Newspapers As Sources For Intellectual Historians: Or, Jack Shafer Doesn't Understand How Historians Work

At Slate, Jack Shafer engages in one of my favorite exercises: investigating the source of a quote. Normally journalists love fishing for a quote from the living, but in this instance Shafer was having fun doing what we historians love: running down a quote from the dead.

And in this case there is a degree of irony. Shafer wants to know who came up with the notion that journalism is "the first rough draft of history." Like Shafer, I too have admired that phrase and what it expresses about the possibilities of journalism. As such I enjoyed his historical exploration of that particular idea about the reporting profession.

But I draw your attention to the piece not for that quote. Rather, I was struck by Shafer's reflection on how historians use newspapers. He wrote:

What makes "first rough draft of history" so tuneful, at least to the ears of journalists? Well, it flatters them. Journalists hope that one day a historian will uncover their dusty work and celebrate their genius. But that almost never happens. Historians tend to view journalism as unreliable and tend to be dismissive of our work. They'd rather work from primary sources—official documents, photographs, interviews, and the like—rather than from our clips.

Is this true for you? When you work on intellectual history, or in any other historical subfield, do you devalue newspaper reports? Do historians really find newspapers "unreliable"?

From my perch, Shafer has no idea what he is talking about. I have found newspaper reports to be valuable---if not invaluable---tools for thinking about a historical period. The value of newspapers is, of course, relative to the strength of other sources---the ones he mentions. But sometimes newspapers are the only source for some kinds of information.

In my own work on Adler and his community of discourse, I spent hours exploring book reviews as media for the exchange of ideas. It was, and is, an imperfect source with variable internal structures. But the reviews nonetheless conveyed sufficient information to allow me place Adler's books in a certain matrix of discussion. Those reviews, as well as other books, archival sources, and oral histories, allowed me to build an intellectual history of the great books idea. Indeed, when oral histories are not available for the actors of a certain period, newspapers are invaluable sources of quotes about people, events, ideas, books, etc.

I know I am not the only practicing historian who values newspapers and other journalistic outlets as a source. There was an entire conference (half day) at Columbia University in April 2010 that covered the specific role of opinion journalism in U.S. intellectual history. [I would love, by the way, to see a report on that conference.]

In sum, while Shafer exhibited investigative traits that an intellectual historian would admire in running down the source of his quote, and while he obviously hopes that future historians will admire his own reporting, he clearly does not understand how historians work. Without newspapers as sources, the work of historians would be severely diminished. Frankly, I am astounded that some journalists like Shafer would believe that historians do not use newspapers as sources.- TL

Newspapers As Sources For Intellectual Historians: Or, Jack Shafer Doesn't Understand How Historians Work

At Slate, Jack Shafer engages in one of my favorite exercises: investigating the source of a quote. Normally journalists love fishing for a quote from the living, but in this instance Shafer was having fun doing what we historians love: running down a quote from the dead.

And in this case there is a degree of irony. Shafer wants to know who came up with the notion that journalism is "the first rough draft of history." Like Shafer, I too have admired that phrase and what it expresses about the possibilities of journalism. As such I enjoyed his historical exploration of that particular idea about the reporting profession.

But I draw your attention to the piece not for that quote. Rather, I was struck by Shafer's reflection on how historians use newspapers. He wrote:

What makes "first rough draft of history" so tuneful, at least to the ears of journalists? Well, it flatters them. Journalists hope that one day a historian will uncover their dusty work and celebrate their genius. But that almost never happens. Historians tend to view journalism as unreliable and tend to be dismissive of our work. They'd rather work from primary sources—official documents, photographs, interviews, and the like—rather than from our clips.

Is this true for you? When you work on intellectual history, or in any other historical subfield, do you devalue newspaper reports? Do historians really find newspapers "unreliable"?

From my perch, Shafer has no idea what he is talking about. I have found newspaper reports to be valuable---if not invaluable---tools for thinking about a historical period. The value of newspapers is, of course, relative to the strength of other sources---the ones he mentions. But sometimes newspapers are the only source for some kinds of information.

In my own work on Adler and his community of discourse, I spent hours exploring book reviews as media for the exchange of ideas. It was, and is, an imperfect source with variable internal structures. But the reviews nonetheless conveyed sufficient information to allow me place Adler's books in a certain matrix of discussion. Those reviews, as well as other books, archival sources, and oral histories, allowed me to build an intellectual history of the great books idea. Indeed, when oral histories are not available for the actors of a certain period, newspapers are invaluable sources of quotes about people, events, ideas, books, etc.

I know I am not the only practicing historian who values newspapers and other journalistic outlets as a source. There was an entire conference (half day) at Columbia University in April 2010 that covered the specific role of opinion journalism in U.S. intellectual history. [I would love, by the way, to see a report on that conference.]

In sum, while Shafer exhibited investigative traits that an intellectual historian would admire in running down the source of his quote, and while he obviously hopes that future historians will admire his own reporting, he clearly does not understand how historians work. Without newspapers as sources, the work of historians would be severely diminished. Frankly, I am astounded that some journalists like Shafer would believe that historians do not use newspapers as sources.- TL

Fellowship Announcement: Harvard's Charles Warren Center

Harvard University’s Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History invites applications for its 2011-12 fellowship and workshop on “The Politics of Knowledge in Universities and the State.”

We aim to convene a multidisciplinary group of intellectual and cultural historians, historians of higher education and the natural and human sciences, sociologists of knowledge, scholars from science and technology studies, students of American political development and political theory, and others in relevant fields. The workshop will explore the intersection of knowledge production with political thought and practice, focusing on key institutional sites in higher education and government. How has the authority, and possibly the content, of knowledge been shaped by political contexts? How have intellectuals engaged with the state and what have been the consequences for policy and knowledge production? How have university and state politics intersected? Are “knowledge” and “politics” distinct, or are interpretive frameworks such as “construction,” “co-production,” or “power/knowledge” more appropriate? Participants will have the opportunity to think systematically about the situated nature of their own work. Comparative and transnational proposals that depart from North American developments are welcomed.

Fellows will participate in a seminar led by Andrew Jewett (History) and Julie Reuben (Education).

Applicants may not be degree candidates and should have a Ph.D. or equivalent. Fellows have library privileges and receive a private office which they must use for at least the nine-month academic year. Stipends are individually determined according to fellow needs and Center resources. The Center encourages applications, otherwise consistent with the Workshop theme, relating to the nation’s life during and as a consequence of wars, and from qualified applicants who can contribute, through their research and service, to the diversity and excellence of the Harvard community.

Application (at warrencenter.fas.harvard.edu) due January 15, 2011; decisions in early March.

Fellowship Announcement: Harvard's Charles Warren Center

Harvard University’s Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History invites applications for its 2011-12 fellowship and workshop on “The Politics of Knowledge in Universities and the State.”

We aim to convene a multidisciplinary group of intellectual and cultural historians, historians of higher education and the natural and human sciences, sociologists of knowledge, scholars from science and technology studies, students of American political development and political theory, and others in relevant fields. The workshop will explore the intersection of knowledge production with political thought and practice, focusing on key institutional sites in higher education and government. How has the authority, and possibly the content, of knowledge been shaped by political contexts? How have intellectuals engaged with the state and what have been the consequences for policy and knowledge production? How have university and state politics intersected? Are “knowledge” and “politics” distinct, or are interpretive frameworks such as “construction,” “co-production,” or “power/knowledge” more appropriate? Participants will have the opportunity to think systematically about the situated nature of their own work. Comparative and transnational proposals that depart from North American developments are welcomed.

Fellows will participate in a seminar led by Andrew Jewett (History) and Julie Reuben (Education).

Applicants may not be degree candidates and should have a Ph.D. or equivalent. Fellows have library privileges and receive a private office which they must use for at least the nine-month academic year. Stipends are individually determined according to fellow needs and Center resources. The Center encourages applications, otherwise consistent with the Workshop theme, relating to the nation’s life during and as a consequence of wars, and from qualified applicants who can contribute, through their research and service, to the diversity and excellence of the Harvard community.

Application (at warrencenter.fas.harvard.edu) due January 15, 2011; decisions in early March.

Are You Searching For A USIH Conference Roommate?

If so, e-mail fellow USIH contributor Lauren Kientz at kientzla@msu.edu. She's helping put folks in touch. - TL

Are You Searching For A USIH Conference Roommate?

If so, e-mail fellow USIH contributor Lauren Kientz at kientzla@msu.edu. She's helping put folks in touch. - TL

Tony Judt, 1948-2010

Tony Judt has apparently passed away following a two-year battle with ALS. No obituaries seem to be online yet. I'll update this post with links to them and some thoughts of my own later in the day.

UPDATE I: While the official New York Times obituary has yet to be posted, this short appreciation by William Grimes has appeared on the NYT's website. See also this piece on Judt's working with ALS that appeared in this morning's Irish Independent before news of Judt's death had been announced.

UPDATE II: The NYT has now posted a complete obituary, also by Grimes. The Guardian (UK) also has an obit up.

A few thoughts of my own: I never had the opportunity to meet Tony Judt, so I can't offer any personal reminiscences; my knowledge of him is entirely through his historical scholarship and his career as a public intellectual. When I read a piece by Judt, I could always count on its intelligence, its wit, and its independence from the orthodoxies that plague those of us who think about the past or try to comment on the present. To say that he was brilliant and independent is not at all to say that he was always right or that I always agreed with him. But he was always worth reading. In my opinion he was the model of a public intellectual. The historical profession has lost one of its most distinguished members and our public discourse has lost one of its most valuable and distinctive voices.

Tony Judt, 1948-2010

Tony Judt has apparently passed away following a two-year battle with ALS. No obituaries seem to be online yet. I'll update this post with links to them and some thoughts of my own later in the day.

UPDATE I: While the official New York Times obituary has yet to be posted, this short appreciation by William Grimes has appeared on the NYT's website. See also this piece on Judt's working with ALS that appeared in this morning's Irish Independent before news of Judt's death had been announced.

UPDATE II: The NYT has now posted a complete obituary, also by Grimes. The Guardian (UK) also has an obit up.

A few thoughts of my own: I never had the opportunity to meet Tony Judt, so I can't offer any personal reminiscences; my knowledge of him is entirely through his historical scholarship and his career as a public intellectual. When I read a piece by Judt, I could always count on its intelligence, its wit, and its independence from the orthodoxies that plague those of us who think about the past or try to comment on the present. To say that he was brilliant and independent is not at all to say that he was always right or that I always agreed with him. But he was always worth reading. In my opinion he was the model of a public intellectual. The historical profession has lost one of its most distinguished members and our public discourse has lost one of its most valuable and distinctive voices.

Culture in Postmodernity; Or, the Historical Logic of the Culture Wars

One of my summer tasks was to write a proposal for the book I’ve been researching on the culture wars. In this process, I’ve been thinking a lot about the broader historical logic of the culture wars. Why was culture in the specific sense of the word—literature, film, curriculum, museums, art, etc.—at the heart of a political firestorm? From there, several related questions arose. Had culture shifted as a concept? If so, could we tie such a shift to what theorists have conceptualized as the displacement of modernity? Is the culture of postmodernity the historical logic of the culture wars?

As part of the paper I will be giving at the upcoming annual U.S. Intellectual History Conference—a paper I title “Moderns Versus Postmoderns: The Culture Wars and the Future of the Left”—I’ve been reading several of the philosophical interventions into the debates about postmodernism made by Marxists such as Fredric Jameson, David Harvey, Nancy Fraser, Terry Eagleton, and Perry Anderson. It is my contention that they offer the intellectual historian a better understanding of the culture wars. By attaching the intellectual and cultural particulars of postmodernity to the political and economic transformations of what they wishfully termed “late capitalism,” these Marxist critics anticipate my contention that the culture wars allowed Americans space to articulate and contest the discombobulating effects of postindustrial capitalism and postmodern epistemologies.



What is meant by postmodern epistemologies—or more specifically, “postmodernism,” which Jameson sub-titles “the cultural logic of late capitalism” in his famous 1984 New Left Review article? Jameson contends that “postmodernism is what you have when the modernization process is complete and nature is gone for good,” or when “‘culture’ has become a veritable ‘second nature.’” In short, in postmodernity, culture takes precedent. Culture is everywhere. Culture is not something we become—as I wrote about in an earlier blog post on the “Intellectual History of Culture as Becoming”—culture is what we are. We are shot through with culture.

In thinking about the etymology of culture, Terry Eagleton’s works are extremely helpful, especially his 2000 book, The Idea of Culture. (I came to this book after reading, on the advice of Scott McLemee, The Task of the Critic, a lengthy interview with Eagleton about his intellectual biography.) For Eagleton, culture first became a political project when the state began to sponsor it. This was a thoroughly modern project: the state sought to cultivate its subjects, to give them culture. Such acculturation was necessary for citizenship. Subjects needed culture before they could be political. The state wanted to form individuals, as Eagleton argues, “into suitably well-tempered, responsible citizens. This is the rhetoric of the civics class, if a little more highly pitched.”

But such a notion of culture no longer seems viable given the postmodern scattering of grand narratives, including the grandest of them all, nationalism. I quote Jameson at length: “If the ideas of a ruling class were once the dominant (or hegemonic) ideology of bourgeois society, the advanced capitalist countries today are now a field of stylistic and discursive heterogeneity without a norm. Faceless masters continue to inflect the economic strategies which constrain our existences, but they no longer need to impose their speech (or are henceforth unable to); and the postliteracy of the late capitalist world reflects not only the absence of any great collective project but also the unavailability of the older national language itself.”

In the words of Perry Anderson, whose 1998 book The Origins of Postmodernity serves as an extended review of Jameson’s writings, the postmodern unavailability of grand narratives, especially the Marxist narrative of class struggle, resulted from the following: “The receding of class conflict within the metropolis, while violence was projected without; the enormous weight of advertising and media fantasy in suppressing the realities of division and exploitation; the disconnection of private and public existence...” Getting to the heart of postmodern epistemologies, Jameson writes: “In psychological terms, we may say that as a service economy we are henceforth so far removed from the realities of production and work that we inhabit a dream world of artificial stimuli and televised experience: never in any previous civilization have the great metaphysical preoccupations, the fundamental questions of being and of the meaning of life, seemed so utterly remote and pointless.”

Then how does the implosion of grand narratives—or the explosion of heterogeneity and hybridity—lead to the culture wars? In spite of the postmodern notion of culture as everywhere and yet nowhere, older, modern notions of culture persistently creep back into the collective consciousness, as the return of the repressed. Culture in this modern sense is a normative way of imagining society. The problem, though, is that normative ways of imagining American society have multiplied. The national narrative, always contested, has given way to various ethnic, racial, religious, and other identity-based narratives, which often lay claim to the national narrative in new and innovative ways. This is the breeding ground of cultural conflict. So, perhaps postmodernity is not the death of the grand narrative, but the multiplication of mini-grand narratives?

Culture in Postmodernity; Or, the Historical Logic of the Culture Wars

One of my summer tasks was to write a proposal for the book I’ve been researching on the culture wars. In this process, I’ve been thinking a lot about the broader historical logic of the culture wars. Why was culture in the specific sense of the word—literature, film, curriculum, museums, art, etc.—at the heart of a political firestorm? From there, several related questions arose. Had culture shifted as a concept? If so, could we tie such a shift to what theorists have conceptualized as the displacement of modernity? Is the culture of postmodernity the historical logic of the culture wars?

As part of the paper I will be giving at the upcoming annual U.S. Intellectual History Conference—a paper I title “Moderns Versus Postmoderns: The Culture Wars and the Future of the Left”—I’ve been reading several of the philosophical interventions into the debates about postmodernism made by Marxists such as Fredric Jameson, David Harvey, Nancy Fraser, Terry Eagleton, and Perry Anderson. It is my contention that they offer the intellectual historian a better understanding of the culture wars. By attaching the intellectual and cultural particulars of postmodernity to the political and economic transformations of what they wishfully termed “late capitalism,” these Marxist critics anticipate my contention that the culture wars allowed Americans space to articulate and contest the discombobulating effects of postindustrial capitalism and postmodern epistemologies.



What is meant by postmodern epistemologies—or more specifically, “postmodernism,” which Jameson sub-titles “the cultural logic of late capitalism” in his famous 1984 New Left Review article? Jameson contends that “postmodernism is what you have when the modernization process is complete and nature is gone for good,” or when “‘culture’ has become a veritable ‘second nature.’” In short, in postmodernity, culture takes precedent. Culture is everywhere. Culture is not something we become—as I wrote about in an earlier blog post on the “Intellectual History of Culture as Becoming”—culture is what we are. We are shot through with culture.

In thinking about the etymology of culture, Terry Eagleton’s works are extremely helpful, especially his 2000 book, The Idea of Culture. (I came to this book after reading, on the advice of Scott McLemee, The Task of the Critic, a lengthy interview with Eagleton about his intellectual biography.) For Eagleton, culture first became a political project when the state began to sponsor it. This was a thoroughly modern project: the state sought to cultivate its subjects, to give them culture. Such acculturation was necessary for citizenship. Subjects needed culture before they could be political. The state wanted to form individuals, as Eagleton argues, “into suitably well-tempered, responsible citizens. This is the rhetoric of the civics class, if a little more highly pitched.”

But such a notion of culture no longer seems viable given the postmodern scattering of grand narratives, including the grandest of them all, nationalism. I quote Jameson at length: “If the ideas of a ruling class were once the dominant (or hegemonic) ideology of bourgeois society, the advanced capitalist countries today are now a field of stylistic and discursive heterogeneity without a norm. Faceless masters continue to inflect the economic strategies which constrain our existences, but they no longer need to impose their speech (or are henceforth unable to); and the postliteracy of the late capitalist world reflects not only the absence of any great collective project but also the unavailability of the older national language itself.”

In the words of Perry Anderson, whose 1998 book The Origins of Postmodernity serves as an extended review of Jameson’s writings, the postmodern unavailability of grand narratives, especially the Marxist narrative of class struggle, resulted from the following: “The receding of class conflict within the metropolis, while violence was projected without; the enormous weight of advertising and media fantasy in suppressing the realities of division and exploitation; the disconnection of private and public existence...” Getting to the heart of postmodern epistemologies, Jameson writes: “In psychological terms, we may say that as a service economy we are henceforth so far removed from the realities of production and work that we inhabit a dream world of artificial stimuli and televised experience: never in any previous civilization have the great metaphysical preoccupations, the fundamental questions of being and of the meaning of life, seemed so utterly remote and pointless.”

Then how does the implosion of grand narratives—or the explosion of heterogeneity and hybridity—lead to the culture wars? In spite of the postmodern notion of culture as everywhere and yet nowhere, older, modern notions of culture persistently creep back into the collective consciousness, as the return of the repressed. Culture in this modern sense is a normative way of imagining society. The problem, though, is that normative ways of imagining American society have multiplied. The national narrative, always contested, has given way to various ethnic, racial, religious, and other identity-based narratives, which often lay claim to the national narrative in new and innovative ways. This is the breeding ground of cultural conflict. So, perhaps postmodernity is not the death of the grand narrative, but the multiplication of mini-grand narratives?

Speaking Truth to Power (or Whither the White House Intellectual?, Part III)

On the eve of Barack Obama's inauguration in January, 2009, I wrote a post about the White House intellectual-in-residence, a figure who was a part of the presidencies of Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Ford, but then more or less disappeared from the scene. Later presidents, of course, consulted intellectuals in other ways.

A few months later, Tim Lacy blogged about an early appearance of intellectuals in this White House: the private dinner that Obama had held with a series of historians on June 30, 2009. U.S. News reported that guests included "Michael Beschloss, H. W. Brands, Douglas Brinkley, Robert Dallek, and Doris Kearns Goodwin." Unlike U.S. News, Tim wasn't particularly impressed with this line-up. Nor was I. As I wrote in a comment on Tim's post:

[T]hese historians of the presidency are precisely the people whose input Beltway insiders already listen to obsessively. If all he wants to do is survey the opinions of Michael Beschloss, H. W. Brands, Douglas Brinkley, Robert Dallek, and Doris Kearns Goodwin, Obama could have saved the taxpayers money and watched PBS's NewsHour for a month.

What I find most distressing is that the President apparently believes that speaking to these people represents breaking out of the DC "bubble." With the exception of Brands, all of these scholars spend much of their lives within the bubble. Indeed, it's hard to imagine Doris Kearns Goodwins's, Michael Beschloss's, and Doug Brinkley's careers without it. A policy elite that only talks to itself is distressing enough. A policy elite that only talks to itself and believes that its reaching to the outside is even more depressing.

Well it turns out that I may have overestimated the capacity of the D.C. "bubble."

One of the other guests that evening turns out to have been Garry Wills, who was a potentially more interesting interlocutor than those mentioned by US News. A few days ago, Wills put up a post on the New York Review of Books blog (who knew that the NYRB had a blog?) that casts more light on last year's White House historians dinner:

It is time for me to break a silence I have observed for over a year, against my better judgment. On June 30, 2009, I and eight other historians were invited to a dinner with President Obama and three of his staffers, to discuss what history could teach him about conducting the presidency. I was asked shortly after by several news media what went on there, and I replied that it was off the record. I have argued elsewhere that the imposition of secrecy to insure that the president gets “candid advice” is a cover for something else—making sure that what is said about the people’s business does not reach the people. But I went along this time, since the president said that he wanted this dinner to be a continuing thing, and I thought that revealing its first contents would jeopardize the continuation of a project that might be a source of information for him.

But there has been no follow up on the first dinner, and certainly no sign that he learned anything from it. The only thing achieved has been the silencing of the main point the dinner guests tried to make—that pursuit of war in Afghanistan would be for him what Vietnam was to Lyndon Johnson. At least four or five of the nine stressed this. Nothing else rose to this level of seriousness or repeated concern.

There's more, of course. As the kids say, read the whole thing.

The main thrust of Wills's post is the point that Afghanistan is likely to become Obama's (and his successors') Vietnam...if it hasn't already. I largely agree with this assessment.

But there's also a lot here that pertains to our discussions of this White House and the role of intellectuals in it, from its deep devotion to secrecy (despite early noises about transparency) to its apparent lack of follow-through (this turned out not to be the first of many such dinners).

I was also struck by the willingness of these very establishment-oriented presidential historians (other than Wills, who is a lifelong gadfly) to speak truth to power (though, to be fair, Wills says that four or five of nine guests emphasized Afghanistan....so it's possible that he's talking about himself plus three as-yet-unrevealed attendees).

The Afghanistan War seems to me to be a classic quagmire, a conflict that will suck untold blood and money and accomplish little or nothing, while encouraging the U.S. state to violate civil liberties at home and commit war crimes abroad. The least bad option remains, as it has been for years, withdrawing ASAP. This view--though common enough on the internets--is still seen in "serious" policy circles as fantastically woolly-headed and radical. "Serious" debate about Afghanistan consists of arguing COIN vs. Antiterrorism, or debating how much more we should spend or how many more troops we should commit.

At any rate, it seems as if the historical profession acquitted itself better than I had feared that night, while Obama did (and has since done) depressingly worse.

Speaking Truth to Power (or Whither the White House Intellectual?, Part III)

On the eve of Barack Obama's inauguration in January, 2009, I wrote a post about the White House intellectual-in-residence, a figure who was a part of the presidencies of Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Ford, but then more or less disappeared from the scene. Later presidents, of course, consulted intellectuals in other ways.

A few months later, Tim Lacy blogged about an early appearance of intellectuals in this White House: the private dinner that Obama had held with a series of historians on June 30, 2009. U.S. News reported that guests included "Michael Beschloss, H. W. Brands, Douglas Brinkley, Robert Dallek, and Doris Kearns Goodwin." Unlike U.S. News, Tim wasn't particularly impressed with this line-up. Nor was I. As I wrote in a comment on Tim's post:

[T]hese historians of the presidency are precisely the people whose input Beltway insiders already listen to obsessively. If all he wants to do is survey the opinions of Michael Beschloss, H. W. Brands, Douglas Brinkley, Robert Dallek, and Doris Kearns Goodwin, Obama could have saved the taxpayers money and watched PBS's NewsHour for a month.

What I find most distressing is that the President apparently believes that speaking to these people represents breaking out of the DC "bubble." With the exception of Brands, all of these scholars spend much of their lives within the bubble. Indeed, it's hard to imagine Doris Kearns Goodwins's, Michael Beschloss's, and Doug Brinkley's careers without it. A policy elite that only talks to itself is distressing enough. A policy elite that only talks to itself and believes that its reaching to the outside is even more depressing.

Well it turns out that I may have overestimated the capacity of the D.C. "bubble."

One of the other guests that evening turns out to have been Garry Wills, who was a potentially more interesting interlocutor than those mentioned by US News. A few days ago, Wills put up a post on the New York Review of Books blog (who knew that the NYRB had a blog?) that casts more light on last year's White House historians dinner:

It is time for me to break a silence I have observed for over a year, against my better judgment. On June 30, 2009, I and eight other historians were invited to a dinner with President Obama and three of his staffers, to discuss what history could teach him about conducting the presidency. I was asked shortly after by several news media what went on there, and I replied that it was off the record. I have argued elsewhere that the imposition of secrecy to insure that the president gets “candid advice” is a cover for something else—making sure that what is said about the people’s business does not reach the people. But I went along this time, since the president said that he wanted this dinner to be a continuing thing, and I thought that revealing its first contents would jeopardize the continuation of a project that might be a source of information for him.

But there has been no follow up on the first dinner, and certainly no sign that he learned anything from it. The only thing achieved has been the silencing of the main point the dinner guests tried to make—that pursuit of war in Afghanistan would be for him what Vietnam was to Lyndon Johnson. At least four or five of the nine stressed this. Nothing else rose to this level of seriousness or repeated concern.

There's more, of course. As the kids say, read the whole thing.

The main thrust of Wills's post is the point that Afghanistan is likely to become Obama's (and his successors') Vietnam...if it hasn't already. I largely agree with this assessment.

But there's also a lot here that pertains to our discussions of this White House and the role of intellectuals in it, from its deep devotion to secrecy (despite early noises about transparency) to its apparent lack of follow-through (this turned out not to be the first of many such dinners).

I was also struck by the willingness of these very establishment-oriented presidential historians (other than Wills, who is a lifelong gadfly) to speak truth to power (though, to be fair, Wills says that four or five of nine guests emphasized Afghanistan....so it's possible that he's talking about himself plus three as-yet-unrevealed attendees).

The Afghanistan War seems to me to be a classic quagmire, a conflict that will suck untold blood and money and accomplish little or nothing, while encouraging the U.S. state to violate civil liberties at home and commit war crimes abroad. The least bad option remains, as it has been for years, withdrawing ASAP. This view--though common enough on the internets--is still seen in "serious" policy circles as fantastically woolly-headed and radical. "Serious" debate about Afghanistan consists of arguing COIN vs. Antiterrorism, or debating how much more we should spend or how many more troops we should commit.

At any rate, it seems as if the historical profession acquitted itself better than I had feared that night, while Obama did (and has since done) depressingly worse.