Paige Williams, writing for the Financial Times (London) (March 13, 2004)

One of Samantha Power's favourite lunch spots is a place off Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts called Casablanca. Decorated with 20ft murals of the movie, Bogart and Bergman gaze with melancholy at diners digging into their seared cod and mixed greens.

The theme has echoes of Hitler and of Hollywood, which resonate because Power's seminal writings on war and human rights have made her a celebrity favoured by the American left...

She is equally distinguished in accomplishment. Over-achievement is de rigueur in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but rarely does it come so globally at the age of 33. In her best-selling book of 2002, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, Power chronicled the role of the US in the history of genocide. The book criticises America's record of passivity in the face of international slaughter and has become required reading for anyone hoping to strengthen US foreign policy on human rights. Power pushes the issue as founding executive director of the Carr Centre for Human Rights at Harvard, where her obsessive tendencies have not gone unnoticed. (When she was working on the book she would crank the heat up to 80 deg F during the day so she could stay warm while she worked late into the night.)

Yet lately, to her dismay, she has been at risk of being interpreted as a bit more hawk than dove - of being appropriated to justify President George W. Bush's war in Iraq. She cringes at the idea...

..."It causes me great discomfort when my book is read in its most narrow sense, which is that, 'The United States should intervene militarily when it feels like it'," she says. She puts down her fork."I mean, the book is the furthest thing from a plea for American military intervention, and certainly for unilateral military intervention on a whim or on a subjective set of excuses and justifications. It's not even about genocide. It's about are we injecting concern for foreign life, for human life, into our foreign policy as a matter of course and not as a fluke matter of convergence with national interests? And the answer remains no."...

...Power is hyper-articulate, and unhesitant in her delivery, which gives me a chance to work on the grilled pear salad. She is also fiercely accommodating of the tape recorder under her nose and doesn't knock it over once, even though she speaks with her hands: twisting and turning as though wringing out a point, this one being that the US should have intervened in Iraq not last year but in 1987-88, when Saddam Hussein's regime was exterminating an estimated 100,000 Kurds.

"I think the narrow read on my book is, 'Intervene when there is badness on the face of the earth, and if you can't get (UN) Security Council support, well, so what?'

"Having experienced a little of war in Bosnia, it is so awful that it really is something one should employ as an absolute last resort, and my criteria for military intervention - with a strong preference for multilateral intervention - is an immediate threat of large-scale loss of life. That's a standard that would have been met in Iraq in 1988, but wasn't in 2003."...

..."The war in Iraq very plainly was not about Saddam's genocide against the Kurds and human rights. It was about a perception of Saddam as a threat to very traditional American security interests. Now the so-called (WMD) security threat has been exposed as exaggerated, at best, and concocted, at worst, the only argument this administration has left for having gone to war is the human rights-democratisation-genocide argument. So they have an awful lot invested in trying to make Iraq a more humane place."...

..."A paradox is that I would hope I was a poster child for the integration of consideration of human rights into American foreign policy, and for the recognition that American interests will best be advanced if we do this," she says.

Other than her close friend Doris Kearns Goodwin, the historian, Power is the only person I've met who can speak at such length while barely coming up for air.

She says it's critical for the US to win back some credibility,"and not be the bull in the china shop".

"Can this administration restore America's credibility?" I ask.

"No," Power says."I don't think so."...

..."We're still going to have special interests no matter who's the president," she says."We're still going to have a reluctance to subject ourselves to international law that we feel we're above. The unfortunate part of the relationship about human rights and security is that now we view the welfare of foreign citizens as valuable and relevant only in so far as it advances our security."...

An influential Democratic historian has credited President Bush with instituting one of only three"grand strategies" in the history of U.S. foreign policy by trading in the doctrine of containment for pre-emption.
     John Lewis Gaddis of Yale said his fellow historians have not paid sufficient attention to the importance of Mr. Bush's sweeping overhaul of U.S. foreign policy because they are blinded by their liberal bias.
     He also accused former President Bill Clinton of failing to adequately address global threats that gathered on his watch.
    "The Bush team really did, in a moment of crisis, come up with a very important statement on grand strategy, which has not been taken as seriously as it should have been taken, particularly within the academic community," Mr. Gaddis said in an interview.
     The eminent Cold War historian makes his argument in a new book called"Surprise, Security and the American Experience," published by Harvard University Press, which has caught the attention of National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and other White House advisers.
     It also has earned the derision of Sen. John Kerry's presidential campaign.
    "There's nothing visionary about a reckless, arrogant and rigidly ideological foreign policy that's lost America influence and cooperation in the world to win the war on terror," said David Wade, a spokesman for the Massachusetts Democrat.
     Mr. Gaddis writes that America's three grand strategies were instituted by Mr. Bush, John Quincy Adams and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. All three strategies were prompted by rare, catastrophic attacks on America by foreign enemies.
     In 1814, after the British burned the White House, Adams, then secretary of state, resolved to secure America through pre-emptive continental expansion, a grand strategy that endured for a century.
     After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor prompted the United States to lead the Allies to victory in World War II, Roosevelt and his successors as president went about securing America through a grand strategy that came to be known as containment of communism. But that strategy became obsolete when the Cold War ended shortly before Mr. Clinton took office.
    "The Clinton administration was somewhat like the Harding and Coolidge administrations after World War I," Mr. Gaddis said."There was the sense that the war had been won, the fundamental processes in world politics were favorable to us, and therefore you could just kind of sit back and let them run."
     But these processes of globalization and self-determination during the Clinton administration did nothing to stop terrorists from using minimal resources to inflict massive death and destruction against the United States and its interests.
     The former president did not act decisively to head off this gathering threat, Mr. Gaddis said.
    "It just seems to me that any good strategist would be unwise to sit back and assume that things are going our way," he said."You ought to be thinking through how what appear to be favorable trends can produce backlashes."
     Such a backlash occurred on September 11, 2001, necessitating a new grand strategy, which was implemented by Mr. Bush....

Max Boot, in the Weekly Standard (March 15, 2004):

In 1995, when I was a junior editor at the Wall Street Journal, I was handed "The Daniel J. Boorstin Reader" to review. I had heard of the author but had never read his work. As I dove into this 900-page compendium, I quickly discovered that Boorstin had a discerning eye for detail, an ability to compose flowing sentences, and a love of quirky facts.

He put those talents to use writing compelling narratives that ranged from mummifying techniques in ancient Egypt to art in modern France. His masterpiece was "The Americans," a trilogy that showed the importance of spelling bees, the garment industry, traveler's checks, and all sorts of other hitherto underestimated influences in the making of this country.

After my gushing review of the "Reader" appeared, I got an appreciative letter from Boorstin inviting me to lunch at the Cosmos Club. This is where--at its former location on Lafayette Square, across from the White House--Civil Service commissioner Theodore Roosevelt once held Rudyard Kipling spellbound. Our lunch was in the grand old pile where the club moved in 1952. With his natty bow tie, horn-rimmed glasses, and tweed jacket, Boorstin looked very much the Washington sage.

What I remember chiefly about the lunch is that he was a charming raconteur and a man of great learning who graciously spoke to me as if I were an equal. Though he was already a wizened ancient--or so it seemed to a twentysomething--his thoughts flowed as smoothly as a fine fountain pen and his
talk was as intoxicating as a cocktail.

I went away from the meal with enhanced respect for the great man. It was with sadness, then, that I read of his death on February 28 at 89. He was treated to lengthy obituaries, which duly noted his glittering résumé: Rhodes scholar, professor at the University of Chicago, director of the Smithsonian's National Museum of History and Technology, Librarian of Congress, bestselling author. But if it's possible for someone who won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and just about every other accolade a historian could reap to be underappreciated, then I would say, judging from the obituaries, that Boorstin was underappreciated.

Most of the articles had a slightly sniffy tone. They praised Boorstin, to be sure, but with reservations. He was, first of all, a "popular" historian--not a compliment in today's academy. He had also "named names" before the House Un-American Activities Committee following a youthful flirtation with communism. Perhaps worst of all, his books are known for celebrating America's achievements instead of wallowing in its shortcomings. As a consequence, Yale's David Greenberg wrote in the Los Angeles Times, "Boorstin . . . had come to be derided in some quarters as a conservative."

It's not hard to see why he might have gotten such a reputation. An old-fashioned liberal, Boorstin was disgusted by the excesses of 1960s leftists, whom he labeled, in a 1968 Esquire article, "The New Barbarians." He also opposed racial quotas and much of what passed for ethnic studies, which he once described as "racist trash."

Belinda Cooper, in the NYT (March 6, 2004):

Taner Akcam doesn't seem like either a hero or a traitor, though he's been called both. A slight, soft-spoken man who chooses his words with care, Mr. Akcam, a Turkish sociologist and historian currently teaching at the University of Minnesota, writes about events that happened nearly a century ago in an empire that no longer exists: the mass killings of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire during World War I. But in a world where history and identity are closely intertwined, where the past infects today's politics, his work, along with that of like-minded Turkish scholars, is breaking new ground.

Mr. Akcam, 50, is one of a handful of scholars who are challenging their homeland's insistent declarations that the organized slaughter of Armenians did not occur; and he is the first Turkish specialist to use the word "genocide" publicly in this context.

That is a radical step when one considers that Turkey has threatened to sever relations with countries over this single word. In 2000, for example, Ankara derailed an American congressional resolution calling the 1915 killings "genocide" by threatening to cut access to military bases in the country."We accept that tragic events occurred at the time involving all the subjects of the Ottoman Empire," said Tuluy Tanc, minister counselor at the Turkish Embassy in Washington, "but it is the firm Turkish belief that there was no genocide but self-defense of the Ottoman Empire."

Scholars like Mr. Akcam call this a misrepresentation that must be confronted. "We have to deal with history, like the Germans after the war," said Fikret Adanir, a Turkish historian who has lived in Germany for many years. "It's important for the health of the democracy, for civil society."

Most scholars outside Turkey agree that the killings are among the first 20th-century instances of "genocide," defined under the 1948 Genocide Convention as acts "committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group."

During World War I the government of the disintegrating Ottoman Empire, fearing Armenian nationalist activity, organized mass deportations of Armenians from its eastern territories.

In what some consider the model for the Holocaust, men, women and children were sent into the desert to starve, herded into barns and churches that were set afire, tortured to death or drowned. The numbers who died are disputed: the Armenians give a figure of 1.5 million, the Turks several hundred thousand.

In the official Turkish story the Armenians were casualties of civil conflict they instigated by allying themselves with Russian forces working to break up the Ottoman Empire. In any case atrocities were documented in contemporary press reports, survivor testimony and dispatches by European diplomats, missionaries and military officers. Abortive trials of Ottoman leaders after World War I left an extensive record and some confessions of responsibility.

A legal analysis commissioned last year by the International Center for Transitional Justice in New York concluded that sufficient evidence existed to term the killings a "genocide" under international law.

Yet unlike Germany in the decades since the Holocaust, Turkey has consistently denied that the killings were intended or that the government at the time had any moral or legal responsibility. In the years since its founding in 1923 the Turkish Republic has drawn what the Turkish historian Halil Berktay calls a "curtain of silence" around this history at home and used its influence as a cold war ally to pressure foreign governments to suppress opposing views.

Mr. Akcam is among the most outspoken of the Turkish scholars who have defied this silence. A student leader of the leftist opposition to Turkey's repressive government in the 1970's, Mr. Akcam spent a year in prison for "spreading communist propaganda" before escaping to Germany. There, influenced in part by Germany's continuing struggle to understand its history, he began to confront his own country's past. While researching the post-World War I trials of Turkish leaders, he began working with Vahakn Dadrian, a pre-eminent Armenian historian of the killings. Their unlikely friendship became the subject of a 1997 Dutch film, "The Wall of Silence."

Turks fear to acknowledge the crimes of the past, Mr. Akcam says, because admitting that the founders of modern Turkey, revered today as heroes, were complicit in evil calls into question the country's very legitimacy. "If you start questioning, you have to question the foundations of the republic," he said, speaking intensely over glasses of Turkish tea in the book-lined living room of his Minneapolis home, as his 12-year-old daughter worked on her homework in the next room. In a study nearby transcriptions of Turkish newspapers from the 1920's were neatly piled.

 

David Greenberg, in the LAT (March 2, 2004):

By the end of his career, the Pulitzer Prize-wining historian Daniel Boorstin, who died last weekend at 89, had come to be derided in some quarters as a conservative. In an age that viewed national myths with skepticism, Boorstin celebrated American exceptionalism and touted Western achievements.

Ironically, though, Boorstin's own signal contribution to the world of ideas lies not in his now-dated Cold War boosterism but in his improbable legacy as a postmodern thinker — one who became invaluable for comprehending today's image-drenched public life.

Boorstin's reputation for conservatism stemmed partly from his pronouncements against liberal shibboleths like affirmative action and multiculturalism, which he issued ex cathedra from his perch as librarian of Congress, a post he held from 1975 to 1987. But the perception of his political orientation also reflected his scholarship, dating to his influential 1953 book, "The Genius of American Politics."

That tract provocatively praised the absence of theory in American political debate. In contrast to the ideologically driven bloodshed that had scarred Europe, he argued, America's short life and abundant land had endowed it with a special, salutary pragmatism. Boorstin even interpreted the Civil War as conservative in nature, since both sides claimed allegiance to the Constitution instead of seeking to overturn it.

For stressing continuity rather than conflict in the American past, Boorstin was grouped with contemporaries like Louis Hartz and Richard Hofstadter as "consensus" historians. All of them found broad agreement among generations of Americans on the basic tenets of liberal capitalism — leaving little room for more radical socialist movements, for example, to develop. But whereas Hartz and Hofstadter lamented the conformity and homogeneity of American thought and politics, Boorstin unapologetically admired it.

Yet if Boorstin's enthusiasm for American exceptionalism defined his place in his profession, in the wider world of letters he has come to be seen, a bit incongruously, as part of the canon of postmodern thinkers.

One tenet of postmodernism, to put it reductively, is that in advanced societies, reality has come to consist merely of constructed simulacra, with no grounding in material reference. In the 1970s and '80s, literary critics, mostly French, elaborated these concepts with a rarefied philosophy and a dense jargon (like "simulacra"). But Boorstin was onto many of these ideas even before the French, though in keeping with his disdain for theory he presented them in plain terms and sprightly prose — as well as a tone of rueful nostalgia.

The critical work was "The Image: Or What Happened to the American Dream," published in 1961. A meditation on reality and illusion in the world around us, the book has become well known for many reasons — including its definition of a celebrity as "a person who is well-known for his well-knownness." Above all, "The Image" decried the advent of what Boorstin termed the "pseudo-event": a staged occurrence that's not intrinsically significant but is created in order to make news — a press conference, for instance, or the presidential debates of 1960, which Boorstin deplored as specious drama.

At their worst, creators of pseudo-events could wreak havoc; Boorstin considered Sen. Joseph McCarthy "a natural genius at creating reportable happenings" who could garner headlines merely by waving a piece of paper. Ultimately, Boorstin worried, the proliferation of contrived illusions threatened the viability of American democracy as a project in rational self-governance.

Since then, scholars and journalists have used the idea of the pseudo-event to critique virtually every aspect of public life. In recent weeks it's been used to explain incidents from Howard Dean's post-Iowa "scream" to the flap over Janet Jackson's bared breast. Boorstin invented a concept that the culture needed.

In "The Image," Boorstin also lamented how celebrities, with their manufactured reputations, had displaced the authentic heroes he admired — those who earned fame through genuine innovations in leadership, science or the arts. Boorstin then reexamined such innovators in his later works, paying homage to intellectual adventurers from Columbus and Copernicus to Einstein and John Maynard Keynes.

Boorstin had his ideological blind spots, but in his long, idiosyncratic career, he managed to proffer a few real discoveries of his own — meriting him a modest place in the history of human thought that he strove to understand.

 

Roger Moore, in the Orlando Sentinel (Feb. 29, 2004):

In a recent radio interview, noted historian Paul Fussell admitted that he wrote his new book, The Boys' Crusade, as a"response" to the works of Stephen Ambrose and Tom Brokaw. Fretting over rose-colored obituaries highlighting Bob Hope's USO shows ("Front-line troops never saw Bob Hope") and Brokaw's pervasive"greatest generation" sugar-coating, Fussell wants to set -- or reset -- the record straight.

And Fussell, a decorated World War II infantry veteran and the author of The Great War and Modern Memory, as well as other authoritative works on how time and revision gild combat history, is just the guy to do that.

In 184 footnoted and pointed pages, Fussell reminds sentimentalists how furious the British were that the U.S. military and its troops brought their racism to the British Isles along with their pre-D-Day gear. He ridicules the misty-eyed last two-thirds of Saving Private Ryan. He reminds the reader of the near mutinous infighting within the Army -- 19,000 men who deserted in the 11 months U.S. troops fought in France, the Low Countries and Germany. He details the"friendly fire" blunders and intelligence failures that cost thousands of lives.

The boots on the ground, Fussell writes, knew all this. Whatever the"morale" back home or in the rear echelons, where Bob Hope put on his shows, the men on the lines were simply trying to stay alive.

And Fussell makes the point, over and over again, that the staggering casualties of the first months after D-Day meant that the U.S. Army in Europe grew younger, more poorly trained and"worse" as the war went on. Hundreds of thousands of young draftees were uprooted from their lives and sent to save the Brits and free the French, who didn't much care for them, in spite of their sacrifice.

Fussell has statistics, letters home, on-the-scene accounts and his own memories to bolster his arguments.

"Many officers neither had nor deserved the confidence of their men," one general of the day noted.

Pentagon"spin" was as vigorous then as it has proved since. Failures were covered up, lives wasted and young men left embittered by the friends they saw used up and spit out for a war most had a hard time understanding.

The word" crusade" that so many historians use to describe the Allied war effort? Fussell says that would have made your average infantryman laugh. Until, that is, the last days of the war, when they liberated the first concentration camps. Then, the"boys" of Fussell's army, got it. But that wasn't why they were there. They were drafted.

Fussell's point is that Brokaw, Ambrose and others do no one any favors by making"the Good War" more righteous and less savage than they should. World War II history should not be mythologized nor sanitized to create best sellers gobbled up by rear-echelon heroes, stateside warriors and the generations that came after them. Romanticizing an earlier war is the easiest way to drum up support for the next one.