Roundup: Talking About History

Timothy Garton Ash: 1989 changed the world. But where now for Europe?

[Timothy Garton Ash is a historian, political writer and Guardian columnist] Nineteen eighty-nine was the biggest year in world history since 1945. In international politics, 1989 changed everything. It led to the end of communism in Europe, of the Soviet Union, the cold war and the short 20th century. It opened the door to German unification, a historically unprecedented European Union stretching from Lisbon to Tallinn, the enlargement of Nato, two decades of American supremacy, gl

Avi Shlaim: Israel's "new history" and the Palestinians

[Avi Shlaim is a professor of international relations at St Antony's College, Oxford. Among his books are The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (WW Norton, 1999) and (as co-editor) The War for Palestine: Rewriting the History of 1948 (Cambridge University Press, 2001). His most recent book is Lion of Jordan: the Life of King Hussein in War and Peace (Penguin, 2007).] 1948 was a year of triumph and tragedy - triumph for the Jews and tragedy for the Arabs of Palestine. Israelis ref

Frank Gannon : Nixon's November 3 speech

[Frank Gannon won a White House Fellowship and served in the Nixon White House 1971-4. He accompanied RN to San Clemente aboard Air Force One on August 9th and organized the researching and writing of the President’s memoirs, RN.] Forty years ago today, Richard Nixon wrote and delivered a speech that both changed the course of American foreign policy and altered the course of American politics. As he later wrote, “Very few speeches actually influence the course of history. The Nov

Brahma Chellaney: Europe Got Freedom, Asia Got Rich

[Brahma Chellaney is professor of strategic studies at the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi and the author of “Asian Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India and Japan.”] NEW DELHI — On its 20th anniversary, the fall of the Berlin Wall stands out as the most momentous event in post-World War II history. The end of the Cold War transformed geopolitics, thereby changing the world. But no continent benefited more than Asia, as has been epitomized by its dramatic economic rise, the s

Max Holland: Richard Nixon's Own Deep Throat

[Mr. Holland, author of The Kennedy Assassination Tapes (Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), is completing a history of the Warren Commission for Knopf.] When W. Mark Felt unmasked himself as Deep Throat, in May 2005, the ballyhoo was dampened by a distinct feeling of anticlimax. As the FBI's number two man in 1972, Felt was the first real suspect: speculations that he had been Washington Post reporter Bob Woo

William McGurn: Harvard's Medals of Honor

[William McGurn is a Vice President at News Corporation who writes speeches for CEO Rupert Murdoch. Previously he served as Chief Speechwriter for President George W. Bush.] Most Americans would not be surprised to learn that Harvard is our nation's oldest institution of higher learning, that it boasts the largest endowment, and that it has produced more U.S. presidents than any other university. Most Americans, however, might be hard-pressed to guess another Harvard di

Masha Lipman: Russia's search for a post-Stalin identity

[Masha Lipman, editor of the Carnegie Moscow Center's Pro et Contra journal, writes a monthly column for The Post.] On Friday, as Russia recognized its annual commemoration of political prisoners, President Dmitry Medvedev published a videoblog in which he condemned Joseph Stalin's crimes and called on the nation not to forget about past political repression or its victims. Medvedev called Stalin's repression "one of the greatest tragedies in Russian history" and expressed

Yuki Tanaka and Richard Falk: The Atomic Bombing, The Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal and the Shimoda Case: Lessons for Anti-Nuclear Legal Movements

Yuki Tanaka is Research Professor, Hiroshima Peace Institute, and author a coordinator of The Asia-Pacific Journal. He is the author most recently of Yuki Tanaka and Marilyn Young, eds., Bombing Civilians: A Twentieth Century History. He wrote this article for The Asia-Pacific Journal.   Richard Falk, professor emeritus of international law and practice at Princeton University, is th

Roger Cohen: The Hinge of History

[Roger Cohen is a columnist of The New York Times.] Ever since June 15 in Tehran I’ve been asking the most alluring and treacherous of historical questions: “What if?” What if the vast protesting crowd of perhaps three million people had turned from Azadi (Freedom) Square toward the presidential complex? What if Mir Hussein Moussavi, the opposition leader, had stood before the throng and said, “Here I stand with you and here I will fall?” What, in short, if Azadi had be

Boris Johnson: Remember the Fall of the Wall

[Boris Johnson is Mayor of London.] I am thinking champagne. And cake. And fireworks, of course, not just any old fireworks but some of those truly shell-shocking bits of Chinese ordnance called Harmonious Geese or Whispering Swans. Far more important than the foiling of the Gunpowder Plot, far more benign in its consequences for world peace and prosperity, we celebrate next week the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall – the ultimate triumph of simple human

Christopher Meyer: The Decline of Britain's Foreign Office

[Christopher Meyer, 2009. Extracted from 'Getting Our Way: 500 Years of Adventure and Intrigue: the Inside Story of British Democracy', published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Meyer was Ambassador to Washington from 1997 until 2003.] Diplomacy rivals prostitution as the oldest profession. Like street-walking, it has never enjoyed a wholly favourable reputation. Often confused with its clandestine cousin, espionage, it has for centuries been associated with deviousness and duplicity. A

Libby Nelson: A Campus Activist-Turned-Administrator Remembers 1969

[Libby Nelson is a 2009 graduate of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, currently the government and politics reporting intern for The Chronicle of Higher Education.]During homecoming this year, the University of Pittsburgh marked the 40th anniversary of a campus protest in 1969, when black student activists occupied the computer center and called on the university to increase the enrollment and hiring of African-Americans, provide support for black student

Robert Nedelkoff: The Last Of The Watergate Cubans Speaks

[Robert Nedelkoff, a resident of Silver Spring, MD, received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Louisville and his Juris Doctor degree from Monterey College of Law in 1996. From 1997 until March 2009, he worked on behalf of the Richard Nixon Foundation at the National Archives in College Park, MD. He has published articles in several magazines, including GQ and McSweeney’s.] In June I wrote here of the

Nathan Gardels: The End of History -- 20 Years Later

[Nathan Gardels is Editor of NPQ, Global Services of Los Angeles Times Syndicate/Tribune Media] November 9 will mark the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, which led Francis Fukuyama to famously declare"the end of history" in an essay in the National Interest and later in a book titled The End of History and the Last Man.Twenty years on, what does Fukuyama think about where history has gone since? I asked him for the Global Viewpoint Network. Here i

Warren Kozak: The Missiles of October

[Mr. Kozak is the author of "LeMay: The Life and Wars of General Curtis LeMay" (Regnery, 2009).] "All war is based on deception." —Sun Tzu In the summer of 1962, the leader of the great Soviet empire, Nikita Khrushchev, faced a serious problem. His huge intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) didn't work. Their launchers were unreliable, their aim was off and the fuel used to rocket them skyward was so volatile that they had to be stored empty. I

Mikhail Gorbachev: World no fairer 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall

[Mikhail Gorbachev was the last president of the Soviet Union; he was awarded the Nobel peace prize in 1990.] Twenty years have passed since the fall of the Berlin wall, one of the shameful symbols of the cold war and the dangerous division of the world into opposing blocks and spheres of influence. Today we can revisit the events of those times and take stock of them in a less emotional and more rational way. The first optimistic observation to be made is that the anno

Svetlana Savranskaya: Afghanistan Déjà vu? Lessons from the Soviet Experience

[Dr. Svetlana Savranskaya serves as the Archive's director for its cooperative projects with Russian archives and institutes and editor of the Russian and East Bloc Archival Documents Database. She earned her Ph.D. in political science and international affairs in 1998 from Emory University, where she studied under Professor Robert Pastor and worked as a Hewlett Fellow at the Carter Presidential Center in Atlanta.] The debate over U.S. policy in the Afghanistan war features stri

Steven M. Gillon: A New Wrinkle in the JFK Assassination Story

[Steven M. Gillon is resident historian of the History Channel] This month will mark the 46th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. A recently declassified oral history by Brigadier General Godfrey McHugh, President Kennedy's military aide on the Dallas trip, sheds new light on the critical hours after the shooting. McHugh makes startling claims about Lyndon Johnson's behavior in the wake of the assassination. The interview with McHugh, original

Daniel Johnson: The Berlin Wall ... Seven Minutes that Shook the World

[Daniel Johnson is a journalist and founding editor of Standpoint magazine.] The Cold War was the first conflict that came close to annihilating Western civilisation — the first but almost certainly not the last. Yet the story of this global 40 Years War ended happily: it concluded almost bloodlessly in the European Revolution of 1989. This was a genuine popular revolution, not a coup by professional subversives and terrorists like the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. It came

Nir Rosen: Lessons Unlearned ... The 1983 Marine Barracks Bombing in Beirut

[Nir Rosen is a fellow at New York University's Center on Law and Security. He has reported extensively from the Middle East, and his book In the Belly of the Green Bird: The Triumph of the Martyrs in Iraq was published in 2006.] Another October 23rd has come and gone, another anniversary of the 1983 U.S. Marine barracks bombing in Beirut -- and more inane articles written by people drawing the wrong lessons. As usual, the authors perceive the United States as some innocent Little R