Listening to Douglas Brinkley record his surprise about how thoughtful and engaged Reagan was confirmed our conviction that liberals are trapped in their own prejudices more than the conservatives they so often malign.

As I sit down to write it is Memorial Day, a day on which we give thanks to the men and women in uniform who have sacrificed so much for our freedoms.
 
But it is also a time to reflect on the men and women who have shaped our nation’s history and on those who write that history, whether its first draft (journalists) or the retrospective version (historians).
 
C-SPAN, a marvelous vehicle for informed discussion, aired several shows on or just before Memorial Day that demonstrated why so many conservatives feel alienated from the mainstream media and academia.
 
First, Douglas Brinkley, now a historian at Rice University, was featured on a show that focused on the diaries of President Ronald Reagan. Brinkley acknowledged that he was greatly surprised to find that Reagan cared about people, that he was not simply a “cold warrior” trapped in his limited views about government and the Soviet Union. Reagan had a sense of humor, Brinkley observed, and did not disagree disagreeably. All of this seemed a revelation to Brinkley.
 
One would like to give Brinkley credit for discovering all this about Reagan some 20 years after his presidency, but it also serves as an illustration of the bias of our academic historians. Apparently Brinkley has been too absorbed with his explorations of Hunter S. Thompson and Jack Keroac to read the many biographies that don’t repeat the standard liberal line about one of our nation’s great presidents. Indeed, his lack of knowledge about Reagan made me wonder how he got assigned as editor of the diaries in the first place.
 
For those of us who have long admired Reagan’s optimism and intuitive leadership skills, listening to Brinkley record his surprise about how thoughtful and engaged Reagan was confirmed our conviction that liberals are trapped in their own prejudices more than the conservatives they so often malign.
 
Yet another example was the rebroadcast of a panel discussion held at the John F. Kennedy Library. The discussion, which first aired in March, featured liberal lions Daniel Schorr, Anthony Lewis and Jill Conway. As they reflected on the great events of the 20th century, one could not help being struck by how completely tethered to left/liberal bias each of them were. (For a more balanced discussion on the same topic I recommend a Charlie Rose episode featuring Henry Kissinger, Bill Buckley and Walter Isaacson.)
 
These liberal biases were clearly shared by the JFK audience, for in the course of the evening different audience members suggested that Bush stole the 2004 election (yes, 2004), that Republicans were corrupting electoral politics by controlling voting machines, and that Bush ought to be impeached.
 
Lewis was on a rampage. He observed that the United States overthrew or was complicit in the overthrow of freely elected governments in Iran, Guatemala, and Chile. While there is truth to this claim, these actions hardly occurred in a fit of anti-democratic pique. Lewis failed to point out that in each case, the overturned power was moving into the Soviet orbit, at a time when our nation was engaged in a sustained “Cold War” against arguably the greatest threat to individual rights in human history.
 
Lewis likewise accused the Bush administration of torturing prisoners and illegally holding captive prisoners of war. He blamed the media for being remiss in not covering all the constitutional breaches of which he believes Bush guilty. Schorr, at the ripe age of 90, was restrained compared to Lewis, but all on hand seemed to be lamenting the Bush presidency.
 
One doesn’t expect a panel of liberal historians and journalists to applaud Bush, but in the spirit of fairness that supposedly governs their profession they might have acknowledged the complex issues Bush and his administration are confronting: enemy combatants who disguise themselves as citizens, who not only torture innocent people in the most gruesome ways, but who murder tens of thousands of women and children wantonly and without remorse. We are facing antagonists who, if set loose in our cities, would not hesitate to detonate a nuclear bomb and reduce them to cinders. They do not abide by the Geneva conventions or any other recognized code of military behavior and thus hardly qualify as combatants deserving to be covered by those agreements.
 
Lewis and Schorr, who lived through World War II, failed to remind their liberal audience that the good guys during that war used two nuclear bombs, firebombed major cities, and killed hundreds of thousands of civilians. The tenacious fighting between American and Japanese soldiers has been documented by Paul Fussell and many others.
 
Despite doing what was necessary to win that war, America managed to carry on, Constitution and Bill of Rights fully intact thanks to leaders who insisted on defeating our enemies despite the outcry it might engender from critics and future historians who would find themselves on C-SPAN a half century later.
 
Roger Simon, the PBS commentator, introduced a bit of reality to the proceedings by observing that Roosevelt and Kennedy, however sanctified their memories to those on the panel, embraced foreign policies not so different from those Lewis attacked so uncompromisingly. Lewis could only sputter that Kennedy had become wiser in his final months in office.
 
While the Iraq war has turned into a quagmire, it is interesting to note that we are defending precisely the values Lewis claims we undermined in the past: a freely-elected government that is being brutalized by terrorists, murderers and fascists. Many of us share Lewis’ frustration that the war continues without any movement toward being settled definitively. The casualties our men and women in uniform are enduring sadden all Americans. Some of us might even agree in hindsight that the decision to go into Iraq was a mistake.
 
But short of simply leaving millions of innocent Iraqis at the mercy of thugs who wish them ill, Lewis offers little in the way of constructive criticism. He would be the first to be outraged if we unleashed our military the way we did during World War II, which increasingly appears to be the only way to secure victory. 
 
Bob Woodward, whose latest book State of Denial is severely critical of Bush’s management of the war, put his finger on the problem during a C-SPAN interview when he conceded that there is no guarantee that the war would have gone much better even if it had been managed perfectly (and no war is managed perfectly.)
 
The enterprise, however well-intended, was too ambitious by half. Rebuilding a nation is hard enough in places where there are established institutions and a tradition of governance. Such a project in a country like Iraq, where terror and tyranny are the only governing tradition of the past half century, has proven nearly impossible. Bush’s critics are right in this respect – short of a comprehensive political solution or massive military escalation, there is little reason to hope for a change in the dire situation.
 
Nevertheless, it could be argued that our military’s sacrifice has not been in vain. Were we not in Iraq fighting our enemies, would they be here? How many terrorist acts outside of Iraq have been disrupted by our aggressive actions, by our containment of Khadafi, by our scattering of Islamic fascists?
 
It could all change tomorrow, but our homeland has not been successfully attacked in almost six years, an accomplishment that would have been labeled impossible in the months following 9/11.
 
Who knows, perhaps in another generation, some historian will notice that Bush accurately foresaw the great threat posed by fanatical Islam, that he pursued a tough but determined policy of engagement in order to spare the world the kind of suffering endured by Europe during the two World Wars. This historian might appear on C-SPAN and notice that Bush cared deeply for those who were suffering, and was fully engaged in the troubling issues that confronted his administration, despite obvious mistakes and misjudgments.
 
Such a historian, if fair-minded, might notice that Bush faced an opposition that seemed fully committed at every turn to undermining his attempts to safeguard our nation and to govern effectively. Bush’s greatest offense, the historian might observe, was to deny the presidency to a party that prizes power above all things.
 
Bush will not likely go down as a great president, but his harshest critics have not covered themselves in glory either. We can only hope that our nation will be reunited come November 2008.