The most important practitioners of this new and hasty art, in fact, aren’t the journalists, but rather the government memoirists, who tend to render their accounts more or less in the same fiscal quarter that they have resigned or been ejected from office. Things weren’t always like this. A little distance from events and a little deference to those still in office or merely still alive used to be thought in order. Dean Acheson put off his memoirs for more than a decade. Presumably this made him feel easier about some of the entertainingly wicked things he still managed to say about people he had worked with; but it also must have made him more confident that he had a reasonable perspective on events. Interestingly, by the time he wrote, history was reinterpreting him. The unfairly reviled secretary of state in the Truman years was in the process of becoming a hero to the very people who had complained about him so loudly, and so was his even more reviled boss, Harry S. Truman.
There is something to be learned from this, but I don’t notice anyone much wanting to learn it. On the contrary, we have, if anything, accelerated the speed with which we get what we are pleased to call history and its inevitable sternly invoked “lessons” on the record. The suddenly truncated term of John F. Kennedy produced the first postwar wave of insider history written while many of the issues its authors addressed were still being played out. This was at least in some sense due to a fluke, many of the memoirists not just seeking to preserve (and improve) the reputation of the slain president, but also to gain him credit for the good things and spare him blame for the bad that came to fruition in the Johnson years.
There was nothing fluky, however, about the trend, which arrived at a whole new place in the Reagan years-years in which newly former cabinet members were savaging their erstwhile colleagues in government within a very short time of their departure. This was truly novel. Once, a million years ago, I was told by a Kennedy cabinet officer that he wouldn’t be interviewed because he was saving his story for his own book. This struck all of us very funny at the time. And anyway, we knew there would be no book for years. Now, we assume this is the situation. I don’t begrudge the memoirists the money. But I do quarrel with the way in which their deeply self-interested records of events are marketed and received as “history,” as definitive, as the real skinny.
The impulse to which so many people have succumbed is a little like the one that makes some tourists leap out of the car at the sight of an Alp, slam camera to eye and click, and then leap back into the car without ever having quite looked at the thing. We produce our so-called history before we have even quite lived it, let alone tried to assemble and understand it. And, as in all other simple footraces, whoever gets there first wins. That, in fact, is often what this memoir race is about: the opportunity to control one’s reputation, whether it is an attempt to justify actions taken in government or blame others for one’s own failures or, from outside government, to show that one’s own side and opinion were right all along.
The trouble, unsurprisingly, is that most of these hasty renderings and the judgments that flow from them get undone. And, because the instant history accounts are so often extreme, when they get undone, they get undone big time-perhaps even excessively. John Kennedy was glorified; now he is being debunked in savage ways. I don’t think his cynicism and some of his misconduct would be nearly so interesting to those writing about them now, if they weren’t writing against a background of accounts that portrayed him so romantically. Similarly, we have gone from the “dumb” Eisenhower to the “smart” one. Nixon and Carter are both in the recovery room after recent surgery on their reputations. It remains to be seen whether their operations were a success. But this much is clear: some revision of the earlier findings, anyway, is in order; and this in turn makes you wonder about all the various “lessons” we insist on drawing from what is almost certain to turn out to be at best partial history.
Here is what is generally missing from what we receive as real-life accounts of what has happened to us in the very recent past. First, any sense of time going back before, let us say, the last congressional session. We are given and take these analyses as if everything that occurs has no longer standing cause than whatever happened a campaign or so ago. This habit of seeing history in terms of months rather than years or decades or centuries is what accounts for our continual surprise at the things that cause wars, rebellions and general grief elsewhere in the world.
The other principal flaw is that we explore only our side of the picture. Little effort is made to understand what went on outside a very small frame of reference, what happened in the councils or in the heads of those foreign government officials or others with whom our own government was dealing. This is oddly arrogant. If an adversary fails, we say he was always weak or we overestimated him; if he succeeds, we say why didn’t our government do more’ We do not ever assume that anything lay outside the control of the American government. We invest it with supernatural powers and complain bitterly if it doesn’t use them to perfect effect.
Such are the thoughts of one who plans to read every word that is written on the gulf war and much of the other instant history the period generates. I’m only saying: read with care, and don’t buy anything too grand or final yet-you may have to return it to the store.
