Apparently the people in charge of the upcoming Dayton Air Show planned to reenact the destruction of Hiroshima. Leaving aside whether this was a good idea or a bad idea (NB: this was not a good idea), the article linked above prompted a reasonably interesting conversation over at unfogged about Truman’s decision to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

One of the regular commenters at unfogged, a talented historian named teo, shared what he described as a paraphrase of a Matthew Yglesias post on the subject from years ago:

It’s really hard for us to figure out how to judge Truman’s decisions because the context in which he was making them was almost unimaginably more brutal than our world today. Millions of people were dying as a matter of course throughout the war, as the result of decisions made by all the major players. As MY [editor’s note: Matthrew Yglesias] put it, paraphrasing somewhat because I don’t recall his exact words, “This is a war in which the ‘good guys’ consisted of the world’s greatest imperial power and an Apartheid pseudo-democracy, in alliance with Joseph Stalin. And they really were the good guys, because the other side was even worse.”

I think this is an important point and very well made. Also, as teo goes on to say, “This doesn’t inherently support either side of the argument over whether Truman should have dropped the bomb, but it provides important context.” Well, here’s more of that context:

That was Air Marshal Arthur “Bomber” Harris, speaking in early June 1942, just after the RAF leveled Cologne. The text of the original speech began with Harris saying,

The Nazis entered this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everybody else and nobody was going to bomb them. At Rotterdam, London, Warsaw, and half a hundred other places, they put that rather naive theory into operation. They sowed the wind and now they are going to reap the whirlwind.

And now here’s a hasty transcription of the video (I hope) you just watched:

Let the Nazis take good note of the western horizon, where they will see a cloud as yet no bigger than a man’s hand. But behind that cloud lies the whole massive power of the United States of America. When this storm bursts over Germany, they will look back to the days of Lubeck and Rostock and Cologne as a man caught in the blasts of a hurricane will look back to the gentle zephyrs of last summer. There are a lot of people who say that bombing can never win a war. Well, my answer to that is that it has never been tried yet, and we shall see. Germany, clinging more and more desperately to her widespread conquests and even seeking foolishly for more, will make a most interesting initial experiment.

Eric and I cut the clip there. But for the purposes of the discussion at unfogged, and for the purposes of contextualizing Truman’s decision to drop the bomb, it’s worth considering that Harris concluded his remarks by noting, “Japan will provide the confirmation. But the time is not yet. There is a great deal of work to be done first, and let us all get down to it.”

In effect, Harris went on national television to say, “We’re about to commit a whole bunch of war crimes, including firebombing civilian targets. But because our enemy is so much more hideous than we are, nobody is going to bat an eye.” Which is to say, World War II sucked. But because the Nazis were so world-historically awful, we remember it as a good war. For the people who lived through it, though, it mostly wasn’t. There, that’s your context.

I’m a huge admirer of Colin Calloway’s outstanding work, and so receiving this sort of review from him means a great deal to me.

I also got the following e-mail a few minutes ago.

Just thank you for writing the book. Read it like a novel – fast and couldn’t put it down. Besides all the good things about it, the clincher and uniqueness is the balance. Not just the extraordinary balance, but the adeptness and depth within the balance. “Draw your own conclusion.”

Sincerely
Don XXXXXXXX
a 38 year Colorado resident
white working stiff lover of history Colorado facts

I suppose I’ve had better days professionally, but I can’t think of any offhand.

I’ve only begun poking around Code Switch a bit, so I don’t yet have a strong opinion. But I do know this: Gene Demby is working there, and everything Gene writes is worth reading. Given that, I recommend bookmarking the site (or whatever you kids use in lieu of bookmarks).

My once and future co-blogger, Eric Rauchway, has a scathing review up at the TLS of Benn Steil’s new book about Bretton Woods. Spoiler: it seems that Eric is ready to make the transition from fighting New Deal denialists to fighting Bretton Woods denialists.

Update: here’s the article as a pdf.

Or so it seems.

If you scroll down here, you can find David Greenberg’s reply to Jesse Lemisch’s and Staughton Lynd’s rebuttal of his essay on Zinn (see below for more on this).

A few times this year, I’ve skyped into classrooms — both high school and college — across the country where one of my books was being discussed. I’ve really enjoyed doing this. The conversations have been lively (and about my work!), so I thought I’d mention here and now that if I can make it work with my schedule, I’ll always say yes to these sorts of requests. In other words, if you’re teaching my stuff and you want me to visit your classroom virtually, please just let me know. [makes call me sign and mouths words “call me”]

FYI: Jesse Lemisch and Staughton Lynd, both New Left historians, pen a rebuttal at HNN to David Greenberg’s review of Howard Zinn’s work (see the post below for the Greenberg).

Here’s David Greenberg on Howard Zinn.

Here’s Michael Kazin, from a few years back, on Howard Zinn.

I’m on deadline at the moment, but I’d like to write something about this later. In the meantime, I’m linking these reviews as a placeholder.

That was LBJ’s homespun rationale for deciding to tape himself in the Oval Office. And the LBJ Library has just released the final batch of those tapes, from 1968, revealing Johnson’s perspective on the Democratic National Convention that year and also on Richard Nixon’s ostensible role in scuttling ongoing negotiations to end the debacle in Vietnam.

Johnson, horrified by the unfolding violence in Chicago and worried that Hubert Humphrey wouldn’t be chosen as the Democratic nominee, apparently considered saving the day by flying from Texas to the convention and announcing himself as an eleventh-hour candidate. That plan fell apart only after the Secret Service explained that it couldn’t adequately protect the president in Chicago, which stood poised on the brink of insurrection.

Perhaps even more interesting than that, Johnson explains that the FBI had provided him with evidence that Richard Nixon had “blood on his hands,” that, in other words, Nixon had sabotaged the Paris peace talks. Nixon, the LBJ tapes reveal, had dispatched Anna Chennault, one of his campaign advisers, to conduct unauthorized, back-channel discussions with South Vietnamese negotiators. Consequently, just as Johnson prepared to announce in October 1968 that the United States would halt all bombing in North Vietnam, the South Vietnamese, having been promised by Chennault that a Nixon administration would deliver a deal much more favorable to their interests, pulled out of the talks entirely.

In a call to Senator Richard Russell, Johnson says

We have found that our friend, the Republican nominee, our California friend, has been playing on the outskirts with our enemies and our friends both, he has been doing it through rather subterranean sources. Mrs Chennault is warning the South Vietnamese not to get pulled into this Johnson move.

Nixon, meanwhile, insisted that he had no idea why the South Vietnamese had left the negotiating table and offered, out of the goodness of his heart, to travel to Saigon to set things right. Johnson, for his part, chose not to share Nixon’s perfidy with the public, because the president worried about the repercussions of revealing the extent of the FBI’s and NSA’s surveillance of American diplomats. Johnson did tell Humphrey. But by then, on the eve of the election, the vice president had closed the gap with Nixon and worried about stalling his own momentum by releasing a bombshell that might alter the trajectory of the campaign.

In the end, Nixon, Humphrey, and Johnson — at least the LBJ of 1968 — look awful: office seekers playing politics with national security, at the cost tens of thousands of lives. I suppose we should praise Johnson for laying bare such insights from the past, but I find myself thinking he should have stripped the bark away at time, revealing the rot beneath.