Assignment America; 121; Can We Forget Our History?

[beeps] [music playing] [Studs Terkel]: There is a quiet on the college campus today. The war is over, and jobs are on the minds of students. In the aftermath of the Indo-Chinese wars and our defeat, the question is: How will America behave as a world power? It's difficult to call the shot to predict the future, but perhaps there are lessons to be learned. Some tell us forget the past, be nice. Others tell us of Santayana's warning: those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it. In the next half hour, I'll be talking with two American historians here on the campus of Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey. Our topic: Can we forget our history? I'm Studs Terkel. [music palying]

[music playing] [Terkel]: Some politicians ask us to put Vietnam behind us. The phrase is no recriminations, and to, in a spirit of unity, celebrate our bicentennial. The question is: How can we forget the immediate past and remember the distant past? Should we? And unity toward what end? We're now about to celebrate the 200th anniversary of a revolution in a country that has just lost a counter revolution in Vietnam. Looking back in the hope of understanding

what we were about and what we may be, we have with us two historians, both teaching at Rutgers University. Lloyd Gardener received his Ph.D. degree from the University of Wisconsin in 1960, and after three years in the US Air Force came to teach at Rutgers. He's written several books in, especially, diplomatic history. And in 1973 was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship to study abroad. He's the immediate past chairman of the history department at Rutgers. The current chairman is his colleague Warren Susman, who received his Ph.D. from Wisconsin in 1958. He taught at Reed College in Oregon, at Cornell, and Northwestern before coming to Rutgers in 1960. In 1972 professor Susman was given an award for distinguished teaching at Rutgers, and promptly spent the next year as visiting professor at Yale. His specialty is American social and intellectual history. Lloyd Gardener, we have just lost a war, a country that bragged it has never lost a war in its 200 years. How will we accept

defeat? [Lloyd Gardener]: Well, uh, I think the key here is whether Americans will disabuse themselves of the notion that, um, they are exceptional and that this nation's history is exceptional. Um, part of the problem I think in American foreign realtions in the past has been the assumption that our history is distinguishable from all other nations' history. So what we do is not like counter revolutions when other nations do it. We don't practice colonialism. We don't do any of those things. We're unique in the history of mankind. And one began to feel at the end of the Vietnam War that we were beginning to get rid of that idea. And now after the events of recent days, it's hard to say whether we really have abandoned that idea. [Terkel]: The events of recent days, you mean the ship Cambodia strike? [Gardener]: Right. [Terkel]: And the praise the president received as a result of it? [Gardener]: Right. [Terkel]: So the question is: Have we learned? Warren Susman,

uh, the exceptional people, have the exceptional learned something? [Warren Susman]: I, we are too quick to celebrate the end of the war in Southeast Asia. It has been yet proven to me that the war in Vietnam is over. In one very specific sense, and let me speak for a minute as a historian. When did the Civil War end? Did it end in '65? Did it end with surrender at Appomattox? Did it end with the end of Reconstruction? Historical events have a tendency to roll on until there develops some kind of vision or historical perspective on the nature of those events which force the reformulation of thinking, which force a reformulation, hopefully, of policy. And one other thing that frightens me about the celebration of the end of the war in Vietnam is that we have heard from speaker after speaker, right,

left, and center, politician and journalist, that now is the time to forget the past and build toward the future. And my answer is that unless we remember that past and study it very, very carefully, there isn't going to be any future whatsoever. [Terkel]: Let's look into this past. And you, both of you have been described as revisionist historians. You don't take what has been for many years a traditional view. Now where, we believe in our image, images very much, don't we? [Gardener]: Yeah, um, when we talk about history, um, a lot of people, a lot of historians insist that Americans really don't pay very much attention to history, uh, that we continually act on day to day basis; and I don't think that's true. I think the, the opposite is true. We have a series of historical myths which we operate on. We pay as much attention, if not more, to history, uh, than any other country. Now originally, we had a situation in the United States in which our, the uniqueness of our history was

reemphasized by geographic factors in terms of our distance from Europe. And this is continued down to the present time, so that when we get involved in a war or revolution or something else, unlike a country whose geographical limitations are very clear, we tend to have to hype our people up with ideology, uh, because there's no clear and present danger; there's no troops landing in New York City or coming up through, uh, Mexico, uh, to attack Texas. So our ideological content has to be all that much higher to compensate for the lack of, of real danger. Now that's one myth that, that continues, and it means that we have a very high ideological level and more time probably higher than other countries. Another is that we came out of World War II, uh, believing that technological power, air power, uh, made up for lack of political power on, uh, the European continent. And we continued this, uh, faith in technological superiority

right down through the Vietnam War when it was clear that airpower really wasn't really going to do anything about a revolution. Couldn't stop it at all. Uh, and we've repeated the same thing in this post-Cambodian operation that President Ford has just, uh, undertaken, believing that we can go in with technological superiority and solve what is essentially a political problem. And that's why I guess one is worried about whether we really have, uh, accepted the fact that our history is like that of other nations and whether we really have learned the essential lessons out of Vietnam. [Susman]: Let me, uh, put that in a slightly different way and quote a historian with whom I usually do not agree, but in this instance I think was very right. Daniel Boorstin said in a very important book in the '50s that Americans have used history or a sense of history in place of political theory. And I think there is much wisdom in that particular sense. Therefore, it's terribly important the vision of the past they get; and whether it does in fact bear relation to what did

occur, and what really the events were, and how those events were handled or whether the mythic vision holds. And I, uh, think where we go depends on how we decide how we got there. If we decide that we get, that we get there by sending the cavalry all the time to save the, the, the Americans who are stranded, which as Lloyd just pointed out, we have just done again in Cambodia. Uh, if that becomes the constant American response no matter what the situation, because that appears to be the historic tradition and the only way to survive, we are in trouble. And we end up debating issues without understanding the nature of our problems, because we refuse to assess them. And I am really appalled at the notion that we can somehow go on until we know a hell of a lot more about what has

happened, what brought us, what brought about the Cold War. Instead of a, for example, instead of assuming immediately that, uh, anyone who suggests that maybe the Soviet Union was not totally culpable is attacked. [Terkel]: The Cold War came into being during the incumbency of Harry Truman. That's why I'm fascinated by what appears to be the canonization of Truman today. Everyone, liberals, conservatives, whatever that words may mean, love Harry. How would you explain this? [Gardener]: I think that the main factor is of people, uh, seeking decisiveness in the presidency, and also they like the fact that during the 1940s issues seemed to be simpler. And I'll place the stress on seemed to be. Only now do they, uh, really seem to be simpler. At the time they were very difficult indeed. Uh, but the other side of that is I suggest decisiveness. [Terkel]: Warren. [Susman]: Yes, I think that's it in part. He, uh,

He had a, a mystique that was built in because of his coming to office from out of nowhere, coming to high office from apparently nowhere. This appeals. Of course, Gerry Ford has played on this. In a sense Nixon played on this before. Uh, he, uh, achieved the impossible, an election he was supposed to lose. He was the fighty little man, uh, who still maintained a personal life where he could take offense at what columnists said about his daughter. And I think the final thing that ought to be said is that he was a consumately brilliant politician. [Terkel]: If he was an architect of the Cold War and the Cold War led to Vietnam, what was good about his decision? [Susman]: Well, you see, you, this is what I said about the, the, the my deep belief that the war in Vietnam was in one fundamental sense is not over. That with all of the

efforts toward detente made during the Nixon er, era, we're still assuming that there's a major kind of conflict with the Soviet or with, with communist powers. Truman among all of the presidents was the initiator of that. The investigator of the Communist menace. He was the man who, uh, above, above all the others took, began to take seriou, the first, began to take seriously that communist menace. He gave us the, the first major efforts into collective security, NATO and all those other things that, uh, Eisenhower followed with until we had a worldwide ring of collective security arrangements with every initial in the rainbow. By the way, I should like to point out that all the fancy people who yell about the importance of collective security and our failure to engage in collective security before the war, causing the Second World War, how come collective

security didn't stop us from getting involved in this morass again? [Terkel, talking over Susman]: I want to, I want to get back to the, the sainthood of Harry Truman and... [Susman]: What sainthood of Harry Truman? [Terkel]: [inaudible] What seems to be the sainthood at the moment. [Susman]: Some people. [Terkel]: A great many. [Susman]: It has to be remembered that there are some who will never forgive Mr. Truman, and this is especially true among the younger, for the dropping of the bomb at Hiroshima. [Terkel]: For which he felt no remorse at all, he said. [Susman]: Remorse? He was proud of that act. [Terkel]: From this point if we may return to the recent Cambodian [inaudible] crisis. Uh, some said we must prove we're also irrational. We can do irrational things to keep the others on their toes. [Gardener]: You're right. [Terkel]: So in, we must prove we are slightly nuts to make the others respect us. Is that the idea? [Gardener]: Well that's a common response. It happened in 1961 in Berlin when Dean Acheson recommended that we should be a irrational over Berlin to convince people we're really serious. If we can't convince them rationally, then we'll have to do it irrationally, too. [laugh] [Terkel]: So where does this leave us on the

eve of the bicentennial celebration of our revolution? Warren has a theory that we can't even celebrate that properly. [Susman]: Well, the issue, you [laugh] I think nothing has ever been botched quite as much, even the war in Vietnam, as a very simple effort to stage a bicentennial. And I think it's worth looking at the disasters that have met the efforts to have some kind of major national and international celebration of that great event in our history. And I think one of the reasons for this failure, there are many reasons, but here's the greatest most powerful, uh, nation with tremendous expertise, managerial skills etc., etc., lots of money, and it's unable to bring off a bicentennial. I think one of the reasons is that a great many Americans can no longer take any of those ideals or any of the rhetoric or any of the propositions associated with the importance of that revolution

seriously anymore in the wake of what's happened in the last 25 or 30 years. A major disaster, if I were to sum it up, that hit the United States in the last 40 years is that we tried to keep the American people together in terms of the failure of the stability of all parts of the order with a negative philosophy, an anti-communism. We played at anti-communism for so long as a device, both in terms of fear and other things to keep people together, that we began to have less and less to offer positively. And I think therein lied the great disaster that we finally came to. People didn't know what the hell they were doing in Korea. They went, went face to face with the reality they don't know what it is, what it means to be anti- communism, except as in the Calley case, to kill people. Uh, it's not a way in which you can keep a society going. You have to

have positive ideological identification. [Terkel]: Our society as far as jobs, economics, can there be full employment? Can there be a modicum of prosperity unless we have a war, hot or cold? [Susman]: Let me answer it two ways. One, I don't think we have to have military spending. I think there is an extraordinary number of things that can be done, that cry for being done even within the current system, that ought to be done, that might provide a much more effective substitute, might ultimately be more productive. How you get that to come about is another matter. The second thing is I would hate to be saddled with the notion that this particular method of organizing economic, social, and political life was the only option open to us. There may be indeed other

options which, uh, differ strikingly from where modern capitalism has led us which could in fact solve those problems. [Terkel]: You know, you know, uh, do [inaudible] the word socialism need no, no longer be a pejorative word in the American vocabulary? [Susman]: I should hope it wouldn't be. The trouble is as you very well know, Studs, because you've talked to a lot more people than we have, socialism, which is a word that I would [inaudible] willing to espouse, means so damn many different things to so damn many different people that I'm not sure how much it helps anymore. But I quite agree that at least the options that are being presented under alternate systems have got now, it seems to me, to be honestly faced and discussed. [Terkel]: Recently, we spoke of the Cambodian communists attacking an American ship. Communists attacking Americans. We don't say Cambodians attacking Americans. One nationality, we use an ideology to describe one and a nationa-, why don't we say

Cambodian communist ships attacked American capitalist ships? [Gardener]: Well, we don't have capitalist ships, we have American ships. And, uh, there's been a very definite tendency I think always to view American nationalism as opposed to foreign ideologies. [Terkel]: Ah. [Gardener]: What you're saying about a Cambodian communist attack is, you see, is a kind of guilt by association as in McCarthy used in the domestic scene. And that's still in fashion, unfortunately. But that's the way it goes at the present time. [Susman]: You see, ev, every, I think it's, uh, long standing, nothing new. Great powers like to think of themselves in a world dealing with powers that are like minded. They find it very difficult to deal with groups that represent antithetical ideological positions, goes all the way back to Athens and Sparta at least. In addition to that, the tendency to see your own

vision is superior or unique, as you cited, comes through and to see other people in a sense as inferior. I mean, uh, go back to the Western for just a minute. The army is always summoned at the last minute. It is the agency which solves the problem. That it's solved by violence. [Gardener]: That's one the great disappointments of, uh, Vietnam War, that the army didn't solve the problem. [Susman]: That's right. [Gardener]: Uhm, in fact the generals in Vietnam made several references both to the American Revolution and of the fact of what was happening in Vietnam was an extension of what had happened in the West. And the Viet Minh, the Viet Cong were those who were outside the, uhm, the normal bounds of decency. [Terkel]: And they were the Indians. [Gardener]: They were the Indians. [Susman]: That's right. [Gardener]: That's a, little, a little too pat. But, uh, there was a lot of that. And, uh, Lieutenant Calley's, uh, plaintive comments today that he was simply trained from the time he was a boy and through the Army to hate communists and to, to fight communists, you see. Again, the

substitution of ideological danger for physical danger and the, the problem of trying to get down off of this high once you get up on this high, very, very difficult indeed. [Terkel]: In the communiques from the Cambodian crisis of recent days, uh, one of the Americans said we didn't bomb that ship. One of the Cambodians [inaudible] we saw some Caucasians on board. Do we use the word Caucasian, I mean how would that be read in non-white parts of the world? [Susman]: Yeah, not only is that obvious, but even the president recognized, whatever you think about the airlift of the orphans etc. from Vietnam, that there was a heavily racist element in the hostile response that these groups met certain places. There's no question that that racist element plays a significant role. [Terkel]: Well now that we have lost a war, and we have [inaudible], how will this affect the American society,

individuals, the country itself? I'm not asking you to play the role of Nostradamus, you know, but thoughts now. [Gardener]: Well, it could have very positive effects. I think that, the, if I'm right, and Warren doubts whether people are this rational or not, that the devastation of America's position in the international economy, uh, etc. is, uh, such an issue then, then we'll think twice about becoming involved in, in such a futile cause again. Uh, it may also be that through this time of trial we will have a reassessment of what community means, what nationhood means, uh, and begin to see ourselves as leaders in other ways besides military ways and solving some of the problems that plague all men. May, may go the other way. [Susman]: I am, uh, much less sanguine about the future. And I think the failure of the '60s, the abysmal failure of the '60s all along the line when many of these issues were fought in, on many

fronts in terms of the reinvestigation of the family, in terms of the, uh, the, the, uh, certain religious questions, the whole counterculture movement. I mean the whole sense over and over. And it happens at the end of novels, and the end of movies, and the end of plays, and over and over again, the notion that we blew it, we blew it, that the experiment failed. [Terkel]: That's what the Henry Fonda said to the other guy, Dennis Hopper at the end [Susman, talking over Terkel]: That's right. That's right. [Terkel]: of Easy Rider, a film, by the way, very popular with the young. [Susman]: Also, it's at the very end of the, the book about Ken Kesey, the Merry Pranksters that Tom Wolfe wrote. We blew it. Three pages of it. [inaudible] finish this. I, I, the, out of this has come thus far no reassessment in terms of, uh, a positive vision for the future. [Gardener, talking over Susman]: No, I [inaudible] [Susman]: No systematic, no systematic work in political theory except things that look towards a kind of, uh, return to the most extreme kind of laissez faire. I'm much less sanguine about it. [Terkel]: Lloyd seems more

affirming. [Susman]: Yeah. [Gardener]: Yeah, I, I think that, uhm, the ability of, uh, even on a simple level, the Freedom of Information Act, which in past times no one questioned the right of the FBI or the CIA to keep documents locked away for 30, 40, 50 years. And I really believe that, that secrecy in government is, uh, it's not the answer, but it's one of the things that is symptomatic of the whole process of going from 1900 to a great world power. And it seems to me what you have now is an ability of a lot of people to challenge that, and directly, and get results. Now this has become very uncomfortable, and it took something like Watergate to really cause this change. But I think a lot of people who were content to go along with national security arguments and justifications for everything no longer buy that at all. [Susman]: Yeah, but I think, I don't disagree with that. And I don't disagree with certain, uh, things that have occurred in the area of civil rights. No question about these things, but I'm talking about the transformation of fundamental institutions,

of corporate structures, of tax policy, of the, the general centralization of government. To be optimistic in this situation, very difficult. [Terkel, talking over Susman]: Well, Lloyd, Lloyd obviously, uh, feels somewhat differently. Go ahead, Lloyd. [Lloyd]: Yeah well, I think that, that while it's quite true, you know, I agree with Warren about the overwhelming power of the corporate structure. Uhm, I think that it's at the root of many of these problems. On the other hand, every other society that's organized in today's world also has some sort of centralized organization. Many nations, Great Britain among them, have been forced to abandon a power status which was obviously number one in order to adjust to a different kind of life. And they go through different kinds of problems in, in doing this. But they have achieved some success in this area. And to say, you know, that this is not possible, uh, you know, bothers me. But on the other hand, I do feel as Warren does that it depends very much on how we view the past.

Whether we say all right it's time for fundamental changes. [Terkel]: Things are open right now. Fluid, indeed, is the word. How do you two feel as historians, I suppose the question is American history books that are being taught, that have been taught, not being taught, do they tell us the truth about ourselves? [Susman, talking over Terkel]: [inaudible] No. And one, one of the thing, well I mean Lloyd, Lloyd's, Lloyd will disagree with some of this, too. One of the things that's happened is, and I think this is true especially about history, is that historians have increasingly refrained from addressing themselves to the big, large questions. We have moved off to, in my opinion, a great many piddling issues. Ah, I, ah, this is not about an attack on everyone. There are a lot of first-rate historians operating. But I am appalled, and especially if you go to meetings and see what younger people are working on, that there's a much greater interest in technique, and problems of how you do things than in trying

to deal with major questions which have to do with the very nature and structuring of, uh, the world in which we live. [Gardener]: The other side of that is, too, that, that while, uhm many historians now are working on smaller, um, subjects and being more specialized, this may also reflect an unwillingness to accept easy solutions about big questions. Uhm. [Susman]: Well, I think that's true. [Gardener]: And, and to deal with them. You have to have both. And it may be that right now people are trying to put back together a mosaic of the American experience, American history, which has been shattered for them by a whole series of events. And this mosaic may make a lot of sense once it's all finished. [Susman]: And we should never forget that unless we do engage in that serious occupation of finding out why all of this has happened, the future is going to be as chaotic and as ridiculous as much as the past has been. [Terkel]: Well let us celebrate the Bicentennial.

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