We've been hearing variations on "BUSH LIED!!!!" for at least 60 years.
BY MORTON KELLER
Sunday, December 11, 2005 12:01 a.m. EST
Variations of "Bush lied" have been part of the political scene ever since America plunged into its permanent overseas embroilment in the Second World War. Reviewing that record won't settle the current dispute over how and why we got into Iraq. But it should remind us that George W. Bush's accusers are hardly walking in fresh snow.
The charge that FDR knew of the Japanese intention to attack Pearl Harbor, but used it to ensure American entry into the war against the Axis, surfaced after 1945, when the war was over, FDR was dead, and the decks were cleared for some sleeves-rolled-up recrimination. In 1948 the progressive historian (and prewar isolationist) Charles A. Beard accused FDR of "maneuvering the country into war." Anti-New Deal Republicans such as Robert A. Taft, anxious for a stick with which to whack at FDR, thought FDR's "policy of bluff" drove Japan to its Pearl Harbor attack. The accusation never really took hold, but never wholly faded away. Eccentric historian John Toland (who found much good in Hitler) resurrected the FDR conspiracy story in his book "Infamy" (1982), which unfortunately appeared a year after Gordon Prange's "At Dawn We Slept" definitively buried it.
Fast forward (not very far) to June 1950, and to what almost everyone saw as North Korea's invasion of South Korea. Once again the U.S. was caught flatfooted by a devastating assault. And once again, politically motivated conspiratorialists shifted the blame to an administration charged with either cuddling up to the communists or hell-bent on going to war with them.
The most potent assault on Truman came from the Republican right. Hadn't Dean Acheson conveniently excluded South Korea from the anticommunist defense perimeter, thereby opening the door to the North Korean onslaught? The catchy "20 years of treason" theme, raised by Joseph McCarthy to a low art, was taken up by Republicans still hungry for revenge against FDR and the New Deal.
The left played the other side of the conspiracy street. I.F. Stone produced "The Hidden History of the Korean War" in 1952. This tract argued that the U.S. and South Korea were the real aggressors, maneuvering a compromise-seeking North into using military force first. Stone's book, all but ignored when it first appeared, got a new lease on life in the Vietnam 1960s, when other voices on the left repeated the charge.
Next came Lyndon Johnson, the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution and the Vietnam War. Here the he-lied-us-into-war theme got its fullest mainstream workout. And not without reason: the second North Vietnamese "attack" on a U.S. warship in the Gulf of Tonkin appears never to have happened. But on the assumption that it did, a near-unanimous Congress authorized the use of force, which the administration relied on to justify its major escalation of the U.S. role in Vietnam.
Did LBJ and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara knowingly use a nonevent to get what they wanted from Congress? William Fulbright, who led the charge in the Senate to get the resolution passed, at first exonerated Mr. McNamara of any conscious intention to deceive. Later he changed his mind. Shades of Mr. Bush and WMDs--though the belief that Saddam had such weapons rested on a far broader evidentiary and intelligence basis than the Tonkin Gulf incident.
When we get to Mr. Bush, WMDs and Iraq, the principle that while history doesn't repeat itself, it rhymes, applies in spades. In March 2003, as in December 1941, June 1950 and the summer of 1964, there was broad agreement that Something Had to Be Done. If flat-out lying created that mood, that is a black mark indeed on American policy making. But if the conspiracy charge was (to put it mildly) far from open-and-shut, and if the conspiratorialists were driven more by ideology and partisanship than by proof, then a healthy skepticism is in order.
History's lesson is this: in modern America, the path to war is beset with actions that rest on uncertain or arguable justification. The political/ideological fringes will craft theories of conspiracy with scant regard for fact or probability. And the opposition will make what it can of this material, within the limits of political prudence.
Mr. Keller is Spector Professor of History Emeritus at Brandeis.
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