Roundup: Talking About History

Tom Ricks: Was the JFK the Flat-Out Absolute Worst President of the Twentieth Century?

Tom Ricks was born in Massachusetts and is the grandson and great-grandson of Democratic politicians there. As I studied the Vietnam war over the last 14 months, I began to think that John F. Kennedy probably was the worst American president of the previous century.In retrospect, he spent his 35 months in the White House stumbling from crisis to fiasco. He came into office and okayed the Bay of Pigs invasion. Then he went to a Vienna summit conference and got his clock cleaned by Khrushchev. That led to, among other things, the Cuban missile crisis and a whiff of nuclear apocalypse.Looming over it all is the American descent into Vietnam.... I don't buy the theory promulgated by Robert McNamara and others that Kennedy would have kept U.S. troops out. Sure, Kennedy wanted out of Vietnam -- just like Lyndon Johnson wanted out a few years later: We'll scale down our presence after victory is secure....

Stephen M. Walt: Nationalism Rules

Stephen M. Walt, the Robert and Renée Belfer professor of international affairs at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government and a contributing editor at Foreign Policy, is the author of Taming American Power: The Global Response to U.S. Primacy and, with co-author John J. Mearsheimer, The Israel Lobby. He blogs at walt.foreignpolicy.com. What's the most powerful political force in the world? Some of you might say it's the bond market.

Warren Rosenblum: Vive la France!

Warren Rosenblum is associate professor of history at Webster University. In 2010-2011, he was a visiting scholar at Harvard University's Center for European Studies.We had the classic American Fourth of July this year. Grilled ribs, potato salad, and then, after dinner, we trashed the French. The ostensible topic was Dominique Strauss-Kahn — the French political leader and recently accused rapist whom many Americans apparently see as the reincarnation of Pepe Le Pew (with a dose of the Tasmanian Devil thrown in) — but the post-dinner anti-French sentiment wafted into other areas as well.I felt bad, though I kept my mouth shut. The food was superb, the company was wonderful, and no one wants to hear a historian start waxing pedantically about everything Lafayette did to help America win its freedom. A good way to make sure we do not get invited back next year.

Carole Joffe: Betty Ford and the Change in Our Political Culture

Carole Joffe is a professor at the Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health at the University of California, San Francisco, and is the author of Dispatches from the Abortion Wars: The Costs of Fanaticism to Doctors, Patients, and the Rest of Us (Beacon). How much I appreciated your gracious letter telling of plans for the Western Regional Conference on Abortion and inviting me to attend.Although my upcoming personal and official commitments will not permit me to be with you, I am grateful for this opportunity to convey my warmest greetings to all attending and my hopes for the success of the Conference.

Paul Kengor: Predicting the Soviet Collapse

Paul Kengor is professor of political science at Grove City College. His books include The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism and the newly released Dupes: How America’s Adversaries Have Manipulated Progressives for a Century.It was 20 years ago this summer that the final disintegration of the Soviet Union rapidly unfolded. In June 1991, Boris Yeltsin was freely elected president of the Russian Republic, with Mikhail Gorbachev clinging to power atop the precarious USSR. In August, Communist hardliners attempted a dramatic coup against Gorbachev, prompting a stunning succession of declarations of independence by Soviet republics, with seven of them breaking away in August alone, and four more following through mid-December.

Mary C. Curtis: Why Does America Romanticize Slavery?

Mary C. Curtis, an award-winning Charlotte, N.C.-based journalist, is a contributor to The Root, Fox News Charlotte, NPR, Creative Loafing and the Nieman Watchdog blog. She was national correspondent for Politics Daily. Follow her on Twitter.  ...The "statement" that caused such a ruckus is in the preamble to a "marriage vow" signed by GOP presidential hopefuls Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum; it condemns pornography and same-sex marriage but finds a silver lining in slavery. That odious institution may have "had a disastrous impact on African-American families," it reads, "yet sadly a child born into slavery in 1860 was more likely to be raised by his mother and father in a two-parent household than was an African-American baby born after the election of the USA's first African-American President."

Aaron Friedberg: The Unrealistic Realist

Aaron Friedberg is a professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University. His latest book, A Contest for Supremacy: China, America, and the Struggle for Mastery in Asia, has just been published by W.W. Norton.On China By Henry Kissinger (Penguin, 586 pp., $36)Henry Kissinger may be the most influential figure in the making of American foreign policy since the end of World War II, and he is certainly the most prolific. Since stepping down as secretary of state in 1977, Kissinger has written eight books, totaling more than seven thousand pages and several million words. And this is to say nothing of the five books he wrote before attaining high office, and the innumerable articles, essays, and speeches he has produced since. Like the man himself, these works are ambitious, prolix, self-serving, and at times brilliant.

Joyce Hoffmann: The Making of the President’s Press Corps

Joyce Hoffmann, who teaches journalism at Old Dominion University, is the author of “Theodore H. White and Journalism as Illusion.”Fifty years have passed since the publication of Theodore H. White’s “The Making of the President 1960,” a behind-the-scenes campaign narrative that redefined American political journalism. White’s story set the dramatic race that culminated in John F. Kennedy’s slim victory over Richard M. Nixon firmly alongside the country’s culture, values and history to give America an understanding of herself.

Walter Williams: Young Americans’ Ignorance Baffling

Walter Williams is an economics professor at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va.A recent Superman comic book has the hero saying, “I am renouncing my U.S. citizenship” because “truth, justice, and the American way — it’s not enough anymore.”Though not addressing Superman’s statement, Stanford University Professor and Hoover Institution senior fellow William Damon explains how such a vision could emerge today but not yesteryear. The explanation is found in his article “American Amnesia,” in Defining Ideas, based upon his most recent book, “Failing Liberty 101: How We Are Leaving Young Americans Unprepared for Citizenship in a Free Society.”The National Assessment of Educational Progress reports only one in four high school seniors scored at least “proficient” in knowledge of U.S. citizenship. Civics and history were American students’ worst subjects.

David McCullough: Vive la Similarité

David McCullough, a winner of two Pulitzer Prizes, is the author, most recently, of “The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris.”THE recent arrest in New York of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, then the head of the International Monetary Fund, has caused some people to question the American-French relationship. Though we will probably never see a Bastille Day when French flags fly along Main Street and strains of “La Marseillaise” fill the airwaves, July 14 would not go so largely unobserved here were we better served by memory. For the ties that bind America and France are more important and infinitely more interesting than most of us know.Consider that the war that gave birth to the nation, our war for independence, would almost certainly have failed had it not been for heavy French financial backing and military support, on both land and sea. At the crucial surrender of the British at Yorktown, for example, the French army under Rochambeau was larger than our own commanded by Washington. The British commander, Cornwallis, was left with no escape and no choice but to surrender only because a French fleet sailed into the Chesapeake Bay at exactly the right moment....

Maureen Dowd: Hitler’s Talking Dogs

Maureen Dowd is a columnist for the NYT.At this late date, when we believe we know absolutely everything about Adolf Hitler, could it be that he was even crazier than we thought?From Caligula to Nero to Qaddafi, dictators are often not just cruel and evil, but lunatics. It’s very rare to find a rational dictator. Absolute power deranges them and gives them delusions and fantasies. So we shouldn’t be surprised by news reports suggesting the Führer was batty beyond even Mel Brooks’s satire.First, an MI5 document was declassified in London in April, revealing megalomaniacal schemes for Nazis to rise again if they lost the war by scattering sleeper agents around the world; and by killing Allied officers with poison infused in sausages, chocolate, Nescafé coffee, cigarettes, schnapps and Bayer aspirin.German agents said they were instructed to first offer Allied targets a cigarette treated by Nazi scientists to give the smoker a headache, then finish the job with a poison aspirin that would kill within 10 minutes....

Rick Perlstein: Betty Ford, Pioneer

Rick Perlstein is the author of “Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America.”THE obituaries for Betty Ford, who died Friday at the age of 93, were filled with colorful stories about an incongruous life: former Martha Graham dancer, dispenser of scandalous comments to the media, alcohol and drug addict. So colorful, in fact, that they may crowd out her historical importance — which may well have been greater than those of her husband, President Gerald R. Ford.Though she was never an elected official, industry titan or religious leader, few Americans changed people’s lives so dramatically for the better. I learned it for myself in the most unlikely of places: a Ford family estate sale in 2007.Some historical background: in August 1975 Betty Ford went on “60 Minutes” and said that if her 18-year-old daughter had an affair, she would not necessarily object. Soon after, she volunteered in McCall’s that she had sex with her husband “as often as possible.”Those comments were widely reported. Less well known is what happened next....

Guy Gugliotta: The U.S. Capitol at War

Guy Gugliotta, former national reporter for The Washington Post, is the author of “Freedom’s Cap: The United States Capitol and the Coming of the Civil War,” to be published by Farrar Straus and Giroux in March, 2012.When Thomas U. Walter returned to Washington at the beginning of July 1861, he found an appalling mess. For 10 years he had served as the architect in charge of building the new Senate and House wings of the United States Capitol and the cast iron dome that would crown the rotunda. When war broke out, Congress was not in session and the building was empty. The Union Army took it over.What followed had not been pretty. Virtually overnight the Capitol became a barracks. Before long, the troops were baking bread in the basement, dumping greasy sides of bacon in the committee rooms, busting up furniture and turning the dark hallways into latrines. “The smell is awful,” Walter wrote in a letter to his wife, Amanda. “The building is like one grand water closet — every hole and corner is defiled.”

Terry Gardner: A healthy dose of American history

Terry Gardner is a travel writer.Reporting from Boston, Philadelphia and New York—Paul Revere was captured on April 18, 1775, before he could warn the residents of Concord, Mass., that the British were coming. (He did make it to Lexington, Mass.) No Revolutionary War battle was ever fought at Valley Forge, Pa., even though Gen. George Washington and his troops were there for nine months, including during a horrific winter.

Niall Stanage: Northern Ireland’s McIlroy Transcends Boundaries

Niall Stanage is a staff writer for The Hill newspaper in Washington.Rory McIlroy’s religion was, until a few days ago, a mystery to Barry McGuigan.“Is he Catholic? Really?” McGuigan said. “I didn’t know that. I thought he was a Protestant young guy.”McGuigan was a precursor of a kind to McIlroy, the young golfer who has become Northern Ireland’s latest sporting hero in the wake of his United States Open triumph last month.But the differences in the stories of the two men are as illuminating as the similarities, especially when it comes to the changing nature of their homeland.

David Goldfield: Evangelicals, Republicans and the Civil War

David Goldfield is the Robert Lee Bailey Professor of History at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, where he teaches courses on the American South. He is the author or editor of 16 books, including “Still Fighting the Civil War”; “The American Journey”; and, most recently, “America Aflame: How the Civil War Created a Nation.”We often hear the phrase “the party of Lincoln” ascribed to the Republican Party. The image conjures a political movement dedicated to the abolition or restriction of slavery and to saving the Union. A less well-known feature of the party’s early years was its grounding in the evangelical Christianity of the Second Great Awakening.

Jewish Daily Forward: Liberate the Letter!

When Ron Chernow was travelling the country last year to talk about his new biography of George Washington, he was often asked about Washington’s 1790 letter to the Jews of Newport, R.I. — the one that famously promised that the United States government would give “to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.”“There were very few speeches that I made where people didn’t ask about that letter,” Chernow recalled. “I can vouch for the fact that there’s tremendous curiosity out there.”He’s curious, too. Even though Chernow spent six years reading through Washington’s papers to research his book, and was awarded the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for his effort, he’s never seen the original letter. In the last decade, hardly anyone has.

Mao Yushi: Judging Mao as a Man

Mr. Mao is an economist and the chairman of the Unirule Institute. Editor's note: This article is adapted from a longer essay that has now been removed from the website of Caixin magazine. After it was published, pro-Maoist groups have called for the author to be prosecuted for sedition and treason. The translation is by Jude Blanchette. Mao Zedong was once a god. With the uncovering of more and more documents and information, he is gradually returning to human form. Some still view Chairman Mao as a god, however, and view any critical discussion of him as blasphemous. If these people have their way, we will never be able to analyze him, never directly face his legacy, never question his spirit.

Eleanor Clift: Nancy Reagan at 90

Eleanor Clift is a contributing editor for Newsweek.As an aspiring actress in Hollywood, Nancy Davis shaved two years off her age, claiming July 6, 1923, when she was born in 1921. A woman being coy about her age is not uncommon, and the truth didn’t come out until the onetime actress was in the White House as first lady. “I told a little fib,” she said.Not that she minds anymore that well wishers are keeping count. Reagan turns 90 on Wednesday, a milestone to celebrate as much for the life she has lived as her longevity. She’ll mark the day by attending a luncheon in her honor at the home of a longtime friend, Ruth Jones, whose husband headed Northrup Corp. and whose birthday lunch for Nancy is an annual affair.

Michael White: Ronald Reagan and the Joy of Myth-making

Michael White is assistant editor and has been writing for the Guardian for more than 30 years, as a reporter, foreign correspondent and columnist. He was political editor from 1990-2006, having previously been the paper's Washington correspondent (1984-88) and parliamentary sketchwriter (1977-84). I stayed the course with the Reagan posse after the unveiling of his statue in Grosvenor Square yesterday. That meant attending the gala dinner in the City of London's gorgeous Guildhall and being teased by colleagues in the hack pack for joining assorted toasts to the 40th president, the Queen and others deemed (by the hacks) to be Guardian class enemies. Never mind, it was a fascinating tribal occasion, as tribal occasions often are for non-tribalists.