Commentary & Reply - Letter to the Editor

Parameters, Spring, 2003

JEFFREY RECORD REPLIES TO ALLAN MILLETT'S REVIEW

To the Editor:

Allan Millett is one of our nation's finest military historians, and I have been pleased to assign his work to students at the Air War College. His review of my latest book (Making War, Thinking History: Munich, Vietnam, and Presidential Uses of Force from Korea to Kosovo, reviewed in Parameters, Winter 2002-2003) mystifies me. The foundation of his critique seems to be that, alas, I am not a professional historian but rather a defense policy "guru," and that, by virtue of this unpardonable defect, I cannot credibly write about presidential reasoning and mis-reasoning by historical analogy when it comes to using or not using military force.

This judgment is shared by neither the several professional historians and others to whom I vetted the book manuscript before publication nor those who have reviewed it after publication. George C. Herring, the dean of American historians of the Vietnam War, calls it a "splendid up-to-date analysis of the ways history is used-and misused by policy makers in reaching crucial decisions to employ military force." He adds that it "should be required reading for those who seek to understand the value and limitations of historical analogy as a tool of decision-making." Military historian Thomas Alexander Hughes says the book "effectively blends a policy maker's ear with a scholar's eye in a serious attempt to teach about the promise and problem of historical analogy in decision-making." American foreign policy historian Warren I. Cohen, in the Los Angeles Times, calls the book "superb" and believes that President Bush "would be well advised to read [it] before he takes the country into war with Iraq."

The scholarly journal Choice declares: "No other published work provides this kind of synthesis of the impact of the past on the present." Military strategist Eliot A. Cohen, who reviewed the book for Foreign Affairs, believes it reveals "just how shallow an understanding most [US political leaders] had," and that the book's "central point--that wars must be understood on their own terms, even though a broad knowledge of history is vital to the creation of policy judgments--is eminently sensible and clearly put."

Millett's judgment that "Record's effort to grasp the issue of policy-by-historical analogy is well-intentioned and worth reading.. . even if he produces no convincing evidence that either the problem or the solution really exists" is no less puzzling. Why would one wish to waste time writing or reading a book that examines a nonexistent problem? I agree with Millett that most American Presidents are not well-educated in the humanities and social sciences. Yet, as my book documents profusely, they nonetheless do reason by historical analogy as a means of interpreting new events; historical illiteracy has never stopped Presidents from engaging in such reasoning, however poorly they do it.

Moreover, the fact that many Presidents have publicly employed historical analogies to gamer public support for a use-of-force decision does not mean they themselves did not believe in them. Harry Truman decided to fight in Korea for several reasons, but it is preposterous to suggest, as does Millett, that the influence of the Munich analogy was not one of them. To be sure, Truman used the analogy for policy purposes. However, the evidence is overwhelming that he and other key policymakers, Secretary of State Dean Acheson and Assistant Secretary of State Dean Rusk among them, genuinely believed the Soviet-sponsored North Korean attack on South Korea in June 1950 represented a challenge analogous to that posed by Hitler to the Western democracies in the 1930s, and that US inaction would invite further communist aggression. Whether or not Truman "needed" Munich in 1950, he nonetheless believed in the analogy's validity.

The Munich analogy's powerful influence on subsequent disastrous American decisionmaking on Vietnam is also incontrovertible--as my book documents in detail via decisionmakers' public and private remarks during and after. As Bernard Brodie noted in his War and Politics, "People who do not remember the events leading up to World War II find it difficult to recapture the tremendously traumatic impact of the Munich Agreement on the thinking of the postwar world, especially in the United States."

No less undeniable has been the influence of the Vietnam analogy on post-Vietnam use-of-force decisionmaking. The Weinberger-Powell Doctrine, which encouraged a premature US cessation of hostilities against Iraq in 1991 and crippled American responses to almost a decade of Serbian atrocities in the former Yugoslavia, is the professional military's distillation of the "lessons" of Vietnam. Those lessons, seemingly revalidated in Beirut and Mogadishu, exerted a chilling effect on American statecraft for three decades. In fact, there never was another Vietnam lying in wait for the United States in either Iraq or the Balkans.

Thus the problem of presidential mis-reasoning by historical analogy exists. As for the solution to this problem, I offered none because I do not believe there is one. Constitutional eligibility for the presidency doesn't include the ability to read and write, much less possession of a Ph.D. in history. I have no objection to Millett's proposed placement of a professional historian in the White House or on the National Security Council staff. But even we non-historians know that history is pretty much what historians say it is, and that historians disagree more often than they agree. An exception is the public commentary of professional historians on Making War, Thinking History, where--so far--Millett finds himself a minority of one.