behalf of minorities has been rare in Supreme Court history. A different kind of activist court overturned minimum-wage laws and other economic regulations on property-rights grounds early in the 20th century, relenting in the late 1930s only after President Franklin Roosevelt proposed his court-packing plan to appoint additional justices.

The court laid the groundwork for the modern era with a famous footnote in a 1938 case suggesting that minorities who were not protected by the political process were entitled to special constitutional status. It took another 16 years, a procession of new justices and a wave of social changes to turn the judicial theory into dramatic reality.

Klarman attributed the Brown ruling to developments outside the court: World War II's effect on racial attitudes, a rise in African American political power and the growth of a black middle class, and Cold War politics, which made Southern white supremacy an international embarrassment.

"The justices in Brown did not think they were creating a movement for racial reform; they understood that they were working with, not against, historical forces," Klarman wrote, adding that the civil rights movement was the chief catalyst for change.

Other commentators said the court deserves more credit. Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David Garrow called the Brown ruling "a huge motivating, encouraging force" for such watershed events as the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955-56 and the sit-ins of the early 1960s. USC's Chemerinsky said the ruling ultimately doomed Southern segregation in all walks of life and represented a triumph for the court's power to subject laws to constitutional review.

Fast-forward a half-century. Today's Supreme Court is arguably as activist as the court that decided Brown, usually in another direction - overturning federal disability-rights and gun-control laws in the name of state autonomy - but occasionally in decisions reminiscent of the earlier court, like last year's ruling overturning state sodomy laws.

Courts in some states, like Massachusetts, are taking the lead in expanding constitutional protections - perhaps following the path of the California Supreme Court, which defied public opinion and decades of precedents by overturning a ban on interracial marriage in 1948, 19 years ahead of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Both sides of the same-sex marriage issue are preparing for crucial tests on opposite coasts: in California, where the state Supreme Court hears arguments May 25 on the legality of same-sex weddings in San Francisco, and in Massachusetts, where the state court's ruling allowing gay marriages to begin on Monday could be undone by a 2006 ballot measure.

Christopher Dickey, in Newsweek (May 18, 2004):

I’ve been covering guerrilla wars for almost 25 years, and in every case I’ve been convinced that the only way to defeat committed insurgents fighting on their home ground, in the short and medium term, is with ferocious, unrelenting repression. Afterward, compromise with the insurgents can help finish the job for good, and the democratic process can be part of that. But first: force.

This is one of the points the best-selling military historian John Keegan makes in his new book, “Intelligence in War: Knowledge of the Enemy from Napoleon to Al Qaeda” (Knopf) His argument is that intelligence is helpful in any battle, but rarely decisive. “War ultimately is about doing, not thinking,” he concludes. And what you do in war can never be called democratic.

The first insurgency I covered in detail was El Salvador in the early 1980s. Back then, it was conventional wisdom among liberals that the activities of right-wing death squads were not only morally repellent, they were counterproductive in the fight against communists. They supposedly drove people into the arms of the rebels. In fact, the death squads were morally repellent. The slaughter they carried out, murdering and torturing many more of the innocent than the guilty, was nauseating. But it was effective. The urban infrastructure of the Salvadoran rebels was virtually obliterated, preventing them from launching any effective uprising for years to come. Salvadoran democracy, such as it is, was built on the corpses of those killed by the death squads. The party that has held the presidency ever since that war ended was founded by the leader of the death squads.

Much is made of guerrilla ideologies—communist, or Islamist, or Baathist. But the driving force in most guerrilla movements is simply dignity. Throughout history, long before any “-isms” were known, men fought against conquerors and occupiers because they found the presence of the foreigners humiliating. They used any means at their disposal to strike back, and as often as not they were denounced by the occupiers as bandits, savages and, yes, terrorists for doing so.

You discover the same pattern repeated over and over again, literally for thousands of years, in Robert Asprey’s “War in the Shadows,” a two-volume history of guerrilla warfare that came out in 1975 and really ought to be reissued now.

You read about a general in an occupation force saying, “There is but one way of inducing the violent rebels to become our friends, and that is by convincing them it is in their best interest to do so”—a none-too-veiled threat. Another complains that “the violence and passions of these people are beyond every curb of religion, and Humanity, they are unbounded and every hour exhibit dreadful wanton mischiefs, murders and violence of every kind, unheard of before.”

The sentiments are familiar enough in Iraq right now even if the syntax is not. But the officers quoted by Asprey were British—Lord Cornwallis and Brig. Gen. Charles O’Hara—writing about Francis Marion, “The Swamp Fox,” and other guerrillas in the Carolinas during the American Revolution. Cornwallis shattered the conventional American Army in the South in less than an hour at the Battle of Camden, but he couldn’t get rid of those guys in the South Carolina Low Country, who just wouldn’t play by the rules. The political leadership back in London was balking at the cost. The local allies Cornwallis picked up started to desert him. He couldn’t get the boots on the ground to do the job. And he just couldn’t understand why he couldn’t win.

Some readers will call this moral relativism (and they’re welcome to expound on the subject at Shadowland@newsweek.com). But it’s really just a matter of learning from the past experience of guerrilla fighting, and of terrorism. There are few mysteries here, unless we refuse to read the history at all.

Asprey calls the trap into which many conquerors, occupiers and colonizers fell “an arrogance of ignorance compounded by arrogance of power,” and he puts in historical perspective what he calls “the paradox of terror”: “By devious mental exercises conducted in the spiritual gymnasium of Christianity, colonizing powers defended the double standard: force used by themselves became benevolence; counterforce used by natives became terror. The conceit is clearly expressed in Cornwallis’s denunciation of Marion and his guerrillas during the American Revolution.”

Some 120 years later, the Americans themselves became an imperial power, when they defeated Spain in 1898 and took over all its restive colonies. Much more than any other conflict the United States ever entered, the pacification of the Philippines holds lessons for the war we’re fighting now. The good news: we won. The bad news: it took many years, wholesale slaughter helped us get the job done, and if the masses of Americans had any idea how gruesome it could get—if they’d had 24/7 news coverage, for instance—they probably would have turned away from the whole bloody enterprise.

At the battle of Mount Dajo in 1906, four years after Teddy Roosevelt declared major combat operations over, some “outlaws” in the Muslim south of the Philippines were attacked by U.S. forces: “The position was first shelled by a naval gunboat and then assaulted by the troops and constabulary,” according to a report issued by the U.S. secretary of Commerce and police. “The Moro women fought alongside the men and held their children before them, having sworn to die rather than yield. In this way a number of women and children were among the killed—an unfortunate but necessary evil.” About 1,600 died. “I congratulate you and the officers and men of your command upon the brave feat of arms wherein you and they so well upheld the honor of the American flag,” Roosevelt wrote to the commanding general after what became known as the Jolo Massacre.

A lot of “anti-Imperialist” Americans had seen this sort of thing coming, among them William Graham Sumner at Yale, who was one of his generation’s most influential political scientists. His long address, “The Conquest of the United States by Spain,” given in January 1899, may be the best thing written yet about the fight we’re in now. “The original and prime cause of the war was that it was a move of partisan tactics in the strife of parties at Washington,” he said. But there was no popular support. So “appeals were found in sensational assertions which we had no means to verify, in phrases of alleged patriotism, in statements about Cuba and the Cubans [read Iraq and the Iraqis] which we now know to have been entirely untrue.”

Sumner argued, as did Mark Twain and many others at the time, that imperialism undermined American democracy, not only in the conquered countries, but in ours. One of the most elegant critiques was made by a poet, Katharine Lee Bates, author of “America the Beautiful.” She also wrote an anthem to those slaughtered by Americans in the Philippines: “The flag that dreamed of delivering / Shudders and droops like a broken wing.”

Bryan Burrough, in the NYT (May 14, 2004):

As cherry trees blossom along the Potomac, members of Congress are castigating the Federal Bureau of Investigation for its inability to reign in heavily armed attackers who have struck at the heart of America. Critics say the bureau is incapable of discerning where the attackers may strike next, unwilling to work with rival agencies and unfit to fight what appears to be a new kind of modern war. Some call for its wholesale reorganization. The embattled director of the bureau pleads for more resources to combat the rising threat.

This may sound like May 2004, but in fact it was the crisis that gripped Washington 70 years ago. In May 1934, the armed attackers were not international terrorists but homegrown kidnappers and bank robbers: John Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd, Baby Face Nelson, Ma Barker and Bonnie and Clyde. It wasn't the war on terrorism. It was the so-called war on crime, and for the F.B.I., it was going very badly....

Today critics are calling for the F.B.I.'s reorganization to combat international terrorism. During the war on crime, the bureau underwent two separate reorganizations, one trumpeted in headlines, the other quiet and internal. Both were badly needed.

At the time of the Kansas City Massacre, the F.B.I. was an obscure arm of the Justice Department struggling to shake an unsavory past riddled with scandal. It had the task of handling a grab bag of minor federal crimes, including crimes committed on Indian reservations and the capture of escaped federal prisoners. Hoover's agents, most of whom were lawyers and accountants with little law enforcement experience, were not allowed to carry firearms or make arrests; if an agent wanted a suspect taken into custody, he was obliged to have a local policeman do it for him.

In the initial 1933 reorganization, Hoover radically altered the bureau's focus. Dozens of new agents were hired, given guns and sent in search of Midwestern bank robbers and kidnappers. With the exception of Machine Gun Kelly's apprehension in Memphis in September, the results were underwhelming. As the crimes of Dillinger and his peers increased in audacity, F.B.I. agents too often arrested the wrong people and allowed the criminals they did find to escape; at one point, Dillinger managed to elude the F.B.I. five separate times in a 25-day stretch....

On the surface, the F.B.I. appeared to dodge calls for a second reorganization that May. Behind the scenes, however, Hoover began a sweeping overhaul of key personnel, details of which have emerged only with the release of F.B.I. files during the last decade. The lesson of Little Bohemia, Hoover decided, was that his men were unsuited for modern gunfights. When an aide canvassed 50 F.B.I. offices nationwide to identify agents"particularly qualified . . . for work of a dangerous character," he came up with exactly 11 names. In desperation, Hoover turned outside for help, hiring skilled marksmen from police departments in Texas and Oklahoma.

To supervise his new gunslingers, Hoover replaced Melvin Purvis, the senior agent supervising the Dillinger and other manhunts, with a sad-eyed desk man named Samuel P. Cowley. Assuming command of the flagging war on crime on June 2, Cowley produced fast results with his deft coordination of far-flung agents, informants and investigations....

Defeating international terrorists in 2004 is certainly a far more complex mission than defeating bank robbers in 1934. Osama bin Laden, Al Qaeda and their fellow travelers won't be stopped by better snipers or managers. Still, the challenge the F.B.I. faces today is much the same it confronted 70 years ago: finding a way to retool an underperforming government bureaucracy to combat an intimidating new danger to the public. The bureau did it to significant effect in 1934, and with luck, it will prove just as nimble again.  

Todd S. Purdum, in the NYT (May 16, 2004):

He was a champion debater, a good student, a strong and graceful athlete in a small, judgmental universe that prized such skills and knew him well. But for five formative years, John Kerry stood a step apart at St. Paul's School, gaining achievement more than acceptance.

Danny Barbiero, a middle-class boy from suburban Long Island who was Mr. Kerry's best friend, remembers how they made common cause in a boarding school full of Pillsburys, Peabodys, Pierponts and Pells. One day, Mr. Barbiero went to see a favorite teacher, the school's first black faculty member, and found someone else already there.

"I went into his apartment," recalled Mr. Barbiero, now an employee benefits consultant."And he said, `This is Johnny Kerry. He's just feeling a little out of sorts because he thinks people don't like him.' I said, `Who cares what people think! You're obviously a terrific person.'"

Mr. Kerry is 60 now and running for president of his country, not of his class. But to a striking degree, the personal qualities that propel him — and daunt him — are the same ones that buoyed and bedeviled him when he was 16 and striving to succeed at St. Paul's, then an austere all-boys enclave, the seventh school Mr. Kerry had attended by the time he arrived here in eighth grade.

Mr. Kerry has always been a pace apart in every world he has inhabited — from grade school to college to Vietnam to the Senate — moving forcefully and successfully through diverse milieus without ever being fully of them. To his critics, his ambition has always been just a little too obvious, his manner too calculating. To his friends, his tenderheartedness and complexities have been too little understood. Always and everywhere, his seriousness has stood out.

"I wish I could give you fresh material, but I can't," said Max King, another classmate, who went on to edit The Philadelphia Inquirer and now, by coincidence, is president of the Heinz Endowments, the wealthy Pittsburgh charity of which Mr. Kerry's wife, Teresa, is the chairwoman."He was at 13 and 14 as serious and earnest and idealistic as he is today, and very much like the person he is today."

If only because life is like high school, Mr. Kerry's adolescent experiences are worth examining in some detail. But for him, those years may loom even larger, since as the son of a diplomat, he grew up in various temporary quarters in America and Europe. From 1957 to 1962, his real home was St. Paul's, and it was here that enduring patterns were set.

"The culture was alien," Mr. Kerry recalled in one of two long interviews late last year."It had a language that I didn't know at first, kind of a body language. It was just a little different. I came from a very different experience. It took some learning."

In an 11th- or 12th-grade student production of"Julius Caesar," Mr. Kerry played a memorable Cassius, warning in his already sonorous voice,"The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,/But in ourselves, that we are underlings."

"And he still has that lean and hungry look," said another classmate, Philip Heckscher, now a teacher and Chinese calligrapher, who played Marc Antony."He was a very good actor." He was also, Mr. Heckscher said,"a very focused person, and that might have made him seem ruthless to some. He was very focused in a culture where people were generally indirect about things, and that made him stand out a bit."...