Living Historians and the Bush Administration

Submitted by Ryan Parker on August 16, 2007 - 8:33pm.

One of my favorite authors is Willie Morris, a fellow Mississippian who served as editor at Harper’s Magazine from around 1963-1971. Many consider this time the most influential and successful in the magazine’s storied history. During his tenure as editor, he gave pages to the likes of Norman Mailer and David Halberstam when other publications would not print their more radical articles. While he is often regarded as Harper’s greatest editor, he is best known for his autobiographical works, North Toward Home, New York Days, and My Dog Skip. A Rhodes scholar, Morris often recounted his time in Oxford, England, especially a story surrounding one of his first history research papers. Morris recounts this story in his autobiography, North Toward Home, and lifetime friend and colleague Larry King retells it in his recent book, Remembering Willie:

Perhaps Willie’s favorite anecdote was how, in 1956, he had stayed up all night polishing his paper for his first tutorial, which was on the Reform Act of 1832: “My next-to-last sentence said, ‘Just how close the people of England came to revolution in 1832 is a question that we shall leave to the historians.’ I read this to my tutor, and from his vantage point in an easy chair two feet north of the floor he interrupted: ‘But Morris, we are the historians.’”

Given our current socio-political climate, I have given much thought to this story lately. As we all know, the current administration is quite fond of assuring us that “history will judge” their current actions no matter how ill-advised or erroneous they seem now. While things may seem irreparable now, just wait…just ride it out…and it will all work out by and by. What frustrates me the most about this defense is its implication that we the public cannot, or are not fit to, judge this administration’s actions and decisions. Of course you can see the irony here: “we” were certainly fit to elect them to office, but “we” are not capable of holding “our” selections accountable.

Thankfully, even beyond the grave, Willie’s story gives yet another lie to the Bush Administration. Just as Willie’s wise professor reminded him, this story continues to remind us: we ARE the historians. Not only are we capable of judging our “superiors,” we are morally and ethically obligated to do so. Moreover, the Administration’s defense ignores, or more accurately is unaware of, a simple chronological truth. Today is tomorrow’s history. Bush is not expecting history to judge him. Rather, he is gambling on the future. History is now, and the most frightening thing about all this is that only a minute amount of history has had to pass for us to realize the glaring errors of his ways. Despite Bush’s assertions to the contrary, we must continually assert that history has judged the Bush administration severely lacking at best and horribly malicious at worst. Not only has it judged thus, it has done so quite expediently.

In last month’s Vanity Fair, David Halberstam, one of Willie’s good friends and colleagues, wrote a timely article just before his untimely death. In this article, he focused on the Bush Administration’s obsession with history, an obsession with which he was more than skeptical. Though they are lengthy, I want to conclude with a few of his comments. Halberstam wrote:

We have lately been getting so many history lessons from the White House that I have come to think of Bush, Cheney, Rice, and the late, unlamented Rumsfeld as the History Boys. They are people groping for rationales for their failed policy, and as the criticism becomes ever harsher, they cling to the idea that a true judgment will come only in the future, and history will save them.

He continues:

Therefore, when I hear the president cite history so casually, an alarm goes off. Those who know history best tend to be tempered by it. They rarely refer to it so sweepingly and with such complete confidence. They know that it is the most mischievous of mistresses and that it touts sure things about as regularly as the tip sheets at the local track. Its most important lessons sometimes come cloaked in bitter irony. By no means does it march in a straight line toward the desired result, and the good guys do not always win. Occasionally it is like a sport with upsets, in which the weak and small defeat the great and might—take, for instance, the American revolutionaries vanquishing the British Army, or the Vietnamese Communists, with their limited hardware, stalemating the mighty American Army.

Of course none of this matters to Bush, or it has simply passed him by, because Halberstam argues:

President Bush lives in a world where in effect it is always the summer of 1945, the Allies have just defeated the Axis, and a world filled with darkness for some six years has been rescued by a new and optimistic democracy, on its way to becoming a super-power. His is a world where other nations admire America or damned well ought to, and America is always right, always on the side of good, in a world of evil, and it’s just a matter of getting the rest of the world to understand this.

Throughout his article, Halberstam examines the histories with which Bush tends to align himself, specifically Truman and the Korean War. He also gives much attention to Vietnam and the complicated parallels with Iraq and the often-misinterpreted American victory in the Cold War. He ultimately concludes, “What we neglected to consider was a warning from those who had gone before us—that there was, at moments like this, a historic temptation for nations to overreach.” Clearly the current Administration is not aware of their hubris. Moreover, they pray that we will not embrace this same hubris and overreach our role as subjects to question their unquestionable authority. Though we all can see that Willie, an astute writer, slacked a little bit on his first Rhodesian essay, the story surrounding it reminds us that we should be ever-vigilant in our roles as historians.

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