Roundup: Talking About History

Richard V. Allen: Jeane Kirkpatrick and the Great Democratic Defection

[Richard V. Allen, national security adviser to President Ronald Reagan, is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford.] IN the days since Jeane Kirkpatrick’s death, much has been written about her tenure at the United Nations, her foreign policy outlook and her indelible personality. But not a lot has been said about Jeane Kirkpatrick, ardent Democrat — and what that meant to the success of Ronald Reagan in international affairs. Let me take you back to earl

Susannah Heschel: Nativity of the Jews

[Heschel holds the Eli Black Chair of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College and is the author of "Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus" (University of Chicago Press).] Mary and Joseph must have been great parents. Jesus' followers were so impressed by his religious personality that they believed he was anointed by God (Christos means "anointed" in Greek). Because Jesus became such a religious hero, the Nativity narratives in the Gospels, written long after his death

David Ferrero: Why reading, math, and science are not sufficient for a 21st century education

Interest in classical humanism, the “traditional” liberal arts, has fallen sharply over the past two decades, and nowhere more so than in American K-12 education. Grounded in the worlds and ideas of the Greeks and Romans, and transmitted to us through the European Middle ages and the Renaissance, classical humanism aims to teach students about the ideas, arts, persons, and events that constitute the “Western tradition.” It’s a model for the liberal arts that engages students with t

John Q. Barrett: The Holocaust was at the heart of the Nuremberg Prosecution

[Mr. Barrett is the editor of the memoirs of of Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson.] As we close a week that included the Iranian government’s historically and morally absurd conference purporting to examine whether there was a Holocaust, it is well to remember that undeniable knowledge of the Holocaust is rooted deeply in the work 61 years ago of Justice Robert H. Jackson and his United States and Allied colleagues at Nuremberg, Germany. On October 6, 1945, Justic

Bashir Abu-Manneh: In Palestine, a Dream Deferred

[Bashir Abu-Manneh teaches English at Barnard College.] Since occupying the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, Israel has been the only sovereign state in British Mandate Palestine. Palestinians have been living either as second-class citizens in the Jewish state; or as colonized residents of the West Bank and Gaza with no human or political rights; or as refugees dispersed and stranded in neighboring Arab countries, in often extremely difficult conditions. The chances of Palestinians over

Christopher Hitchens: Yes, the Founding Fathers Were Skeptics About Religion

Why should we care what the Founding Fathers believed, or did not believe, about religion? They went to such great trouble to insulate faith from politics, and took such care to keep their own convictions private, that it would scarcely matter if it could now be proved that, say, George Washington was a secret Baptist. The ancestor of the American Revolution was the English Revolution of the 1640s, whose leaders and spokesmen were certainly Protestant fundamentalists, but that did not bind the F

Jon Wiener: Nixon was the Worst President

[Jon Wiener is a contributing editor of The Nation and professor of history at UC Irvine.]Is George W. Bush the worst president in U.S. history? Or is it Richard Nixon? That question is being debated by historians ranging from Eric Foner and David Greenberg in the Washington Post to Sean Wilentz in Rolling Stone. Usually Bush is named worst because, although Nixon abused the power of the presidency, he also did some good things, like opening relations with China and approving the

Oliver Camm: Pinochet myths

[Mr. Camm writes a column for the Times of London.] There are two great myths about the late General Augusto Pinochet. One is that the coup that brought him to power in Chile in 1973 was engineered by the United States. I wrote about the myth here. While there are many reasons for opposing the realist foreign policies of Henry Kissinger, and many more for abominating the tyranny of Pinochet, no one has ever been able to demonstrate that the US brought Pinochet to power, for the simp

Sidney Blumenthal: Once the warrior queen of neoconservatism, Jeane Kirkpatrick died a critic of Bush's unilateralism. Her death illuminates the conflicting legacies of the movement she helped found.

The death last week of Jeane Kirkpatrick -- ambassador to the United Nations during Ronald Reagan's first term and the highest-ranking neoconservative in his administration -- coincided with President Bush's rejection of the Baker-Hamilton Commission report on Iraq and his subsequent consultations with neoconservatives to entrench his belief in "victory." But rather than providing a sobering but inspirational backdrop for Bush's heroic stand against the foreign-policy establishment, K

Humberto Fontova: Allende: The Untold Story

[Humberto Fontova is the author of Fidel: Hollywood's Favorite Tyrant, a Conservative Book Club "Main Selection."] To read the mainstream media lately you'd think Augusto Pinochet's villainous henchmen, while twirling their pointy black moustaches and snickering maliciously, overthrew a Chilean "President" (Salvador Allende) somewhere on the order of Jimmy Carter. Then they lined up 3000 harmless sociology professors and innocent leftist parliamentarians and shot

Did GW or other early presidents say, So Help Me God" when they were sworn in?

The oath of office for United States president, as specified in Article II the constitution, does not include the phrase "so help me God." Contrary to the Architect of the Capital description of President Washington's Inaugural, the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies, Donald R. Kennon, Chief Historian, United States Capitol Historical Society, Dr. Marvin Kranz of the Library of Congress , the Public Broadcasting Service Online Newshour , the CNN Presidential Inaugura

Gene Healy: Why do presidential rankings favor imperial commanders in chief?

[Gene Healy is senior editor at the Cato Institute and co-author of "Power Surge: The Constitutional Record of George W. Bush."] History may prove kinder to President Bush than the voters were on November 7. That, however, says less about the value of Bush's contributions than it does about the perverse conception of presidential greatness shared by historians who rank the presidents. Such perennial rankings, based on surveys of historians and political scientists,

Emily Parker: Who Will Tell the Story of Japan?

... There are other reasons why some in Japan would be wary of [novelist Haruki Murakami]. The writer ventures where many Japanese fear to tread: exploring the nation's notorious World War II misadventures in Asia, a taboo subject in Japan and a continuous thorn in relations with neighboring China and South Korea. Mr. Murakami's widely acclaimed "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle," published in the U.S. in 1997, contains long, gruesome interpretations of the past. In his book &qu

National Security Archive: Pinochet ... A Declassified Documentary Obit

As Chile prepared to bury General Augusto Pinochet, the National Security Archive today posted a selection of declassified U.S. documents that illuminate the former dictator's record of repression. The documents include CIA records on Pinochet's role in the Washington D.C. car bombing that killed former Chilean ambassador Orlando Letelier and his American colleague Ronni Moffitt, Defense Intelligence Agency biographic reports on Pinochet, and transcripts of meetings in which Secretary of State H

WSJ Editorial: Augusto Pincohet, a Cold War dictator who paved the way for democracy

Augusto Pinochet died on Sunday at the age of 91, more than 18 years after he agreed to a 1988 plebiscite that turned him out of power. The standard Pinochet narrative is to emphasize the loss of liberty during the 17 years he ruled the country as a military dictator. The real story is more complicated. Though General Pinochet became a devil symbol of the international left, he was a far more complex figure and cannot be understood apart from the global Cold War conflict of which he

David Bedein: "Acceptable" Holocaust Denial

[David Bedein is the bureau chief of the Israel Resource News Agency, located at the Beit Agron International Press Center in Jerusalem.] On Monday, the Israeli government issued vehement denunciation of the conference convened by the Iranian government in Teheran to promote the denial of the mass murder of the Jews in World War II, in an act of holocaust denial. Our news agency asked the spokespeople of the government of Israel if they would also denounce the leader of the Palestin

Kevin Mattson: Those who don't know history are doomed to distort it–and our political discourse

[kevin mattson is a professor of history at Ohio University and author, most recently, of Upton Sinclair and the Other American Century.] In the run-up to the 2006 elections, the past became the present political weapon of choice. Everything in politics, it seems, has a historical analogy. Consider first a speech this past summer by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld before a gathering of the American Le- gion. It revolved around an analogy between the appeasement of fascism in

Edward Rothstein: Out of Epic Wars, Another Epic Is Born, the One Called Civilization

Aeneas, as far as we can see, is spared the trauma of a hero’s death, the kind of prophesied calamity that brought Achilles down at the height of his powers. Instead, Aeneas is last seen, at the close of Virgil’s Aeneid, triumphantly planting his iron sword “hilt-deep in his enemy’s heart.” But has there been a time in recent memory when Aeneas’s literary corpse has not been wrestled over, when this Trojan warrior, brought to such vivid life by Virgil, has really been able to rest in peace?

Max Boot: How the U. S. military reinvented itself after Vietnam

It’s hard to remember now, but the outcome of the 1991 Persian Gulf War stunned the world. Few people even at the Pentagon expected it to be as one-sided as it was. Before Operation Desert Storm, Iraq’s armed forces were widely seen as a formidable adversary, hardened by years of war against Iran and supplied with the best equipment Saddam Hussein’s oil riches could buy. Iraq had 900,000 soldiers—more than the U.S. Army—and they had had months to entrench themselves in Kuwait and southern Iraq.

Aaron Asher: What happened when an anti—Vietnam War activist met his new client—Lyndon Johnson

As an American President presides over a divisive war without an apparent end, for the second time in my life, my thoughts have been drawn back nearly four decades to another President, Lyndon Baines Johnson, and his war in Vietnam. In 1969 a strange twist of history—his and mine—made me, by then an antiwar activist, the publisher of a retired President whom I both respected and hated. Although I had seen the polls indicating that a substantial majority of the public had lost confid