Roundup: Talking About History

Gregor Peter Schmitz: Holbrooke ... The Not-So-Quiet American

[Dr. Gregor Peter Schmitz is Washington correspondent for Der Spiegel.] There is little doubt that he was the embodiment of US diplomacy. Richard Holbrooke, who died on Monday evening at the age of 69, was a widely-respected negotiator, a former US ambassador in Berlin and elsewhere, a key player in bringing peace to Bosnia. Most recently, he was President Barack Obama's special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan. He was, in short, a "giant of US foreign policy,"

Caleb Crain: Did Principle or Pragmatism Start the American Revolution?

[Caleb Crain is the author of American Sympathy: Men, Friendship, and Literature in the New Nation. (November 2009)] What did the American Revolution look like? Nathaniel Hawthorne imagined it as an angry face, painted so as to appear divided in two. “One side of the face blazed of an intense red, while the other was black as midnight,” he wrote. This uncanny visage appears in Hawthorne’s tale “My Kinsman, Major Molineux,” of 1831; its owner rides on horseback through moonlit Boston

Blake Hounshell: Did Holbrooke oppose the Afghan war?

[Blake Hounshell is managing editor at Foreign Policy.] The last words of Richard C. Holbrooke, a lion of U.S. diplomacy, were "You've got to stop this war in Afghanistan" -- a sentence worth pondering as the United States heads into a fresh round of debate over a conflict that has ground on for more than 9 years, steadily escalating from a sideshow to a nightmare that threatens to consume Barack Obama's presidency. What did Holbrooke mean? Did he oppose the

Martin Peretz: Kissinger and Nixon

[Martin Peretz is the editor-in-chief of The New Republic.]Richard Nixon was a psychopath for whom Henry Kissinger worked, first as national security adviser and then concurrently in that position and also as secretary of state....Every so often as the secret tape recordings President Nixon made in the Oval Office are released we assume that some scarlet blush will come to Kissinger's face. No doubt Kissinger is very much embarrassed today.Here is the shameful exchan

John Meroney: Was Ronald Reagan a Secret Snitch?

[John Meroney is completing a book about Reagan's life in Hollywood. He provides audio commentary on the Ronald Reagan Centennial Collection, a DVD set of Reagan's films, out next month.] Did Ronald Reagan secretly give the FBI names of people he suspected were communists when he was a movie star and Hollywood labor chief in the 1940s? This allegation resurfaced in the media just before Thanksgiving when the San Jose Mercury News, which published excerpts from Reagan's

Fred Abrahams: Postcard from...Albania

[Fred Abrahams's book on the fall of communism in Albania will be published next year by New York University Press.] Albania's communist regime was orthodox and extreme. When other East European countries liberalized slightly after Stalin's death in 1953, the Albanian ruler Enver Hoxha held firm, calling the Soviet Union "revisionist." Albania turned to China for aid. That ended with the Mao-Nixon rapprochement. Albania then embarked on an experiment of autarky a

James Kaplan: Straight Outta Hoboken

[James Kaplan is the author of “Frank: The Voice.”] TO the best of my knowledge, Frank Sinatra acknowledged the existence of rap music only once in his life: at the lavish 1995 tribute in honor of his 80th birthday, after the hip-hop trio Salt-n-Pepa performed a special-lyrics version of their hit “Whatta Man,” he turned to his wife, Barbara, and said, “Marvelous.” That was, in all probability, the obligatory Hollywood “marvelous.” Yet Sinatra, who would have turned 95

Paul Gottfried: Was George Washington a Christian?

[Paul Gottfried is Raffensperger Professor of Humanities at Elizabethtown College and the author of Encounters: My Life With Nixon, Marcuse, and Other Friends and Teachers.] One of the stupidest historical debates I’ve ever tried to follow concerns the personal religious conviction of our founding father George Washington. Presently there seem to be two opposing schools of propagandists. They can be divided more or less into Beckites and Obamaites, and both seem obsessed with Washin

David Rothkopf: Just imagine what John Lennon would say about the Afghan war

[David Rothkopf is a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and President and CEO of Garten Rothkopf.] I woke up bleary and disoriented on the morning of December 9, 1980. I was at my girlfriend's apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. It was, like most pre-War Manhattan apartment buildings -- especially those in which students could afford to live -- drafty despite the clattering radiator and pipes that seemed to give the building a life all its

Alvin S. Felzenberg: Why America Continues to Prefer JFK

[Alvin S. Felzenberg is author of The Leaders We Deserve (and a Few We Didn’t): Rethinking the Presidential Rating Game. He is currently at work on a book about William F. Buckley, Jr.] A conservative friend of mine asked me why the public continues to rank John F. Kennedy first among Barack Obama’s nine predecessors in public opinion surveys, as they did again just this week — a Gallup poll showed Kennedy with an 85 percent approval rating, eleven points higher than that of his cl

Jordan Michael Smith: John Lennon ... Reagan Democrat?

[Jordan Michael Smith has written for The Boston Globe, The Atlantic, and The New Republic.] After John Lennon was shot on Dec. 8, 1980, thousands of fans spontaneously gathered around his apartment in New York City, imagining what the apostle of peace might have accomplished with the rest of his life. The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund received an outpouring of donations, some of which described the late Beatles songwriter as a “humanitarian.” That was one John Len

Thomas de Waal: The Ghosts of Abkhazia

[Thomas de Waal is a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.] I slept badly in the Hotel Ritsa in Abkhazia. I had an unsettling dream in which I walked through an old house with an elderly Stalin, muttering malevolently to himself. In the morning, wondering who had disturbed my sleep, I had a long list of suspects from the other world. Many of Abkhazia’s numerous ghosts must live within the walls of this whitewashed hotel. A convalescent Tro

Fraser Nelson: Why we must remember the lessons of the Anglo-Scottish Enlightenment

[Fraser Nelson is the editor of The Spectator. He is also a political columnist for the News of the World.] The Adam Smith Institute kindly asked me to speak at their Christmas reception last night, and yesterday I was mulling what to say. When at The Scotsman ten years ago, I would sometimes visit the great man's grave in Edinburgh, and be surprised to see only Chinese tourists paying tribute. It was a pretty good sign of how political power would play out. Edinburgh is, with Pragu

Michael Makovsky: Was Churchill Shifty, Mercurial, and Shallow?

[Michael Makovsky is Foreign Policy Director of the Bipartisan Policy Center and author of the Churchill's Promised Land (Yale University Press).] Seventy years ago, in the summer and fall of 1940, Western civilization teetered in the balance as Britain stood alone against Nazi-controlled Europe. Other major world powers did not lend aid; Russia supported Germany, and the United States remained neutral. After Britain resisted the assault of Nazi bombers, in what was dubbed the “Batt

Mary L. Dudziak: How to Remember Pearl Harbor

[Mary L. Dudziak is Judge Edward J. and Ruey L. Guirado Professor of Law, History and Political Science at the University of Southern California.]On December 7, the nation will remember the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor as the beginning of World War II.  What happened in the U.S. territory of Hawaii that day was not the beginning of American involvement in World War II, however.  And Japan, on her own, did not bomb Pearl Harbor into American memory.  Instead,

Ronald Radosh and Steven Usdin: Rosenbergs Redux

[Ronald Radosh is co-author of The Rosenberg File, an Adjunct Fellow at the Hudson Institute, and a writer for Pajamas Media. Steven Usdin is author of Engineering Communism: How Two Americans Spied for Stalin and Founded the Soviet Silicon Valley. He is Senior Editor at BioCentury.]In March of 1951, a young Jewish couple from New York City, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, both secret members of the American Communist Party, were tried in Federal Court for “conspiracy to commi

Brad Hirschfield: Heroes of Hanukkah: God, Maccabees and You

[Listed three years in a row in Newsweek as one of America's "50 Most Influential Rabbis," and recognized as one of our nation's leading "Preachers & Teachers," by Beliefnet.com, think tank President, talk show host, interfaith activist, and diversity expert Brad Hirschfield is the author of You Don't Have To Be Wrong For Me To Be Right: Finding Faith Without Fanaticism (Harmony, 2008).] Hanukkah is a time of heroes, but who those heroes are is not so obvious

John McMillian: John Lennon Wasn’t the Pacifist We’ve Turned Him Into

[John McMillian is an assistant professor of history at Georgia State University. His book ”Smoking Typewriters: The Sixties Underground Press and the Rise of Alternative Media in America” is being published in January by Oxford University Press. Currently he is writing a joint biography of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones for the Free Press.] ...Though he lived for 40 years, Lennon’s reputation as a peacenik derives from just a brief period in the very late ’60s and early ’70s, w

Jeffrey Toobin: Ten Years Since Bush v. Gore

[Jeffrey Toobin, a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1993, writes about legal affairs.] Momentous Supreme Court cases tend to move quickly into the slipstream of the Court’s history. In the first ten years after Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 decision that ended the doctrine of separate but equal in public education, the Justices cited the case more than twenty-five times. In the ten years after Roe v. Wade, the abortion-rights decision of 1973, there were more than sixty-

Arnold Reisman: On an Armenian Manifesto Circa 1923

[Arnold Reisman is an engineer and a retired professor of operations research at Case Western Reserve University. Born in Lodz in 1934, he came to the United States after World War II and is the author of numerous books about Holocaust refugees in Turkey, including Turkey's Modernization: Refugees from Nazism and Ataturk's Vision (New Academia, 2006).]Recently a friend showed me a booklet which I found intriguing.  It includes a most interesting and incisive account of what had been