AURORA FORUM AT STANFORD UNIVERSITY
THE AMERICAN PRESIDENCY:
CHARACTER AND CRISIS
David Kennedy
Michael Beschloss
Michael Krasny (moderator)
Kresge Auditorium
Tuesday, October 28, 2003
Michael Krasny:
Thank you. A warm welcome to all of you. I’m delighted to be
here, and especially delighted to be here with two of our preeminent historians, and I
think it’s going to be not only an enlightening and educational evening but also one that
is most memorable and, to put it mildly, stimulating because we’re going to talk about
character and crisis in the American presidency.
I want to begin by talking a little bit about the fact that often these two things are
linked in our minds, that is, crisis and the presidency and character and the presidency,
largely, I suppose, because every year, as many of you know, historians are gauged in
terms of who they think has the most lasting and memorable record as president of the
United States. And often that’s seen in terms of presidents showing grace under pressure,
showing courage, showing a kind of honorable sense of morality that makes them head
and shoulders above other presidents. Usually poor James Buchanan often comes in
trailing, or Andrew Johnson, because he was impeached, whereas Lincoln, of course, and
Jefferson and FDR rise up to the top. What we’re going to try to do here tonight: what
would be more fascinating? For many of us who grew up thinking (and it was,
unfortunately, the case) that any boy could become president, finding ourselves enriched
by studying the presidency, looking up to the presidency as a kind of iconic office as well
as figures of the presidency that we study in history in those little biographies that many
of us read, I think it’s going to be fascinating to talk with two extraordinary men about
the presidency and character and crisis.
By way of introduction, let me say that I think you’re very fortunate indeed to
have here at Stanford a Pulitzer prize-winning historian of the caliber of David Kennedy,
one of our preeminent historians. He’s here with us this evening to talk about this
subject. And so is Michael Beschloss. David Kennedy’s most recent book is called
Freedom from Fear. It’s about Americans during the Depression and the war years, and
Michael Beschloss’s most recent book is called The Conquerors. It’s a book about the
presidencies of Truman and Roosevelt, particularly during the war years.
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I thought the best place for us to begin, and we’ll begin alphabetically with you,
Michael, is to talk a little bit about what we mean by character when we think of the
presidency. I intimated a little bit about what it often seems to evolve to, that is a sense
of, or the notion of, performing with grace under pressure and performing well under
crisis. But we also think, I suppose, of character as proving and enduring and having an
historical record to endure through the years. Give us your sense of what we think about
when we think about presidential character.
Michael Beschloss: Well, I think the first thing is, and I think David would agree, we
don’t have any views about any of these characters until they’re long dead, unlike most of
us in real life. And there’s a reason for that, because we historians, at least, have a view
that to really understand a president, especially at a moment of crisis, you’ve got to have
two things that you don’t have in real time. We watch a George W. Bush or a Bill
Clinton, and they are covered very intensively by cable TV, the Internet, all this
reportage. Sometimes you learn things about them that you really did not want to know.
But the point is we have a sense that we know these people in real time, but we
lack two things that historians need to have. One of them is information. We know a lot
about what George Bush might say in public; what we don’t know is some of the things
he said in private or perhaps says to even former officials at Stanford who may be
working for him right now who may keep diaries and later on write their memoirs. And
when we get those kinds of diaries and national security documents, we will know a lot
more about what is going on than we can possibly know now, and we’ll get a better
judgment. The other thing is that you really need hindsight. Right now we all watch TV
and our pundits say if the president has had a good month, or a good week, or a good
minute, just looking back with that degree, and it doesn’t mean much. When you look at
these presidents twenty or thirty years later, they look so different because when you wait
that period of time, you know what was important and what was not important and also
how the story turned out.
One very quick example, and I don’t want to be too long at the beginning, is
Franklin Roosevelt, about whom David has written so well. In 1940 and 1941, he had to
deal with one of the great crises that a president has ever had to deal with: the danger of
Adolph Hitler and the fear of the Japanese. In retrospect, because of some information
we now have, Roosevelt, despite neutrality laws that were pretty tough, did some pretty
un-neutral things, and some of them in secret, in the north Atlantic and with the British
that, I think, if they had been revealed at the time, might have put him in jeopardy of
being accused of even breaking the law. You might have had some wild member of the
Congress even instituting impeachment hearings, saying that the president is knowingly
lying to the American people and doing un-neutral things against the law. But with
hindsight, I don’t want to speak for David, but it may be that he had to do these things to
make sure that we were prepared for World War II, and I think historians are probably
willing to cut Roosevelt some slack, saying, Maybe he lied; maybe he flirted with
breaking the law; but it was done for something that was very important: defeating Hitler
and the Japanese.
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The last point. You move the clock up to 1970. Richard Nixon, when he was
bugging people and authorizing break-ins and authorizing other criminal conduct, would
have said at the time, and he said later on: I’m doing exactly the same thing that
Roosevelt did. Roosevelt didn’t tell the truth. He did these things. He tapped the wires
of embassies, and so on, so what’s the difference? I’m a president in wartime just as he
was. The difference is that with thirty years’ hindsight, we look back and say, Nixon was
probably not doing this for national security; he was doing this to protect himself
politically, which is a little bit different.
The point I’m making is that you can make judgments about character and crisis
at the time that are interesting. You have to do it because we’ve got to vote for these
people and we have to vote for someone now; we can’t wait for thirty years to see what
some historian writes, to our chagrin. The point is that in the end, the judgments with
that kind of hindsight information are usually pretty different from the way that they’re
looked at at the time.
Michael Krasny:
Thank you, Michael. Let me take this point and go to you, David
Kennedy, with it. Do we need hindsight and perhaps some historical viewpoint when it
comes to character? How much hindsight do we need? And again, what are the
standards? What are the litmus tests or the gold standards, in your judgment, for judging
character?
David Kennedy:
Let me start by saying that I think this question is devilishly
difficult. Character is a notoriously difficult thing for anyone to define or come to grips
with, and especially someone else’s character, I think, is always elusive for us to capture.
The assignment we have here this evening is not only to talk about character but also the
very peculiar institution of the American presidency, and then added to the mix is the
notion of the character of the presidency in crisis. So we have three very volatile
elements here to work with.
I agree with Michael quite emphatically that there is value to this thing called
historical perspective. It comes from the accretion of information that history builds
about historical episodes and characters, and it comes from this also quite elusive but
nevertheless quite important element of perspective, which we only get over time when
we understand context and how stories not only begin and unfold but how they largely
end.
I would think, Michael, that the fullest response I can give to your question about
what I think of when I think of character in the presidency – character in the very peculiar
institution with which we live in this country – is, if I have to boil it down to a single
element, I think that the most important ingredient in presidential character, the most
important ingredient in determining presidential success, is what I’m going to call clarity.
But I’m going to parse that a little bit. Clarity. [Laughter] As a president once said, “Let
me make one thing perfectly clear.” I’m talking here about clarity.
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Michael Krasny:
clarity.
When you say you’re going to parse it, it’s not clarity if you call it
David Kennedy:
It depends what clarity means.
But I mean three things: clarity of conviction, clarity of principle, and clarity of
communication. In other words, I think the president, or any leader, I suppose, but
peculiarly the president, has to know who he or she is. By that, I mean clarity of
conviction. Clarity of principle and clarity of vision, I might say more properly. You
have to know where you are historically and in what situation you find yourself and how
your convictions and principles thereby apply. And clarity of communication: the
presidency is a relationship between the office of the president and the electorate, the
democracy of the people of the United States. You have to be able to communicate
clearly your convictions and your visions if you’re going to be an effective leader. So I
think clarity in those three senses goes a long way toward capturing, in my mind, what’s
important about presidential character for success.
Michael Krasny:
You keep calling it a peculiar institution. Can you have clarity
given the emphasis on the peculiarity?
David Kennedy:
Well, this might lead us into a lengthy discussion of what’s
peculiar about the American presidency. The United States is one of a relatively small
handful of countries worldwide that directly elects their president. In fact, most of the
others are to be found in the Western Hemisphere, so there’s a peculiarly new-world
character about the nature of our political system. We directly elect our presidency by
vote of the entire electorate. The alternative is the parliamentary system where the
parliament or the legislature essentially elects the party leader who is the chief executive
officer.
The Constitution of the United States spends fifty-one paragraphs defining the
duties, responsibilities, and limitations of the Congress. It spends only twelve paragraphs
defining the duties and limitations and responsibilities of the president. So clearly the
founders had a certain conception of where the center of gravity of our political system
would be, and it would be principally in the Congress. And indeed, for a long period of
American history, that, I think, was largely the case. It’s only in the last century or so – I
would personally date it from the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt – that we’ve lived in
a system that has a more plebiscitarian presidency, and that is one of its striking
peculiarities.
Michael Krasny:
Michael Beschloss, I want to go back to you and pick up on
something here which is, when we hear David Kennedy talk about clarity, that we also
mean not only clarity of vision, as he said, but clarity of communication, clarity of
principle, and all those kinds of things. And yet when we think of crisis and character in
the presidency, we often think of acting against the tide, or acting in a bold and a daring
way – acting when it means losing political capital or against tremendous odds – taking
that kind of a risk. Don’t we?
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Michael Beschloss: Yes. And I think that if you had to distill presidential character to
one thing – and I could list a lot of them – but maybe the one thing that is most important
to me is exactly that, which is, if a president is faced with a situation where either dealing
with a crisis or pursuing a national need means that he might have to give up his job, he
might not get reelected, or he might become very unpopular or leave office a less revered
figure than he hoped to be – you’d want a president who is willing to say, This issue is
more important than my political survival or my popularity. That’s pretty much borne
out by history.
We were talking about FDR before World War II. It was a very isolationist time.
A lot of the political people around Roosevelt would have said in 1938, “If you have any
desire to serve a third term, you’d better not rock the boat with the public and give them
any idea that we might be involved in a second world war. The public thinks that World
War I was a failure; they’re absolutely dead set against making what they would consider
that mistake again.” And Roosevelt never actually said this, but what his reply would
have been had he been told that, would have been “There’s something more important
which is that I may lose the election, but if I don’t begin talking about defense and asking
the Congress to begin preparing this, we might lose a World War II and this country will
become a very ugly and unimportant country if that happens.”
It was the same thing with Kennedy and Johnson in the 1960s. Kennedy sent a
civil rights bill to Congress in June of 1963. People don’t remember, but between the
time that was sent and the time John Kennedy went to Dallas in November, his poll
ratings dropped about twenty-five points, especially in the South, which was a big part of
his margin in 1960, so that on the day John Kennedy died, had he lived, he was in danger
of losing the ’64 election mainly because he had taken a risk to advance the cause of civil
rights. So I guess one big test for me of a president’s character is whether this is
someone who, if faced with something like that, with a full heart would say, “There’s no
doubt that I would rather do the right thing than stay popular or get reelected.”
Michael Krasny:
I was thinking about the old remark of Scott Fitzgerald that
“nothing endures like character.” When you think about the Roosevelt administration or
think about the Kennedy administration, you tend to lionize those figures. I’m wondering,
David Kennedy, if, dovetailing off of some of Michael Beschloss’s remarks, or actually
dovetailing off of the conversation Michael and I had on the air, when you as an historian
look and separate the wheat from the chaff and you decide that there’s a calculus to a
presidency as you do, and you evaluate it – you look, let’s say, at Roosevelt and you look
at the kind of bravery that Michael was alluding to, and then you also see Roosevelt not
making brave decisions with respect to what he could have done against the Nazis to save
Jews, or with Truman, for example, turning out to be a kind of garden variety virulent
anti-Semite. Michael expressed a great deal of disappointment when he did his research
for his book The Conquerors. How much of that sort of thing weighs in, or how much
does it weigh when you look at Johnson and you say, Here was an exceptional president
domestically, but he led us into Vietnam, and so you have this kind of strange calculus:
you’re setting off the deficits against the things on the plus side.
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David Kennedy:
Which is why I think Michael Beschloss’s first point is so
important. We really can’t come to conclusive judgment about these matters until we
have the full knowledge of history and understand the full context in which these events
occur. The Lyndon Johnson example you just gave is a splendid example because I think
historians generally give him very high marks for the courage with which he took the
civil rights bill to the Congress. It is recorded that he said to one of his aides at the
moment he signed that bill, “I think the Democratic Party has just lost the South forever,”
which turned out to be substantially true. That was a very courageous act, and he knew
he was probably changing the political regime of the country when he did that, and
history gives him high marks for it. But history gives him very low marks for what in
another context might look like courage but in this context looks just like hardheadedness
and stubbornness in the way he persisted in the Vietnam policy that history by and large
has judged as a disaster. One can cite other examples of what looks in one context like
courage yet looks like something else in the longer light of history, or even in the short
run with the electorate. I think an example is the only Stanford man ever to become
president of the United States, Herbert Hoover, who in some larger sense, I think, has had
a bad rap in the history books, but there’s no question that he had a failed presidency and
not least of all because he stubbornly persisted with certain kinds of policy principles and
prescriptions that were no longer operable.
Michael Krasny:
Let me throw it back in another light, Michael. I think about
someone like Reagan and I read Dinesh D’Souza’s book, where I’m sure you know he
was lionizing Reagan as one of the best presidents we’ve ever had because of breaking
the stalemate over the Cold War and because of what he saw as prosperity and all of
those kinds of things, and he was a great communicator, at least he was certainly often
described as being one. And he was a president who had a certain kind of obstinacy as
well, a stubbornness in so many areas like health care and helping the poor, and so forth,
so again there’s that calculus that seems so vexing, to use the word again, in terms of just
evaluating a presidency.
Michael Beschloss: We’re all human beings. David is absolutely right about LBJ. By
going ahead with the civil rights bill the night of Kennedy’s assassination, he knew that
he might suffer the same fate as John Kennedy might have in terms of being defeated in
1964, yet he did it anyway. He actually said, “What the hell is the presidency worth if I
can’t use it for civil rights?” It’s the kind of thing that you rarely hear presidents say, but
you sure hope they will. And this is the same guy who, a year and a half later, at the time
that he was sending Americans in big numbers to Vietnam for the first time and saying,
“Let’s nail the coonskin on the wall,” and “America wins the wars she fights,” while in
private he was saying things that I found on some of these tapes, and others have, that he
said things like “I can’t think of anything worse than losing the war in Vietnam, and I
don’t see any way that we can win.” So if you’re evaluating the character of a president,
I think it probably doesn’t get much worse than a president who is sending large numbers
of American children into harm’s way at the same time that in private he thinks the war is
unwinnable and he thinks it’s a hopeless cause.
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Michael Krasny:
Then again, you could look at something, David Kennedy, like the
Nixon presidency – a presidency that has often received a good deal of invective and
what I would hesitate to call almost malignant remarks, particularly in this region of the
country – and yet here was a president who, one could argue, stuck to his guns in many
ways and decided, I’m going to work toward Vietnamization; I’m going to clear up that
mess that LBJ and the other predecessors in the office made. And it took a certain
stubbornness and maybe even, one could argue, courage to do that. It took a clarity of
vision to do that, to stick with the principles, even though most of it sounded
reprehensible.
David Kennedy:
Well, I find it very difficult to look into my heart and find anything
charitable to say about the Nixon presidency. I think he failed in all three of the tests that
I offered. He didn’t know who he was, he didn’t understand very well his moment in
history and what possibilities and limitations it offered to him, and he was lousy at
convincing the American public of what policies he wanted to pursue.
Michael Krasny:
I don’t know if you read Richard Reeve’s biography, but he makes
the case that Nixon might have been autistic, actually.
David Kennedy:
I didn’t know that.
Michael Krasny:
It’s a fascinating analysis.
Michael Beschloss: One other thing with Nixon: I sure would not disagree with
David’s brilliant character analysis in this place. And I’d even add on this, and I’m not a
Nixon-basher and he did do good things, but he would say in those speeches on TV that
we remember: I’ve decided to do this action in Vietnam, and I know that this will be
politically costly but I’m doing so. My advisors have unanimously advised me not to do
this, but ….
David Kennedy:
would be wrong.
…I could do the easy thing, I could do the popular thing, but that
Michael Beschloss: Precisely. But that would be wrong. That’s right.
Michael Krasny:
I remember vividly that he would say things like, “We must come
together.” Or he would say, “We are going to go to the top.”
Michael Beschloss: We’ve got to get a psychiatrist in here along with us historians.
But the point I’m making is that those were probably courageous decisions. He was
going against public opinion; he was probably making himself unpopular, but at the same
time, and we sure know this thirty years later, there were really dumb decisions, and just
for a president to do something because it’s courageous is not enough. It also has to be
the right thing.
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The other thing is that, again, if you’re looking at character, I think Nixon did
many bad things. One of them, however, I think, almost topped all. That is, in 1968 –
and you were talking about Vietnamization – when Nixon talked about the most pressing
issue of the 1960 campaign, which was this tragic war in Vietnam, as some of you will
remember, he gave the impression that he had a secret plan for peace. That was not a
phrase he used. If it was a plan, it was very secret if he had it. But the point of this was
that he allowed people to think that he would actually be quite dovish if he were elected
and the polling research shows that a lot of Americans who voted for Nixon did so
because they thought he would be more likely to get country out of the war, and a lot of
Americans who voted for Humphrey did so because they thought that he would continue
Johnson’s policies and keep on fighting the war. So if you look at an election and a
campaign as something that gives you some idea of what these guys will do in office,
1968 was just about the worst, I think, in the last hundred years because Nixon was
elected under absolutely false pretenses by people who thought he would end the war.
And one reason why the demonstrations against the war after Nixon came in were so
bitter, I think, was not only because people opposed the policy but because so many
people felt betrayed in that he had told them something that was opposite of what he was
doing.
Michael Krasny:
They weren’t necessarily wrong about Humphrey, because I
remember his infamous, “this great adventure in Vietnam.”
Michael Beschloss: He did say that, and in public he gave people the idea that he
would essentially continue the Johnson policies. David and I would say that this is why
you need an historian to explain this because thirty years later, we now know that there
was a reason for that. And the reason was this: in late September of ’68, Humphrey
wanted to give a speech that definitely said: I don’t agree with Johnson’s policies; I will
get the United States out of the war pretty early in 1969. He told Johnson he was going
to do this, and Johnson gave one of his gracious and self-effacing replies, which was, “If
you do that, Hubert, I’m going to dry up every Democratic dollar from Maine to
California,” and that had an effect. Humphrey did not give the speech; he certainly
should have. But the result was that this was an absolutely atrocious campaign.
Michael Krasny:
It brings up, David, another vital issue. Since historians have to
sift through sometimes thirty or more years later, it’s so important to get the materials, to
get the diaries, to get the notebooks, and so forth, I think it’s worth talking about for a
moment how that’s becoming increasingly more difficult. I don’t want you to necessarily
make a brief against this administration (or maybe secretly I do), but the truth of the
matter is that they have made it extremely difficult for people in your profession.
David Kennedy:
Yes, that’s right. They’ve changed the terms of the Freedom of
Information Act so that accessing in present, current time to all kinds of administration
data, government data, is much less easy to come by than it once was. But you know,
from an historian’s point of view, we have an itch to know what’s going on in real time
today. From an historian’s point of view, the problem is a little bit different. There’s a
glut of information. I won’t get these numbers exactly right, but I’ll get the orders of
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magnitude approximately right. The Franklin D. Roosevelt Library in Hyde Park, New
York, covering three-and-a-fraction terms of the Roosevelt presidency, contains
something on the order of 15 million items. The Bill Clinton Library that’s going up in
Little Rock, Arkansas, covering two Bill Clinton terms, contains something like 400
million items. Now don’t hold me to exact numbers, but the orders of magnitude are
roughly correct. This is a challenge to future historians. It’s not that there’s a paucity of
information.
Michael Beschloss: We’ll read every word, David.
David Kennedy:
You and I together.
Michael Beschloss: We’ll read every other word. You can read one and I’ll read the
next.
David Kennedy:
But you see the problem. Getting reliable information when there
is such a bulk of data to sift through is a formidable undertaking.
Michael Krasny:
How much of that data is really useful? You have to compress
what’s really of use to historians in many respects. A lot of it is effluvia almost, isn’t it?
David Kennedy:
while.
Yes, but you don’t know that until you’ve sifted through it for a
Michael Krasny:
So it’s like being a garbologist or something.
Michael Beschloss: You sure feel that way sometimes with some of the papers that we
all go through. But the thing is that also, although the bulk is greater, as we know, the
quality is less. For instance, when David was writing about the Roosevelt period, one of
the wonderful sources, if you’re trying to find out about Franklin Roosevelt, is a diary
that was kept by his secretary of the Interior, Harold Ickes, which is about six million
words. About once every week, Ickes used to dictate about all the times he had seen
Roosevelt and other New Deal figures, and Ickes was this very angry, cantankerous
person, so the diary is just compelling reading. You almost don’t want to stop. But the
point is that he would say what Roosevelt had said to him and what he felt about it and
what he was going to do about it, and it takes you straight into the historical moment in a
way that allows historians to recreate what it would have been like to be in Franklin
Roosevelt’s entourage during those twelve years. Nowadays, you probably won’t have
something like that because people just write less. People are not in the habit of keeping
diaries and writing letters.
But there’s also something more important, and that is that when a new president
comes into office, and this is also true of people who work for him, there’s a White
House council that tells them: It is in your interest to keep as little of a paper trail as
possible. Literally, do not send e-mails, don’t write detailed memos, don’t write letters,
don’t keep diaries, (a) because these things might be leaked somehow to a newspaper, but
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(b) because in this litigious age and this age of special prosecutors, you cannot be sure
that there won’t be some kind of an investigation where your diaries or your letters even
to your wife might be subpoenaed, and this has literally happened. George Bush, the
elder’s, diaries were published while he was still president as part of Iran-Contra. So the
result is that presidents and people around them nowadays shy away from all of this and
the result is that if it goes very much further, we’ll have to write history from press
releases because we won’t have the kind of documents and sources that we had in the
past.
Michael Krasny:
Think about the Clinton and the present Bush administrations and
their presidencies in terms of spin campaigns and press releases, as Michael said. It puts
a different kind of onus on the historian. I can see, for example, exactly what he’s talking
about as being a major impediment.
David Kennedy:
It certainly is. In some ways, a person who in most respects I
greatly admire, Franklin Roosevelt, is to a certain degree the father of all this movement
because no one better manipulated the press than Franklin Roosevelt. He invented whole
new rules for the relationship between the president and the print medium. He used the
electronic medium of the radio as no one had used it before. It wasn’t a very old medium
in his day – it was only about a decade old when he assumed the office – but if you look
to the ur-occasion – the original occasion – when a president really self-consciously
manages the news, to use a phrase that entered public discourse in the Kennedy
administration, it is, I’m afraid, the administration of Franklin Roosevelt.
Michael Beschloss: And he even tried to manage historians because for, I think,
probably about twenty years after Roosevelt died, if you read a history of the Roosevelt
administration, you will find whole scenes of Roosevelt writing out his inaugural address
in longhand at his house in Hyde Park in February of 1933. Only in 1967 was there a
memoir by Roosevelt’s speechwriter, Raymond Moley, in which he says, basically, “I
wrote it,” and what Roosevelt did was he copied the thing in his own hand. He wrote the
weather and the place he was sitting at and the date of this, and the result was that people,
including my undergraduate teacher, James MacGregor Burns, would write these
wonderful scenes of Roosevelt sitting at the table in the house and it was lightning and
thundering outside and he scrawled out his entire inaugural address almost like on the
back of a shovel, and Roosevelt loved the idea that historians would be conned.
Michael Krasny:
There’s a wonderful metaphor when you think about it, in
Roosevelt’s way of disguising or concealing his infirmities, particularly his invalid
infirmity, because so many presidents have physically not revealed the problems they’ve
had of one sort or another. You find a heart murmur, and the public has to try to get that
information and can’t, and people like praetorian guards like Karl Rove or Haldeman and
so forth protecting the president from this. And I say it’s a metaphor because it’s not
only physically; it’s also in terms of character flaws. To a great extent, it’s the job of that
administration – whomever is working for that president – to make sure that the public
isn’t aware of character flaws, and so it becomes an even more challenging and
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formidable job for you to do the work you do, especially in the present time. Is that
right?
Michael Beschloss: No disagreement from here.
David Kennedy:
The presidents you name are not the first ones to conceal their
medical conditions. Grover Cleveland had an operation in secret on a yacht moored, I
believe, in the Hudson River.
Michael Krasny:
He also had a child that he concealed, didn’t he?
Michael Beschloss: That was on a different occasion, Michael.
David Kennedy:
That was a different campaign. The occasion of the famous
slogan, “Ma, Ma, where’s my Pa? On to the White House, ha, ha, ha.”
But Cleveland had an operation on the roof of his mouth to remove a possibly
cancerous lesion. He had it in secret because his vice presidential candidate was a soft
money, silver inflationist, and he was afraid that if word got out that his health was in
danger and that the vice president might ascend to the presidency that he’d lose his hard
money coalition. So this is quite a venerable practice.
Michael Krasny:
I didn’t mean to suggest that it started with Roosevelt. There was
probably a lot that we didn’t know about Lincoln’s health. You can go back that far.
Michael Beschloss: Actually, that’s true. In fact, one of the things that we’ve
discovered is that Lincoln thought he suffered from syphilis, and it’s interesting. We
don’t know if he had it or not, by the way, but we do know that he worried that he did
have it and I think if you’re trying to explain Lincoln’s melancholy and the fact that he
made such an enormous effort to understand his wife, who in many ways was very rough
on him, it doesn’t seem very clear until you understand that if Lincoln thought he had
syphilis and thought that perhaps he gave it to his wife and that’s the reason why she
began to have mental problems and why his children died, and apparently he suspected
that this was the reason, then you understand him in a way that you wouldn’t have before.
Michael Krasny:
Before we go to our audience, if we can make the traffic available
so that people can get to the microphones, which may be no small task, I’d like to ask
each of you about more recent administrations. Admittedly, you said that it takes
hindsight – it sometimes takes thirty years – but let’s project ourselves as best we can.
And let’s think about how these two most recent administrations, the administration of
George W. Bush as well as that of William Jefferson Clinton, might look to historians or
might look to you thirty years from now on the basis of what we know and perhaps even
on the basis of what we don’t know or what we can guess or intuit.
David Kennedy:
I’ll take the plunge. I think there is a kind of gathering,
conventional wisdom about the Clinton presidency that it was a great squandering – that
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here was a naturally gifted politician – a prodigiously gifted politician – a person who did
understand history, and I think where history had deposited this country at the moment
that he took the helm, a person with clear and unambiguous communication skills, but
who, for whatever complicated set of reasons and internal character flaws and
circumstances and fate, never really had the opportunity fully to bring his vision into full
reality. I think that Clinton’s presidency is going to go down as some kind of a
disappointment. I think that will be the dominant note in which historians will write
about it.
Michael Krasny:
Before we go to Bush, Michael, would you agree with that?
Michael Beschloss: I would, and I guess some of the questions I’d ask would be
somewhat similar, such as, and I think you can only ask questions now because we don’t
have the hindsight of information, but, for instance, is it possible that in ’93, when
Clinton pushed very hard for a budget bill that barely made it through Congress by one
vote, was that an act of political courage? I think it might very well have been. It made
him very unpopular, probably cost the Democrats Congress the next year to a great
extent. When he tried to pursue health care, even though the program may have had
enormous flaws, was this courageous in that he was touching that third realm in politics
that everyone always says, Don’t meddle with health care because it will mean your
political ruin? Was this someone who was really trying to take the bull by the horns?
And then, after he did lose Congress in 1994 and became very afraid that he would lose
reelection, is this someone who basically said, I’m tired of being a martyr and putting
myself in jeopardy. From now on, I’m just going to stay as popular as I possibly can?
Michael Krasny:
So when Dick Morris said welfare….
Michael Beschloss: You throw the people in the streets and you sign a welfare bill.
And even more than that, is it possible that in 1997, the year when he was safely
reelected – it was before Monica – he could done a lot of things and used that political
capital, is it possible that he was so chastened by that near-death experience in 1994 that
he could never really do that? I don’t think we know the answers to these questions, but
this is the kind of thing that twenty or thirty years from now – it’s why our business is so
fascinating – we’ll begin to get the evidence and the hindsight that we can use to find out
what happened.
Michael Krasny:
And the presidency, David Kennedy?
David Kennedy:
Well, addressing a question like this – how will history judge the
current presidency? – reminds me of some of the novelistic techniques of nineteenthcentury authors like Charles Dickens and Henry James, who would publish installments
of their novels in the public press before they’d even written the conclusions. And then
they’d ask a literary critic of the time to criticize Hard Times or A Tale of Two Cities
before the end had even been written. I think it would have been a pretty formidable
challenge. So that’s the kind of question you’ve given me. Thank you.
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Michael Krasny:
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You can always opt out of it.
David Kennedy:
But I think again there is at least the rudiments of -- the skeleton of
-- a narrative emerging about the Bush presidency and this narrative will turn, I predict,
(since you’ve asked me to project, I’ll predict) that the attack of 9-11 is the defining pivot
of this administration and its response to that will be the basis on which it is judged
historically. That’s maybe a truism by this time, but I think it’s impossible in my mind to
dislodge that as the center of the narrative that will build around the Bush presidency. I
think that contrary to the way he campaigned in 2000, which was as somewhat of a neoisolationist who was positioning himself to withdraw the United States from certain kinds
of military commitments, not least of all NATO, especially in the Balkans, that in fact it
tried to forswear the mission of the United States military in nation building, that in fact
9-11 effected some kind of conversion in his thinking and the thinking of those around
him and he is now, to use a word a little differently than I used a moment ago, I think that
he’s become a plunger. I think he’s taken some very high risks, exposed himself and the
presidency, the party, and the country to some very severe risks, but in the pursuit of very
large rewards, and I don’t think history yet knows the answer to the question of how this
will come out and whether the risks will be worth it.
Michael Krasny:
Do you see Afghanistan as also a major risk, or is it mainly Iraq?
David Kennedy:
I think Afghanistan was a lesser and a far more justifiable risk. I
think the Iraq operation is a very bold, very high-risk maneuver that may or may not pay
off in the end.
Michael Beschloss: That sounds right to me, and this is why you need this time,
because we can’t possibly have these answers until we know how the war on terrorism
turns out. It’s a little bit like the Cold War. Two examples: in 1953, when Harry Truman
went back to Missouri, he was considered by his contemporaries a rather minor president
– someone who was a minor successor to Franklin Roosevelt, had tolerated corruption in
his entourage, had maybe made some bad decisions in Korea. Fifty years later, we know
how the Cold War ended. We know it ended because a dozen presidents used the
strategy that Truman devised which makes Truman a very great man.
In George W. Bush’s case – David is absolutely right – this is a huge historical
gamble. I’d even go before Afghanistan. After the 9-11 attacks, history sometimes looks
inevitable in retrospect, but there are many people who might have been president after
those attacks who might have said, “I will deal with this by bombing some of the terrorist
bases or take this to the World Court or get the FBI in, but not do something like declare
a worldwide war on terrorism. You can be sure that some of the people around Bush said,
You’re crazy to declare a worldwide war on terrorism. It’s going to take a long time. We
might not win. There might be more domestic attacks. It might make you very
unpopular. But he chose to do that. We don’t know yet how it’s turned out. Iraq is
another example of this because Bush was essentially saying, I am gambling that if we
win a war against Iraq, we can conduct the reconstruction in a way that’s going to remake
that country and perhaps bring peace and democracy to the Middle East and also chase
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other Saddam-like dictators around the world – for instance, like the one in North Korea
– remind them that the United States is a pretty powerful country and keep them from
doing bad things. We have no idea whether that’s going to work or not. Thirty years
from now, we will know, and if you invite us back, David and I can tell you.
Michael Krasny:
I must say that I’m struck particularly by what David said when he
was talking about the new isolationism, with which the campaign and the presidency
began and how that’s turned into nation building in Afghanistan and Iraq and how it’s
taken a very counterpoint. It seems as if, notwithstanding civil rights and
notwithstanding some of the major kinds of things that have shaken this country
internally, that often it is foreign affairs where presidents make their mark – where they
show their characters. Certainly Bush wanted to begin his presidency by avoiding
foreign affairs, and now he’s not only got all of this in the Middle East, but as you
suggested, North Korea as well. Consequently, it would seem as if that is the major
litmus test, with a few exceptions.
Michael Beschloss: And to even turn it the other way, it’s the way that presidents
oftentimes make great reputations. I was once talking to Clinton years ago when he was
president, and he said the most amazing thing. He said, “I wish I were president during
World War II.” And if you know what Franklin Roosevelt went through, especially in
1942 and before the war trying to convince people to prepare, only a masochist would
want to be president during that period. But what he really meant was, (a) this was a
period when the nation was united and showed respect to its presidents, which was not
something that Clinton was feeling at the time, but (b) the other thing was, he knew, and
he reads an awful lot of history, that if you want to be a great president, usually there has
to be a great task like a depression or a war or a big urgent national need like civil rights
that allows a president to demonstrate what he’s made of.
Michael Krasny:
Couldn’t Bosnia have been that early on for Clinton possibly?
Michael Beschloss: I think it could have been had he dramatized it, but at the time that
Bosnia really ripened as a crisis, Clinton was so much bent on focusing on domestic
affairs and economics, like a laser beam. If you look at Clinton’s first two years as
president, what he said in public among those 400 million items ( I think sometimes his
speeches seemed as if they had 400 million words; they were sometimes pretty long to
read), but very little on foreign affairs, especially in those two years. He thought he’d get
sidetracked.
Michael Krasny:
David, some final thoughts?
David Kennedy:
Well, in thinking back to your original question and Michael’s
original comment about the importance of context in history and how we should be
cautious about our judgments in present time, I agree with all that. But it’s also the case
that there have been over the last fifty years or so several more or less scientific polls of
informed historians and political scientists ranking the presidents going back to when, I
think, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr. started the first one in 1948 and it’s gone on to the
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C-SPAN poll three or four years ago. I think it is the most recent one I know of.
Interestingly enough, there is a certain consensus across those polls, even though there
have been a half dozen or more of them over a fifty-year period, and the great presidents
come out routinely to be Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, and Washington usually ranks
toward the top. And the failures are very consistently people like the two who bracketed
the Civil War – Buchanan and Andrew Johnson – and now a more recent president,
Richard Nixon, seems to occupy the cellar along with them in these polls. I’m not just
making that up; that’s the way the polls come out. So there is some comfort to be taken, I
think, from the fact that when we do turn the long, slanting light of history on these
events, that we come to some rough agreement at least about who measures up and who
doesn’t.
Michael Krasny:
And part of that is what democracy is about – that kind of
evaluation, I think, it needs to be said. And democracy is also about bringing you into
this, so let me do that and extend an invitation to those of you in the audience who have
questions or comments to please come forward. There are microphones on both sides.
We’ll try to get as many of your questions and comments as we can. I hope that no heads
are stepped on or anything like that. We’ll begin with this gentleman over here.
********
AUDIENCE CONVERSATION
Question:
You talked about a unified America during World War II, and as many of
us know, we had a president who told the American people that the only thing we have to
fear is fear itself. My question for you is, how does the current president use fear to try to
manipulate the American people?
David Kennedy:
Well, I honestly don’t think George W. Bush has invented the fear
that is widespread in this country since 9-11-01. That was a very real event and it
inspired very real and genuine feelings of fear in millions upon millions of people. I
think we can’t blink that away. I think any president who refused to acknowledge how
frightening that was wouldn’t be doing his job.
Michael Beschloss: I think a president who really exploited that and felt that it would
be a political weapon for him would make a pretty big mistake because if the public is
afraid of something, they will honor a president who protects them, but the second
they’re feeling afraid again, guess who they’re going to blame? That’s what we were
talking about in terms of the risk that Bush took in the war on terrorism. It would be
wonderful for him if there were no more terrorist attacks and everything seems to be
going well, but if there is an attack and people say, That was your fault for not preparing
us or for provoking this by doing things abroad, guess who’s going to suffer for that and
guess who would not be reelected or who would become very unpopular?
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David Kennedy:
I was at Ground Zero in New York at the World Trade Center site
just a few weeks after the attack, and the clean-up operation was already in full swing. I
talked to some of the equipment operators – they took a break and came over and we had
a little bit of a chat – and I asked them some question to the effect of what it’s like
psychologically to come to work at this spot every day, and they said “Oh, it makes us
really angry.” I said something in reply like, “I can understand that. I’m angry, too. Our
country’s been attacked; three thousand people have died,” and so on. And they
interrupted me. They said, “Oh, no. That’s not our principal anger. We’re principally
angry at our government for having failed to prevent this kind of event. What do we have
a government for if it isn’t to protect us against these things?” Now that’s a sentiment
that I daresay has not gone very far in this country and that’s something to be pondered.
Michael Krasny:
Except that Senators Lieberman and McCain are trying to get
papers that have not been available about intelligence that was provided to the present
administration before 9-11. And why those papers are not available remains to me a very
central and very significant question. History again.
Question:
Do you believe that the Electoral College correctly reflects the will of the
American people? Secondly, how do you think history might be modified if we indeed
elected the president directly?
David Kennedy:
Well, recent evidence, namely the 2000 election, and other
episodes in American history do and force us to qualify the idea that the Electoral
College directly represents the will of the people. The differences, however, are at the
margin. They can be quite consequential as they were in 2000. But there is a certain
amount of congruence between the results in the Electoral College and the results of the
gross plebiscite in the general election. The system is broken a little bit, I think, but I
have absolutely zero hope that it will ever be fixed because the Electoral College gives a
marginal advantage to small-population states who get a so-called senatorial bonus in the
Electoral College, and there’s enough of them to block any constitutional amendment to
change the system. So I’m afraid we’re saddled with this as far into the future as we can
see.
Michael Beschloss: It’s true, and if we could talk about this – and this is hard – but
let’s subtract the election of 2000 for a minute. It’s like the elephant in the room; it’s a
little bit hard to do it. But one thing the Electoral College does do, and that is that if we
had direct election of presidents – just the popular vote – you would probably be having
presidential candidates sitting in TV studios in L.A. and New York and essentially
broadcasting to the masses. What the Electoral College forces them to do is, you know,
Tennessee might be an important state one year, a swing state; the same thing with West
Virginia. What it does is that it makes sure that those smaller states get the attention of
presidential candidates in a way that they would be ignored if there were a popular vote.
In this modern age, it almost seems as if it’s antique for us to have such a bizarre and
antiquated system, but at the same time, I think there would be a danger of the tyranny of
the majority unless you had something that forced them to pay attention to groups that
might otherwise escape their notice.
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Michael Krasny:
In this modern age that you described, has it become increasingly
more difficult for presidents to represent institutionally a kind of moral exemplum by dint
of the office by saying to the America people: This is something that I believe and this is
something that I would like you to follow in the way of my conviction?
David Kennedy:
Franklin Roosevelt, for instance: how many fireside chats did he
give? – about thirty over twelve years on the radio. In those days, people didn’t know
much about Roosevelt’s private life. There was a distance and there was an awe and
there was a majesty that gave the times he spoke enormous impact and force. Nowadays,
presidents have become so familiar. In the last thirty years, we’ve had so many instances
in which presidents have had cases at least where they shaded the truth that you just don’t
have a situation like that where a president is the figure that can influence public opinion
the way that Roosevelt did.
Michael Krasny:
And yet there’s still remarkable respect for the office throughout
the land. Also, when Tony Blair tried to express his view on why the UK went into Iraq,
the press there excoriated him. They had him for dinner, so to speak. That hasn’t
happened to George W. Bush. It doesn’t seem to be happening to George W. Bush.
David Kennedy:
Well, my own view is that it hasn’t happened because of the
continuing trauma of 9-11 and the unwillingness of the press to violate the public sense
of trust. George Bush has had a huge bonus – a free ride, if you want – politically
because of that event.
Question:
To what extent do you think the institutions of term limits and perhaps the
desire to attain that second term has affected the willingness of president to take risks and
do the right thing?
Michael Beschloss: I think they do take fewer risks because they want to get reelected.
The famous case is John Kennedy, who is alleged to have said in 1963, “I intend to get
the United States out of the war in Vietnam, but I can’t do it until 1965 after I’m safely
reelected.” I don’t think he really believed that, although there are people who will tell
you that he said that to them, because that would require Kennedy essentially saying, I’m
willing to have Americans give up their lives essentially to get me reelected, and then I’ll
pull them all out in 1965. But it does point to this, which is that he didn’t want to do
many controversial things, especially after he had taken that big risk on civil rights, that
would jeopardize that. His idea was to let ‘er rip in 1965 when he didn’t have to face the
voters again. I would really worry about, for instance, the proposal of a six-year
presidential term where, from the first moment the president is in, he doesn’t have to
worry very much about public opinion. Can you imagine a Richard Nixon or a Lyndon
Johnson in his worst days feeling that he never had to face the voters again and getting up
in the morning and doing exactly what his id told him to do?
Another implication of your question, I think, is that if we relax the constitutional
amendment that defines the presidential terms that they would become more bold. I think
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you’d have a hard time proving, as you look at the presidency at least in the twentieth
century, that the second term of any presidency was more bold – that a president took
more political risks than he did in the first term. I just don’t think you can find a pattern.
Question:
I was wondering what each of you thought in terms of what is the best
thing any president did for the good of the country. Secondly, what is a book about
presidents – and you don’t have to recommend your own or each other’s books – that you
would recommend that we definitely read in the next five or ten years?
Michael Krasny:
As a non-biased person, I would recommend both of their books.
Michael Beschloss: And David and I are not aware that any other books have been
written about presidents.
The question about what’s the best thing a president has ever done: you could
think of a few. Washington made sure that this country was viable; Lincoln contested the
Civil War. David was talking about some of these polls of historians on presidents,
ranking them from one to forty-three. I’m not a huge fan of them. I like the fact that they
stimulate interest in presidential history and it’s a good way of getting people thinking,
but it’s a real problem. How do you compare Jefferson and the Louisiana Purchase to
FDR’s preparedness or Eisenhower and the Interstate Highway Act? These are things
from such enormously different times that I think they’re really difficult to compare.
David Kennedy:
This may sound a little cornball, but I think that the best thing a
president can do, frankly, is to live up to the oath of office, a particular statement in
which is that he will preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.
There is a peculiarly preservative and defensive character, I think, to the oath the
president takes and it descends from our national inherited idea that we got it
substantially right when we wrote the Constitution 200 years ago and protecting that
system. Saving that system is the principal responsibility of the president.
Michael Beschloss: But here, in a way, is the whole problem of historical retrospect
because by that test, FDR probably flunks because if he was possibly violating the law in
1940 and 1941 in convoys in the north Atlantic and un-neutral acts, he may have been
violating his oath. In fact, in 1937, when he took the oath of office for the second time,
he later said that when he took that oath, as David will remember from his research, too,
Roosevelt said, “As I was taking the oath, I said in my own mind, ‘Yes, I’m promising to
defend the Constitution’ [and he was saying this as he was being sworn in by a justice of
the Supreme Court], ‘but the Constitution as I understand it, not you.’”
David Kennedy:
But what Roosevelt is remembered for is preserving the fabric of
this society, preserving the constitutional system, preserving its institutional structure,
advancing to be sure, but within the broad framework of the constitutional principles laid
out in 1789. Sure, he might have trimmed here and there, as you say; there’s no doubt
about it, but in the end, at a moment when many people in this country and elsewhere
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thought that this country could unravel and that its basic institutional structure could
collapse, he held it together.
Michael Beschloss: And that’s why history is so much, in the end, years later, looking
at ends versus means. Roosevelt used some means that were pretty ugly but for ends that
we find quite noble, and I think that’s the reason we consider him a great president.
Michael Krasny:
He also had more years on the job, too.
Question:
Much of the conversation so far is focused on acts of character and
courage of fairly well known presidents, many of whom are of recent vintage. Can you
look back through the course of American history and see some acts of courage, some
demonstrations of character, that perhaps aren’t as well known by lesser presidents?
David Kennedy:
Millard Fillmore, who promoted the entry of California into the
union, even at the risk of upsetting the very delicate balance in the Senate that had held
together a compromise over the labor issue for a generation or more.
Michael Krasny:
time?
Can you imagine if he had envisioned Schwarzenegger at that
Michael Beschloss: Might have changed the Constitution to allow foreign-born
presidents. I’m not so sure.
Michael Krasny:
Actually, the thought was that they were going to pull off a trade:
the Republicans would agree to foreign-born presidents and the Democrats would agree
to more than two terms so Clinton could run again.
David Kennedy:
Was Clinton in favor of this compromise?
Michael Krasny:
courage?
Michael, can you think of some obscure acts of presidential
Michael Beschloss: I can. Let me take one from the twentieth century because I think
it makes the point well. Dwight Eisenhower when he left office was considered to be a
great general but someone whose best years were not in the White House. He didn’t do
much – maybe the Interstate Highway Act – and only long afterwards did we find that he
really had some moments of courage that we had not seen on the outside. I was born
about a year before he was reelected, so I don’t remember personally, but I mean all of us
Americans. One of them was in 1954 after the French failed in Indo-China and there was
a great demand that Eisenhower send troops to Vietnam to protect the security of the
South Vietnamese – almost exactly the same question that faced Johnson ten years later.
And Eisenhower said, I’m not going to do it; I don’t think we should be involved in a
land war. And he had a number of his generals who were putting enormous pressure on
him to do this, saying, We might lose the entire Cold War, Mr. President, unless you do
this. It took guts for him to oppose that, but it’s not the kind of dramatic incident that we
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normally think of with Lincoln and the Civil War or Franklin Roosevelt and the Second
World War.
Michael Krasny:
When did Eisenhower give that speech where he talked about the
military-industrial complex? That was kind of a gutsy speech, wasn’t it, for the time?
Michael Beschloss: That was the day before he left office in January of ’61, and this
was where Eisenhower said, We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted
influence, sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. A lot of the people
who heard it said, Isn’t this odd that some speechwriter has pushed this onto Eisenhower?
He’s read it but he probably has no idea what he’s reading. It sounds like some leftist
tract. Only later did we find out from looking largely at sources that we didn’t have at
the time that this was something that ran very deep with Eisenhower. He felt that one of
the dangers of fighting the Cold War might be that you would generate this complex
among the military establishment and also private industry that benefited from a Cold
War going on. Actually, believe it or not, the original draft of the speech didn’t say “the
military-industrial complex.” I hate to break it to you in this setting, but what it actually
said was, “the military-industrial-academic complex.” That’s true, and what he was
worried about there was that a lot of universities would get fat contracts for military
research and they would be part of this spiral that would continue the Cold War.
Question:
Could you give a couple of historical examples about presidents that lied
to the public or concealed things from the public or did things that were opposite from
what they said they’d do when they tried to get elected. Are there a lot of historical
examples of presidents who, actually with the support of the public, but while also
knowing that the public is misinformed on the issues? For example, we went into Iraq
with the public support, but the administration fully knew that a lot of that support was
because people thought that Saddam Hussein was involved with 9-11, which is obviously
not true. The estate tax was repealed, probably with the public support, because it was
marketed as a death tax. Sixty-six percent of people think it applies to them, while it only
applies to five percent. Are there a lot of historical examples where presidents “take
advantage” of misinformation of the public and utilize that to enact policy?
David Kennedy:
You’ve just named two very conspicuous ones. I’m searching my
archival memory for further ones, but those are two very good examples.
Michael Beschloss: How much time have we got? Sadly, I hate to say this, but it’s
true: presidents are rather prone to allow the public to be stampeded into war by
information and incidents that may not be all there. We were led into war in the 1890s by
the sinking of the Maine; in 1910 we found that the Maine was sunk by a boiler
explosion, not by the Spanish – much too late for Americans to factor it in as they were
thinking about war. Woodrow Wilson, I think it can be said, was courting an incident in
the north Atlantic that might draw Americans into the idea that it was a good idea to get
involved in Europe’s war. Franklin Roosevelt, I think you would have to say, in ’40 or
’41 – I wouldn’t say that he was praying for an incident, but he sure wouldn’t have
minded if the Germans had sunk a big American ship and Americans suddenly said,
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Perhaps we shouldn’t be so isolationist; let’s aid Britain in a big way, although that did
not lead to the suspicions that are somewhat held even by some Americans now that Pearl
Harbor was created as a deliberate incident to stampede Americans into war. I guess
what I’m getting to is – the Gulf of Tonkin incident with LBJ – quite the same. As you
go through history, I hate to say it, but there is a pattern of presidents allowing incidents
like this, and sometimes exaggerating them, to get Americans into a war that perhaps they
might be a little bit less likely to get into if they knew the facts exactly.
Michael Krasny:
I wonder, in fact – I’ve had radical historians on the Forum who
have said that there hasn’t been a president who hasn’t lied to the American people,
whether to serve their own interests or in wartime, as you suggested.
David Kennedy:
Well, it’s interesting that the pattern of examples that have been
offered here, especially all of Michael’s, have all had to do with the fact of going to war,
which is something that the people of this country are notoriously unwilling to do or not
interested in doing and they do take some – not to be a finer term on it – manipulation.
You can trace this all the way back, in fact, to the Polk administration, which lied about
where certain confrontations between U.S. and Mexican troops had taken place in Texas
as a way of getting a war resolution out of the Congress.
Michael Beschloss: And one member of Congress who objected the most was
Abraham Lincoln, who demanded to know, “Where is the spot?” for which he
temporarily got the nickname “Spotty” Lincoln.
David Kennedy:
But it’s striking to me that this pattern seems to suggest that the
moment when the campaigns or the presidents give in to the temptation to misrepresent
or spin the news is when they’re confronting decisions of war.
Question:
I’m curious. What is the approximate time frame that presidents
have from the time they take office before we can start to see the effect of their policies,
and who are some presidents who maybe didn’t have their policies take effect in that
certain time frame – who were too slow in seeing changes where they turned out to be
viewed as ineffective presidents?
David Kennedy:
Well, I’ll say two things in response to that. Number one: we have
a federal government that is purposely built, by design, to be very difficult to manipulate.
The Constitution restrains all parties in the government from bold initiatives. That’s just
the way it’s built. It arises out of the eighteenth-century preoccupations about tyranny,
and so on. That’s number one. The number of instances when a president is able to
actually move a system in a dramatic way are relatively few.
Number two: I would say that, again, my otherwise hero, Franklin Roosevelt, has
done all the rest of us into a kind of disservice by the mythologizing of the hundred days
of 1933, and there’s been an expectation ever since that all presidents right out of the
starting block, in the first three months or so of office, will produce dramatic results. The
fact that the fabled hundred days themselves in 1933 produced very little of lasting
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consequence – all the lasting institutional reforms that came out of the New Deal really
date from 1934 and 1935, not from 1933. So I think the system is biased against quick
results and I think our expectations have been falsely stimulated to expect quick results,
partly by the mythology of that dramatic moment in 1933.
Question:
Returning to the examination of the current administration, I was
wondering if you could say a few remarks about what you think history will say the
reasons were behind the way the Bush administration has approached the regimes in the
order it has in addressing the “axis of evil” that it has outlined. Basically, why Iraq as
opposed to North Korea given what we knew about North Korea and what we did not
definitively know about Iraq, and what you think perhaps we will do as a nation in terms
of addressing North Korea in the future.
Michael Beschloss: There’s an example of the kind of thing that we really cannot
possibly know. The kinds of things I would like to have would be records of the
conversations the president had with his national security advisers. For instance, before
the Iraq war, what did they talk about? Why are we doing this? Do we really think that
there’s a serious weapons of mass destruction program or are we doing it to bring
democracy to the Middle East? Are we trying to scare other dictators? To get a sense of
that in public, but it really is almost like a shadow on the wall of a cave. You’ve got a
rough idea, but not remotely what you’ll get later on.
Let me give you an example of what I’m talking about. After the Cuban missile
crisis in 1962, it was hugely written about. You can go back to the newspapers and
magazines, and there were very self-confident analyses of what Kennedy had done and
not done with Khrushchev in getting that crisis over with. Most of what was written in
America was: Kennedy had faced down this atrocious attempt by Nikita Khrushchev to
put missiles in Cuba, almost like a criminal, and he had done this with great courage and
scared Khrushchev into pulling the missiles out. A big American victory. And so it
stayed for twenty or thirty years until we began to get other records that showed us what
was really going on. How could you understand the Cuban missile crisis without
knowing what we knew later on, which was (1) Kennedy was running something called
Operation Mongoose, which was trying to overthrow Castro, possibly kill him, which
gave the Russians a big incentive to try to do something that would stop an American
invasion of Cuba, and (2) the fact that the crisis was settled not just by Kennedy facing
down Khrushchev, but by a secret deal between Kennedy and Khrushchev to get the
missiles out in exchange for missiles in Turkey and a couple of other enticements? That
whole episode looks totally different in retrospect. So I guess we could talk about what
we might think about Bush in Iraq and it would be enjoyable to do since we have an
election next year, so to some extent we have to, but I guess what I keep on coming back
to is that this is just so different from the way this can be done twenty or thirty years from
now.
Michael Krasny:
There’s a lot of speculation, though, about, for example, this
question about how oil may have played in the decision to go into Iraq and, in fact,
Arnold Schwarzenegger’s involvement. A number of people sent me e-mails and called
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in, Greg Palast wrote an article in which he said that Schwarzenegger had had a secret
meeting with Kenneth Lay, and there have been a lot of assumptions about this, that
again, there might be some oil, or oil interests, behind the Schwarzenegger campaign.
It’s a difficult job for historians to ferret out these kinds of facts, particularly…. I’m not
saying that they’re to be corroborative or not, but they’re pretty much concealed if they
are corroborative. If they’re there, finding them is sometimes almost futile, isn’t it?
Michael Beschloss: Well, it is, and oftentimes you don’t find out. The Gulf of Tonkin
incident is perhaps one example that shows this. For those of you who don’t remember,
in August of ’64, Johnson felt that there was an attack on an American ship in the Gulf of
Tonkin off of Vietnam and retaliated, as he said in private, by “bombing the hell out of
the North Vietnamese.” It was the first time he’d really done that, and that began the
slide into big American engagement in Vietnam in 1965. For years, there has been all
sorts of speculation about why he did this. Did he manufacture the incident? Did he lie
about it? Did he genuinely think that there was an attack? Nowadays, with this much
hindsight, we know a couple of things that are very important to understanding it.
Number one: there never was any attack on an American ship; it didn’t happen. But
number two: we know this mainly from these tapes that Johnson made of his private
conversations, including that day, that Johnson was told that there was a good chance that
there was an attack. This is real-time intelligence. And he says to the Pentagon: Look
into this. Find out if there was really an attack or not, he says in the morning. Then at
5:00 p.m., there’s another call, and the call is an AP reporter has discovered that there
may have been an attack in the Gulf of Tonkin and we’re investigating it, and Mr.
President, you’ve got to do something because unless you retaliate now, you’re in the
middle of a campaign and people are going to say you’re weak. So Johnson essentially
felt cornered, and even though he did not necessarily think that there had been an attack,
he gives a speech that evening saying that there was this unwarranted and unprovoked
attack on an American vessel and America is now retaliating. That had huge
consequences, and the sad thing is that it happened almost on a banana peel because it
was a response to a press leak. My point is that without those tapes, we wouldn’t have
any idea of what really happened.
Michael Krasny:
Is it possible, David, that we might be finding out someday that
there was intelligence given to this president about weapons of mass destruction that
could have been wrong intelligence that prompted him to do what he did?
David Kennedy:
Sure, it’s possible. It’s also, I think, no less possible that we’ll find
out that there was intelligence that has not yet made its way into the public realm that
confirms a real threat from Iraq. We simply cannot know at this time.
Question:
I found it interesting when you were talking about FDR and some
of his faults – attacking the Supreme Court, he concealed his health problems, some
people felt that he completely ripped apart the constitutional order of the country that
kept the federal government from intervening in everybody’s lives. Yet what it really
comes down to, since he did preserve the country during the Depression and he did fight
and win World War II, it sort of seems almost petty to bring these things up. Something
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seems to be going on with Reagan and the Cold War that lately his stock has been rising
because people seem to give him credit for winning the Cold War. Yet it seems to me
that it would be been impossible to prop up the Soviet Union. George Bush, Sr., in a way
tried to do that toward the end, unsuccessfully. Should Reagan be given credit for
winning the Cold War or is he just really the guy who was president during that final last
push before the Soviet Union just collapsed of its own dead weight?
David Kennedy:
Well, the skirmish lines have already been formed on this
historical question, and to mix a metaphor, I think the jury’s still out. But this is an
example of where we need access to information that has never been in our possession,
that is the Soviet archives. There was a very interesting roundtable discussion that took
place in Colorado in the summer of 1994, I think it was. The discussants were George H.
W. Bush (Bush 41, Senior), Margaret Thatcher, Helmut Schmidt, François Mitterrand,
Mikhail Gorbachev. It was a discussion of exactly this issue. Thatcher and Bush took
the position that the Reagan administration ended the Cold War by bluffing the Soviets
into an arms race that they couldn’t afford, especially by threatening them with
destruction from the heavens and SDI, and this was putting the arms race onto a
technological plane they couldn’t possibly compete on, and that’s what brought them to
their knees. Gorbachev, on the other hand, said on this occasion, You’ve got it all wrong.
The Soviet leadership had been trying to signal you in the West for years before the late
1980s that we wanted a redefinition of the Cold War. We wanted to restructure the entire
relationship with the West, and therefore you, Reagan administration, spent that two
trillion dollars on the defense buildup of the eighties absolutely in vain because we were
on our way to reform, anyway. Now we simply don’t know as fully as we would like yet
which of these accounts is correct. It’s my guess that in the end it will be elements of
both stories that will inform the final tale. But this is another example of how we, in real
time, simply cannot know with the confidence that we would like what the story is.
Michael Krasny:
I thought the real heroic figure there was Nancy Reagan because
she kept whispering in his ear at night, “Stop the Cold War.” Some final thoughts,
Michael?
Michael Beschloss: Yes. In fact, there’s even another element of that, too, that’s not
inconsistent, which is that in the late 70s, early 80s, there was a not small group of CIA
analysts who said the Soviet empire is at something that they called a “crunch point.”
“Crunch point” was the term they used. What they said was that the Soviet economy is
really failing, the satellites are beginning to rebel, the republics are rebelling against the
center, and therefore in the early 1980s, there is a chance that everything may fall apart.
So one question to be answered is going to be, would that have happened anyway, let’s
say, if Jimmy Carter had served a second term, or was is Reagan’s push with defense
spending and SDI that made it happen faster or in a way more favorable to the U.S.?
That’s the kind of thing that will depend to a great degree on getting archives out of the
Soviet Union, which are coming in a way that’s somewhat sporadic, unfortunately.
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Michael Krasny:
Let me thank both of our guests and say that we’re indeed very
fortunate to have them. Thank all of you for being here and for your attention this
evening. Thank you very much.
********
David Kennedy
David Kennedy is the McLachlan Professor of History at Stanford. Among his many
books are Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 19291945, which won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 2000. His writings have appeared in
numerous publications including The Historian, Reviews in American History,
Encyclopedia of American Biography, the Dictionary of American Biography , The
Nation, The New Republic, The London Review of Books, The Atlantic Monthly, The
Los Angeles Times and The New York Times. He has also served as an advisor to PBS
on The American Experience.
Michael Beschloss
Newsweek has referred to Michael Beschloss as “the nation’s leading Presidential
historian.” He has written about American presidents at times of crisis in his recent
New York Times bestseller, The Conquerors: Roosevelt, Truman and the Destruction of
Hitler’s Germany, 1941-1945. He has authored six other books and is now working on
a history of Abraham Lincoln’s last days and his assassination. Michael Beschloss is a
regular commentator on PBS’s “The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer,” and is also a
contributor to ABC News.
Michael Krasny (moderator)
Michael Krasny is host and senior editor of KQED Radio’s award-winning “Forum,” a
news and public affairs program that concentrates on the arts, culture, health, business
and technology. Since 1970 he has been a professor of English at San Francisco State
University and is a widely published scholar and critic as well as a former regular
contributor to Mother Jones magazine and a fiction writer. He has also worked widely
as a facilitator and host in the corporate sector and as moderator for a host of major
non-profit events.
********
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