Stanford University Press Blog

Eisenhower Unmasked

In Dwight Eisenhower’s 1961 farewell address as president of the United States, he said of the Cold War, “Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and libert y may prosper together."

According to Ira Chernus, author of Apocalypse Management: Eisenhower and the Discourse of National Insecurity (2008), the peace that Eisenhower spoke of was actually a constant state of “apocalypse management” which would involve the endless management of nuclear threats. By using discourse that assumed that the United States would forever face an enemy bent on destroying it, the author contends that Eisenhower made national insecurity a way of life in America.

The author discusses Eisenhower’s Cold War discourse in a recent article entitled “The Real Eisenhower” for History News Network (March 17, 2008) in which he utilizes a rich source of Eisenhower quotes (often juxtaposing excerpts of public speeches with private statements made within his cabinet) that reveal the former presidents’ thoughts and strategies on the threat of Communism and nuclear attacks.

He describes Eisenhower’s Cold War policy as one, “that put anticommunist ideology above human life, made by a man who would 'shoot your enemy before he shoots you'; a man who believed that the U.S. could 'pick itself up from the floor' and win the war, even though 'everybody is going crazy,' as long as only 25 or 30 American cities got 'shellacked and nobody got too 'hysterical.'”

In looking at these quotes, Chernus says, “That’s how one president talked about nuclear war, a president who is now especially widely admired across the political spectrum….[I]t should remind us how easily presidents can create images that mask profoundly important truths.”

Chernus reminds us that Eisenhower’s legacy of insecurity is still with us today, and his sentiments on the presidential masking of truth is a poignant one especially upon the 5 year anniversary of the war in Iraq and the nearing end of the Bush administration.

Charles Gati, E.E. Cummings, and Hungary 1956

In a newly released paperback, Failed Illusions: Moscow, Washington, Budapest, and the 1956 Hungarian Revolt, Charles Gati relates new facts about the Hungarian revolution and its suppression by the Soviet Union in a political thriller that combines the immediacy of an eyewitness account (the author was a 22-year-old reporter in Budapest during the uprising) with the experience and expertise of a scholar. Gati points out, “The Hungarians need to hear what happened 50 years ago--and Americans need to hear that in the future we will not say we seek clearly unattainable goals abroad for political ends at home.”

Denying neither Hungarian heroism nor Soviet brutality, Failed Illusions fundamentally alters our picture of what happened during the 13-day uprising that began on October 23, 1956. Gati finds that the young revolutionaries were brave but their expectations unrealistic, and their leader, Imre Nagy, a reform communist who headed the revolutionary government, could not rise to the occasion by steering a realistic course between his people’s demands and Soviet interests.

Gati’s account exposes a crucial gap between words and actions in U.S. policy. In his view the United States was all talk, no action, and offered mixed signals at best. It encouraged the revolutionaries with promises of “liberation” and the “rollback” of Soviet power from Eastern Europe. The book exposes Washington’s ambivalence by citing Vice President Nixon, who said at a top-secret NSC meeting in July 1956 that “it wouldn’t be an unmixed evil” for the U.S. if the Soviets were to invade Hungary. Interestingly, U.S. failure to aid the Hungarian revolutionaries is also the subject of a poem by E.E. Cummings, Thanksgiving 1956.

The Stake of a Reputation

We all have secrets, but the ease with which information is transmitted via YouTube, MySpace, and Google has made keep them much more difficult. Lawrence Friedman’s Guarding Life’s Dark Secrets, discussed in a recent Wilson Quarterly review by Gary Alan Fine, looks at our cultures attitudes about reputation by examining when the courts have protected our secrets and when they have not.

We tend to think of those our ancestors as being better behaved than we are today, but Friedman argues that their comportment did not always match the reputation that they carefully maintained. “Friedman emphasizes that life in ­19th-­century America was rough. Heavy drinking, fighting, and con games were com­mon in public spaces.” Society, and the laws that supported it, recognized that this behavior could never be completely suppressed.

“What resulted, [Friedman] says, was the ‘Victorian compromise,’ the practice by which (most) respectable citizens were protected from being discredited by their moral lapses, except when public notice demanded otherwise. It was a culture of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell.’ For the middle class and the elite, it was a world of second chances. The working class served as society’s scapegoats. Thus, even though gambling was common at all levels of society, it was the gambling dens of the poor that were raided, not the salons of the wealthy. These miscreants, not so different from their fellow citizens, were discredited, isolated, and ­stigmatized.”

Today’s compromise has changed, as it is much more difficult to hide transgressions—instead, our public figures have perfected the art of the apology.

You can read the entire review here.

Némirovsky's Anti-Semitic Scandal

A recent article by Ruth Franklin of The New Republic seeks to shed light on the anti-Semitic controversy surrounding Suite Française author Irène Némirovsky, who died at Auschwitz 60 years before the English translation of her novel hit the New York Times bestseller list. Upon its U.S. release, Suite Française drew comparisons to The Diary of Anne Frank as another great Jewish literary work that was able to survive the trauma of the Holocaust.


Franklin sees this as a false media spin considering Némirovsky’s anti-Semitic past, despite her Russian-Jewish lineage. Franklin cites Jonathan Weiss’s biography Irène Némirovsky: Her Life and Works (2006) to reinforce this argument, referencing its examples of the author’s closeness with right-wing political circles and publishers. Némirovsky was able to establish a profitable career through writings that depicted Jews in ugly racial stereotypes. When the threat of arrest and deportation became clearer, Némirovsky appealed to her right-wing contacts, contending that she was not one of “the undesirable foreigners” of France. Her husband even championed her anti-Semitic writings in the hopes of gaining protection. Franklin says, “As Weiss’s important and prodigiously researched biography makes clear, Némirovsky was the very definition of a self-hating Jew.”

Franklin analyzes the anti-Semitism found in new, recent translations of Némirovsky’s other works, including David Golder and The Ball, and challenges some critics’ argument that Némirovsky’s characters were representations of how she saw Jews. “…She seems to not have wondered whether there was more to Jewish life than what she saw, or whether what she saw was any different from what the racists and the anti-Semites were seeing.”

It is undeniable that Némirovsky’s death—which occurred not long after her arrest in 1942—was tragic. This fact, coupled with her literary displays of anti-Semitism, brings up questions of how to now approach Suite Française and its uncertain position amongst other literary works born out of the Holocaust. Examining her personal history, as Weiss has done in his thorough biography, may be the first step in answering those questions.

Ailing Suharto Draws Attention to Indonesia

With former Indonesian President Suharto in unstable condition after suffering multiple organ failure earlier this month, many wonder if he will pass away without penalization for the war atrocities and financial corruption that ran rampant during his rule of Indonesia from 1967-1998. Some speculate that foreign nations—particularly the U.S.—are hesitant to bring him to justice to avoid tense international relations.

The origins of that hesitation may be found in Bradley R. Simpson’s Economists with Guns: Authoritarian Development and U.S.-Indonesian Relations, 1960-1968  (forthcoming March 2008), the first comprehensive history of Indonesia-U.S. relations. Simpson examines how and why the U.S. supported the military regime of General Suharto, a crucial juncture in modern Indonesian history that shaped the country's trajectory and is now reflected in the nation's current tenuous transition into democracy.

Other Stanford University Press titles dig further into modern Indonesian history. Edward Aspinall's Opposing Suharto: Compromise, Resistance, and Regime Change in Indonesia (2005) chronicles the struggles and success of everyday citizens fighting authoritarianism while M. C. Ricklefs's A History of Modern Indonesia Since c. 1200, Third Edition (2002) looks at the nation's history with a broader perspective.

Japan vs. Iraq: What we did differently?

Going into the war in Iraq, President Bush invoked the American occupation of Japan after World War II, an occupation that transformed a feudal society into a democratic nation:

America has done this kind of work before. Following World War II, we lifted up the defeated nations of Japan and Germany, and stood with them as they built representative governments. We committed years and resources to this cause. And that effort has been repaid many times over in three generations of friendship and peace. America today accepts the challenge of helping Iraq in the same spirit -- for their sake, and our own. (September 7, 2003)

Now, historian Takeshi Matsuda presents a vivid description of the American occupation of Japan in Soft Power and its Perils (2007). He explains why the Japanese consented to the changes the American occupation brought, while we have seen the Iraqis become increasingly hostile to an American presence in their country.

One of the primary differences, in his view, is that the United States approached Japan with a genuine interest to understand Japanese culture and to create mutual understanding between the two nations. Matsuda argues that, while the American occupation was certainly geared toward a certain level of cultural imperialism, the US also prepared huge reserve of knowledge about how Japanese and American cultures would interact well before the occupation began:

“In contrast to the current situation in Iraq, the U.S occupation of Japan was a democratic experiment supported by American soft power, as well as hard power…U.S. preparation for the occupation of Japan began immediately after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941—that is, four years before the actual occupation of the country.” In addition, “intergovernmental agencies in Washington also spent a great deal of effort defining the general objectives of the occupation of Japan and formulating programs need to meet the specific objectives of the United States.”

Matsuda argues for the importance of academics in shaping the perceptions of both countries of one another. Following World War II, there was an explosion of Japanese Studies in the US and American Studies in Japan, the latter often heavily subsidized by the US. According to Matsuda, this facilitated understanding between the two cultures, such that “U.S.-Japan cultural relations flourished and became full blown in later years in ways that few people would have ever dreamed.”

In a review of America’s Kingdom in the London Review of Books, Tariq Ali writes that, “Critical academic works on the Saudi kleptocracy are rare. …Which is why America's Kingdom comes as a pleasant surprise. Robert Vitalis, who teaches political science at the University of Pennsylvania, has produced a scholarly and readable book on the interaction between Saudi society and Aramco, the US oil giant that had its beginnings when the Saudi government granted its first concessions to Standard Oil of California in 1933. Combining history with political anthropology, Vitalis sheds a bright light on the origins and less savoury aspects of the Saudi-US relationship in its first phase, when oil production was accompanied by the manufacturing of myths that prettified the US presence."

   
Robert Vitalis not only provides a historical basis (spanning more than seventy years, three continents, and an engrossing cast of characters) for understanding this “special relationship” between the United States and the Saudi monarchy, but he also argues that despite the constant media scrutiny after 9/11, the special relationship continues today. And there’s plenty of evidence going around. The Wall Street Journal reports in an article today that instead of taking explicit measures against a powerful Saudi bank in 2003 (or even earlier), which allegedly finances terrorist networks from the Middle East to Indonesia, the U.S. government has chosen to lobby the Saudi royal family quietly about its concerns, with little success so far.

The book  points to a major divergence between the official “myths” (perpetuated by both the U.S. and the Saudis) and the political and historical realities in the Middle East. It shows how the development of Saudi Arabia’s oil under a racist and unfair US-owned company generated a lingering resentment and hatred against the West. As Tariq Ali's review suggests, these feelings persist in our times, even among Saudi elite.

A Youthful New Direction in Postwar France

Richard Jobs’ recent book, Riding the New Wave, is described as a “fascinating study” in the July 6, 2007 issue of the Times Literary Supplement. Examining how the idea of youth was conceptualized and experienced during France’s Fourth Republic, Jobs argues that “youth, both as a concept and as a social group, [was] a primary mechanism in France’s postwar rejuvenation and its cultural reconstruction because the young, through their buoyant energy and dynamism, symbolically pointed the way to the future.”

World War II destroyed not only France’s physical infrastructure, but its societal infrastructure as well. During the German occupation, France had essentially been fighting a civil war – Nazi collaborators against those fighting for independence. In Riding the New Wave, Jobs describes the war years as “a terrible experience for France… characterized as much by betrayal and treachery as they were by heroism and sacrifice.”

Faced with the difficult task of reuniting and rebuilding their society and weary from the long years of war, the French fixed on newness as a possibility of hope. The youth came to be seen both as new and as a reason to hope; “they represented the hope of a future unburdened by the devastation of the recent past.” Moreover, youth was a common denominator for all factions of society – everyone is young once – and therefore was accessible as a concept around which to unite.

Riding the New Wave examines a much-overlooked period of French history, providing insight into the years leading up to the radical student protests of the late 1960s. Readers will see that although France was dealing with a unique and difficult situation, many of its ideas of youth mirror those we currently hold.

What should we do about immigration?

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me:
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.

What do these words mean today? Yesterday, the latest immigration bill died in the senate, signaling that the government, and the country, will continue to look for a direction for our immigration policy.

In this context, it is useful to examine how other countries have dealt with the pressures and benefits of immigration. In The Boundaries of the Republic: Migrant Rights and the Limits of Universalism in France, 1918-1940, Mary Dewhurst Lewis turns to interbellum France to examine Europe's first guest worker program and the transformations it underwent as France experienced difficult economic and political circumstances. There is much, she argues, that could be used in our current dilemma from the lessons that France learned in the years before the Second World War.

One of the lessons Lewis presents is that there is not a straightforward connection between the integrity of a country's sovereignty and the extent of migrant rights. The reality is a complex negotiation between various interests and levels of power in which there is always a combination of benefit and loss. There can be no straightforward answer our current dilemma, making the nuances of France's journey – first admitting nearly two million immigrants, and then expelling 93,000 of them – relevant and engaging.

Budapest 1956

Fifty years later, Charles Gati, an expert in Soviet and Eastern European politics, revisits the Hungarian Revolution and its suppression by the USSR in his latest book, Failed Illusions. The book delves into questions such as why the Soviets changed course and decided to intervene in Hungary after initially pulling out, what effect the attitude of the United States (both the CIA and the propaganda of Radio Free Europe) had on the outcome of the revolution, and what role other world events played in forcing Hungary to be lower priority for the West. Despite the marked differences between the cold war and our current “war on terror” it is useful to look back at cold-war America for lessons about how to respond to the foreign policy challenges we face today. A recent article in the NYT here (with an audio interview with Charles Gati) discusses the relevance of events in 1956.