4.11.00
A Stinker of a Pulitzer

3.16.00
Spinning the Dark Side of Success

3.10.00
A Country for McCain:
Thailand

here they go again. The Pulitzer prizes have been awarded, and the prize for history went to David M. Kennedy's Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945, the fourth volume published in what will be the Oxford University Press’s eleven-volume Oxford History of the United States. Oxford's series has produced two splendid works, Robert Middlekauff's The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789 and James McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era. However, Kennedy's volume can be skipped.

The heart of his story is, of course, World War II. And this is his summation of what Americans should have thought in 1945:

"They might have reflected with some discomfort on how slowly they had awakened to the menace of Hitlerism in the isolationist 1930s; on how callously they had barred the door to those seeking to flee from Hitler's Europe; on how heedlessly they had provoked Japan into a probably avoidable war in a region where few American interests were at stake; on how they had largely fought with America’s money and machines and with Russia's men, had fought in Europe only late in the day, against a foe mortally weakened by three years of brutal warfare in the east, had fought in the Pacific with a bestiality they did not care to admit; on how they had profaned their constitution by interning tens of thousands of citizens largely because of their race; on how they had denied most black Americans a chance to fight for their country; on how they had sullied their nation's moral standards with terror bombing in the closing months of the war; on how their leaders' stubborn insistence on unconditional surrender had led to the incineration of hundreds of thousands of already defeated Japanese, first by fire raids, then by nuclear blast; on how poorly Franklin Roosevelt had prepared for the postwar era, how foolishly he had banked on goodwill and personal charm to compose the conflicting interests of nations, how little he had taken his countrymen into his confidence, even misled them about the nature of the peace that was to come; on how they had abandoned the reforming agenda of the New Deal years to chase in wartime after the sirens of consumerism; on how they alone among warring peoples had prospered, emerging unscathed at home while 405,399 American soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen had died."

Well, yes, they might have "reflected with some discomfort" on that coagulation of late-20th-century academic conventional wisdom. They preferred — silly them — simply to say: We won, and a good thing, too.

Do not read this book. And if any of your children wind up at Stanford, where Prof. Kennedy teaches, tell them to shun his classes.

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