PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS Thirty Years After, or the Two Musketeers
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PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS
Thirty Years After, or the Two Musketeers*
WARREN F. KIMBALL
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I have spent thirty years with Franklin Delano Roosevelt-longer than I
have been with anyone except my wife, Jackie, and longer than most other
people were able to put up with him. He helped pay my bills, put my kids
through college, and carry me up the professional ladder, all the while keeping
me challenged, fascinated, and engaged. How that happened is for an
autobiography not worth the writing. This is about why that happened and how
that thirty-year project has paralleled, diverged from, come to terms with,
and/or ignored the issues our profession confronted and confronts.
Starting a career at the beginning of the sixties was for all of us of that
generation a formative experience. But not always in the way some assume.
After all, only a few of us went to places where the action was. For every
graduate student at Berkeley or Wisconsin or Columbia, there were a half-
dozen more at Kansas or Texas or Georgetown. Moreover, I can assure you
that on the campus of Georgetown University, where I was in the early 1960%
William Appleman Williams hardly mattered, while at the Naval Academy,
where I taught, he simply did not exist.' For many graduate students of that
era, the growing intellectual/activist ferment that increasingly focused on a
combination of civil rights and then the Vietnam War was far removed from
what we were doing in graduate school. In some cases that is because graduate
student politics and activism is a luxury that only the wealthy or the
subsidized can afford-not something for part-time students with families,
*This is an expanded version of an address presented on 8 January 1994 at the SHAFR
luncheon during the American Historical Association annual meeting in San Francisco,
California. I owe a debt of gratitude to Anders Stephanson of Columbia University for planting a
seed and then trying so hard to make it germinate. My thanks also for the apt comments of Lloyd
Gardner of Rutgers, Charles Alexander of Ohio University, and the three ladies who attended the
previews.
'Which is a bit surprising in both directions: Not only was Williams a graduate of the Naval
Academy, but Georgetown's most famous diplomatic historian, Charles Callan Tansill, wasjoined
after World War I1 by Charles Austin Beard, one of Williams's intellectual forebears, in an
unbreakable chokehold on the throat of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
161162 DIPLOMATIC HISTORY
like me. Moreover, on most campuses the brew mixed of Vietnam, genera-
tional change, and twentieth-century Ludditism had not yet fermented into that
heady if contradictory combination of idealism and cynicism that would
become the campus revolts of the late sixties and early seventies.
Many of my generation stood in line at John F. Kennedy’s bier but we
were, in reality, the last gasp of the Eisenhower era-what Charles Alexander
has perceptively called “the mild bunch.”2 We inherited the “consensus” belief
and honestly found Louis Hartz’s The Liberal Tradition in America a
revolutionary way to view our past. After all, we, or our teachers, reasoned
that everything was getting better for all Americans-not through violence,
but by absorbing conflict. Minorities-which then meant only black
Americans-seemed on a fast track toward middle class equality, given the
civil rights legislation of the late fifties and early sixties. The Cold War
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stalemate worried us occasionally when the troublesome Russians seemed
bent on expansion in Berlin or Cuba, but most of us slept well each night,
secure in the knowledge that the same people who had brought us relative
peace since Korea remained in charge. We were supposed to have been
traumatized by the homble threat of nuclear warfare hanging over our heads,
but the long Soviet-American peace seemed a reality long before anyone
thought up the phrase.
As Ike’s kids, we were a generation where the males assumed they would
have to serve in the military. In some ways it was comforting. Brought up on a
staple diet of john Wayne and Henry Fonda winning the Second World War,
the death and violence of conflict somehow seemed softened by courage and
Hollywood dialogue. We’d read Norman Mailer’s Naked and the Dead-but
for its dirty words and bravado, missing in the process whatever criticism of
war might have lain hidden in the forest of testosterone-soakedlanguage.
Moreover, joining the military was a way to avoid the unpleasant task of
making decisions and finding a job. For those like me, who had no specific
professional career in mind, no burning desire to write or ask questions or seek
knowledge-r become a dean-the military was a wonderful way to avoid a
commitment. It wasn’t patriotism that put us in uniform, it was the draft, a fact
perhaps relevant to the attitudes that developed in the American military later
in the sixties.
Three years of sea duty in the Pacific, defending America against the
spread of comm~nism,~ left me at sea, literally and figuratively. I wish I could
say that sailing the oceans brought me into some kind of empathetic contact
with FDR, but that was not the case. Still uncertain, I took up a navy offer to
teach at Annapolis and, after some negotiations (I thought I was scheduled to
teach seamanship, they wanted me to teach English-I bargained for history) I
ended up in the classroom (without any graduate training) teaching Europe
since 1815 and American diplomatic history. Whatever the disservice done the
midshipmen, I had stumbled on a career. Four years of night school at
*Charles C. Alexander, Holding the Line: The Eisenhower Years, 1952-1961 (Bloomington,
1975) xv.
lIn 1960-61, my ship (an LST) was loaded with army engineers assigned the job of building
an oil pipeline from the Gulf of Thailand to Laos-a violation of international law and Thai
neutrality. I later realized.THE TWO MUSKETEERS 163
Georgetown, which had taken me on the grounds that someone had to try to
teach me what I was already teaching, and I was, as of mid-1965. an “ABD,” a
far less precarious professional status than it is today. The celebration of
American empire, increasingly challenged from the wings, had generated
great growth in our subdiscipline-after all, success needs its scribes and
geopolitical leadership needs its experts.
None of this explains, precisely, how I ended up spending thirty years
studying Franklin Roosevelt, although it may explain, in part, my perspective
on that thirty-year project. In fact, I have only the vaguest idea how I got
interested in FDR in the first place. He was certainly not a household word in
my home, though years later I do recall my father mumbling that he had voted
once for Roosevelt-in 1936-and regretted it ever since. Yet my interest in
international relations may well have had its start there. Both my parents were
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lifetime members of what used to be an identifiable group-New England
internationalist Republicans. They voted the national Republican party ticket
because the Henry Cabot Lodges and Dwight D. Eisenhowers opposed the
great devil of the 1930s that had brought us into war-isolationism. Yet their
belief in the concept of the self-made man or woman made them look on the
growth of big government with suspicion and distrust. They never saw the
contradiction inherent in big government abroad and small government at
home.
Impelled, perhaps, by that same New England background, I began my
present incarnation as a colonial history graduate student. Digging through
dusty files at the Maryland House of Records was fascinating. Even as my
teaching at the Naval Academy forced me to focus on diplomacy, I formed a
lifelong interest in what colonial historian Max Savelle awkwardly but
accurately called the development of an American attitude toward external
affairs. It was, quite obviously, a variation of that same debate over isola-
tionism versus internationalism.
Whatever the detours, how does all that lead to FDR? In part, there is
accident. A term paper here, a good lecture there. Perhaps, without my
realizing it, my graduate director, Jules Davids, had inherited a bit of the
preoccupation with FDR of his mentor, Charles Callan Tansill. But FDR
seemed, from the beginning, to offer a perspective on all the history of
American foreign policy and diplomacy. Roosevelt was deeply, irrevocably
American. His responses to international situations time and again mirrored,
or better paralleled, events and responses of earlier and later times. When he
and his advisers called for free trade they used the phrase in the same curious
way that John Adams, Ben Franklin, and even Thomas Paine used it. Those
thirteen original colonies were founded on external (foreign) trade, a fact that
permanently structured the thinking of Americans. No wonder Oscar Handlin
would see the ideas of William Appleman Williams as grotesquely un-
American. They were just that-though not in the unpatriotic meaning of the
word as it was used in the superheated atmosphere of the Cold War.
Studying Roosevelt and his era seemed, then and now, to raise all the
right questions about America’s role abroad, during an era when major change
was possible. War is a chance for change, even revolutionary change-in the
case of world war, that is a worldwide opportunity. The decolonization of164 DIPLOMATIC HISTORY
European empires is only the most obvious example. Moreover, that the
Second World War followed on the heels of (and was perhaps part of) the
Great Depression made the industrialized world in particular receptive to
change. Certainly contemporaries, and this historian, found a multitude of
other opportunities to do, or at least try to do, the right thing. FDR undeniably
saw opportunities to spread the New Deal, and somewhere in the Kremlin
there must have been at least one Communist who believed.
But that sense of opportunity was lacking in so much of what I read about
that era. Even Charles Beard, who had proceeded from a commitment to
reform, became polemical and dogmatic. The ostensibly important works,
from Basil Rauch to Charles Tansill, were lawyers’ briefs that had discarded
even the faqade of objectivity, presenting the options that faced policymakers
in stark, black and white contrasts of right and wrong. The debate over FDR’s
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policies-whether they be the “back door to war” or the “Yalta sell-out”-had
turned into vicious historiographical warfare. When Charles Beard wrote of
that son-of-a-bitch Roosevelt, he likely had Samuel Eliot Morison in mind as
well.4 What struck me, time and again as I read the histories and dug through
the archives, was how inaccurately those extreme arguments-whether pro- or
anti-Rooseveltdepicted the actual choices faced and made by U.S.leaders.
That wariness of dogma disguised as truth, of belief camouflaged as
inquiry, came from all sorts of places. Years of education and training as a
philosophy major in Roman Catholic colleges, including a stint in the
seminary, must have played a role. At graduate school, Jules Davids eschewed
labels, reacting perhaps to Tansill’s emotionalism. The other diplomatic
historian at Georgetown, William Franklin, moonlighting from his position as
historian at the State Department, not surprisingly concentrated on the
documents printed in the Foreign Relations of the United States series.
But the most telling lesson on the dangers of a thesis as a guide to
thinking came after the goading of some reviewers of my dissertationhook,
The Most Unsordid Act. They complained that I had not sufficiently
elaborated on my conclusion that Roosevelt and the act’s main proponent,
Henry Morgenthau, Jr., had no ulterior economic/expansionist motive in
proposing lend-lea~e.~ What those reviewers were looking for was a consis-
tent, long-term pattern, and I was eager to oblige. Armed with an attitude, and
blissfully ignorant of the increasingly nasty nondebate developing between
Cold War Liberals and the New Left, I dove into the archives and came out,
after some uncomfortable reflection, with just the opposite conclusions. FDR
4Basil Rauch, Roosevelr: From Munich to Pearl Harbor (New Yo&, 1950); Charles Callan
Tansill, Back Door to War: The Roosevelt Foreign Policy, 19334941 (Chicago, 1952).
Morison’s nasty attack on Beard came in “Did Roosevelt Start the War? History through a
Beard,” Atlantic Monthly 182 (August 1948): 91-97. For the historiography and bibliography of
Franklin Roosevelt’s foreign policy start with J. Garry Clifford, “Both Ends of the Telescope.:
New Perspectives on FDR and American Entry in World War 11,” Diplomatic History 13 (Spring
1989): 213-30; Wayne Cole, “American Entry into World War 11: A Historiographical
Appraisal,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 43 (March 1957): 595-619; and two articles by
Mark Stoler, “World War I1 Diplomacy in Historical Writing: Prelude to Cold War,” in American
Foreign Relations: A Historiographical Review, ed. Gerald K. Haines and J. Samuel Walker
(Westport. CT, 1981). 187-206. and “A Half-Century of Conflict: Interpretations of U.S.World
War 11 Diplomacy’’(in press for publication in the Summer 1994 issue of Diplomatic Hisfory),
“The Most Unsordid Act”: Lend-Lease. 19394941 (Baltimore, 1969).THE TWO MUSKETEERS 165
may not have drawn up lend-lease with long-term economic advantage in
mind, but when it came to negotiating the terms of lend-lease aid, I concluded,
the president insisted on some very specific long-term concessions from
Britain.‘
That wariness of historical belief-systems became ingrained in the early
seventies after the American Historical Review somehow designated me a
reviewer of early Cold War studies-perhaps because the editors recognized
the overpowering tendency to evaluate Second World War diplomacy in terms
set by Cold War debates. Willy-nilly I was drawn into the highly politicized
dispute, then raging and still smoldering, between the neo-Beardian “New
Left” and the informal coalition of liberals and conservatives that, while
disagreeing as to the appropriate tactics, had agreed on the origins and nature
of the Cold War. It was an unpleasant experience replete with nasty telephone
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calls, pressure from unidentified quarters on the editor and on me to change
what I had written, nasty shouting matches, and bitter invective. It was our
profession at its least civil. Whatever the heat and merits of the arguments,’
the stark choices of interpretation and motivation were, for me, inadequate as
an historical explanation and, at the same time, a lesson in the dangers of
political commitment. I didn’t then use the word “reductionist,” but I had, I
realize, concluded that history-at least the history of the Second World War
and origins of the Cold War-was much too complex, too unpredictable, and
too human to fit neatly into any too-fixed constellation of thought.
The difficulty of reconciling history and ideology is complicated by the
way our discipline-a word that gives us a good deal more rigor than we
practice-consistently indulges in linguistic maneuvers. Take, for example,
the ingenious or disingenuous expropriation of the root “real,” as in “the
Realists.” I cannot know if Professor Morgenthau knew how devilishly clever
he was when he conflated his perfectly legitimate theory of what made in-
ternational relations tick with “real” and “realistic”-words English speakers
use imprecisely to mean “self-evident” and “common-sensical.” Perhaps he
adopted the word because, with the benign arrogance of the theorist, he found
his ideas self-evident common sense. So we have generations of students and,
unfortunately, scholars equating a geopolitical theory of relations between
states with self-evident common sense. It’s tough to argue against both
scholars and the New York Times even if one uses a capital “r” and the other
doesn’t. It was a ploy reminiscent of Alexander Hamilton’s expropriation of
the term Federalist-when he really intended centralization of power.
My own struggle with the varying meanings of isolation and isolationism
also brought me to distrust, dislike, and disavow labels, whether they be
sloppy oversimplificationsor a disguise for beliefs. Historians, politicians, and
journalists bequeath misunderstandings on us by using words like “isolation”
when they mean insulation, or “neutrality” when they mean impartiality. And
why did Williams perversely label his theory of what shapes American foreign
‘Warren F. Kimball, “Lend-Lease and the Open Door: The Temptation of British Opulence,
1937-1942,” Political Science Quarterly 86 (June 1971): 232-59. Reprinted with revisions in The
Juggler: Franklin Roosevelt as Wartime Statesman (Princeton, 1991).
7F0r which see my review essay, “The Cold War Warmed Over,” American Historical
Review 89 (October 1974): 1119-36.166 DlPLOMATIC HISTORY
policy “the open door,” when John Hay had beaten him to the punch? I never
thought the English language was so short of proper nouns that we had to
invent new meanings for the same words, but now, as with Realists (realists),
we are stuck with the confusion.8
As the “schooling” of diplomatic historians became the vogue (I use the
word “schooling” because I am reminded of nothing so much as schools of
fish darting this way and that in response to some unheard command), I
wrestled with fitting FDR neatly into this or that category, but always to no
avail. The currently popular “Neo-Wilsonian Realist” (or r e a l i ~ t )is~ either a
contradiction in terms or broadens the meaning of Realist (or realist) to the
point that every government leader qualifies. With apologies to William
James, I opted instead for a method (not a theory) of examining how policy-
makers operate at more than one level. Hence my interest in uncovering the
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longer-term assumptions of policymakers and then comparing those ideas to
their often contradictory actions at the more tangible level of shorter-term
geopolitical fire-fighting. For example, Roosevelt believed in eliminating
European colonial empires, yet he acquiesced to the reentry of the French into
Indochina. Rightly or wrongly, those positions were not contradictory for
FDR, but at two different levels of thought and action.I0
History is a series of contradictions, and historians spend years, even
careers, trying to reconcile those contradictions, seeming to make the pre-
sumption that everything someone does must fit neatly into a fixed pattern of
purpose and action. Assumptions, those of Franklin Roosevelt in my case,
often push someone in a general direction, but the pressures of daily decisions
(geopolitics for foreign policymakers) frequently generate actions that
frustrate and confute those long-term goals. In fact, people, governments, and
anything run by humans all avoid hard choices like the plague. To bring that
comment into my milieu, I know of no evidence that FDR’s famous
bureaucratic style came from any conscious, planned strategy-whatever the
mythology. ‘ I His postponing of difficult decisions, his evading of controversy,
his sweeping of nasty problems under the rug were all part of the normal
human desire not to cross the bridge ’ti1 one comes to it. We all have
irreconcilable goals and desires but we ignore those contradictions until we
have to “cross that bridge.” Of course, anyone studying FDR crosses that
bridge a dozen times per day, as he did-but that is true for most history. Our
8A classic illustration of the problem of interlingual homonyms was the suggestion made
back in the 1980s by some American scholars to their Soviet counterparts for a comparative study
of “frontiers.” An interminable silence followed. US.requests for a response met with evasive
action for nearly three years until someone in Moscow finally r e a l i d that the Americans were
not proposing a discussion of boundaries and territorial expansion (not that such was not a
worthwhile and equally uncomfortable process for both societies).
9See, for example, the review by Joseph Nye in the New York Times Book Review,
3 October 1993.
‘Osee Kimball. The Juggler, 7-8, for a longer discussion of layered analysis. On Indochina
see Kimball and FEd Pollock, ‘‘ ‘In Search of Monsters to Destroy’: Roosevelt and Colonialism,”
ibid., 146-57.
‘‘Even a cursory reading of the best biography (of any political figure) I have ever read,
Geoffrey C. Ward, A First-class Temperamenr: The Emergence of Franklin Roosevelt (New
Yo&, 1989). illustrates that FDR’s vaunted “style” was instinctive rather than calculated.THE TWO MUSKETEERS 167
obsessive search for consistency, mirrored in our equally obsessive search for
a comfortable theory that explains all, is destined to fail.
Much of the schooling that so occupies us is in response to the current
or conventional (whatever that means) interpretation. For example, George
Kennan’s American Diplomacy, 1900-1950 came in response to the moral-
legal arguments that grew out of the strange combining of Wilsonianism and
the Cold War. Badly needed correctives to the elitist picture set out in
A. Whitney Griswold’s The Far Eastern Policy of the United States them-
selves overexaggerated the importance of public opinion on policy. William
Appleman Williams exaggerated his arguments in The Tragedy of American
Diplomacy as he reacted to the celebratory explanations of the expansion of
American power in the twentieth century-something he later admitted. l2
Whatever the need for new approaches, the tendency is to balance one
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exaggeration by exaggerating the balance weight. We are all, as it were,
unbalanced.
An endless parade of historians has characterized FDR as devious, incon-
sistent, and impenetrable-someone who defied easy labels. They have then
proceeded to label, categorize, and slot him in ways that I have never found
satisfying. I have never come upon any label accurate or even useful for
describing Roosevelt and his foreign policy. Labels, by their nature, cannot
take into consideration that people change their minds-sometimes openly,
sometimes without admitting it. I have stuck with the quasi-biographical
approach because of the conviction that labels imply a degree of consistency
in human thought and action that is not there. Along with that has come a deep
distrust of schooling, despite the recent argument of one of our members that
“it ain’t nothin’ if it ain’t got a name.” I was charmed (and persuaded) when, a
few years ago, one of the founders of the “corporatist school” candidly
admitted that the corporatist theory did not work in all cases.
A few months ago at a conference in England I was presenting my views
on FDR’s conception of the two/three/four policemen concept. During the
discussion I idly suggested that the Polish question-which confronted
Churchill and Roosevelt from the day Hitler attacked the Soviet Union
because Stalin almost immediately asked that his new allies recognize the
Soviet-Polish frontier (that is, boundary)-should have made it clear to
Roosevelt that his scheme of a world where the Great Powers set and enforced
the rules simply could not work. The so-called lesser nations, a category that
in FDR’s mind included France, Canada, and eventually, I think, even China,
had interests and nonnegotiable demands that would not go away just because
a policeman said so. In any event, a colleague came up afterwards and claimed
that I was contradicting myself, that my written pitch on FDR and his postwar
proposals had always been that Roosevelt was, and I quote, “a Realist.” I
couldn’t see the capital r, but I could hear it. After thirty years of trying to
avoid facile labeling, there it was.
I add, hastily, that a label is not the equivalent of a theory or even a
school. But it is striking how much we all claim to dislike labels, yet we are
then forced to speak in the same tongues. Does theory require a name?
”W.A. Williams to the author (1975).168 DIPLOMATIC HISTORY
Certainly we have historians who use labels as a substitute for theory, and
others who use them as a pseudo-intellectual form of name calling.
You are hearing this from the same historian who challenged Thomas A.
Bailey some fifteen years ago on the issue of theory disguised as narrative. My
argument then, and now, is that Bailey, like every other historian, wrote from
a theory (interpretation is the softer word).13 But in his case, we historians
failed to identify and analyze that interpretive framework because we, like the
students, were beguiled and distracted by Bailey’s entertainment value. Tom
Bailey angrily accused me of prefemng boring history, but he missed the
point-as I told him. My complaint was not about his wonderful style, but
about the generations of historians who had, like their students, succumbed to
that style without recognizing the interpretation that lay hidden beneath.
It is one thing to understand that the act of observation is itself subjective
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and hence theory laden; historians must always be conscious of their own
assumptions. Theory as the object of study is extraordinarily useful. Theory
should open our eyes to alternative, perhaps better, paths to good history.
Moreover, such studies force us to confront challenges to our own
suppositions-it takes an outsider to assess the theory or presumptions of
others. Someone else has to tell me what I am, theoretically, if scholarly
discourse is to function.
But it is quite another thing to adopt a theory. To adopt a theory is to
adopt a faith. To.do that postulates the validity of a neo-positivism, the
assertion that we can deduce (divine might be a better word) universal laws
that explain what makes things happen, for humans as well as for the material
universe. That is an implausible position that reeks of dogma and revealed
truth. This is more than an easy denunciation of preformed judgments. It is an
argument that historians consciously must try to allow histories to take their
own pattern, not one imposed by lazy labels and hardened by ego and
argumentation. I have, for example, tried hard to confront my own interna-
tionalist leanings-“instinctive belief” one critic suggested.
Nor is that the only face-off I have had with challenges to what I thought
were givens. The journey I took was being taken by many of my peers. In fact,
looking backward, it seems apparent that the argument from political economy
being made in the 1960s by a small number of diplomatic historians was, by
the 1970s. either being adopted, coopted, or incorporated to a degree by
almost all of us, despite some vigorous claims to the contrary. What intrigued
me was my reading of Herbert Feis-a master historian of the era-whose
evidence invariably included mounds of material on the politics of American
economic beliefs, even while he privately schemed to discredit those who
asserted that economics drove American foreign policy. It was not so much a
conversion for me, as sensitivity training-sensitivity to the contradictions in
our foreign policy and diplomacy, and sensitivity to the need to examine the
assumptions that lie beneath the actions. More specifically, it was a powerful
lesson on FDRs elusiveness.
13‘‘Seductionwithout Satisfaction: Textbooks and the Teaching of American Diplomatic
History.” Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations Newsletter (June 1980).THE TWO MUSKETEERS 169
Such healthy uncertainty is heightened by the anecdotal nature of what we
do. Even if we were able to know and digest all the external facts-an obvious
impossibility-history is about humans, and human actions cannot be fully
comprehended. If psychiatry tells us nothing ‘else (and it seems to tell us
increasingly less these days), it reveals that we cannot understand ourselves-
we can only hope to accept what we are. We have taken positivism, what
E. H. Carr dismissed as the “cult of facts,”14and consigned it, quite properly,
to the realm of curious but mistaken ideas. Likewise, we should take
rationalism and add a grain of salt. Perhaps those who study, or imagine, great
forces without people think they can determine rules, patterns, historical
forces-but forty years of reading the newspapers leaves me convinced that
the term “political science” is an oxymoron.
I suspect my empathy for FDR is heightened by my sympathy for his
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rejection of theory (“isms” he called them) and his attempt (not always
successful) to follow the pragmatic advice of William James to reject
assumptions, which are, after all, what theories are made of. That does not
mean that Franklin Roosevelt came to the White House without assumptions
or ideologies of his own. He was, as I have said before, the quintessential
believer in American values and institutions. We can and should use concepts
as a means to analyze people, but slapping a label on Roosevelt suggests a
consistency that cannot hope to explain the nuance and complexity of his
presumptions and principles. In fact, FDR was not a Realist, a Communist, a
Progressive, a Liberal, or any of the other facile shortcuts often used to avoid
analysis. He was FDR.15
Of course, a preoccupation such as mine has its own dangers. For
decades, students and colleagues of Howard K. Beale grew increasingly
amused and, perhaps, bemused as the great historian took on more and more
of the characteristics of his main historical character-Theodore Roosevelt.
From panama hats, white linen suits, and a walking stick to shouts of “Bully!,”
Beale seemed to have become his subject. With a good deal of affection,
friends and colleagues of Arthur Link speak of the reincarnation of Woodrow
Wilson in the person of his major biographer and the editor of his papers.
Merle Coulter, the cantankerous historian of the South, took on, I am told, the
personality and prejudices of the Southern aristocrats he studied, and I must
confess that upon meeting the controversial John Charmley a few months ago
he reminded me of nothing so much as how a younger Churchill must have
appeared-flamboyant, always on stage, and fully equipped with cigar and
ample girth.
I am dismissed in a recent book as a member of the “Roosevelt nomen-
clature.”I6 Whatever the logic or illogic of such ad hominem slurs, those sorts
of suspicions are commonplace. Is that the fate of all historians who focus on
I4E. H. Cam, Whar Is History?, 2d ed.(London, 1986), 3.
15As he once put it himself, in what is perhaps his only self-description-I am a Christian
and a D(d?)emocrat. That does not, of course, contradict what I havejust argued.
16This usage is, presumably, intended as a cute corruption of the Russian nomenkluturu-
the corrupt, careerist Soviet bureaucracy. I somehow missed being lumped by the same author as
part of Roosevelt’s “praetorian guards.” Amos Perlmutter, FDR & Stalin: A No? So Grand
Alliance, 1943-1945 (Columbia, 1993). 1, 14.49.170 DIPLOMATIC HISTORY
individuals? Are they invariably relegated to that place in the attic of
historians' minds reserved for their colleagues who have lost perspective and
become advocates and apologi~ts?'~
That gets to the question of people-historical agency, to use the tech-
nical term. My own search for how to calculate the importance, the contri-
bution, the difference made by the leaders I have spent thirty years studying
replicates, in miniature, an endless debate in the historical profession-both
inside and outside our own little comer. Do individuals make, or even signifi-
cantly affect, the course of history? Are they worth studying? Hardly a new
question, but one that remains with us. Who is right-Karl Marx or Thomas
Carlyle? C. L. Sulzberger or B. F. Skinner? Perhaps the real issue is whether
diplomatic history is biography or quantum mechanics. Do we study people,
or great forces?
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That is, of course, a false eitherhr question. We are in the business of
trying to determine the relative influence of great forces as deflected and
interpreted by individuals. What determined the nature of the postwar
settlement after World War II? Communism? Capitalism? Nationalism?
Industrialism? Welfare State Socialism? Or Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin?
To take individuals out of history, particularly out of foreign policy history, is
to opt for easy answers-we might as well argue that the real determinants of
human history are the irrevocable and irresistible forces of sunlight, gravity,
and the environment. That is hardly the kind of usable history that Brooks,
Becker, Beard, and Bailey-to mention only the Bs-believed in and
practiced.
When William Appleman Williams criticized one of his own students for
putting too much emphasis on the effect of external events on American
policy, he was offering a variation on the debate over the relative importance
of people (and ideas) versus geopolitical pressures. For the thirty years I have
labored with Roosevelt, Churchill, and their interaction in World War 11, I
have tried to answer the same question. If FDR and/or Churchill had never
lived, how different would things have been? I still have no answer-or rather
have managed to answer it all three ways on different occasions.
For nearly five decades, historians have viewed the war through the prism
of the Big Three,leaving the impression that Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin
were not only in charge, but in control. For the Anglo-Americans, there are
few secrets left (even if federal agencies have dragged their feet in disgraceful
fashion, refusing to declassify certain World War 11 files that are now over
fifty years old!). A number of recent books suggest that Churchill was not the
dominant mover in Soviet-British relations in 1941, even if he was a major
171 hope I am safe, at least for the immediate future, from such subject identification if for
no other reason than I do not like Franklin Roosevelt as a person-with the possible exception of
the way he responded to being a victim of polio. He used others, even those who thought him a
close friend. For him, friendship was a one-way street that seemed to begin with the question-
what have you done for me lately? Even his relationship with his wife and children was sadly
sterile and studied, though he obviously enjoyed their company. In both the good and the
bad sense, Franklin Roosevelt met George Steiner's prerequisite for greatness4hildish
self-centeredness.THE TWO MUSKETEERS 171
player.’* Likewise, much recent scholarship presents FDR as passive at worst,
opportunistic and unfocused at best.
By concentrating on broad patterns in American and Anglo-American
history we run the risk of homogenizing that history and losing sight of its
singular aspects. This is, of course, another round in the battle between
Thomas Carlyle and Karl Marx. One could speculate plausibly (as Marx might
have) that Anthony Eden, Lord Halifax, or even Neville Chamberlain would
have carried out much the same policies as Churchill. Yet, was Churchill’s
role not essential in two aspects: his inspirational and managerial leadership,
and the broad assumptions of Anglo-American partnership he canied with him
to the end of the war-and after?
Likewise, Roosevelt, whatever his shortcomings as a manager, was an
extraordinary leader. “It is hard to imagine Anthony Eden or Clement Attlee
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peering out pugnaciously from wartime recruiting posters, or Cordell Hull
evoking spontaneous cheers by suddenly appearing among Allied troops.” Are
Roosevelt and Churchill irrelevant-relegated to mere anecdotes-in the face
of the great forces at work? Are British and American bureaucracies at the
nexus of decision making? To say that is to argue that neither FDR nor Sir
Winston made decisions that others would not have made. I wonder. Would
Willkie have stuck with Europe first? Would Hull have overruled Marshall
about TORCH? Would Chamberlain have supported Dowding during the
battle of Britain? Would Halifax have committed Britain to defiance of Hitler,
even in the face of defeat? How many American leaders would have stuck,
through thick and thin, to a policy that assumed the wartime alliance with both
Britain and the Soviet Union could be the foundation for the postwar system?
For Franklin Roosevelt and all leaders, the devil, not God, was in the details.
But are these not variations of questions to ask about any aspect of foreign
policy and diplomacy?
One of the things studying FDR has straightened out for me is the
argument over international versus diplomatic versus foreign policy history.
They are simply three halves of the same walnut (that may pose physical
contradictions, but not conceptual ones). Whatever the thundering of the
multilingual devotees, I soon came to learn that their work is neither less nor
more important than what others are doing. I did what my limited language
abilities allowed me to do, and I use and admire the work of those who can do
things I cannot. What Americans think and do is, of course, affected by the
actions and assessments of others, but I slowly came to realize that what a
Romanian diplomat said to a Turkish emissary about Franklin Roosevelt had
precious little relevance for why FDR did what he did.
One further note about this age-old problem of historical agency. The
currently popular Stalin-as-paranoid thesis of Cold War causation constitutes
the extreme argument for the Great Madworld Historical Figure theory of
history. The inevitable results of that kind of historical approach appeared in
postwar Germany where virtually every German professed either ignorance of
‘‘See, for example, Gabriel Gorodetsky, Stafford Cripps’ Mission to Moscow, 194042
(Cambridge, England, 1984). and Steven Miner, Between Churchill and Srulin (Chapel Hill,
1988), which, while presenting far different views of Sir Stafford Cripps. emphasize the role of
Anthony Eden over Churchill in formulating British policy toward the USSR.172 DIPLOMATIC HISTORY
Hitler’s deeds or offered the “I was just following orders” explanation. The
current historical memory about the Soviet Union, on the part of the bulk of
Russians and Americans, has only a single villain-Josef Stalin. Everyone
else was helpless in the face of such a monster.19 Is that where the United
States will end up when it evaluates the outrageous behavior of the CIA? Was
Lyndon Johnson (and perhaps a handful of advisers), then, responsible for the
Vietnam War? Or is it just possible that the German, Soviet, and American
publics all bought into the assumptions and logic of their leaders andor
vice versa?
But perhaps the question of personalities versus historical forces is a false
one. I have often quoted Oscar Wilde’s aphorism that “it is personalities, not
principles that move the age.” But, I always cautiously suggest, did not “those
personalities have principles?” Moreover, as both E. H. Carr and common
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sense have told us, numbers count.20 Roosevelt and Churchill, by virtue of
their authority, had “numbers” behind them-whether it was the number of
soldiers, weapons, technology, money, or of all the other assets their nations
could muster. And they had the “numbers” that accrued to those who
promised to stop, once and for all, war and suffering. Innovative historians
like Perry Miller and Erik Erikson demonstrated the value of studying the
inner person operating within the external world. In Hegel’s perceptive phrase,
“The great figure of the age . . . actualizes that age.”*l
Putting aside whether or not individuals make it all happen, is history
more than narrative and chronology? In a letter to the editor of the New York
Times, Martin Scorsese complained that reviews of Federico Fellini offered a
form of censorship when they claimed Fellini let “style get in the way of his
storytelling.” The result was that his films, according to the reviewer, were
“not easily accessible to audiences.”22 I am hardly qualified to address
whether easy accessibility is essential, antithetical, or irrelevant to art, but I do
wonder a bit about historians who let theory get in the way of history. Of
course, history is not mere storytelling-although without the story it may not
be history. Of course, history does require us to do our best as artists to assay
the motives, superficial and hidden, behind the story. We have all encountered
colleagues and graduate students who are full of a great deal of theory but all
too little history. History as an act of faith, despite Charles Beard’s cautionary
advice, generates bitter warfare that, though often couched in ad hominem or
ad corpus terms, is in fact a desperate attempt to validate one’s own
interpretational positi0n.2~After all, our egos, images, and self-appraisal are at
stake-and consistency is not the hobgoblin of just small minds.
19Things may change when and if scholars gain full access to Soviet archives, but for now
we have a new breed of Kremlinologistsbuilding theses on one or two documents,the provenance
of which is often unavailable. That is only a small step beyond the days when whole books were
written analyzing Soviet foreign policy based on who stood next to whom atop Lenin’s tomb.
Intriguingly, the image of a helpless public seems to find diplomatic historians at both ends of the
interpretive spectrumjoining-losing the circle as it were.
*‘Can, What Is History?, 43-44.
2’See Perry Miller, Jonathan Edwardr (New York, 1949); and Erik H. Erikson, Young Man
Luther (New York, 1958). Hegel is quoted in Carr, whaf Is History?, 48.
22Letter to the New York Times, 25 November 1993.
23Charles A. Beard,“Written History as an Act of Faith.” American Historical Review 39
(January 1934): 219-29. I have been roundly, and perhaps properly, chastised for gross misuse ofTHE TWO MUSKETEERS 173
Beyond egos and personal agendas, where should we be going with
World War II studies? I have thought of hiring myself out as a sort of oxidant
for revolution. I arrived in Portugal in 1974 just in time to be greeted at the
border by soldiers with red carnations instead of medals, and cradling young
women in their arms instead of loaded guns. A Fulbright year in Spain
coincided with Franco’s death, the arrival of democracy, and the departure of
armed guards from my (and everyone else’s) classroom. A visit to the Soviet
IJnion in 1985 found an excited young Russian historian rushing into OUT com-
partment breathlessly exclaiming: “It’s a revolution! Shevardnadze has
replaced Gromyko. It’s a revolution!” We smiled, unknowingly. Of course he
was right.
The major potential resource for new, perhaps dramatically new, data on
Second World War history is the Soviet archives-a real opportunity despite
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the combination of bureaucracy, habit, and greed that continues to limit
access. But the real revolution for historians may be the freeing of our minds
from the confines of the Cold War-an intellectual straitjacket that has
affected all our thinking. I have spent thirty years trying to escape the clutches
of the Cold War. Without having read Lytton Strachey or E. H. Carr, I knew I
could not be ignorant enough to write Cold War history. Or, put another way,
the Cold War was, to borrow from Marshall McLuhan, too “hot” a medium.
But not writing about the Cold War was not enough to keep it in per-
spective. The most cited monographs on Second World War diplomacy focus
on the development of Soviet-American discord, even if the two states
combined with Britain and other allies to inflict near-complete defeat on
Germany, Italy, and Japan. Editor after editor of Diplomatic History has
complained that they are overwhelmed with Cold War and contemporary
articles-only demonstrating the presentism that suffuses foreign policy
history. That is not surprising-most diplomatic historians have their secret
Walter Mitty world in which they are makers instead of chroniclers of foreign
policy, and we are all often enjoined to write in terms of public policy.24I am
not making the absurd suggestion that Soviet-American relations in World
War I1 were irrelevant to the war and to the postwar world. Quite the contrary.
But angry debates with their immediate origins in disputes over Cold War
guilt offer only limited insights into the history of the Second World War, or,
for that matter, any other aspect of the history of American foreign policy.
Perhaps World War I1 as a fight against the horrors of Hitler was the
“Good War.” Does that qualify the Cold War against the repressiveness of
Stalinism for the same title? Isn’t the grandeur of unequivocal war-replete
with its formal declarations, Geneva conventions, and body of rules for so-
called civilized warfare-what made it possible for people to talk of the “long
peace” rather than the Cold War? After all, nothing happened between 1945
the word “theory.” When I asked my critic to tell me what word I should use, I got a litany-
school, position, approach, perspective, assumption, interpretation,and so on. So I have used them
all, including theory.
24This raises and begs the questions of historians who chide others for making “history into
an instrument of politics’’ while almost in the same breath insisting that diplomatic historians have
a responsibility to write and think in terms of current public policy. Both are forms of what the
“progressives” labeled the “search for a useable past.” Have any diplomatic historians yet been
born who do not see. themselves as new and improved secretaries of state?174 DIPLOMATIC HISTORY
and 1990 that could inspire another War and Peace, so why elevate things like
Korea, Suez, and Vietnam to the status of great events? But if World War I1
was something different from the Good War, something less than a self-
justifying moral crusade, if it was, even in part, just another war, then our
American experience takes on a very different tone.
I am not the first to contend that we now have an opportunity to go
beyond the stale theoretical debates over Realism and Middle-Aged Leftism (a
horrible phrase, but better than Wisconsinism or Williamsism) that have
dominated our thinking for the past three decades, affecting not only the
historiography of Cold War studies but our analyses of history back to the
American Revolution and before. And even if Cold War studies cannot escape
that compartment, the rest of diplomatic history can and should.
But that sort of investigation does not come easily to Ike’s kids, trained
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and acculturated in an era where the good guys and the bad guys were easily
distinguishable-if not by their white or black hats then by their political
economy, History was not so much a means to some deeper truth as it was a
justification of our actions and a narrative of our success. History was a nice,
pleasant way to make a living.
But it is essential that we seize this opportunity to move FDR and the
Second World War, and most other parts of diplomatic history, outside the
tentacles of Cold War assumptions and arguments. Perhaps Robert Oppen-
heimer’s depiction of the United States and the USSR in the Cold War as two
scorpions in a bottle-inevitably and unthinkingly hostile-is right. In any
event, that seems the case for my generation of Cold War h i ~ t o r i a n sBut
. ~ ~that
was not true for FDR and that e r a - o r eras before him. Real choices were still
possible, and choices were made-be they right or wrong.
I have been involved with this subdiscipline at a time when it has grown
in leaps and bounds-as Diplomatic History and SHAFR can attest.
Unfortunately, that process has been accompanied by, or part of, what Richard
Leopold has astutely called the “Balkanization of history” and, I would add,
the marginalization of diplomatic and political history.26I cannot diagnose the
profession’s ills-though that is a presidential compulsion-but there is
something wrong with the 1994 OAH “Call for Papers.” According to the
notice, the theme of the program was “the history of political ideologies and
social movements.” Yet the accompanying lengthy list of subdisciplines that
have devoted “serious attention” to studying political ideologies made no
reference to the history of foreign policy and diplomacy.27 That glaring
omission by the OAH is, I suspect, a bad habit rather than a conscious
dismissal of a large body of important scholarship. But whatever the cause, it
is a habit that has begun to develop a siege mentality among diplomatic
historians.
Why has this happened? Are we, in some subconscious way, being
blamed for the collapse of reform during the Cold War and the lack of focus
250f course, any organization comprised of people who spend such an inordinate amount of
time studying the life-and-death questions of war, power, and coercion is, by definition, testy.
26L.eopoldto the author, 9 September 1993.
*’OAH [Organization ofAmerican Hisrorians]Newslerrer (August 1993).THE TWO MUSKETEERS 175
that has followed? Is this some sort of primal return to an instinctive form of
nationalism and isolationism-however that deconstructs?
Having succumbed, a little, to the diagnostic temptation, let me pose one
last question. I am a bit puzzled by the appeal to the “cultural dimension.”
What, pray tell, are cultural relations? High culture?-obviously not. Intel-
lectual contacts? Literary allusions? Popular perceptions? Does that dimension
go beyond (or not as far as) politics, policies, and leaders? Or is it a vague,
catch-all phrase for the totality of everything? If so, then how does it go
beyond what some diplomatic historians have done for at least the last twenty
to twenty-five years and sometimes earlier? Wasn’t Henry Adams writing
history in the cultural dimension back at the turn of the century? What about
Albert Weinberg and Frederick Merk? If I may play deconstructionist (or at
least heurist), is it not possible that the phrase “cultural relations” describes
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the accumulation of enough anecdotal evidence from all sources to draw
artistic conclusions about our subject?-something we have long agreed is
what we do, even if some do it better than others.28
So then, where am I with this thirty-year project, having denied theory/
ideology in the singular and Cold War categories in the particular, having
rejected being schooled, having denied the existence of history without
individuals? Certainly the work is not done. There is, first of all, Trollope’s
truism to keep in mind:
How often does the novelist feel, ay, and the historian also . . . , that he has
. . . accurately depicted on the tablet of his brain the full character and
personage of a man, and that nevertheless, when he flies to pen and ink to
perpetuate the portrait, his words forsake, elude, disappoint, and play the
deuce with him, till at the end of a dozen pages the man described has no
more resemblance to the man conceived than the sign board at the corner of
the street has to the Duke of Cambridge?29
But I remain engaged not only because the portrait is flawed and because I do
not have all the answers, but because the answers seem to change. The end of
the Cold War has, if anything, renewed my interest and perhaps removed
some blinders I could not escape. Certainly it has resuscitated the old debate
over the “fate,” or at least the postwar disposition, of Eastern Europe-
although the specter of refighting that historiographical battle makes me
wonder if we do not approach retirement just in time.
Roosevelt’s ripples touched the world, the nation, the government, and
those who came into contact with him. More than any other single American,
he set into place and/or motion the institutions, patterns, and outlines of the
**This is said despite the best efforts of my friends to educate me on these matters
(“sweeping away the clouds of ignorance” was the phrase one of them used). Nor should it be
thought that I am denigrating the contribution being made by those who focus on things other than
high politics to an understanding of the causes of our foreign policy. John Dower’s superb War
wirhout Mercy (New York, 1986) is but one excellent example. Similarly, the kind of gender
studies practiced by Cynthia Enloe in Bananas, Beaches, and Bases (Los Angeles, 1989). and The
Morning After: Sexual Politics and rhe End of the Cold War (LQSAngeles, 1993), offers some
important insights. My comments are more a reaction to the tendency to dismiss diplomatic
history as unimportant if not irrelevant-a tendency not shared either by students or the book-
buyinjjpblic.
Anthony Trollope, Barchesrer Towers (New York, 1963). 181.176 DIPLOMATIC HISTORY
international history that followed. And I remain unsure just how that all
worked. I do know, with some certainty, that the only way to comprehend
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, his world, and his choices-whatever their limits
-is to try to put him in the context of his world, not mine, and not that of the
real and intellectual cold war that has overwhelmed us for five decades. No
historian would argue that they can actually do that-but should we not try?
Am I sitting, as a friend once put it, on all three sides of the fence?
Perhaps. But I like to think that there are no fences in our historical inquiries,
only a series of paths that intersect, parallel, and twist around each other in
ways that never end. Walt Whitman could have been describing all historians
when he wrote:
Do I contradict myself?
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Very well then I contradict myself
(I am large, I contain multitudes).You can also read
