November 19, 2002
Manly History
Salon is running — for its subscribers only — an interview with Daniel Ellsberg in which he does something he does not do in his new book: speculate on the motives of the very smart people who made such very bad decisions:
My best guess is that Lyndon Johnson psychologically did not want to be called weak on communism. As he put it to Doris Kearns, he said he would be called if he got out of Vietnam, an “unmanly man,” a weakling, an appeaser.
He preferred to risk office, and to lose office, as a tough guy, than to gain and retain office while facing some strident charges from politicians who were beaten that he was a weakling. And I believe that he was not alone in that. Many Americans have died in the last 50 years, and maybe 10 times as many Asians, because American politicians feared to be called unmanly.
And now we have a president waging a war that he has failed to justify against a foe who defeated his father. Couldn’t possibly be any psychological motives there. Nah.
Furthermore, doesn’t this mean that we can learn surprisingly little from history? The policy of appeasing Hitler turned out to be a deep mistake, yet it wasn’t incontrovertibly wrong at the time, and afterwards we made just as deep a mistake by “learning from it.” Having to know how to apply the lessons of history means they’re not much in the way of lessons at all.
