Books
This Department features reviews and summaries of new books that link history and current events. From time to time we also feature essays that highlight publishing trends in various fields related to history.
If you would like to tell the editors about a new book (even your own) that addresses the concerns of HNN -- current events and history -- or would like to write a review, please send us an email: editor@historynewsnetwork.org.
Thursday, August 7, 2008
Jeremy Kuzmarov. Review of Bradley R. Simpson, Economists with Guns: Authoritarian Development and U.S. Indonesian Relations, 1960-1968 (Stanford University Press, 2008)
Jeremy Kuzmarov is Visiting Assistant Professor of History, Bucknell University
Unbeknownst to most Americans, in 1965, following a coup by General Suharto, the Indonesian military massacred upwards of 800,000 people and imprisoned an estimated million more in an attempt to liquidate the communist PKI party. The United States government gave both moral encouragement and logistical support to the mass killings, including the provision of weaponry and “lists” of suspected PKI members to be targeted for assassination. Mainstream newspapers like the New York Times wrote laudatory pieces in praise of the genocidal Suharto government, referring to it as a “gleaming light in Asia” because of its fervent anti-communism and openness towards foreign investment and free-trade. C.L Sulzberger added, in the crude racism of the day, that “the killing had attained a volume impressive even in violent Asia, where life is cheap.”
Bradley R. Simpson’s outstanding new book, Economists with Guns: Authoritarian Development and U.S. Indonesian Relations, 1960-1968, provides chilling new evidence of American complicity with what the CIA itself referred to as “the worst mass killings” since the era of Hitler and Stalin. He comments that the U.S. “viewed the wholesale annihilation of the PKI and its civilian backers as an indispensable prerequisite to Indonesia’s reintegration into the global political economy and the ascendance of a military modernizing regime.”
Building on George and Audrey Kahin’s invaluable study, Subversion as Foreign Policy: The Secret Eisenhower-Dulles Debacle in Indonesia, Simpson details how U.S. support for the 1965 coup and genocide was part of a much longer destabilization campaign directed against Achmed Sukarno; Indonesia’s first post-independence president whom Washington opposed because of his socialist leanings and leadership of the non-aligned movement of Third World states. Simpson also explores in considerable depth the ideology of American foreign policy-elites and the symbiotic relationship they developed with U.S. trained Indonesian economists who served as key advisers to the Suharto government promoting a mix of privatization, authoritarian development and free-market capitalism. These policies served as a precursor to the structural adjustment paradigm promoted by the World Bank during the 1980s and 1990s, and yielded similarly deleterious effects for the working-class and poor. Significantly, they could only be imposed by fiat, rather than popular consent.
Challenging the romanticized views of the Kennedy administration pervading popular culture and the Obama presidential campaign, one of Simpson’s major contributions is to show the continuity from Eisenhower on in seeking to illegally subvert Indonesian politics and undermine Sukarno. Through the CIA, the Eisenhower administration had funneled arms to dissident generals mounting a series of regional rebellions. Its cover was blown when an Air America pilot, Allen Pope, was captured after shelling an Indonesian village. During the Kennedy era, the special group on counter-insurgency (CI), headed by Robert Kennedy, was particularly influential in trying to build up the paramilitary capabilities of the Indonesian police, who were pro-western in their orientation and seen as a potential counterweight to the power of the military. The CIA further pressed for covert actions – laying the groundwork for the 1965 military coup, which the Johnson administration supported. These policies resulted in part from a growing infatuation with the notion of military modernization developed by prominent intellectuals of the period and RAND Corporation analysts. They believed that through the imposition of order and stability, the military could be the most effective instrument in serving U.S. Cold War interests and promoting economic development and growth. This idea lay behind the U.S. alliance with Suharto, and also shaped its involvement in an assortment of right-wing coups in Latin America and elsewhere during the 1960s and early 1970s.
Going beyond previous scholarship on modernization and the Kennedy administration, which focuses solely on ideology, Simpson advances a political economy analysis, showing how intellectual ideas of modernization were coterminous with the promotion of Western economic interests. Indonesia was particularly valued by policy-elites as a result of its mineral and oil wealth and provided a bonanza to oil corporations like Caltex following the 1965 coup. This was true of many other firms, including General Motors and Morris and Knudsen (precursor to Halliburton) which had been threatened by Sukarno’s movement towards nationalization and thus feared the strength of the PKI. General Suharto was ultimately far more amenable to U.S. interests from an ideological and economic vantage point, resulting in his being embraced in spite of his atrocious human rights record. The long shadow of McCarthyism, furthermore, made his anti-communist pogroms highly appealing to many in the State and Defense Departments who expressed no outspoken criticism of, or dissent against the rising toll of bloodshed. As a State Department staffer once commented, “No one cared as long as they were communists that were being butchered.”
Simpson’s last chapter focuses on the title of his book – the economists who worked as a technocratic elite under Suharto in ushering in the new order. He traces how they were influenced by their training at Berkeley and other Ivy League institutions in free-market capitalist ideals and aimed to promote westernization and modernization through the opening of the country to foreign investors. As Simpson makes clear, their influence on policy stemmed not from any popular consent but rather the violence and repression of grassroots dissent upon which Suharto’s power was based. In an arrogant manner they believed that their specialized technical knowledge of economic theory made them supremely qualified to dictate public policy. Ultimately, however, while Indonesia did experience striking growth levels in its GDP under Suharto, a large majority of the population remained mired in poverty and destitution, lacking in basic social services. Their political freedoms, meanwhile, had long since eroded.
On the whole, as one can see through Simpson’s book, Indonesia provides an important case study for U.S. foreign policy in the Cold War. It demonstrates how ideological and economic objectives came to trump human rights, and how Washington was able to use foreign aid and training programs to effectively promote its interests through native clients who were swayed by Western ideals and had their own power interests at stake. Moreover, it reveals the cold-hearted calculations of American policy-makers who were willing to support murderous violence and genocide in order to advance its objectives.
Simpson’s book is highly significant in one other respect: it shows the perils of authoritarian models of economic development and the fallaciousness of the military modernization theories promoted by Kennedy-era intellectuals, which continue to hold some credence among foreign policy elites today. The catastrophes that befell Indonesia in the late 20th century should serve as a warning as to what can happen again if people continue to think that the end justifies the means.
Sunday, August 3, 2008
Ron Briley: Review of Rick Perlstein's Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (Scribner, 2008)
During the Presidential campaign of 2008, one John McCain television ad opens with a reference to the summer of love in 1967 followed by the solemn comment that McCain did not participate in these frivolous antics; he was a prisoner of war and serving his country. Although he was only in grade school at the time, some conservatives have attempted to link Barack Obama with the violence of the Weather Underground through his association with Bill Ayers. Questions regarding the “liberal” bias of the media are raised by the McCain camp in television pieces comparing Obama with superficial celebrities such as Paris Hilton and Brittney Spears. What do such issues, especially invoking the 1960s, have to do with the economic and foreign policy issues confronting America in 2008? According to Rick Perlstein, the answer is that we are all living in Nixonland crated between 1964 and 1972.
In Nixonland, Perlstein, the author of the award-winning Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (2001), writes an old-fashioned political history, based primarily upon newspaper and periodical accounts supplemented by archival sources and interviews, focusing upon the Congressional and Presidential electoral campaigns from 1964 through 1972 and how the politics of that period and today were shaped by Richard Nixon. Once demonized by the New Left in the 1960s and 1970s, Nixon’s reputation has risen somewhat in academic circles where George W. Bush is often described as the worst President in American history. But in Nixonland, Richard Nixon reassumes the center stage as a leader orchestrating a politics of divisiveness which Reagan and the younger Bush have only emulated and refined. Perlstein writes his fascinating account somewhat from the perspective of what Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., once termed “the vital center.” While never dogmatic, Perlstein often assumes a liberal position under attack from both the political left and right. And he certainly makes a strong case that while much of the media focus in the 1960s was upon the emergence of a radical counterculture; the real story of the era was the formation of a conservative movement which continues to dominate American politics.
Perlstein begins his study with a description of the 1965 urban unrest in Watts which signaled that the Great Society consensus championed by Lyndon Johnson was based upon a rather flimsy foundation. Civil rights legislation and government social programs still left many black Americans out of the consensus, and that frustration erupted in the steamy streets of Los Angeles in August 1965. A white backlash fueled opposition to further civil rights legislation such as an open housing bill, and the Republican Party gained seats in the 1966 Congressional elections. The Vietnam War was also unraveling the Johnson majority, with growing opposition to the Democratic President within his own party.
Richard Nixon, argues Perlstein, was perfectly poised to take advantage of this political discontent. Many believed that Nixon was, indeed, done with politics following his defeats in the 1960 Presidential campaign and 1962 California Gubernatorial race. Yet, the former Vice-President was looking for an opportunity to re-enter the political arena, and this opening was offered by the growing social, class, ethnic, generational, gender, and regional divisions of the late 1960s. Nixon, Perlstein maintains, was able to exploit increasing animosity by white Southerners, ethnics, and suburbanites that a liberal and cultural elite were ignoring the needs of ordinary Americans, while catering to the demands of minorities and spoiled college students who were not willing to serve the nation in Vietnam as their elders had during the Second World War. Employing some of the psychological interpretations developed by Fawn Brodie in her biography of Nixon, Perlstein argues that Nixon identified with these disaffected Americans whom he would later label the silent majority.
Perlstein depicts Nixon as the perennial outsider who worked in his father’s struggling grocery store and attended small Whittier College in California rather than an elite institution such as Harvard. While at Whittier, Nixon organized a fraternity he termed the Orthogonians to challenge the Franklins, who “were well-rounded, graceful, moved smoothly, talked slickly.” Nixon’s club was “for the strivers, those not to manner born, the commuter students like him. He persuaded his fellows that reveling in one’s unpolish was a nobility of its own” (22).
The Franklin-Orthogonian dichotomy is used by Perlstein to characterize Nixon’s political life. Ever the outsider, Nixon attended Duke Law School rather than an Ivy League school, and after graduation he could not find employment with a prestigious Wall Street firm. Following military service in World War II and election to Congress in 1946, Nixon first made his mark nationally with his leading role in HUAC’s investigation of Alger Hiss, whom Nixon identified as one of the culturally elite Franklins. The Hiss case helped propel Nixon to the Senate and Vice-Presidency, but Eisenhower almost dumped the young man from California due to allegations of illegal campaign contributions. Nixon saved himself with the self-pity of his Checkers speech in which the candidate cast himself as an Orthogonian beset by elites who would deny his wife, Pat a new coat and his children a pet dog. Perlstein concludes that the Nixon of the Checkers speech resonated even better with discontented Americans during the late 1960s. Nixon was one of them—a victim of the liberals and cultural elitists just like the rest of middle America.
As the nation was torn asunder by violence in 1968, Nixon, thus, emerged as the law and order candidate who would bring peace with honor to Vietnam, while taking a tough stance against protesters breaking the law and assuring Southerners that desegregation would not be pursued through “forced busing”—positions undercutting the third party candidacy of George Wallace. Achieving a narrow victory in 1968, Nixon remained insecure. Perceiving the media as his enemy and out of step with the American people, Nixon unleashed Vice-President Spiro Agnew’s attacks upon the “nattering nabobs of negativism” within the nation’s leading television networks and newspapers. Perlstein is critical of what he perceives as the media’s retreat during a time when the Nixon administration merited a closer monitoring by the fourth estate in service of democracy and the people’s right to know.
Perlstein chronicles how the insecurity of the Nixon administration culminated in the Watergate crisis. The “dirty tricks” employed by Nixon operatives resulted in the Democrats nominating George McGovern, the candidate Nixon most wanted to face in the 1972 general election. Nixon was able to portray McGovern as the candidate of pot, protest, and abortion, obscuring discussion of economic policies and Vietnam. In the short run, Nixon was able to secure re-election, but the uncovering of his political tactics led to the President’s resignation. Nevertheless, Perlstein asserts that the divisive politics, focusing upon cultural symbols rather than economic interest, unleashed by Nixon still dominate political discourse. He dedicates his book to “the memory of the dozens of Americans who lost their lives at the hands of other Americans, for ideological reasons, between the year s of 1965 and 1972.” Perlstein concludes with the hope that political and cultural disagreements will never again lead to such violence, but he pessimistically notes that we still live in Nixonland.
Critics of Perlstein’s study will note that while the 1960s were turbulent, divisions over race, gender, and class are hardly unique to that decade of American history. One only needs to remember the American Revolution, slavery, Indian Wars, Civil War, social and industrial unrest of the 1890s, and the Great Depression to recognize that there is a legacy of conflict beyond the designs of Richard Nixon. Also, Perlstein is open to criticism for downplaying the role of the ostensibly affable Ronald Reagan in fostering the politics of division, but there is no denying that Perlstein’s massive volume makes for a fascinating read. It is not so much that Perlstein introduces new information and interpretations, but that he is a fine writer who is able to deftly utilize media accounts in the recreation of a fascinating period in American history whether or not one agrees with the label Nixonland.
Friday, August 1, 2008
Zachary J. Lechner: Review of Anthony Lewis's Freedom for the Thought That We Hate: A Biography of the First Amendment (Basic Books, 2008)
Zachary J. Lechner is a Ph.D. candidate at Temple University
Freedom for the Thought That We Hate: A Biography of the First Amendment is part of Basic Books’ “Basic Ideas” series in which “a leading authority offers a concise biography of a text that transformed its world, and ours.” The authority here is Anthony Lewis, law professor, former New York Times columnist, Pulitzer Prize winner, and author of the bestselling 1964 classic Gideon’s Trumpet and the 1992 work Make No Law: The Sullivan Case and the First Amendment.
Writing for a popular audience, he makes no great revelations in this new book, though drawing on judicial opinions and secondary scholarship, he offers a concise, useful volume on one of Americans’ most cherished and misunderstood legal rights.
Lewis delineates his main argument over the course of twelve chapter essays on the judicial history of the First Amendment. He asserts that the amendment did not arrive fully articulated when the Framers added the Bill of Rights to the proposed Constitution in 1787. Rather, its meaning took shape over time through a series of Supreme Court rulings. Not until 1931 did the Court invoke the amendment in order to protect free expression. The First Amendment “has no discernable history,” Lewis explains, meaning that justices have no record of the Framers’ intentions. So calls for original intent hit a dead end. Lewis focuses mainly on judges, who, he maintains, are influenced by their social surroundings when rendering decisions. He also writes about the significance of other actors—political leaders and citizens—in driving debates about the First Amendment. Judges function as the heroes in Lewis’s book, but he emphasizes that they have frequently ignored or upheld legislative and executive challenges to the right of Americans to think and express themselves.
Lewis opens by chronicling the way dissent was repressed in sixteenth and seventeenth-century England and in colonial America. One of the major instruments was seditious libel, which criminalized publications critical of either the church or the state. Leaders reasoned that such writings would demean authority and rupture the bonds of civil society. Over the first four chapters, Lewis ably charts the historical controversy over seditious libel. In a nation guarded by freedom of expression, this restriction seems incompatible. President John Adams and the Federalists used the concept as justification for the Sedition Act of 1798. This legislation enabled them to fine and imprison their political enemies. The American voters in the “Revolution of 1800,” not the Supreme Court, Lewis clarifies, nullified this legislation. Similarly, in a context of war and fears of Bolshevism, justices upheld the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918. The Supreme Court in fact did not put the issue of seditious libel to rest until its ruling in New York Times v. Sullivan in 1964.
Lewis describes the importance of Justices Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. and Louis D. Brandeis in pushing the Court to sustain the constitutional guarantee of free speech. Between 1919 and 1929 they issued a series of groundbreaking dissents. These laid the path for the Court’s later rulings protecting freedom of expression. The decision in the case of Stromberg v. California (1931) marked the first time the high court struck down a statute on the foundation that it violated the First Amendment. The Court, Lewis states, determined “that free speech was a basic American value, that repression was not to be tolerated to prevent some dim and distant bad tendency.”
The outcome of New York Times v. Sullivan further emboldened defenders of free expression. Seditious libel was dead. No longer could Americans be imprisoned for criticizing a political leader. Common law had compelled defendants to prove the truth of their claim. The judiciary reversed this difficult burden. It now required the plaintiff to prove the falsity of a claim as well as the defendant’s knowledge of the untruth. The Court made an even larger statement in Sullivan. “What had always been a matter of state law,” Lewis points out, “became, in most cases, a subject that turned on federal constitutional law.”
Specifically, the Sullivan decision empowered the press to report freely on the civil rights movement. In subsequent topical chapters, Lewis devotes considerable attention to press freedom and judicial discussions regarding how far that freedom should be extended, especially when it infringes on personal privacy. The Court, however, has refused to allow the press to use truth as an unmitigated defense against privacy interests. Lewis calls for balance. He sides with the late Justice William J. Brennan, Jr., who located the central meaning of the First Amendment in the right to censure the government, not to print anything and everything about non-political figures. Indeed, Lewis is apprehensive about a press that joins with the government to invade citizens’ privacy. Ultimately, he believes, a free society necessitates a compromise between freedom of expression and the right to privacy.
Lewis further details the intersection of journalism and freedom of expression with a penetrating analysis of press privilege. In the Branzburg v. Hayes (1972) decision, the Supreme Court determined that journalists could not invoke the First Amendment to avoid having to testify before a grand jury. The ruling denied press privilege, and the Court has subsequently refused to revisit the issue. Nevertheless, journalists continue to claim special protections under the First Amendment.
Lewis asserts that the Framers surely did not equate “journalists” with “the press,” as professional journalism as we know it today did not exist in the eighteenth century. “The press” probably encompassed publishers of pamphlets, books, and newspapers. Lewis takes a middle-ground position on whether or not journalists can be required to reveal their sources. The notion of “qualified privilege” was outlined in 2005 by David Tatel, a United States Court of Appeals judge for the District of Columbia Circuit. Elucidating Tatel’s position, Lewis writes,
[C]ourts should balance the interest in compelling discourse, measured by the harm the leak caused, against the public interest in newsgathering, measured by the leaked information’s value. Thus, for example, if the government wanted to learn who leaked the story of President Bush’s order for wiretapping without required warrants, a court would weigh the harm caused by that leak against the importance of the information to the public. In my view the latter would plainly prevail, and the reporters would have a privilege not to disclose their sources.
This moderate stance, Lewis contends, would usually but not always shelter the press. He describes the 2003 contempt proceedings against Judith Miller of The New York Times and Matt Cooper of Time. Both journalists cited press privilege in refusing to identify the person who leaked to them covert CIA operative Valerie Plame’s identity. Based on qualified privilege, and in this instance, Lewis convincingly and succinctly defends the public’s right to know. It is a good example of his nuanced consideration of the First Amendment’s guarantees and their social ramifications.
Before returning to the subject of the press, Lewis devotes chapters to obscenity and to the use of fear to suppress free expression. The federal government, he writes, has often justified interferences with civil liberties and the First Amendment as necessary wartime measures. In contrast, he describes the Vietnam War-era Court’s more vigorous protection of civil liberties. We are left to wonder why the justices defended the First Amendment in this conflict and not others.
My question points to the major drawback of Freedom for the Thought that We Hate—the author’s failure to rely adequately on social and cultural contexts for each case. Lewis certainly indicates, as any good textbook would, for example, the political expediency behind the Alien and Sedition Acts and the Cold War culture in which the 1950s courts functioned. It is common sense that Supreme Court cases and decisions are products of their times. In the introduction, Lewis suggests that he will go beyond this truism. He states that “great judges” recognized the broad social benefits of free expression, yet he insists, “judicial commitment to openness of expression grew as citizens’ did; each informed the other.” I’m intrigued by this idea, but Lewis is short on examples.
Furthermore, he leaves significant questions unanswered: How do judges’ political orientations influence their legal outlooks? (Surprisingly, Lewis generally ignores this important dynamic.) When are judges merely the products of their times, and when do they break free of prevailing societal constraints? And most essential: In terms of judges, the press, and other non-judicial actors, who influences whom, and when, and why? Perhaps in the introduction Lewis simply should have avoided making an argument about legal change and the public. Such an investigation would necessitate a complex weaving together of legal, social, and cultural history. In such a short survey, with so much territory to cover, that is a tall order for even as gifted a legal scholar as Lewis.
This criticism aside, strong insights abound in Freedom for the Thought That We Hate, particularly in the final chapters. Lewis explores hate speech, balancing freedom of the press with a fair trial, free speech and political campaigns, and the role of the press in a democratic society. He savages the post-9/11 media’s failure to ask the Bush Administration tough questions on torture and the imprisonment of suspected terrorists without trial. He portrays journalists as seduced by power; they are a pale reflection of the fiercely independent and skeptical men and women who distinguished their profession during the Vietnam and Watergate years. Although he maintains his disappointment with the contemporary media, Lewis does acknowledge its close scrutiny of the recent wiretapping controversy, which helped journalists break free of their “deferential” point of view.
Many readers will share his concerns. They may find some of his other opinions more problematic. For instance, Lewis calls for restrictions on exhortations of terrorist violence. The Supreme Court has protected speech unless it involves incitements to violence that pose an imminent threat. “I think we should be able to punish speech that urges terrorist violence to an audience some of whose members are ready to act on the urging,” the author reasons. "That is imminence enough.” As with many free expression controversies, there is no easy answer.
While one can disagree with Lewis’s various stances on First Amendment issues, there is no denying his larger claim that “the freedoms of speech and of the press have never been absolutes.” They evolved over time to occupy a central place in the American constitutional law. Lewis concludes that above all else the First Amendment demands bravery from the press and judges. The judiciary, despite notable exceptions, has pushed American society in a progressive direction, forcing it to live up to its constitutional ideals—pay no mind, he advises, to the misguided critics of “activist” courts. The courage and openness demanded by free expression are, for Lewis, indispensable to the proper functioning of a democratic society. His short study of the First Amendment’s history reminds us of the malleability of its fourteen words and their need for vigilant safeguarding.
Thursday, July 31, 2008
Mel Ayton: Review of Paul Donnelley's Assassins and Assassinations: History’s Most Infamous Plots (New Holland Publishers)
Source: Special to HNN (7-31-08)
[Mr. Ayton is the author of books and articles on the JFK, RFK and Martin Luther King Jr assassinations. The paperback edition of his latest book, The Forgotten Terrorist was published in May 2008.]
Paul Donnelley has done an extremely painstaking research job and he leaves no doubt in the minds of the reader as to the how and the why of the major assassinations in world history. His breadth of research and insight, which provides a vivid account of the psychological make-up of the assassin whether mentally deranged or politically motivated, is remarkable. Additionally, Donnelly has left the reader in no doubt as to whether or not a particular assassination really changed history.
As Donnelley makes clear the motives of the actors and the efficacy of assassination as a ‘political tool’ vary widely throughout history. In this compelling study the author reveals the strange and complex world of the assassin and shows the shocking ease in which psychopathic, professional or personal assassins can carry out their appalling act of murder, sometimes with devastating effect on the societies they attacked. He has also shown how assassination in many parts of the world has not only been a normal and rational political act but has often been effective in the transference of power.
From the Wolf’s Lair of Hitler’s ‘1000-year Empire’ to the inner sanctums of the Kremlin, from the murderous world of organized crime to the political plotting of American and European anarchist groups and Islamic jihadists, assassins have attempted to change the course of history. Donnelley delineates the sinister history of this common and deadly profession with dozens of cases - chosen for their pertinence to world events and the effect they had on the society of the day. Particularly interesting are those cases which are usually not found in books about this subject, including Hitler’s would-be assassin Johann Georg Elser and Michael Collins’ assassin, Denis O’Neill.
His book is triumphant in two ways. The first triumph is stylistic. Unlike similar books on the subject Donnelley writes with authority but does not tire the reader with turgid prose. The second triumph is ethical. Donnelley does not allow himself to pander to the constant harpings of conspiracy theorists who see every American assassination as an act of government betrayal. Instead, Donnelley focuses clearly on the facts and treats speculative accounts as nothing more than the efforts of the conspiracy-minded who always prevent facts from interfering with their prejudices.
Donnelley’s chapters on the American assassinations of the 1960s, from the murder of JFK to the assassinations of RFK and Martin Luther King, are particularly insightful and enthralling as the author strips away the misunderstood evidence in these cases which have underpinned most conspiracy theorizing. Other chapters provide insight on the assassinations of Julius Ceasar, Thomas A Beckett, Jean-Paul Marrat, Abraham Lincoln, William McKinley, Grigori Rasputin, Leon Trotsky, Earl Mountbatten, Albert Anastasia, Reinhard Heydrich, Che Guevara, Benazir Bhutto, Indira Ghandi and Franz Ferdinand and the attempted assassinations of Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II. Thus, his carefully crafted book offers the reader a wide range of personalities, motives and circumstances in which to learn about this most shocking of crimes.
Accordingly, this book should be required reading for any student of contemporary international politics as well as the general reader who wants to learn more about the underlying fanaticism that provokes some individuals to practise this extreme form of ‘censorship’.
Friday, July 25, 2008
Luther Spoehr: Review of Stephen Joel Trachtenberg's Big Man on Campus: A University President Speaks Out on Higher Education (Touchstone Books, 2008).
Source: Providence Sunday Journal (7-20-08)
Surely, Stephen Trachtenberg was a successful university president. Under his stewardship—for 11 years at the University of Hartford, then nearly 20 years at George Washington University—endowments and enrollments, programs and prestige, all grew. A career administrator (with law and public administration degrees, but no Ph.D.) who unabashedly describes himself as “admittedly quirky,” he asserts that he has “not [been] completely socialized” by academe and now wants to share his “outsider-insider perspective” on it.
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
B. C. Knowlton: Review of Rick Atkinson's The Day of Battle and James Holland's Italy’s Sorrow: A Year of War, 1944-1945
Source: Special to HNN (7-23-08)
[Mr. Knowlton is an Assistant Professor of History at Stonehill College in Easton MA.]
Books Under Review
Atkinson, Rick. The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944. (New York: Henry Holt, 2007)
Holland, James. Italy’s Sorrow: A Year of War, 1944-1945. (New York: St. Martin’s, 2008)
It is tempting to say that, just as the Allied campaign in Sicily and Italy in World War II was of less significance and decisiveness than the one that carried the Allies from Normandy to Germany, so the course of the historiography has tended to emphasize the last year of war in northern Europe. And no doubt there have been more books written about D-Day, The Battle of the Bulge, and the collapse of the Third Reich, than about the race to Messina, the Salerno and Anzio landings, the bombing of Monte Cassino, the capture of Rome, and what followed. But it can’t really be said that historians of the war have overlooked the Mediterranean theater. Douglas Porch has recently seen it as The Path to Victory for the Allies; Robin Neillands has followed the British Eighth Army from North Africa to the Alps; Lloyd Clark has revisited Anzio; and Robert Katz has recounted both the military campaign and partisan activity involved in the Battle for Rome. 1 Rick Atkinson won a Pulitzer Prize for An Army at Dawn, about the war in North Africa with an emphasis on the U. S. Army; and James Holland has written about the Italian and German siege of the British-held island of Malta, and the stand of the British and American Allies, they having forged their alliance, in North Africa.2
It is now tempting to say that in coming to these most recent World War II histories by Atkinson the American and Holland the Englishman, we can expect to see the perspectives and the prejudices of the wartime Allies researched and represented. Why Britain should have been fighting in North Africa in the first place; and why North Africa should have been the first place in which America would fight, are two points that must be covered in histories of the war in the Mediterranean theater. Whether and why the Allies should have gone from North Africa to Sicily, and from Sicily to Italy, are two more questions that call for historiography. And then it was indeed in the Mediterranean theater that the British and the Americans learned how to fight alongside each other, and to get along with each other as they fought the common enemy. The American troops who came ashore in Operation Torch were quite green; the British troops who had just defeated the Afrika Korps in the Battle of El Alamein had been battling Germans and Italians for over two years. This occasioned a good deal of condescension and resentment between the English-speaking Allies.
Though Winston Churchill knew well that Britain could not win the war without the Americans, and knew as well that before the war was won American manpower and industrial production would far surpass that of the Empire and Commonwealth, still he was determined to exert as much influence as he could, for as long as he could, on Allied war planning. Churchill argued for the North African landings, for following up that victory with the invasion of Sicily, and then for maintaining the Mediterranean strategy by attacking the long and mountainous soft underbelly of the Axis. He practically insisted upon Anzio, and repeatedly declared that the capture of Rome was the key to weakening the enemy ahead of the landings in France, which he assured the skeptical Americans he was all for, but not yet. Though Atkinson again emphasizes the American experience of the war, The Day of Battle begins with a Prologue recounting Churchill’s arrival in the United States for meetings with President Roosevelt in May of 1943. In his meetings with Roosevelt at Casablanca in January of that year, Churchill’s persuasion, and his staff’s preparation, meant that the Mediterranean strategy would not yet give way to D-Day. Just as the U. S. Army had improved its performance over the course of the North African campaign, so had the U. S. Army staff gotten better at preparing itself, and protecting the President, against Churchill’s adventurous diversions. By the end of the TRIDENT conference he and the British war planners had succeeded in holding their Mediterranean ground, but the final agreement did set a date for the Normandy invasion, and did stipulate that several army divisions and many naval vessels would be withdrawn from the Mediterranean and sent to England in anticipation of OVERLORD. More men and materiel would later be redeployed for the planned ANVIL invasion of southern France. These decisions would have a telling effect upon the daily battles of the year of war in Italy.
Atkinson’s narrative of battle begins with the execution of Operation HUSKY and ends with “the expulsion of the barbarians” from Rome. That, of course, happened just one day before D-Day; and so, like most of the journalists covering the war at the time and many historians ever since, Atkinson has decided that the capture of Rome is the perfect moment to turn his attention from what was after all a secondary theater to what was always going to be the main theater of Allied operations. The Third volume of his “Liberation Trilogy,” according to the back flap of this one, “will recount the climactic struggle for Western Europe, from the eve of Normandy to the fall of Berlin.” In complementary contrast to this Whiggish history of the war, Holland’s more sorrowful account begins on the eve of the battle in which the Allies would finally break through the Cassino Line and out of the Anzio beachhead, and ends just before the fall of Berlin with the surrender of German forces in northern Italy, who by that time were fighting the Allies in the midst of often barbarous partisans. Holland’s Prologue recounts not the colorful drama of political summitry but the setting and detonating of a partisan bomb on the Via Rassella in Rome which killed over 30 members of an SS police regiment and led to the massacre of more than ten times as many Roman civilians in the Ardeatine Caves. That was more than two months before the Germans left and the Allies entered Rome; but the capture of Rome was, for Holland, just the beginning of a brutal summer of fighting in which the Germans could hold their ground only by pacifying it, and the Allies could advance only by devastating it. The Germans massacred partisans and civilians quite indiscriminately; fascist and communist partisans also fought each other; and even in areas liberated by the Allies, Italian civilians sickened and starved, and women and girls sold themselves to their liberators for food and supplies. The war would continue through one more brutal winter in which rain, mud and misery was the infantryman’s lot, and one more stalemate would play out before the last offensive led to the end.
Both Holland and Atkinson have carefully researched and compellingly represented the human experience of total war in the Italian peninsula. They note that it reminded many people of the experience of World War I. Both authors make routine and telling use of oral and written accounts of common soldiers and noted journalists. In Atkinson’s book we hear more from Americans, and in Holland’s from all of the Commonwealth. Atkinson relies heavily on Ernie Pyle; Holland less obviously on Eric Sevareid and Martha Gellhorn. The BBC is heard only when it broadcasts coded messages to the partisans. Audie Murphy and Bill Mauldin have prominent cameo roles in The Day of Battle; Italy’s Sorrow features such unknown but colorful characters as Sergeant Sam Bradshaw, a tanker from the north of England by way of North Africa, a South African subaltern named Kendall Brooke, Canadian infantryman Stan Scislowski, and Ken Neill, a fighter pilot from New Zealand. They all survived the war; and though their experiences do represent the mortal danger of it all, their survival does elide a bit the deaths and silences of so many others. Atkinson’s account, however, of the experience of Lieutenant Colonel Jack Toffey of the U. S. Army, who was killed near Palestrina as the Allies were on their way to Rome, conveys both the documentary plenitude of a survivor’s memoir and the unaccountable and incommensurable sense that death in battle can happen at any moment to anyone involved and that as the war ends for them it goes on as if interminably for everyone else. Holland also incorporates the accounts of many German soldiers – most of whom, somehow, survived -- and of partisans of all persuasions -- many of whom, in one way or another, did not. And both make the most of the fact that Field Marshall Albert Kesselring, the German commander in Italy, survived the war, was spared the firing squad, and wrote his own memoirs.
In matters of strategy, involving again the commanding generals and their political superiors, Atkinson and Holland have more to say, respectively, about the Americans and British; but both focus appropriately on the exigencies of the alliance, and are equally even-handed in according praise and attaching blame to both sides. General Mark Clark was indeed a prima donna, but was also an able and courageous commander. General Sir Harold Alexander was a bit of an enabler, but his diplomatic handling of his American subordinate served the interests of operational harmony and efficiency. The Anzio operation was inadequately planned and insufficiently supplied; but General John Lucas was still not up to the job. Winston Churchill’s initial insistence upon SHINGLE turned predictably to officiousness about its execution; but he was justified in questioning whether Lucas should be put and then kept in command of it. When Lucas had been replaced by Lucian Truscott, and the Allies had broken out from what they called “the Bitchhead,” Mark Clark did indeed disregard an order from Alexander to drive northeast toward Valmontone, and so cut off the German tenth Army then retreating from Cassino; and he did do this so that his Fifth Army would be the one to capture Rome to the northwest. But Alexander was being adamant about his strategy while Clark could make a case for maintaining tactical flexibility. And it was not certain that the German army could be cut off, or that the Allied army would not be taken in the flank as it made its way toward Valmontone. Still, what Clark did he did, in Atkinson’s words, “with duplicity and bad faith” (549); and it was, in Holland’s words, “seriously bad form” (162).
Both books are over five hundred pages long, but are filled with well-informed and illuminating detail; and both maintain an admirable and harrowing narrative intensity and momentum. They do complement each other very well, and very satisfactorily supplement the historiography of the Second World War in the Mediterranean theater. But neither author has a merely scholarly interest in the history. They are actively involved in the preservation of source materials and the dissemination of current understandings of the Second World War. Atkinson writes for the Washington Post, and has also written about the war in Iraq. Holland collects oral histories online, leads tours to battlefields, and has also written historical novels. The Day of Battle, and Italy’s Sorrow, show both the best and the worst of the war, and so should find an audience among those who both enjoy reading about it and appreciate what they are reading.
1 Douglas Porch, The Path to Victory: The Mediterranean Theater in World War II (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004); Robin Neillands, Eighth Army: The Triumphant Desert Army that Held the Axis at Bay from North Africa to the Alps, 1939-45 (New York: The Overlook Press, 2004); Lloyd Clark, Anzio: Italy and the Battle for Rome (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2006); Robert Katz, The Battle for Rome: the Germans, the Allies, the Partisans, and the Pope, September 1943-June 1944 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2003).2 Rick Atkinson, An Army at Dawn: the War in North Africa, 1942-1943 (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2002); James Holland, Fortress Malta: an Island Under Siege, 1940-1943 (New York: Hyperion, 2003); Together We Stand: North Africa 1942-1943, Turning the Tide in the West (New York: Harper Collins, 2006).
Saturday, July 12, 2008
Luther Spoehr: Review of Gary W. Gallagher's Causes Won, Lost, & Forgotten: How Hollywood and Popular Art Shape What We Know About the Civil War (University of North Carolina Press, 2008).
Anyone who has taught or written history for any length of time at any level knows that textbooks and monographs have far less influence on students than have movies, television, historical novels, and other instruments of popular culture. So it is worth investigating just what those non-academic media have been teaching the public, students and grownups alike.
Nowhere is this more likely to be true than in the case of the American Civil War, the subject of over 60,000 books, plus a vast array of movies, magazine articles, and the like. Gary Gallagher, the prolific Civil War historian at the University of Virginia, takes a well organized look at the last 20 years worth of Hollywood’s Civil War productions and over 2,750 advertisements for Civil War paintings and sculptures that were printed in Civil War Times Illustrated and two other periodicals between 1962 and 2006. What he finds will not be terribly surprising to, say, readers of Tony Horwitz’s Confederates in the Attic. But if Walt Whitman was right to declare that “the real war will never get in the books,” Gallagher shows that Whitman’s dictum applies even more aptly to movies and popular artwork.
Friday, July 11, 2008
Charles W. Hayford: Review of Stephen MacKinnon's Wuhan, 1938: War, Refugees, and the Making of Modern China
Source: http://www.asiamedia.ucla.edu (7-10-08)
War is hell, none more so than the stymied, enraged, calculated brutishness of the Japanese invasion of China in 1937 and 1938. The Rape of Nanjing is familiar, but less well known is what happened afterwards. Chiang Kai-shek moved his government to Wuhan, on the mid-Yangzi, and presided over a bloody and successful strategy of resistance and retreat which left the Japanese exhausted. In the ten months before the Japanese took Wuhan in October 1938, a vast United Front formed. The epic retreat to the wartime capital to Chongqing, in Sichuan, had the same heroic, mythic ring as did Mao's Long March. In the years upriver, Chiang's regime stagnated, but when he arrived in Chongqing in early 1939, Chiang was, paradoxically, both defeated and triumphant.
Stephen MacKinnon's Wuhan, 1938: War, Refugees, and the Making of Modern China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008) tells the story of these crucial months between Nanjing and Chongqing. The story exposes the foundations of change which are usually suppressed and epitomizes the recent re-thinking of military history, a trend which MacKinnon helped to organize. As with Margaret MacMillan's The Week That Changed The World, a brief period illuminates longer sweeps of history.
For the "Wuhan moment" was a watershed. Fissiparous provincial generals (often misleadingly called "warlords"), Communists, and cultural entrepreneurs of the earlier generation came together in one place and rallied to the national cause. The lion did not exactly lie down with the lamb, but Zhou Enlai had tea with an Anglican Bishop, Mme. Chiang Kai-shek welcomed the notorious radical Agnes Smedley, Edgar Snow wrote an encomium to the Generalissimo, and Chiang, precisely because he did not have unchallenged control, presided over a United Front which was militarily effective and culturally creative.
Yet themes of horror drive the action. One is the terrible swift transformative power of battle. The story begins with the single bullet to the back of General Han Fuju's head. In August, the old-style warlord defied Chiang's orders to fight to the last man and instead pulled out of Shandong, leaving Tianjin defenseless and Japanese troops free to descend upon Nanjing. The Council of Generals was united in the verdict for execution. They now formed a cohesive national military led by men who, like Chiang, had graduated from Yuan Shikai's Japanese-style Baoding Military Academy. Chiang supervised but did not control them.
Their tactics and organization prevailed at Xuzhou in April and Chiang's decision to blow up the Yellow River dikes in June stymied the Japanese advance for a time. Chinese military casualties alone were over half a million. MacKinnon reminds us of the irony that, as the United States stood by, Chiang's Soviet military advisers, some of whom had been in Canton in the 1920s, came to replace Germans. Germany (ring the irony bell again) originally supported China partly because Japan was allied with their enemy, Great Britain. Wuhan watched Soviet and Chinese pilots bravely fly outclassed Soviet and American planes against Japanese with better training and experience.
The second theme of horror is the refugees, more appropriately called "survivors." The invasion and the diversion of the river to the east produced civilian devastation and refugees on a scale unsurpassed in modern history. Their massive numbers forced governments to create, fund and administer new institutions and brought all classes together to deal with their survivor guilt. The book includes a section of photographs, especially those from Robert Capa, which goes beyond illustrating the text; it is a separate and unique statement of the humanity of the refugees.
The national crisis challenged the top-down, urban and Westernized culture produced by May Fourth intellectuals in the 1920s. The wartime culture produced art, literature and music that were populist, nationalistic and politicized. The government did not coerce or co-opt culture workers into the nationalist cause; they thronged to enlist. Some resisted the politicized vulgarization, but Guo Moro, for instance, who in the 1920s wrote poetry and adapted Marxist analysis to China, worked for a cultural United Front.
For these few months, Madrid and "romantic" Hankow were twin capitals of anti-fascism. Progressive Western intellectuals made them whistle stops on their global grand tours. The genius of Hollington Tong as Chiang's press impresario was to allow free rein to both the visiting journalists and the Chinese press, with no censorship. MacKinnon notes that not a single publisher or journalist was arrested or murdered in the year 1938, a record for a Chinese capital. Since reporters could select their own stories and interview anyone from Zhou Enlai to battlefield commanders, Chiang emerged in the international press as the brave leader of an indomitable nation. Edgar Snow called him "indispensable." Franklin Roosevelt distrusted the dispatches of his own State Department but eyewitness accounts from Evans Carlson and Snow led him to push for major loans to the Nationalists. In Chongqing, censorship and control bred cynicism among wartime correspondents such as Theodore White. Still, the brief freedom in Wuhan, speculates MacKinnon, showed that China's professional press corps had a potential which still exists.
The Wuhan moment passed. The decimation of Nationalist armies and officer corps left Chiang triumphant but sequestered and vulnerable. In Chongqing he worked to impose control, rather than building power, which harmed him in the long run. In Yan'an, the paranoid security regime and village centered strategy was solidified. Each side suppressed the Wuhan cultural United Front and repressed cultural dissidents by imprisonment, assassination or execution.
The most intriguing of MacKinnon's conclusions is that this war "profoundly brutalized" Chinese society and left a "survivor mentality" that lasted through at least the 1960s, as well as a "psychic numbness to violence and ability to endure oppression without protest." If World War II and the Holocaust transformed Europe, then how much greater were the effects of war on China?
In any case, read this slim and seductively informative book and recommend it to friends who are not China specialists.
Sunday, July 6, 2008
Lee P. Ruddin: Review of Robert Kagan’s The Return of History and the End of Dreams (Atlantic Books, 2008)
I dreamed a dream in time gone by
When hope was high
And life worth living
…
But the tigers come at night
With their voices soft as thunder
As they tear your hope apart
And they turn your dream to shame
“I Dreamed a Dream,” Les Miserables, 1980
Robert Kagan’s The Return of History and the End of Dreams has been as eagerly anticipated in 2008 as Norman Podhoretz’s World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism was in 2007. Much like Podhoretz’s polemic which was endorsed by Republican presidential-wannabe, Rudy Giuliani, Kagan’s casebook is endorsed by another Republican presidential-wannabe, John McCain. (Both Messrs. Podhoretz and Kagan served as advisors.) Whereas Giuliani stood aside, rendering the World War IV thesis all but obsolete, McCain’s confirmation as the Republican nominee for 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue renders The Return of History thesis anything but.
Yet, for all the talk of the Republican Party and the presidential struggle, it is the struggle between democracy and autocracy that concerns us here. The prospect “of a new era of international convergence” (p.4) has turned out to be nothing but a “mirage” (p.3). “History has returned,” Kagan pronounces, pitting autocracies against democracies — the latter of which “must come together to shape it, or others will shape it for them” (p.4).
Convergence, commonality and commerce were the axis of the day during the Nineties. So much so, Kagan writes that “soft power was in and hard power was out” (p.21). Yet the post-Cold War dream was soon to end. Divergence, difference and destabilization have become the axis of the Noughties. Kagan, no discerner of the laws of history, remains free from quasi-Marxist determinism — suffered by Francis Fukuyama — and the view that history was moving in one ineluctable direction (read pax democratia). For this reason, Kagan is in and Fukuyama is out. In an essay entitled “The End of the End of History,” Kagan writes:
[T]he Chinese and Russian leaders are not simply autocrats. They believe in autocracy. The modern liberal mind at “the end of history” may not appreciate the attractions of this idea, or the enduring appeal of autocracy in this globalized world; but historically speaking, Russian and Chinese rulers are in illustrious company. The European monarchs of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries were thoroughly convinced, as a matter of political philosophy, of the superiority of their form of government. Along with Plato, Aristotle, and every other great thinker prior to the eighteenth century, they regarded democracy as the rule of the licentious, greedy, and ignorant mob.
Kagan, much like history, has returned and is here to stay. After a disappointing outing with Dangerous Nation: America in the World 1600-1900 (2006) Kagan is back to the big-picture thinking that so first attracted me to his writing.
Simple yet scholarly; unremarkable yet remarkable; belligerent yet benign — Kagan kicks off where he finished five years ago. For those partial to a little Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order (2003) you will not be disappointed with Kagan’s latest installment. Containing no chapters, Kagan’s 2008 effort — reminiscent of his 2003 work — reads much like an elongated Foreign Affairs essay. Of similar length (c. 100 pages), it, too, can be read effortlessly at one sitting (equally the time it probably took Kagan to write it). What is more, Immanuel Kant and others reappear in what could be deemed a sequel read (pp.6, 19-20, 42, 70, 84-85, 94 & 103).
Kagan utters words that sit uncomfortably with current postmodern Enlightenment lexicon. For instance: “The global divisions between the club of autocrats and the axis of democracy” renders any talk of an ‘international community’ utterly obsolete. Nevertheless the succinctness with which Kagan writes here is refreshing and quotable. That said talk of a “league of democracies” is dream-like; as Kagan himself acknowledges, “Europeans have been and will continue to be less than enthusiastic about what they emphatically do not call ‘the war on terror.’ ” Sorry to say, the author’s discussion of India is unnuanced while references to Islamism are conspicuous by their near-total absence.
In essence, The Return of History concentrates on the interplay between globalization and great power ambition; from Russia to China to Iran. Each of which is a non-status quo power that is dissatisfied with its current international status. Be sure, those in Moscow and Beijing hold the belief of “impending greatness on the world stage” (p.41). To make matters worse, those from Iran, much like those from China and Russia, have a historical sense of grievance. Kagan’s interest in history is rooted in the present, which enables him to elucidate the present sense of historical grievance.
Russia:
The mood of recrimination in Russia today is reminiscent of Germany after World War I, when Germans complained about the “shameful Versailles diktat” imposed on a prostrate Germany by the victorious powers, and about the corrupt politicians who stabbed the nation in the back. Today Russia’s leaders seek to reclaim much of the global power and influence they lost at the end of the Cold War. Their grand ambition is to undo the post-Cold War settlement and to reestablish Russia as a dominant power in Eurasia, to make it one of the two or three great powers of the world (pp.16-17).
China:
In the early nineteenth century the Chinese found themselves prostrate, “thrown out of the margins” of a suddenly Eurocentric World. The “century of humiliation” that ensured was so shameful because China’s fall came from such a glorious height. Today the Chinese believe that their nation’s ancient centrality, appropriately adjusted for the times and circumstances, can, should, and will be restored (p.27).
Islamism:
China had its “century of humiliation.” Islamists have more than a century of humiliation to look back on, a humiliation of which Israel has become the living symbol (p.48).
Grievance added to the forces of globalization and great power ambition (the three Gs nexus, to paraphrase Timothy J. Lynch and Robert S. Singh, authors of After Bush: The Case for Continuity in American Foreign Policy) might just make “the hopeless dream of radical Islam” not so hope-less after all (p.80):
The willingness of the autocrats in Moscow and Beijing to protect their fellow autocrats in … Tehran … increases the chances that the connection between terrorists and nuclear weapons will eventually be made (pp.84-85).
I dreamed a dream of a time to come where the Republican Party (not the Democratic Party) shape history as they tear apart autocratic hopes and turn their dreams to shame.
This review is dedicated to my mother, Joan Ruddin.
Monday, June 30, 2008
Beth Barton Schweiger: Review of Erskine Clarke's Dwelling Place: A Plantation Epic (Yale University Press, 2005)
Source: Paul Harvey's blog: http://usreligion.blogspot.com (6-28-08)
In the late winter of 1796, a Georgia planter sent instructions to his wife about a slave he had leased to a neighbor some years earlier. “Make Old Jupiter go to Mr. Dowses and bring old Silvey home and set her to work,” John Jones wrote. Silvey was Jupiter’s wife. After years of doing everything in his power to get her returned, Jupiter rejoiced when his master finally relented. After the couple was reunited, Jones wrote again. “Tell [Jupiter] that as he has now got his wife back I shall expect he will do his best for me,” he told his wife. (3)
The twisted paternalism of American slavery is on full view in these two lines. Two couples, one enslaved to the other, knew one another intimately in life and in death. The mistress bathed the fevered back of the sick slave, the slave delivered and suckled the woman’s child. Master and slave, men and women, sang hymns together, prayed together, and wept together over their dead. Yet they did not know each other at all. Slave and master were bound together in a relationship so complex and ambivalent, Eugene Genovese famously wrote, “that neither could express the simplest human feelings without relation to the other.”[i] Indeed, John Jones needed his slave’s gratitude when he restored the precious thing he had so carelessly broken. And Jupiter felt the bitter edge of his joy, which laid bare his powerlessness to protect his family. Slave and master lived separate lives in a single place, unable to breach the terrible chasm opened when one human being claims complete power over another. John’s son Charles would later observe that masters “live and die in the midst of Negroes and know comparatively little of their real character.” (26)
In his Bancroft prize-winning book, Erskine Clarke shows over and over how the same event—a visit, a death, a birth, a purchase of property, a church service, a trip to town—meant one thing for the slave and another for the master. Leasing a slave was both a careless decision to bring in some extra cash and a wrenching end to marital intimacy. Clarke shows as no historian has done before that the history of American slavery should be written as a single narrative of “two histories of one place and one time.” (ix)
By far the more difficult of the two histories to write is that of the slaves. Clarke used an extraordinary collection of papers left behind by the family of the Rev. Charles Colcock Jones, scattered in archives from New Orleans to North Carolina. The family, one of the wealthiest families in one of the wealthiest slave societies in the world, meticulously recorded the births, deaths, sales, and movements of their slaves and many details of the material circumstances of their lives. In this, we are indebted to the paternalism that prompted such record-keeping. The voices of the slaves themselves are nearly always silent in these records, so Clarke draws on an anthropological model pioneered by the historian Rhys Isaac to reconstruct their experiences.[ii]
Accordingly, the book is filled with people moving across the landscape of coastal Georgia, which itself becomes a character in the story. There are carefully imagined meetings, conversations, and surreptitious gatherings by slaves on any one of seventeen plantations in the region. Most of these events are known to us only through accounts left by their masters, but Clarke richly reimagines them from the perspective of the slaves. One can only marvel at the exhaustive research and years of thought required to support such readings.
It is a cliché to say that a brief review cannot do justice to a book. Clarke’s beautifully-detailed history is as densely peopled and intricately plotted as a Russian novel, stuffed with magnificent detail. In these pages, we learn and relearn the epic of American slavery. Clarke writes unapologetically of a particular people in a particular place. We see the view across the marshes from the broad piazza of the big house at Montevideo and the view from the fires that burned in front of the cabins in the settlement at Carlawter. We watch as a Presbyterian session bowed to the absolute power of the master by declaring that Major, a church member, could marry again after his wife was sold away, as she was as good as dead to him. We see the only white man singing and praying with several hundred mourners at the slave preacher Sharper’s funeral, and watch as the ox cart bears the coffin down a dusty moon-lit road to the burial ground in the settlement. We see how the story of slavery moved towards bondage for the master and towards freedom for the slave, and how both master and slave were diminished.
The kind of slavery practiced on the Jones family plantations was not the only kind of American slavery. As Ira Berlin has emphasized, slavery changed dramatically in North America from generation to generation and region to region.[iii] The free people of Liberty County, Georgia thrived off the labor of their slaves for more than a century and a half before Federal troops invaded during the Civil War. The stability and prosperity brought by the labor-intensive rice cultivation meant that slaves in the region were able, more than many American slaves, to live in relatively stable families, to negotiate the task system of work with their masters, and to create a rich Gullah culture out of remembered African traditions. Yet these relatively stable slave settlements were under constant threat in the early nineteenth century, along with the rest of the seaboard South, from a new kind of slavery practiced in the lower Mississippi valley. The massive migration of more than a million slaves to till the rich soils of the interior, named by Berlin the “Second Middle Passage,” put constant pressure on plantations in the older seaboard states. Long before the thundering of Federal guns threatened to end plantation slavery as it was practiced in the Low Country, it was being threatened from inside the South.
Charles Jones was a sincere Christian man, and by any meaningful measure, a benevolent master. He had agonized over slavery in his youth, particularly during his years of study at Andover and Princeton, at one time declaring it unqualifiedly against the laws of God. He eventually silenced his own fears by devoting his life to “the religious instruction of the slaves.” If slavery must continue, Jones reasoned, then it must be reformed and brought under the supervision of Christian people. Accordingly, Jones devoted most of his working life to evangelizing slaves on his own and neighboring plantations. His optimism about the possibilities of moral reform to wrench society into the shape he thought best matched the fervor of any northern moral reformer of his day. North and South, all Americans seemed convinced of their power over history. And yet, even the relatively benign and deeply Christian paternalism of Jones and his wife Mary could never completely dull the sharp assertion of power by owners over what was owned. “They are traitors who may pilot an enemy into your bedchamber!” Jones exclaimed of his slaves in late 1863 as Yankee gunboats sailed up a nearby river, prompting the boldest of them to take flight. (415) And as her life lay in ruins after the war, the widow Mary demonstrated how easily pious pity for the slave hardened into racial hatred for freedmen and women. “With their emancipation must come their extermination,” she bluntly declared. “They perish when brought into conflict with the intellectual superiority of the Caucasian race.” (444)
Clarke is not the first to use the rich papers left behind by the Jones family. Nor is it the first time a study based on them has won national acclaim. In 1972, the literary scholar Robert Manson Myers published an 1,800-page colossus, The Children of Pride, which featured a selection of Jones family letters written between 1854 and 1868.[iv] The book was hailed by many critics and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973 over some loud objections. One Georgia historian scorned the book’s warm reception by the “literate few in the fading Daughters of the Confederacy” and decried its “Gone With the Wind” southern apologetics, complete with “shadowy whites, invisible negroes, slavemasters of unbelieveable Christian rectitude, and flowers of chivalry.”[v]
Clarke’s achievement in Dwelling Place is to tell two histories where Myers told only one. The striking difference is apparent on every page of the book, but it is most starkly on display in the appendices. Children of Pride included almost 300 pages of a densely-printed “Who’s Who” of nearly all of the people mentioned in the Jones letters. Not a single slave appears in the hundreds listed there (although they do earn an index of their own by first name only.) By contrast, Clarke includes eight family trees of slaves owned by the Jones family. His painstaking work demonstrates visually what is made clear on every page of his book: that the slaves had their own family histories, that their low country settlements were composed “not simply of a mass of slaves, but of distinct men and women, people with names, with diverse personalities and personal histories.” (189)
Clarke’s contribution in this book extends beyond writing slaves like Jupiter, Sharper, Silvey, and Major and their masters into a single narrative. His book also reflects on the meaning of American Christian slavery and how best to write its history. Is the best history one informed by moral outrage? How much do we have a right to expect of the dead? Shall we use them only to measure our own progress? Historians of American slavery have long wrestled with such questions. Many who have claimed no interest in defending Christianity have been able to explain people like Charles Jones only by denying that they were Christians at all.
Clarke offers a different answer. He has expressed exasperation with those who deny that “Southern evangelicalism could be a part of an intellectual tradition worth exploring,” and like Donald G. Mathews, he takes for granted that “the slaveholding ethic was as natural an extension of Evangelicalism as was abolitionism.” [vi] In this, he offers a sharp rebuke to any who might claim that the Church is a culture. Charles Jones was very possibly the best Christian master that the system of American chattel slavery might have created, and yet it is nearly impossible to claim him as one of our own. Clarke refuses to make excuses for Jones’s sincere and ultimately misguided piety, or to claim that he was merely a rank hypocrite. He takes the costlier path of trying to understand him, wisely acknowledging that we have much to learn from staring down Christian slavery for what it was. Clarke is hardly an apologist for the South. But as a seminary professor with deep roots in the Low Country and in Jones’ beloved Presbyterian tradition, it is not possible for Clarke to stand outside of Jones’s world and point a finger at this preacher’s folly. Instead, he chose the more difficult task of standing with him. And it is only in standing with him that Clarke can tell us what he sees—a blind, visionary, noble, arrogant, thoughtless, wise, brave, cowardly, heartless, loving, and mortal Christian man.
Charles Colcock Jones died in the turbulent spring of 1863, lying on his bed at Montevideo fully dressed in black with a “pure white cravat.” Only his wife and daughter-in-law were with him at his death, but many of the slaves whom he thought he knew watched as the coffin, built by the carpenter Porter, was covered over with earth. Firm in the conviction of his sin and of his Savior, Jones died still closed to the full wisdom offered by his theology. Yet it was not that he saw the truth and chose to resist it. Instead, he grasped only a part of the truth even while he was convinced he had it all. “You can know a thing to death and for all purposes be completely ignorant of it,” a character in a recent novel opined.[vii] Erskine Clarke’s history warns us how little we can see, even when we would swear that our eyes are wide open.
[i] Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made, (New York: Random House, 1974; Vintage Books, 1976), 3.
[ii] The Transformation of Virginia: Community, Religion, Authority, 1740-1790 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1982).
[iii] Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves, (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003).
[iv] Children of Pride: A True Story of Georgia and the Civil War, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972). Myers also published a book on Jones’s experience at Princeton and wrote a play based on the papers. Myers, A Georgian at Princeton, (New York: Harcourt, 1976) and Quintet: A Five Play Cycle Drawn from The Children of Pride (Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1991).
[v] Charles Crowe, “Historians and ‘Benign Neglect’: Conservative Trends in Southern History and Black Studies,” Reviews in American History 2 (June, 1974): 163-173.
[vi] Review of Heyrman, “Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt,” Theology Today 55 (July, 1998): 283-5; Religion in the Old South (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), xv.
[vii] Marilynne Robinson, Gilead, (New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 2004), 7.
Monday, June 23, 2008
Jeremy Kuzmarov: Review of James M. Carter's Inventing Vietnam: The United States & State-Building, 1954-1968 (Cambridge University Press, 2008)
Source: Special to HNN (6-23-08)
[Jeremy Kuzmarov is Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Bucknell University.]
Echoing the fantasies of conservative policy-makers, a series of revisionist historians have, over the course of the past two decades, attempted to recast the U.S. role in Vietnam as a noble one that might have accomplished its strategic objectives of defeating communist insurgency and established a pro-U.S. client if not for bureaucratic constraints, poor military decision-making and a decline in troop morale facilitated by dissenting journalists and antiwar activists. James M. Carter’s outstanding new book, Inventing Vietnam: The United States and State-Building, 1954-1968 systematically explodes the false logic underlying this analysis. He demonstrates through extensive archival research how the American military disaster in South Vietnam was the product of a failed effort at state-building dating from the mid-1950s and America’s support for a series of corrupt rulers who exacerbated the humanitarian crisis bred by U.S. social engineering initiatives and created a political vacuum seized upon by the revolutionary National Liberation Front.
An assistant professor of history at Drew University, Carter generally provides an insightful analysis of the ideology of American policy elites of the Cold War period. They saw Vietnam as a venue for creating a modern westernized state whose economic sustainability could ideally provide a bulwark against Communist expansion and become a model for the developing world. Their universalized vision, however, was divorced from the political realities of Vietnam, in which a popular yearning for national independence and freedom from foreign interference reigned paramount following the era of brutal French rule, as did the desire for more radical land reform and wealth redistribution given pervasive social inequalities.
The U.S. stubbornly committed itself, nevertheless, to constructing a viable “free nation” in South Vietnam following the temporary division of the country below the 17th parallel under the Geneva Accords. While subverting the 1956 elections, the U.S. helped build the military and police forces of client Ngo Dinh Diem in order to promote “security” (in the Orwellian sense of the term given that the South Vietnamese routinely arrested and tortured members of the Vietminh, who had led the liberation struggle against France), and sent an array of civilian contractors and engineers to try to develop the country’s infrastructure and economy along liberal-capitalist lines.
The U.S. introduced a series of commodity import programs and awarded an array of private firms, including Raymond International and Morris Knudsen with massive building contracts for infrastructural projects, including an attempt to dam the Mekong River. This strategy backfired, however, in that it lent itself to massive corruption and graft and did little to promote grassroots development, particularly in the countryside. There, Vietnamese were often forced to work as laborers on infrastructural projects for little pay and later worked on American military bases performing degrading and humiliating tasks. All the while, the U.S. continued to rely on a series of puppets, from Diem to his successors Nguyen Khanh and Nguyen Cao Ky and Nguyen Van Thieu, who utilized American subsidies for their own benefit and to reward political cronies.
Carter focuses on the Strategic Hamlet program as an example of how U.S. development projects backfired politically. The aim of the program was to create model villages replete with schools, health clinics and work opportunities that would dissuade peasants from joining with the revolutionaries. In practice, through coercion and terror, villagers were often herded into the camps against their will, while civic action cadres that the U.S. was training brutalized them and failed to deliver on the promised social programs.
As popular resistance developed and the U.S. began to systematically bomb the countryside to root out the enemy, a massive influx of refugees fled into the cities, creating a public health and humanitarian crisis of epic proportions. Diseases like tuberculosis and cholera became rampant in the teeming urban slums. As Carter ably chronicles, many Vietnamese were forced to work in the burgeoning underground economy, including as prostitutes. Cost of living increases and inflation bred by the war and the influx of luxury goods and U.S. currency into a hollow economic base further made life a living hell for those lucky enough to have escaped the vicious bombing attacks. It was in this context that the revolutionary National Liberation Front gained in political prestige and support with its calls for expelling the occupying armies and their sycophants. Indeed, the U.S. military campaign was in many respects doomed from the outset; its failure was a consequence of the failure of state-building policies and the reliance on politicians and generals who lacked much legitimacy among their own people.
Although Carter’s story is not an unfamiliar one to those who lived through the war years or who are well versed in the subsequent scholarly and eyewitness literature, his book is important given the spate of historical revisionism and distortion of public memory pervading among some elements U.S. society today. Carter has done an excellent job in mining the archives for materials on U.S. nation-building programs and its paradoxes, including a strong chapter on the experience of Michigan State University, which sent professors during the Eisenhower years to build up the police forces and administrative capacities of the Diem regime. Many of the same professors, including Wesley R. Fishel, who headed the operation, would later become cynical about U.S. policies and opposed the war, though probably disinclined to recognize their own complicity. Carter skillfully uses archival material from private companies in demonstrating how its employees believed in the ability of technological innovations to bring progress and modernity to Vietnam. At the same time, he also portrays their detachment from the devastation and suffering caused by the military pacification efforts their labors had helped develop.
Critically, speaking, Carter might have elaborated on how private corporations were major boosters of the war effort as a result of the high profits they earned, exemplifying the role of the military - industrial complex in driving forward government policy. Carter might have also tried to unearth more material on Vietnam’s Hanoi leadership and National Liberation Front – how their vision for Vietnam conflicted with the U.S. and its Vietnamese agents, and how they were able to capitalize on the failure of American initiatives. His conclusion ends somewhat abruptly, and might have included some analysis about the unfortunate continuity of U.S. foreign policies from Vietnam and the failure of its policy-makers to heed its lessons. All the same, Carter has done a great service by setting the record straight on the war and dispelling some of its most pervasive myths, which hopefully can be remanded to the garbage can of history where they belong.
Sunday, June 15, 2008
Mel Ayton: Review of Shane O'Sullivan's Who Killed Bobby?
Source: Special to HNN (6-15-08)
- Shane O'Sullivan: Response to Mel Ayton
- Dan Moldea: Response to Shane O'Sullivan
- Shane O'Sullivan: Response to Dan Moldea
- Dan Moldea: 2nd Response to Shane O'Sullivan
- Mel Ayton: Response to Shane O'Sullivan
Irish screenwriter Shane O’Sullivan’s book Who Killed Bobby? The Unsolved Murder of Robert F. Kennedy (2008) is a fast paced thriller clearly written by someone who knows his way around scriptwriting. In fact, not only does it resemble a fictional movie script in its format but also in its content. (1)
O’Sullivan’s book was published some 6 months or so following the issue of his DVD about the assassination, RFK Must Die. Both are carefully constructed to lead the reader along the conspiratorial yellow brick road into a wilderness of smoke and mirrors. It is a narrative of speculation and innuendo which substitutes for the known established facts of the case. The end result leaves the reader wondering who didn’t shoot Bobby Kennedy.
O’Sullivan builds much of his conspiracy case on the bedlam that followed the assassination of RFK in the pantry of the Ambassador Hotel when an estimated crowd of 77 people reacted to gunshots fired by the assassin, Sirhan Sirhan. After the first shot had been fired the crowd acted as one would expect. Some witnesses reacted out of fear for their own safety and attempted to avoid the gunman who was firing wildly into the crowd after he had succeeded in placing his gun against RFK’s head and firing. Others fell about after hearing gunshots and observing flashes eminating from the muzzle of Sirhan’s gun. Consequently, the pantry was in such a turmoil it is no wonder the witness statements were contradictory and fraught with speculation as to what exactly happened.
O’Sullivan is crudely manipulative and deceptive when it comes to presenting witness statements. O’Sullivan wrote, “…not one witness placed Sirhan’s gun close enough to Kennedy and in the correct firing position to inflict the wounds observed in the autopsy.”(emphasis added) (2) However, the controversies over the trajectories of the bullets entering RFK were never an issue when the witnesses were interviewed therefore they were never asked. O’Sullivan thus glosses over the statements made by witnesses Juan Romero, Boris Yaro, Vincent DiPierro and Freddy Plimpton who were close to the Senator and who said Sirhan placed his gun at RFK’s head.(see: http://hnn.us)
Out of this turmoil a number of witnesses gave knee-jerk and incorrect ‘more than one shooter’ responses to the news media and to police officers on the scene. They later retracted what they had said or their stories were rendered implausible when close colleagues or friends took issue with their claims. (see: http://mcadams and http://hnn.us)
To most rationally-minded observers this was an entirely natural occurrence. However, O’Sullivan chooses the least plausible explanation for anomalous events as described by pantry and Embassy Room witnesses. He then links one bureaucratic error after another to build his sinister scenarios. Accordingly, O’Sullivan concludes these witness statements were proof positive that a second gunman had been present when Sirhan fired his shots.
Unfortunately, O’Sullivan has ignored just about everything writer Dan Moldea took years in uncovering. Unlike O’Sullivan, Moldea is a veteran investigative journalist. His excellent work on the case decisively destroyed the many ludicrous answers conspiracy writers gave to some anomalous evidence surrounding the crime scene and witness statements. (see: http://www.amazon.com)
But O’Sullivan isn’t satisfied with Moldea’s explanations because they get in the way of building his case for a second gunman in the pantry. To counteract Moldea’s research O’Sullivan nitpicks his way around minor contradictions which were the result of slight changes to witnesses’ statements when they were re-interviewed. And, if a witness makes a condemning statement about Sirhan, he has to be rendered not credible. For example, Sirhan confessed to killing RFK to ACLU lawyer A.L. Wirin and Sirhan defense investigator Michael McCowan. O’Sullivan dismisses Wirin because he supported the conclusions of the Warren Commission Report that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. He dismisses McCowan because he heard a rumor McCowan had links to the CIA. O’Sullivan’s methods of discrediting those who fail to identify his purported CIA agents in the Ambassador Hotel take a similar turn.
O’Sullivan also repeats the many myths about the RFK assassination including the oft-repeated claims that Sirhan was too far away from the Senator to fire the fatal shot; had been facing Kennedy when he fired his gun; could not have fired the fatal bullet to the back of the Senator’s head and that a girl in a polka dot dress had been his accomplice. (see: http://hnn.us and http://hnn.us) And, without any scientific training whatsoever, O’Sullivan manages to pour scorn on an acoustics report which decisively proves the recent 13 shot shooting scenario provided by conspiracy buff Philip Van Praag was seriously flawed.(3)
But it is O’Sullivan’s claim that CIA agents were present at the Ambassador Hotel the night RFK was shot that renders his overall thesis suspect. O’Sullivan devotes three quarters of an hour of his 138 minute documentary and four chapters of his book to the controversy about the alleged CIA agents. To his credit, O’Sullivan does show David Morales’ best friend Reuben Carbajal on camera denouncing those who say Morales was the man identified as having been present at the Ambassador Hotel . However, O’Sullivan still included in his documentary presentation the wrongful identifications made by his discredited sources, none of whom knew the agents well. This, despite the overwhelming evidence supplied by David Talbot, Jefferson Morley and myself (see: http://hnn.us and (http://www.maryferrell.org) and the fact O’Sullivan eventually discovered the real identities of the men who were actually Bulova watch salesmen. (see: http://www.washingtondecoded.com)
It is clear throughout his documentary and book that O’Sullivan has labored long and hard to preserve the myth of CIA involvement in the RFK assassination. Following the real identifications of the alleged agents he then immediately sullies his own discoveries of the real identities of the ‘agents’ by attempting to characterize the Bulover Watch company as a ‘CIA asset’. O’Sullivan’s unnamed sources said the company was a ‘well-known CIA cover’ thus implying the men he identified in the news film footage were CIA personnel after all. But O’Sullivan does not tell us who claimed the Bulova Watch Company was a ‘CIA front’. In fact, there is no credible evidence whatsoever to support this claim. This is simply another classic tactic used by conspiracy buffs to sow seeds of doubt.
O’Sullivan must have known, during the final stages of editing, that he no longer had a sensational story of CIA involvement in the Robert Kennedy assassination for his documentary centerpiece. He has therefore invented a novel way of having his cake and eating it. He has kept his sensational DVD documentary in circulation, which makes the outrageous RFK/CIA claims, whilst at the same time disavowing them in his book. However, it does beg the question – why market a film that is chock full of lies and innuendo?
The answer seems to lie in the fact that his heavy financial investment (he had ‘backers’ for his film) in travelling the length and breadth of the United States looking for confirmation of his preconceived and hand–fed theories that the CIA killed RFK must have weighed heavily on his shoulders. Without a raison d’etre for his documentary all O’Sullivan was left with was the regurgitation of the same old myths connected with this case which have previously been debunked (see HNN links above).
For years O’Sullivan has been heavily influenced by conspiracy buffs who have been desperate to link the CIA with the purported conspiracies to murder John and Robert Kennedy. In his endeavors he was assisted by committed British socialist and former member of a militant print workers union, John Simkin. Simkin is a friend of Castro’s Cuba and well –known for his animus towards intelligence agencies of the western kind. He is also noted for his attempts to link the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr , JFK and RFK to the CIA. In his website forum Simkin also had the audacity to accuse Dan Moldea of having concluded Sirhan was a lone assassin for financial considerations. Simkin was forced to issue a retraction. (4)
O’Sullivan was also aided by Michael Calder, well – known in the conspiracy community for his claims that the CIA murdered President Kennedy. Embracing these two conspiracists alone renders O’Sullivan’s quixotic efforts suspect. It is a little like employing the services of a kamikaze pilot to learn how to fly. Both are credited in Sullivan’s documentary. (5)
But O’Sullivan’s most important contact was Bradley Ayers whom he met in 2004. The former Army captain had been writing a book about his early 1960s work for the CIA’s Miami station, JMWAVE. It is a self-published book entitled ‘The Zenith Secret – A CIA Insider Exposes The Secret War Against Cuba And The Plot That Killed The Kennedy Brothers’ (2006). Beginning in 1968 Ayers became convinced of a JFK assassination plot. Since that time he has become part of the conspiracy industry consisting of numerous individuals and organizations so committed to the concept of a JFK plot that they do not allow mere facts to interfere with their ‘religion’.
In his book Ayers makes a number of references to Jason, his British journalist friend and of how he provided him with, “…my human sources as well as my own testimony and observations”. Ayers and ‘Jason’ had “…an exceedingly harmonious, mutually complementing relationship”. ‘Jason’ is clearly a pseudonym for Shane O’Sullivan. Why O’Sullivan never mentioned this in his documentary or his Guardian article or his comments on various JFK conspiracy forums is anyone’s guess unless it was to preserve the myth of his objectivity. According to Ayers, O’Sullivan became convinced of CIA involvement in the RFK assassination long before he had had time to fully research his suspicions. Furthermore, O’Sullivan must have been under no illusion that Ayers was a conspiracy buff and heavily involved in promoting his JFK assassination conspiracy book. (6)
According to a real JMWAVE expert, former Miami Herald reporter Don Bohning, Ayers’ work is incredibly inaccurate and misleading. Bohning wrote, “There are so many inaccuracies in (Ayers’ book). One that comes to mind…he met Bill Harvey at a reception on Key Biscayne in Miami in 1963. No way that could have happened since Harvey was ‘fired’ by Bobby Kennedy from the Cuba job during the October 1962 Missile Crisis and I doubt Harvey would have come down here in 1963. Manny (Chavez) has been reading it and he said there was so much crap in it he was going to write to O’Sullivan.” (7) Ayers is the man whose credibility, according to O’Sullivan, “cannot be questioned”. (8)
Ayers’ book, research and contacts were crucial to O’Sullivan’s work, especially Noel Twyman who O’Sullivan interviewed. Ayers in turn had been aided by Twyman and Jim Fetzer who assisted the former Army Captain in his research. Fetzer wrote the introduction to Ayers’ book and he is a regular interviewee on Black Op radio, a small internet radio station devoted to promoting all kinds of US government conspiracies, where he espouses his ludicrous ideas about the JFK assassination and the US Government’s 9/11 ‘conspiracy’. Fetzer became a national figure of ridicule in 2007 when he appeared on television claiming the United States government was responsible for murdering three thousand people in the 9/11 attacks.(9) (Fetzer also has doubts that man landed on the moon.) Vincent Bugliosi excoriated Twyman in his book Reclaiming History describing him as a ‘gullible theorist’ with ‘poor research’ methods.(10)
O’Sullivan’s interview with Sirhan’s brother Munir is yet another exercise in whitewashing vital facts. Munir Sirhan stated on camera that the Sirhan family were a “…normal, happy, God-fearing family”. This is, as I found out whilst researching Sirhan’s life, arid nonsense. The father, Bishara Sirhan, had deserted his family shortly after they arrived in the United States. Sirhan had abandoned his Christian faith and embraced atheism and the occult a few years before the assassination. All the brothers except Adel had been in trouble with the police. Sharif was arrested for attempting to murder his girlfriend and, like Sirhan, hated Jews. Mary Sirhan, who had indoctrinated her sons to hate Jews, had no control over her sons and often asked Arab friends to intervene in their disputes amongst themselves and with her. Saidallah was arrested for ‘drunk driving’ and ‘drunken disturbances’. And Munir was a disciplinary problem in school, was involved in a high-speed pursuit by the California Highway Patrol and had been arrested for selling marijuana. Munir also lied to police about the provenance of the RFK murder weapon. (11)
The last remaining Sirhan brother was utilized by O’Sullivan to create the myth that Sirhan was a non-violent devout Christian. Viewers and readers are left unaware of Sirhan’s atheism, his belief in the occult, his frequent angry anti-Semitic and anti-American outbursts and the overwhelming evidence which points to Sirhan’s pathological hatred of Jews and his stated desire to eliminate US leaders who had given their support to Israel.
Bias and manipulative editing is also recognizable throughout O’Sullivan’s documentary. One example is the way in which O’Sullivan puts Paul Schrade and Robert Blair Kaiser on camera praising the Irish screenwriter for his ‘breakthrough’ in the case which places CIA agents at the Ambassador Hotel. Both men praise O’Sullivan for his investigative journalism in discovering these ‘facts’ but it is quite obvious to the discerning viewer they are both, at the time they are speaking, unaware that O’Sullivan had discovered the real identities of ‘Campbell’ and ‘Joaniddes’. And if O’Sullivan’s discovery came after he interviewed Kaiser and Schrade, O’Sullivan should have made this apparent to the viewer.
O’Sullivan has also presented poorly researched background information about the possibility Sirhan had been hypnotized to murder RFK. He references the case of Bjorn Nielsen who purportedly hypnotized Palle Hardrup to commit murder in 1951. He uses this case as a proven example of how someone can hypnotize another to commit murder. What O’Sullivan does not do, however, is inform his readers that Hardrup confessed to making everything up in 1972 in an interview with Soren Petersen of the Danish newspaper BT. (12)
Repeated efforts by conspiracists like O’Sullivan to blame individuals like Thane Cesar and the CIA for RFK’s assassination is destined to continue despite the absence of any credible evidence to support their claims. And the irresponsible way they level their charges without proper investigation must be condemned. As RFK aide John Seigenthaler said about gossip which linked him to the RFK murder, “When I was a child, my mother lectured me on the evils of ‘gossip’. She held a feather pillow and said, ‘If I tear this open, the feathers will fly to the four winds, and I could never get them back in the pillow. That's how it is when you spread mean things about people.’”(13)
Conspiracists like O’Sullivan have a way of persuading a significant section of the American public that pure speculation, innuendo and the abililty to cast doubt on every piece of evidence that doesn’t suit their purpose are sufficient to build a case for conspiracy. It is also likely O’Sullivan will be aided in his efforts to blame the CIA by Sirhan’s new lawyer, William Pepper, who accused the US government of assassinating Martin Luther King Jr and even brought a fantasist to trial in 1999 as a co-conspirator in the case. (14)
Meanwhile, Sirhan Sirhan sits in California’s Corcoran Prison hopeful that one day the American public will be fooled into accepting the representations of the conspiracy-mongerers and demand his release.
HNN Editor: Source notes to Mel Ayton's piece follow Dan Moldea's response.
Shane O'Sullivan: Response to Mel Ayton
Shane O'Sullivan is an Irish author and filmmaker based in London. His feature documentary RFK Must Die was recently released theatrically in London and New York and is now available on DVD. His book, Who Killed Bobby? The Unsolved Murder of Robert F. Kennedy has just been published by Union Square Press.
The starting point for any review is an objective reviewer. When I saw LAPD apologist Mel Ayton had "reviewed" my film and book, I knew such objectivity was impossible and I could have scripted the "review" myself.
How could HNN commission such a partisan "reviewer" to write a "special to HNN" on the first substantial book on the Robert Kennedy assassination in eleven years? Since when does an author pushing his new paperback "review" a competing title in the marketplace? The agenda at work here is plain to see.
This is not a review. It's a premeditated rant, riddled with errors. When first posted, Ayton couldn't even get the title of my book right, calling it Who Killed Bobby Kennedy? I had to ask for a correction.
Asking Mr. Ayton to review my work is akin to Jimmy Hoffa reviewing Robert Kennedy's The Enemy Within. Lacking the teeth or wit of Mr. Hoffa, Ayton's habitually sour, lumbering jabs at my work merely highlight the cranky disposition of a retired schoolmaster who devotes his golden years to spreading disinformation and taking pot-shots at conspiracies without doing his homework.
It's clear, for instance, that Ayton wrote his book on the RFK assassination without checking the FBI files on the case, reading the trial transcript or interviewing a single witness, preferring to regurgitate the LAPD final report ad nauseam.
From his bunker at the University of Sunderland, Ayton leans heavily on two main sources, to which he displays blind allegiance - Dan Moldea's book, The Killing of Robert Kennedy and the LAPD final report.
After an impressive investigation that lays out a compelling case for conspiracy, Moldea's book features one of the most unconvincing U-turns in the history of non-fiction (Moldea hasn't had a book commissioned since.) Moldea pays a last visit to Sirhan and shamelessly goads him by asking if he'll come clean and remember the shooting after his mother dies. Moldea then has the painfully contrived epiphany that Sirhan acted alone.
Moldea's conclusion includes an extremely dubious "confession" Sirhan allegedly gave chief defense investigator Michael McCowan during the trial. Throughout the Sirhan case, McCowan was under probation for an earlier mail fraud charge. He was forced to resign from LAPD in 1965 after using his uniform to confiscate three diamond rings belonging to his girlfriend from the post office and selling them without her knowledge. Is this a credible source for a Sirhan "confession"? A "confession" McCowan didn't bother disclosing to Sirhan's defense attorney at the time.
Moldea also declares security guard Thane Eugene Cesar innocent of any involvement in the shooting after he passes a polygraph test 25 years after the fact. Given the LAPD's abuse of the polygraph in this case and the ease with which you can "fool" a polygraph, this seems an absurd way to determine Cesar's innocence.
When I contacted Moldea to see if I could interview Cesar for my film, Moldea told me it could be arranged for $50,000. An interview with Moldea would cost $2,500. My BBC colleagues chuckled at Moldea's exaggerated sense of his own worth and Moldea confided that he was godfather to one of Cesar's children.
Mel Ayton defers to Moldea completely in his book when it comes to the crucial ballistics evidence yet Moldea is a close family friend and effectively the agent of the man many believe to be Kennedy's real assassin.
When it comes to the LAPD final report, Ayton treats it as Gospel. Let's look at the men who controlled the physical evidence and the witnesses to conspiracy in that investigation.
LAPD criminalist Dewayne Wolfer testified at the trial that all seven bullets in evidence matched Sirhan's gun. When the Wenke panel re-examined the firearms evidence in 1975, they concluded none of the bullets in evidence could be matched to the Sirhan gun.
Conclusion: Wolfer lied repeatedly on the stand about the physical evidence. None of the bullets fired that night have ever been matched to the Sirhan gun. The 1975 panel heavily criticised Wolfer for his incompetence and mishandling of evidence. Ayton stupidly dismisses Wolfer's errors as "bureaucratic" and "minor contradictions."
And even if you feel Sirhan acted alone, no objective observer of this case can excuse Sgt Enrique Hernandez's bullying of Sandra Serrano and countless other witnesses to conspiracy. Witness retractions under those conditions are meaningless and, as seen in my film, Serrano still sticks to her original story.
Special Counsel Thomas Kranz also deliberately misrepresented witness Don Schulman in his 1977 report. The summary of the Kranz interview with Schulman is full of outright lies and falsifications. The long-suppressed audiotape of the session confirms that from his position behind Kennedy, Schulman continued to insist he saw three wounds erupt on