The Nature of History-

During the rising tide of America’s involvement in the Vietnam War, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. published his book, Bitter Heritage,[1] which was an attempt to persuade the policymakers of the era that America’s involvement in Vietnam was a mistake. History teaches us so, Schlesinger said. Still desirous of influencing the course of American foreign policy, Schlesinger recently published War and the American Presidency,[2] which is his effort to convince us that history shows the Bush Administration’s policies in Iraq to be misguided.

This tendency to want the role of the historian to be that of shaper of public policies is one of the two most persistent threads in Schlesinger’s long and deep scholarship. The other is a kind of genteel skepticism about the ability of history to instruct us with quite the degree of specificity necessary to engineer any very specific policy prescriptions. Indeed, his most recent book concludes with his mature reflections on the problem of the utility of history, under the apt title “The Inscrutability of History.”

To make his case against the Bush foreign policy, Schlesinger deploys some historical analogies of unilateral executive action—a case he made years ago in his book on The Imperial Presidency.[3] He recounts Thomas Jefferson’s actions in the Barbary War and James K. Polk’s misadventures in the Mexican War; he reminds us of Abraham Lincoln’s suspension of civil liberties after Fort Sumter and Franklin Roosevelt’s skating close to the edges of lend-lease; he points at Ronald Reagan’s invasion of Grenada and George H.W. Bush’s snatching of Manuel Noriega from Panama. His interesting thesis in this regard is that in prior examples of the “imperial presidency” the presidents involved either had the decency to recognize that their actions were unconstitutional, or the semi-decency to at least think them linked to a specific crisis. George W. Bush, he tells us, is the first president in history to claim permanent unilateralism as a high principle of governance. According to Schlesinger, this arrogance is what makes Bush stand out from the stream of history and reveal himself as someone uniquely ignorant of its lessons.

But being wise as well as learned, Schlesinger well understands the limitations of history and historians. As he says, “the oracle of history, like the oracle of Delphi, is very often clouded and ambiguous.”[4] This is why, he confides, professional historians “privately regard history as its own reward; they study it for the intellectual and aesthetic fulfillment they find in the disciplined attempt to reconstruct the past and, perhaps, for the ironic aftertaste in the contemplation of man’s heroism and folly, but for no more utilitarian reason.”[5] But he also admits that many historians are sorely tempted to “invoke arguments of a statelier sort in justifying themselves in society.”[6] Schlesinger is one historian who is perpetually so tempted.

There is much that is true and insightful in Schlesinger’s critique of the eyeless Samson in Iraq, but it is all essentially present politics and policy advocacy—for which the services of an historian are not necessarily required. History does perhaps contain lessons. For example, history teaches us that unexpected events often trump the best-laid plans of mice and men. It also teaches us that various forms of self-interest are often stronger motivators of behavior than professed political ideologies. It teaches us that some men are fools, others knaves, some bumbling incompetents, some middling, and a few extraordinary in some pleasing way. History teaches us many things. But history is not a fortune cookie that we can crack open and read the past’s message to the present. It is nonsense to suppose that the story of James K. Polk’s Mexican War contains hidden within it a message of the form: the Iraq policy of George W. Bush in 2004 is bound to turn out badly. The kinds of lessons that history has to offer—as Schlesinger himself describes it in his final chapter—are of a less “statelier” sort.

This tension in Schlesinger’s work is of course a tension in the entirety of the history profession. Humanity’s second recorded historian, Thucydides, expressed in a general way all historians’ hopes when he averred that history can instruct military and political leaders in how to make better future decisions because history repeats itself in a circular pattern, and so the same life-quizzes are bound to come around again, for which the historian can offer the cribbed answers in advance.

Many historians have written and spoken in a similar vein. Probably the only historiographical idea that most non-historians know is the George Santayana observation that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”—the corollary of which seems to be that those who understand the past will not be so trapped. Policy history, almost more than any other variety, is premised on the assumption that policymakers are rational actors and that if their decisions are informed by good historical analysis those decisions will be more likely to yield positive future outcomes. Policy historians ache to be useful. They want, like Arthur Schlesinger, to help shape better future policies.

Not too long after Thucydides raised our hopes, other historians gave voice to our other main intuition about the nature and role of the study of the past—the sense that we show a deplorable tendency to not learn all that much from our mistakes. History can, we must admit, sometimes seem very much like W. S. Holt’s description of it: “History is a damn dim candle over a damn dark abyss.” Novelist and poet, Robert Penn Warren, gave us a more direct challenge to the presumptions of policy history when he said: “History cannot give us a program for the future, but it can give us a fuller understanding of ourselves, and of our common humanity, so that we can better face the future.”

The instinct that too much by way of utility for history may be too much to claim, has also been widely and amply expressed by practicing historians. To take just one example, Henry Steele Commager once put it this way: “History, we can confidently assert, is useful in the sense that art and music, poetry and flowers, religion and philosophy are useful. Without it–as with these–life would be poorer and meaner; without it we should be denied some of those intellectual and moral experiences which give meaning and richness to life.”[7] One of the best statements of the skeptical take comes, ironically, from Arthur Schlesinger himself, who reminded us:

History . . . can answer questions, after a fashion, at long range. It cannot answer questions with confidence or certainty at short range. Alas, policy makers are rarely interested in the long run–“in the long run,” Keynes used to say, “we are all dead”–and the questions they put to history are thus most often questions which history is least qualified to answer. Far from offering a short cut to clairvoyance, history teaches us that the future is full of surprises and outwits all our certitudes. For the study of history issues not in scientific precision nor in moral finality but in irony.[8]

We should also admit to ourselves, in passing, that for many of the ordinary people of the planet (i.e., non-professional historians) the study of history is mostly a form of entertainment. Certainly the popularity of the History Channel on television is revealing of a certain strain of interest in a certain kind of history. So while we might like to think that the study of history has something to do with the acquisition of a knowledge-base to better inform public policy, for many people history, to the extent it interests them much at all, may only succeed in doing so to the extent it shares some of the same traits as the programming on their favorite TV channel—which is not altogether a bad thing. But like the conquering Roman generals who, while receiving the accolades of the cheering crowds, supposedly had a slave riding along in the chariot whose task was to periodically whisper in the great man’s ear “All glory is fleeting,” so too historians might want to keep repeating to themselves from time to time, “The History Channel,” “The History Channel.” Just to keep our grandeur in perspective.

In simple terms, the practice of policy history presumes that the purpose of history is not merely that of the humanities—to enrich our understanding and appreciation of the world—but is aimed more at a present utility of some form. Given that this is one of our foundational assumptions, it might be advisable to reflect from time to time on just how sure this foundation really is. A little genteel skepticism, in other words, might be in order. But before we can fan ourselves with the breeze of genteel skepticism, we need to divert briefly to consider its hurricane cousin.

 

The Challenge from Postmodernism-

There is an entire domain of skepticism about the possibilities of historical knowledge that policy historians, in particular, have been abysmal in acknowledging, and that is the challenge posed by the rise of postmodernism in the philosophy of history. Historians in general tend to either accept postmodernism implicitly and uncritically, or they try to ignore it, usually with less than evident grace. Policy historians seem downright oblivious.

Postmodernism poses two core challenges to historians, and especially to those historians who want their historical analyses to be useful adjuncts to the making of better public policies. Postmodernism in history holds that: truth and objectivity in historical narrative are confused and impossible ideals; and that history must be politically-engaged in present political causes and that historical narrative is to be judged primarily by how helpful it is in empowering certain client groups (women, minorities, post-colonial peoples, etc.).[9]

The idea that truth and objectivity are chimeras, is unfortunately almost an article of faith among contemporary historians, and it is a battle-cry for postmodernists. Although I have much to say on this subject,[10] for now let me just make a couple of quick observations about the role of the ideal of truth in historical explanation and about the dangers of a too-robust politicization of the historian’s role.

All historians know the thrill of discovering something unexpected and previously lost to history in some archive somewhere. I remember a conversation I had one lovely Fall day with professor Rebecca Boehling of the History Department at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. I came across professor Boehling taking a break from her research, sunning herself on a bench outside the History Department. We began to chat about historical research in general, and about her research on the history of the French Resistance during World War II. At one point she described to me a small but thrilling discovery she had made one day while working in a European archive. Among other more mundane records she came across a little slip of paper, a note from one Resistance member to another, that read simply “They are killing the Jews.” Boehling knew in that moment she had found evidence of a moment in time when some Resistance fighters first knew of the Holocaust. And as she recounted the moment of discovery, her eyes began to sparkle, and her voice shifted an octave, and I could visibly see the excitement of merely the recall of that moment coursing through her body. It truly is the search for something real that is at the heart of our enterprise.

 Consider an analogy. It’s rather like setting out on one of those barbarous English fox hunts, with the hounds howling and the horses snorting and pawing the earth, and then the mad dash, the jumping of hedgerows, the rushing hither and yon, all in pursuit of something only the hounds can sense and that you as a mere rider may not even catch a glimpse of. And at the end of a bone-weary day of riding, you might well turn up completely empty-handed. But how different this empty-handedness would be from that of the country squire who spent the day sitting in his overstuffed armchair at the hunting lodge, slipping his tea from fine china, and imaging himself on hunts he never made, riding mounts that never lived in any stable, and catching a quarry that never was. The rider on the hunt is as an historian chasing a glimpse of the past; the contented squire a consumer of the fictional arts. The difference is subtle; especially when they both end up empty-handed, but the two are worlds apart. And somewhere in that difference, lies the essence of history.

Historians like Schlesinger have always been desirous of making history a help-mate to present politics. But they have restrained the extent of this politicization of history by the application of a healthy dose of skepticism about the certainty with which historians can discern the lessons of the past. More ominously, postmodernists want to insist that all historical narratives are just ruses for the exercise of hegemonic political power.[11] Thus, for many postmodernists the essential test for good history is to inquire as to whose interests are being served by our narratives—the right political clients equal good history, the wrong political clients equal bad history.[12] Postmodernists see earlier generations of politically engaged historians—men like Schlesinger, William Leuchtenburg, and Commager—as old-fashioned fuddy-duddies who are too intellectually timid to be admired by the current generation of politically-focused historians.[13]

Since postmodernism now sponsors an extreme form of epistemological skepticism about the lessons of history, it would seem to follow logically that postmodern historians ought to be extremely modest when it comes to constructing present political agendas based on the lessons of the past. After all, if we cannot ever discern the truth about the past then its “lessons” are forever beyond our grasp. Our present politics cannot, therefore, be informed by our study of history.

But this is not the reasoning the postmodernists sponsor. Paradoxically, they conclude that since we have no effective epistemic constraints on our interpretations of the past, that anything goes, politically. That is, they read the epistemological impotence that they insist is our true condition to say that since we cannot know the lessons of the past we cannot be expected to let them constrain our present politics. We are free, as historians, to craft historical narratives whose main test for validity is whether they are effective in helping us achieve our present political aims and objectives.

While the joining of historical analysis to present political concerns is, I wish to suggest, always a perilous undertaking; harnessing history to politics is downright dangerous without the constraint of at least a genteel skepticism. Naïve historicism—which holds that we can have certain knowledge about the past and thus can know with certainty the right present politics—and radical postmodernism—which holds we can know nothing true about the past—both end up somewhat ironically in the same extreme place. Both think we can grasp the absolutely right present politics based on a study of history—the naïve historicists think they can discern the right politics in the misty outlines of the past and the postmodernists simply construct what they believe are the right politics without any effort at discernment. But they both in the end are dogmatists about their politics. On the extremes, the continuum of politically-engaged historians turns back upon itself and joins hands.

If we accept any of these postmodern conceptions of history, then the discipline of policy history has no valid aims and no defensible rationale. This is why it is vital that policy historians begin to actively think about, write about, and critique postmodernism in history.

 

Policy History as an Aid to Decisionmaking-

In the 1980s very skillful scholars like Richard Neustadt and Ernest May sought to carve-out a professional niche for policy history by training bureaucrats and corporate middle-managers to think like historians.[14] They were convinced that graduates of their seminars would be better decisionmakers, and thus, that history in the future would take better paths than it has in the past.

Neustadt and May were also, we should candidly admit, seeking ways to provide additional employment opportunities for historians by enhancing their present utility to the practical business of corporate and public governance. Now, I am not averse to historians striving to make a good living. And I am not even shocked by the spectacle of our trying to trick our patrons into believing our craft has more present utility than it does. But we ought at least to tell each other the truth about the nature and limits of our profession when we engage in our theorizing about the discipline.

Much of the previous self-reflection performed by historians regarding the ambitions of policy history has been at a fairly “tactical” level of analysis. So for example, in the early 1980s we see scholars like Edward Berkowitz reflecting on how history can become more relevant to policymakers—offering in the process both some generalized misgivings and some practical advice.[15] In 1991 the editors of the Journal of Policy History thought it necessary to remind policy historians of the perils of thinking their discipline to be one of the predictive sciences: “Policy history seeks to edify and not to specifically instruct. Prescriptions are best left to policymakers actively involved in contemporary problems, and not to historians—those physicians of the buried.”[16] Writing two years later, Hugh Davis Graham could provoke a roundtable discussion on the topic of whether policy history was vital or stunted.[17] Graham’s charming way with words softened what was in fact a fairly dark reading of the prospects for policy history. But not quite a decade on, Julian Zelizer could reflect optimistically and with some evident sense of satisfaction on nearly three decades of development of the specialty of policy history.[18] Zelizer was even able to conclude that the prospects for policy history were favorable enough that “historians should be speaking with greater authority in the world of governance.”[19]

Some of these earlier reflections—especially those of Berkowitz and Graham—contain a whiff of skepticism about the utility of policy history. But where Hugh Graham found various structural and historic obstacles to effective policy history, I see mainly philosophical ones. The skepticism I wish to deploy is of a more “strategic” variety. And to see why I am such a skeptic, there may be no better place to focus than on the work of Neustadt and May.

In their Thinking in Time, Neustadt and May analyzed a series of failed policy initiatives–that is, stories that came out badly from their point of view–to identify the faulty historical analysis that led to these bad decisions. Thus the Vietnam War was expanded and doggedly pursued by Lyndon Johnson, we are encouraged to believe, because Johnson saw Ho Chi Minh as Hitler with a goatee and North Vietnam as Germany circa 1930. Having the right historical analogies about Vietnam (that America’s involvement in 1964 was more like that of the French in 1950) would have caused Johnson to see the folly of his ways and hence to (perhaps) have avoided the debacle of Vietnam. And of course, it would be professional historians who would provide this clarifying service, thus vouchsafing our enterprise as one which, contrary to traditional conceptions, is actually in the business of engineering better futures.

The work of Neustadt and May has a certain appeal: it has a kind of superficial plausibility and a tone of eminent reasonableness which cannot help but bewitch most historians. But their whole enterprise is fundamentally misguided, for four sorts of reasons.

The Problem of Scale: First, there is the problem of scale. Neustadt and May are appropriately modest in their aspirations for improving our decisionmaking by improving our use of reasoning from history. At one point, they suggest that an improvement in the “batting average” of decisionmakers from around .250 to .265, is all they are promising—even in the best of cases.[20] In the world of batting-averages, a 15-point improvement is a scant 1.5% improvement in performance. But is it really plausible to believe that such a tiny enhancement in the use of reasoning from history can really move the often very large policies that decisionmakers confront? In what way, precisely, could a 1.5% improvement in Lyndon Johnson’s use of historical analogies about Vietnam have shifted the war train onto a different track? Which of the analogies Harry Truman formed about Korea in the early 1950s, if they had been changed by 1.5%, could possibly have led to the magical alternative future Neustadt and May fantasize on Truman’s behalf? As they described this alternative future:

Truman might more easily have stopped MacArthur’s northward march at the first good defense line past the border, hailing UN success where the old League had failed, relishing a victory of principle. Thereby Truman could have spared himself Chinese attack, American retreat, inflationary pressure, allied fears, and two more years of fighting to achieve no further purpose. He could have stood in a Fifth Avenue reviewing stand, taking in the march-past with confetti and cheers . . . [21]  

Really? And if historians could do all this, then historians would be kings—which has not noticeably been our fate. For a more realistic look at the power of history, let us consider more deeply the example of the American involvement in Vietnam.

Lyndon Johnson was, no doubt, confused about the conflict in Vietnam. LBJ expressed many times (in especially revealing ways in his secretly recorded telephone conversations) his sense of his dilemma: he could not see any way to win the war, yet he could not see any face-saving way to just stop trying. As he typically put it, “damned if I am going to be the first President to lose a war.” Well, while a psychotherapist might have helped him with this dilemma, I’m not sure an historian could.

Johnson never asked himself the right question about Vietnam. The right question was: who did Ho Chi Minh see in the mirror each morning when he was trimming his beard? Johnson, you see, had one masterful political skill, according to his biographer, Robert Caro. In his Master of the Senate[22] Caro recounts how LBJ could always see every political issue through the eyes of the guy on the other side. He would then use this ability to figure out what the guy really needed, versus what he was asking for, then Johnson would somehow construct a deal which gave the guy what he really needed while giving Johnson what he wanted.

If LBJ had applied this same skill to the Vietnam problem, he would have understood something that he and all his advisers missed. Because the problem was that Johnson kept looking at Vietnam not through Ho’s eyes, but through the eyes of his advisers–McNamara and the rest. The correct answer is that when Ho looked in the mirror each morning he saw Abraham Lincoln looking back at him. Ho, like Lincoln, saw himself as trying to preserve the union––trying to hold his nation together. The “slow squeeze” strategy of a gradually escalating application of military might assumed that when Ho looked in the mirror he saw a member of the board of directors of the Ford Motor Co. looking back––someone wearing a three-piece suit and doing cost/benefit analyses. Thus, when the cost/benefit analysis became too adverse (when the “squeeze” got tight enough) the rational manager would cut his losses and move on to other things. But would Lincoln have “moved on to other things” if Union losses mounted? Would Ho? That was the key failure of Lyndon Johnson in Vietnam. He forgot to inquire about the image in Ho Chi Minh’s mirror.

But could an historian have helped him out, even if we made this failure of insight palpable to Johnson? More likely, it would not have made a dime’s worth of difference to the decision faced by LBJ. His decision, as he conceived it, was to continue to fight or to “cut and run.” He was unwilling to cut and run (“I won’t be the first President to lose a war”). The “slow squeeze” strategy offered him the false hope that fighting might lead to a better outcome (there was “light at the end of the tunnel”). Using my historical analysis, he might have come to the realization that there was no possible light at the end of that tunnel. How would this change his basic choice? It wouldn’t. It might only mean he would lapse into despair and hopelessness earlier than he did. Maybe he would not escalate the war so rapidly, continuing it on at its chronic level indefinitely. Or maybe he would have adopted former Air Force Chief of Staff General Curtis LeMay’s approach and “bombed [North Vietnam] back to the stone-age.”[23] But I doubt he would have seen any virtue in ending the war, even if he had no hope of winning it. Such huge insoluble dilemmas are often the stuff of public policymaking.

While the writings of Neustadt and May are engaging, and their methods quite plausible, it is a stretch to suppose that these modest little techniques of theirs can somehow swamp the influence of the immensely larger motives that move decisionmakers. It really is an amazing conceit to suppose that, for example, George W. Bush decided to invade Iraq because he forgot to make a list of the ways that Iraq in 2003 was and was not analogous to Iraq in 1990; or that if he had just engaged in the exercise of “placing” Saddam Hussein in historical time, the scales would have fallen from his eyes and a more enlightened American foreign policy would have risen like a redneck Athena from the waters of the Potomac.

The Problem of Future Causes: The second problem area in the Neustadt/May approach concerns their tendency to treat present decisions as logically closed in time. Implicitly, Neustadt and May describe present choices as taking place in a universe in which the facts of the past are available to us, along with the options of the present, but without any allowance for the imponderables of the future. In a sense, there is nothing wrong with this; this is how historians must operate. It is perfectly wholesome in fact for the real business of historians, which is helping us understand the past better. But it is woefully inadequate when it comes to the enterprise that Neustadt and May are embarked upon, which is predicting the future.[24] The problem, as we all understand, is that absolutely unpredictable events often intrude upon our best-laid plans. In other words, causal factors from unanticipated future events are often the real drivers of the course of the future. So, for example, no amount of historical sophistication could have possibly prepared the Truman Administration to be ideally poised for the unpredictable event of the North Koreans swarming across the 38th parallel on a June day in 1950. It was this event—rather than any subsequent faulty use of historical analogies—which was the main driver of events on the Korean peninsula in 1950 to 1953. This is often the way of the future: it is unpredictable, not so much because we fail to draw the right finely-tuned lessons from history, but because the future will be full of novel events for which history contains no clues.

The Problem of Historiographically Arational Action: The third type of problem in the Neustadt/May analysis is that it implicitly assumes that policymaking is, historiographically-speaking, a rational undertaking. Which is to say, Neustadt and May assume that historical analogies and placements in time, and the like, are actually relevant to present decisionmaking. But too often, this assumption is patently false. In fact, historical reasoning is often deployed not in an effort to clarify policy choices, but in an ex post facto exercise to provide intellectual cover for decisions that policymakers are determined to make regardless of the lessons of history. Let me provide some examples of what I have in mind.

As the members of the House Judiciary Committee were earnestly pretending to consider the merits of the case for impeachment of William Jefferson Clinton, a large group of eminent historians–led by Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Sean Wilentz–took out a full-page ad in the New York Times under the rather grand heading “Historians in Defense of the Constitution.”[25] Their ostensible purpose was to help the Judiciary Committee by informing them about the history of the impeachment process. These historians confidently told the legislative decisionmakers that an understanding of the history of the impeachment process indicated that Bill Clinton’s misconduct did not rise to the level of an impeachable offense.

This pointless exercise was followed by another when the Judiciary Committee itself convened a panel of historians and legal scholars–including Wilentz–to instruct them directly in the historical context of the impeachment process. Among Wilentz’s helpful tutoring in the findings of history was his report to the Committee that the impeachment of Andrew Johnson in 1868 led directly to the Gilded Age and to a succession of “unremarkable chief executives” lasting until Theodore Roosevelt’s elevation to the presidency. Did it indeed? The point is, need I say, debatable. But even so, it connects in no necessary way to an answer to the political decision of whether or not to impeach Bill Clinton in 1998.

The ostensible purpose of the Committee’s summoning of a group of scholars to give testimony on the history of the impeachment process was to ponder, in a wise and large frame of vision, the weighty consequences of the action they were contemplating. This gesture was of course as empty as that of the historians’ ad. The relevant majority of the Judiciary Committee had long before made up its political mind to seize this opportunity for all it was worth; and the assembled scholars might just as well have recited at random passages from Finnegan’s Wake, for all the good their learned testimony did. But rather than entertain the decisionmakers with a little Joyce, Wilentz thought the way to their hearts and minds was to insult them, so he hectored the Republican members of the Committee that if they voted articles of impeachment “your reputations will be darkened for as long as there are Americans who can tell the difference between the rule of law and the rule of politics.”[26] Actually, history will show, if it shows anything on the point, that the reputations of these members of Congress will brighten for those who agreed with their decision and darken for those who did not.

One of the more interesting exchanges during Wilentz’s testimony occurred when a Republican congressman tried to rebut Wilentz’s claim to be the spokesman for the lessons of history, using a thoroughly postmodern take on truth in history. Congressman William Jenkins of Tennessee parried to Wilentz’s thrusts by observing that the Republicans could lay their hands on conservative historians who would sponsor the opposite reading of history, and since history, after all, is just a matter of opinion, it is entirely proper for them to embrace the readings they find more pleasing to their present political purposes. As Jenkins put it: “We need to remember, at least here this morning, that what we're dealing in and what you came armed with, is just a bunch of opinions. Now, like they say back in Tennessee, everybody’s got those. . . . If there are learned opinions to the contrary, then, they would balance one another out, as far as this committee’s concerned.” [27]

To suggest that history itself contains the answer to the political question of whether or not to impeach Bill Clinton—or whether the Bush Iraq policy is good or bad for the country—is a kind of hubris that is an embarrassment to our profession. This is pretty much what happens when historians confuse their present political opinions for the lessons of history.

Another, more vulgar, example from the Clinton impeachment may also prove instructive. When Linda Tripp finished entrapping her friend Monica Lewinsky and thereby “outing” her affair with President Clinton, this action led to a long series of legal maneuvering on the part of the all the major players in this civic soap-opera. Clinton was investigated under the now-defunct Ethics in Government Act, which was the authorizing statute for the appointment of Kenneth Starr as the Special Prosecutor to hound Clinton into some form of legal jeopardy. Along the way, pretty much the full cast of the soap-opera, including Lewinsky, “retained counsel”–often it seemed, mainly for their contemporary second role as media spokespersons. In any event, Ms. Lewinsky racked-up some legal bills which, in the overall spirit of the melodrama, she sued the federal government over, to try and force the government to pay them on her behalf. As it happens, a provision of the Ethics in Government Act permits this particular form of irony, but only if the involvement of the petitioner was in some way essential to the uncovering of the crime. This provision thus required the special federal appeals court hearing Ms. Lewinsky’s claim to make a judgment as to whether her role in history was accidental or essential to the chain of events leading to the impeachment of Bill Clinton. Alas for Ms. Lewinsky, on the penultimate day of 2003 the court denied her claim, on grounds of their reading of history. “The question is,” the court informed us, “would evidence of criminal wrongdoing by an incumbent president and accomplices of that president have escaped an investigation of similar scope in the absence of the Ethics in Government Act. History teaches us the answer is no.”[28] Does it indeed? I’m not sure, but I am fairly sure this is a pretty good example of the kind of thing that we actually “learn from history.”

Perhaps one might concede that politics of this rather brutal sort does often intrude in the making of public policy. But surely, one might argue, when we consider less politically-charged examples we will find a much more rational policymaking process. Perhaps in some instances we might; but let me provide just two contrary examples—one small and one large.

The Social Security Act of 1935 provided income security in the form of insurance against loss of income due to retirement. Consequently, a Retirement Earnings Test (RET) was put into the law to use in assessing the technical question of whether or not a person was retired. The RET was based on a person’s earnings from employment: earnings over the limit implied retirement had not taken place so no benefit was payable. Over the years, this test was watered-down by raising the earnings limit in an ad-hoc fashion because beneficiaries naturally enough wanted to collect retirement benefits and keep working. By the late-1990s, political pressure was building to abolish the test entirely. By that point, an argument from history had become one of the two or three main rationales advanced by politicians of both parties to justify the repeal of the RET. According to this argument, the legislative history of the 1935 Act revealed that the only rationale for the RET was to force older workers out of the labor force in the context of the Depression thereby making room for younger workers to take their place. Since, the argument continued, the Depression is long-gone, there is no present rationale within the policy logic of the Social Security system for the continued use of a RET.

As it happens this historical account of the origins and legislative history of the RET is empirically false, a fact that I demonstrated in a review of the legislative history of this provision of the law.[29] Also, as it happens, precisely nobody gave a damn because the political fix was in and the truth was of no consequence to the policy decision that was desired by policymakers. Hence, the RET was repealed in April 2000 in the "The Senior Citizens' Freedom to Work Act."

The Social Security RET is a classic example of the utter futility of historians thinking that better history is really desired by decisionmakers. Its moral is, I think, depressingly clear: not only are better historical analyses not really sought, but blatantly false ones will do perfectly well if they get decisionmakers to where they want to go.

As a very large example of how policy history interfaces with actual political decisionmakers in the real world of governance, consider the Republican Party since Reagan and its breathtaking dishonesty on the matter of taxes.

“Taxes,” Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. scolded us, “are the price of civilized society.” For Republicans, evading them is the path to electoral victory. But, of course, they cannot be evaded since they are the fuel of government, and Republicans, despite an expressed ideological antipathy to government, keep running for public offices with alarming regularity. Hence, even Republicans have a need for taxes. But following Ronald Reagan’s creative lead (who called them “user fees” among other things), they now understand that it is perfectly viable to raise as much revenue for government as you like, provided only that you somehow prevent the taxpayers from associating your revenues with the “T-word.”

When the Republican Robert Ehrlich was elected Governor of the heavily-Democratic state of Maryland in 2000, he ran on a pledge to balance the state budget and not to raise a dime of new taxes to do it. By the end of his second year in office, the state’s annual deficit was projected at $1.2 billion and the new Republican Governor had a four-part plan for addressing it: 1) cut services by $416 million; 2) transfer money from other accounts into the state’s general fund ($296 million); 3) “improve tax compliance” ($58 million); and 4) introduce slot-machine gambling to the state ($395 million).[30] No new taxes, exactly, but $453 million in new state revenues nonetheless.

Ultimately, the Governor got pretty much everything he wanted by way of budget policy, except the gambling proposal, which met with stiff resistance from various quarters. Research on the impacts of legalized gambling on the economies of states and localities has shown that the introduction of gambling impoverishes local residents for the benefit of out-of-state owners. Indeed, for each slot machine introduced into Maryland, the region will lose the equivalent of one job in the regional economy.[31] But real money will flow into the state’s coffers, money that is not “taxes.” As William Thompson explains it: “Still . . . some in Maryland and the District are still pushing to [adopt slots]. Why? For the same reason I've seen politicians pass laws like this in venues around the country: Because all they care about is checking off a potential tax-reducing revenue item on their budgets. They'll get it, all right, and they're cynically willing to hurt the regional economy in the process.” [32]  

But this factual policy history has fallen on willfully blind eyes and intentionally deaf ears in the Governor’s mansion in Annapolis. At this writing, the Governor continues to be locked in a political battle over the desirability of slot-machine gambling as the main remaining source of untapped state financing. He has tried lots of political arguments in the last four years to persuade reluctant lawmakers to go along. More recently he has deployed a policy analysis designed to appeal to the state’s environmentalists—in a chain of reasoning that would make Mother Goose proud.[33] It goes like this: If Maryland fails to put slot-machines at horse racetracks then the racetracks will go bankrupt; if the racetracks close this will cause the horse farms in the state to fail; when the horse farms fail they will be sold to become agricultural farms; when the new farms raise their crops they will create pesticide run-off; this run-off will flow into Maryland’s cherished Chesapeake Bay, thus polluting the Bay. Thus, the environment will be degraded unless Maryland allows slot machine gambling. [34]

May I suggest the modest hypothesis that no amount of improved historical analogies, or “placings in time,” will cause Governor Ehrlich to question this reasoning. No amount of policy analysis or well-burnished historical analogy could possibly penetrate Governor’s Ehrlich’s mindset about the desirability of slot-machines as a mechanism of raising state revenues for the plain and simple reason that this choice is an expression of an entrenched political ideology that has nothing whatever to do with the facts, past or present, of the desirability of gambling as a source of state revenues. Gambling allows Republicans to raise taxes without calling them taxes. No mere policy scientist or humble historian can make the slightest dent in the utility of this political free-lunch.

The Problem of One-Armed Historians: The fourth and final type of potential error propagated by Neustadt and May is the assumption that a more nuanced and complex understanding of historical events is really what decisionmakers seek from policy historians.

Harry Truman once famously complained that his economic advisers were a continuing source of frustration because they were always saying to him: “on the one hand, but then on the other hand.” I think Truman was speaking for all decisionmakers when he said he wished for nothing so much as a good one-armed economist.

Even if we assume that decisionmakers are authentically looking for real help from historical analysis (which, for the reasons I have discussed, I believe is often not the case), a more likely outcome of all the clarification offered by sophisticated historians might just as often be to make decisionmakers more conflicted, more uncertain, and less able to decide. A more complicated sense of historical analogies may only make for more complicated decisions. As Edward Berkowitz has put it: “Historians . . . have their own arsenal of insights based on their observations of the way the present follows from the past. These insights give historians a unique understanding of the constraints that the past places on the future.”[35] Hugh Davis Graham put it more bluntly: “Historians . . . are cautionary and seem more comfortable with negative advice. Historians are quickest to see what’s wrong with politically tempting analogies. . . . Given the generally weak instrumental case that policy historians have made for the importance of their advice to decisionmakers . . . it is not surprising that political leaders, agency officials, and corporate decisionmakers have sought policy advice from lawyers and social scientists rather than historians.”[36]

Recall again the example of Lyndon Johnson and the thicket of dilemmas he faced in Vietnam. Would a more sophisticated appreciation of the world as seen by the North Vietnamese really have streamlined his decisionmaking?

Decisionmakers, at their best, usually want two things from historians: 1) the one right, simple analogy to show the one right, simple decision; or 2) the analysis that assures them that the decision they want to make, or have already made, is the right one. They don’t want nuance. They don’t want a list of the ways in which the present is and is not like the past.

Berkowitz makes a similar point, in a more modulated way, and he offers as examples the failure of the negative income tax in the Nixon Administration and the repeated failure over the years of various efforts to reform the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program by introducing “workfare” requirements.[37] According to Berkowitz, policymakers often fail to appreciate that policy history acts as a dampening constraint on what they wish to do. And he politely points out the moral of the story, as illustrated by the AFDC example: “The resulting disparity between past performance and future expectation deserves at least some comment. It may have no effect on the policy debate because the goal of workfare has such irresistible political appeal, an appeal so strong that policymakers may turn a deaf ear to the historical record. Still, historians have an obligation to bring historical analysis to the table, even if few people wish to partake of it.”[38]

I would say, more cynically, that policymakers do not want policy history that constrains their options, and when we give it to them, we are either ignored or sent out of the room. But I lapse into the same resigned conclusion as Berkowitz: we have no choice as historians but to present policymakers with our best policy histories; but we should not kid ourselves into believing this is what they really want from us. What they really want is a bunch of one-armed historians.

 

A (Mild) Note of Optimism-

I am, as should by now be clear, fairly cynical about the prospects for much utility in the study of history. My sense of skepticism about learning from history was well-captured in a bon-mot that John Kenneth Galbraith once offered up about financial history. Galbraith observed that the period of time between one stock market crash and the next is approximately the period of time it takes to have forgotten about the first one.

People act out of all sorts of motives, apparent and hidden, benign and not. They act out of greed and lust, self-interest and anger, out of hope and fear, out of a desire for political advantage or revenge, out of wishing and wanting, and sometimes out of altruism and good intentions. But better historical analogies are not likely to make people more altruistic; or their egos healthier; or their politics less pressing. Perhaps decisionmakers might welcome some help in the form of identifying additional or missed opportunities to maximize self-interest, but they are unlikely to embrace insights leading to a reduction in those self-interests.

But the study of history is not without its powers. Policy history in particular has tended to provide five types of clarifying knowledge, according to Zelizer: 1) a description of the tendency to Institutional and Cultural Persistence; 2) an analysis of Lost Alternatives; 3) a list of Historical Correctives to “set the record straight”; 4) a more sophisticated description of Political Culture; and 5) a more detailed account of [policy] Process Evolution. [39] But while Zelizer does not develop the theme, to my reading most of these forms of historical analysis actually tend to make decisionmaking more rather than less uncertain.

Having said all this, in order to save my soul, I will end by waving a small flag for our discipline.

I believe passionately in the enterprise of policy history. I think it is essential that historians scrutinize the doings of policymakers in order to help us understand how and why we adopt the public policies we do, and to help clarify the choices before us before we make them. I also think it our solemn duty to point out false analogies and faulty historical reasoning—while fully recognizing that often the exercise of one’s duty can be an exercise in futility. And pace the presumptions of the postmodernists, I also think historians can and often do get at the truth of the matter regarding policy decisions. This all seems to me to be worth doing, but I do not for a moment expect decisionmakers to thank us for any of it.

All this knowledge and insight deepens our understanding of our world, and can help, in a broad, general way, to make us both better citizens and better consumers of public policies. But the idea that policy history can help us become better designers of detailed present policies in order to maximize the prospects of creating better futures, seems to me to be too much for historians to claim. That way lies the rocks of Hubris, threatening the historians craft as it sails the future’s uncertain seas.

Learning from the lessons of history may not be all it’s cracked-up to be, but we have no real choice but to keep trying. The prospects for policy history are just about as good, or bad, as they are for any other domain of historical inquiry. Perhaps that’s not much, but it’s all we’ve got. And so I suppose, for me, that will have to be enough.