In a year marked by losses at home and abroad, there are few that hurt so much as the April death of Pultizer-winning journalist, David Halberstam. His lengthy examination of the decision making behind the Vietnam war, The Best and the Brightest, showed how self-confidence can be a huge problem when it trumps all doubt and leads to lethal decisions. Even if you don't credit the current administration with 1/10th the good intentions of those who came before, the echoes from Halberstam's work are so loud, they're defeaning.
Vanity Fair is this month publishing an article written just before Halberstam's demise, in which the journalist-historian tackles the last refuge of the Bush loyalist: the idea that Bush will be vindicated by history.
In their view Iraq under Saddam was like Europe dominated by Hitler, and the Democrats and critics in the media are likened to the appeasers of the 1930s. The Iraqi people, shorn of their immensely complicated history, become either the people of Europe eager to be liberated from the Germans, or a little nation that great powerful nations ought to protect. Most recently in this history rummage sale—and perhaps most surprisingly—Bush has become Harry Truman.
Halberstam tags the current administration "the history boys," since it seems populated by people who are more concerned with the length of their bios in the history books, than the results of their actions today. In particular, they like to imagine themselves as the reincarnation of another administration -- a Democratic administration.
Recently, Harry Truman, for reasons that would surely puzzle him if he were still alive, has become the Republicans' favorite Democratic president. In fact, the men around Bush who attempt to feed the White House line to journalists have begun to talk about the current president as a latter-day Truman: Yes, goes the line, Truman's rise to an ever more elevated status in the presidential pantheon is all ex post facto, conferred by historians long after he left office a beleaguered man, his poll numbers hopelessly low. Thus Bush and the people around him predict that a similar Trumanization will ride to the rescue for them.
However, while Halberstam may find plenty of similarities between the mistakes of Vietnam and those of Iraq, he finds very little to draw a line between George W and Harry S.
If Bush takes his cues from anyone in the Truman era, it is not Truman but the Republican far right.
...
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 superpower. 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.
...
The president tends to drop off in his history lessons after World War II, especially when we get to Vietnam and things get a bit murkier. Had he made any serious study of our involvement there, he might have learned that the sheer ferocity of our firepower created enemies of people who were until then on the sidelines, thereby doing our enemies' recruiting for them.
If you have any interest in good reporting, keen historical insight, or damn fine writing, you owe it to yourself to read the whole thing. And for those still hurting over Halberstam's departure, it's nice to know that his book on the Korean War, The Coldest Winter, is still slated for release this fall.
I'll lay you any odds you want, that Bush won't be reading it. Despite the interest of this crew in writing their names across history, they have no interest in or appreciation for history.