Roundup: Historians' Take

Michael Dobbs: Cool Crisis Management? It's a Myth. Ask JFK.

[Michael Dobbs is the author of "One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War." He writes the "Fact Checker" column for The Washington Post.] ... To use the 1962 showdown as a guide to handling modern-day crises, we must separate history from political spin. Kennedy and his aides had an obvious interest in stressing the president's cool resolve under fire. Camelot's court historian, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., has described the way JFK "dazzled the world" through a "combination of toughness and restraint, of will, nerve, and wisdom, so brilliantly controlled, so matchlessly calibrated." Kennedy's defense secretary, Robert S. McNamara, declared that "there is no longer such a thing as strategy; there is only crisis management."

Juan Cole: The Real State of Iraq

[Mr. Cole is Professor of Modern Middle Eastern and South Asian History at the University of Michigan. His website is http://www.juancole.com.] American television loves natural disasters. The Burmese cyclones that may have carried off as many as 200,000 people offered the cameras high drama. The fl

Ira Chernus: It's time for a Radically Different View on Patriotism

[Ira Chernus is a professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder and author of Monsters to Destroy: The Neoconservative War on Terror and Sin.] Republicans do not own the rights to this word. Obama has an opportunity to change how we think about patriotism. Will he take it? "If the 2008 election is to be a debate about the true meaning of patriotism, then bring it on." That's the clarion challenge from bellwether liberal columnist E.J.

Robert S. McElvaine: Why presidents love economic euphemisms

[Robert S. McElvaine teaches history at Millsaps College in Jackson Miss. His latest book is"Grand Theft Jesus: The Hijacking of Religion in America."] ... There is, however, one word Bush has not used: "recession." It's but the latest chapter in a long history of euphemisms that politicians employ in hopes of making economic disasters not sound so bad. "Recession" was itself an early example. When the economy, still not recovered from the Great Depressi

Maurice Isserman: Will the Left Ever Learn to Communicate Across Generations?

[Maurice Isserman is a professor of American history at Hamilton College. Among his books are The Other American: The Life of Michael Harrington (PublicAffairs, 2000), and America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s (3rd, rev. ed., Oxford University Press, 2007), with Michael Kazin.] When 32-year-old Michael Harrington, a veteran socialist activist, first met 20-year-old Tom Hayden at a student conference on civil rights in Ann Arbor, Mich., in the spring of 1960, he found him "

Stanley Kutler: A Government of Law, Not Fear

[Stanley Kutler is the author of “Abuse of Power: The New Nixon Tapes” and numerous other writings on American constitutional law and the presidency.] The Constitution holds, albeit by a slender thread. The Supreme Court, by a 5-4 vote in Boumediene v. Bush, ruled unconstitutional a 2006 law barring enemy combatants held at Guantanamo from seeking writs of habeas corpus. For now, we are not under Chief Justice John Roberts’ or Justice Antonin Scalia’s constitution. Fear reigns in th

Daniel Pipes: The Enemy Has a Name

If you cannot name your enemy, how can you defeat it? Just as a physician must identify a disease before curing a patient, so a strategist must identify the foe before winning a war. Yet Westerners have proven reluctant to identify the opponent in the conflict the U.S. government variously (and euphemistically) calls the"global war on terror," the"

Peter Navarro: China's theft of American secrets

[Peter Navarro is a business professor at the University of California-Irvine, a CNBC contributor, and author of The Coming China Wars. For more information, please visit http://www.comingchinawars.com.] According to a leaked secret FBI document, Chinese counterfeiters have sold close to $75 million of fake Cisco Systems routers to the U.S. military. While this revelation has been largely ignored by the mainstream media, it raises troubl

Jim Sleeper: The Conservatives' Conundrum -- and Ours

[Mr. Sleeper, a lecturer in political science at Yale, is the author of The Closest of Strangers: Liberalism and the Politics of Race in New York and Liberal Racism.] What has gotten into George Packer? In Blood of the Liberals he undertook a wrenching examination of American liberalism's agonies and ironies; and in The Assassin's Gate and his play Betrayed, he bore searing, humbling witness to the ordeals of Americans and Iraqis who wouldn't have written for themselves.

Julian Zelizer: Russert's Most Important Legacy

[Julian E. Zelizer is Professor of History and Public Affairs at Princeton University. He is the co-editor of Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s (Harvard University Press).] There have been many moving eulogies about the late NBC reporter Tim Russert. We have heard about his personal modesty and his extensive preparation for interviews. Russert was able to subtly expose the inconsistencies and underside of politicians with a smile. But Russert's

Juan Cole: John McCain's Oil Scam

[Mr. Cole is Professor of Modern Middle Eastern and South Asian History at the University of Michigan. His website is http://www.juancole.com.] McCain is arguing for offshore drilling to lower US petroleum prices in the"short term."It is all a big lie, and a dangerous one at that. Our marine environment and our fisheries are already at risk. And the

Earl Tilford: Seduction By Air ... Then and Now

[Dr. Earl Tilford is Professor of History at Grove City College and enjoyed an extensive military career in the U.S. Air Force. He is former director of research at the U.S. Army's Strategic Studies Institute, where he worked on a project that looked at future terrorist threats. He also authored three books on the Vietnam War and co-edited one book on Operation Desert Storm.] Air power is seductive. From the Army Air Service’s Col. Billy Mitchell’s Winged Defense, written in the aft

Allan Lichtman: The (Non-Electoral) Case for the Obama-Clinton Ticket

[Mr. Lichtman is a professor of history at American University and the author of The Keys to the White House (1996). His latest book is: WHITE PROTESTANT NATION.] Leaving aside the elusive question of which vice-presidential pick would help Barack Obama get elected, non-electoral criteria powerfully favor an Obama-Clinton ticket. Hillary Clinton clearly has the requisite experience and skills to assume the presidency if necessary and her campaign demonstrated that the

Matthew Dallek: Democratic unity still out of reach

When the primary season began, the Republican presidential candidates were bitterly divided, while the Democrats were satisfied with their choices. Arizona Sen. John McCain mocked former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney as the “candidate of change.” Romney broadcast commercials castigating McCain and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee as liberals. Six months later, however, the Democratic Party is nursing its wounds, struggling to unify supporters of nominee-in-waiting Barack Obama and also-ran Hi

Jonathan Zimmerman: Obama ... Son of Africa or ugly American?

[Jonathan Zimmerman, a professor of education and history at New York University, is teaching this semester at NYU's study-abroad program in Accra, Ghana. He is the author of the forthcoming "Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory."] There's a new hit song in Ghana this spring. You hear it everywhere: in bars, restaurants, shops and taxicabs. It has a catchy rhythm, a melodic chorus, and a loud note of praise for an American presidential candidate.

Tom Engelhardt: Why We Can't See America's Ziggurats in Iraq

[Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso, 2008), a collection of some of the best pieces from his site, has just been published. Focusing on what the mainstream media hasn't covered, it is an alternative history of the mad B

Stanley I. Kutler: The Vice Presidency ... Hype and Flourishes

[Stanley Kutler is the author of “Wars of Watergate” and of numerous writings on American constitutional law and the presidency.] For two centuries, selecting vice presidential candidates was at best a mere afterthought. Hardly anyone knew of the process, if indeed one existed aside from a brief huddle by the presidential candidate with a few advisers and friends. The presidential nominees usually settled on lesser-known figures, deserved obscurities in American history.

Susan Brownell: Could China stop Taiwan from coming to the Olympic Games?

[Susan Brownell is the author of Training the Body for China, which is widely recognized as the single best work by a scholar on Chinese sports.] Actually, this was a trick question.Chinese leaders strongly desire for Taiwan to attend the Olympic Games and other major sports events because they are the most important venue in which Taiwan i

Benjamin Ginsberg: The Perils of Polling

[NOTE: In April, the Governing America in a Global Era program at the Miller Center of Public Affairs at U.Va. held a conference, "Has Polling Killed Democracy?" to examine the past and future of polling and its role in electoral politics. Among those participating was Benjamin Ginsberg, Johns Hopkins University, the author of this op ed.] Politicians, advocacy groups, the media and public officials sponsor thousands of opinion surveys every year to assess public sentime

Martin Kramer: The myth of linkage (Middle East politics)

Last September, when I arrived in Cambridge for my fall stay at Harvard, I opened the Boston Globe and saw this headline over an editorial: “The Other Middle East Conflict.” I immediately said to myself: well, I know what the Middle East conflict is—that’s the Israelis and the Palestinians. So what is the other Middle East