Books that changed my mind

 [I mentioned some of these items a few years ago, but now my list is longer.]

I was exchanging reading recommendations with a friend and realized that there have been a few books in recent years that actually changed my mind regarding what I thought happened in history. I read a lot of disappointing books -- too shallow, too heavy, too incomplete -- but I generally enjoy revisionist historians, especially if they have a provocative thesis and ample evidence. If you want to buy one of these, the best place to look  is https://www.bookfinder.com/ So here's a short list:

World War I: I'm now persuaded that Russia shares much of the blame for the start of the Great War by its policies to dominate Turkey and by mobilization during the July 1914 crisis. After deep dives into long-hidden Russian archives, Sean McMeekin showed in The Russian Origins of the First World War that even Barbara Tuchman got the sequence wrong by relying on the falsified memoirs of the Russian Foreign Minister. McMeekin's books on Russian diplomacy and the July crisis changed my view of German war guilt, though Austria-Hungary still deserves shared blame with Russia. See also his Russian Revolution, July 1914, and Stalin's War, which describes World War II from Stalin's viewpoint rather than the usual FDR/Churchill one.

Philip Zelikow's The Road Less Traveled persuaded me that leaders missed a chance to end the war in December 1916 with a poorly staffed peace initiative by Woodrow Wilson that was undercut by Secretary Lansing and "Colonel" House.

FDR's boldness: I had long admired Franklin Roosevelt's strategic bravery in maneuvering the United States in support of Britain and against Hitler, believing that he was just ahead of public opinion, skillfully pulling it along. Lynne Olson's Those Angry Days persuaded me that, much of the time, FDR vacillated, doing less than many of his advisors urged and hoped. He still was a great leader, just not quite as bold as I had thought.

World War II: James Lacey's The Washington War, a bureaucratic politics analysis of FDR's leadership, persuaded me that administrative and economic policies had as much to do with America's ultimate success as its military operations. Phillips Payson O'Brien's The Second Most Powerful Man in the World: The Life of Admiral William D. Leahy, Roosevelt's Chief of Staff persuaded me that Leahy was far more influential on FDR's war policy than General George Marshall. Jonathan Schneer's Ministers at War: Winston Churchill and His War Cabinet persuaded me that much of Britain's success was due to the way the cabinet worked together; Churchill dominated, but the cabinet mattered.

Postwar American policy: Derek Leebaert's, Grand Improvisation: America Confronts the British Superpower, 1945-57, persuaded me that Britain hoodwinked America into doing what it wanted until the collapse at Suez. Samuel F. Wells, Jr.'s Fearing the Worst: How Korea Transformed the Cold War, convinced me that American misjudgments in the Korean war made the nuclear arms race with the USSR more likely. Serhii Plokhy's Nuclear Folly: A History of the Cuban Missile Crisis, persuaded me that JFK lied about his policies and we came dangerously close to a full-scale nuclear war.

Slave Power's influence on foreign policy:  I never thought that slavery and its perpetuation had much impact on American foreign policy until I read Matthew Karp's eye-opening history, This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy.

Karp details how the South dominated key foreign policy posts and consciously advocated policies to protect and even extend slavery in the decades before the War of the Rebellion. Defenders of slavery really had a "deep state."

The Revolutionary War:  I used to have a typical American high school student's view of our war for independence as a story of brave patriots, toughened at Valley Forge and led by George Washington, who finally triumphed at Yorktown. Two books have changed my understanding of that conflict. One was Andrew Jackson O'Shaughnessy's of British politics during the conflict, The Men Who Lost America. He argues that the British gave up for broader strategic reasons. Add to this Holger Hoock's Scars of Independence,   which describes the local violence on both sides and the mistreatment of Loyalists during and after the war. The good guys won, but they won dirty.

How many wars are we in today?

 The president sent Congress his latest report on troop deployments under the War Powers law on December 8. It shows that combat-equipped forces are in 15 named countries plus 90,000 in various NATO countries and others "postured outside Afghanistan." There is also a classified annex.

No surprises here. The letter has a defensive tone. For example, it says US forces in Yemen are doing counter-terrorism and are not engaged in hostilities against the Houthis.

I remain convinced that the war powers laws are useful in providing some transparency on US military activities and will continue to draw attention to the reports.

devils' bargains

 I experienced chilling reminders of events I lived through as I read journalist David Corn's American Psychosis: A Historical Investigation of How the Republican Party went Crazy.  Of course Corn tells only one side of the GOP story. He omits the Dwight Eisenhower of the interstate highway system and the National Defense Education Act; the Richard Nixon of  environmental protection and clean water laws; the Ronald Reagan of nuclear arms controls; the George H.W. Bush of the Gulf War and the Budget Enforcement Act; the George W. Bush of the No Child Left Behind Act and PEPFARS.

Instead, he tells of how Republican leaders and their presidential candidates embraced the radical fringes of their party in hopes of electoral victories. Eisenhower tolerated McCarthy to keep his rabid anticommunist supporters. Other Republicans repeated the smears of the John Birch Society throughout the 1960s. Nixon courted George Wallace and his segregationist supporters as part of his "southern strategy." Reagan welcomed them as well as the politicized evangelicals. George H.W. Bush wasn't radical enough for Newt Gingrich and his acolytes even though his campaigns used the nasty racism of Lee Atwater.  George W. Bush rewarded his religious supporters and even John McCain and Mitt Romney dropped their criticism of the GOP radicals in their search for votes.

I've been involved with political campaigns long enough to know that most candidates want to add to their base, not exclude potential supporters. But at what price? Have they no shame? My own disappointment at my boss Senator John Culver's loss after his campaign defending his liberal record despite pressures to change his views was eased a bit when he gave us mementos inscribed with Rosa Parks' words, "My feet are tired, but my soul is at rest."

The devils' bargains Republican candidates made were not news, but the pattern was stark and over many decades. The other shocker in the book was to read the actual language of the radical activists. Time and again they used apocalyptic phrases and said Democrats would destroy America if elected. And even when communists didn't invade us from Central America and capitalism survived with Medicare, they continued to predict imminent demise.

Even worse, the radicals weaponized language, seizing the most scary and pejorative words to use about opponents.I was on the team receiving the barbs of Terry Dolan and NCPAC in the 1970s and Lee Atwater in the 1980s, even before Newt Gingrich taught a new generation of candidates to be "nasty." The lesson they learned, sad to say, is that anger and outrage and fear work as campaign themes. Now it's everywhere, amplified and accelerated by social media.

I wish we could go back. To civility, to rational debate, to arguments over better and worse, more and less.  I wish we could treat opponents as honorable people until proven otherwise. So far the Democrats have tolerated but not adopted the views of their most radical candidates. But until the Republicans do likewise, we're in a downward spiral toward something very dark.

How many wars are we in today?

 Fifteen plus, according to the latest war powers report to Congress. The uncertainty comes because the report says" approximately 90,000 United States Armed Forces personnel are deployed to North Atlantic Treaty Organization countries in Europe" without naming the countries. The conflicts are basically the same as in recent reports: Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey, Somalia, Kenya, Djibouti, Niger, Cuba [at Guantanamo], Philippines, Egypt, and Kosovo plus NATO. The law requires reporting of places where troops equipped for combat are deployed; there does not have to be active combat.

I post this for consistency, not to make other judgments. I believe the war powers act has been a valuable tool for congressional oversight of military operations.

the economics of the Civil War

 Napoleon may have said that an army marches on its stomach, and modern armies also need a sturdy supply train with weapons and ammunition, but governments fighting wars need money. In his illuminating new book on the financing of the American Civil War, Ways and Means, author Roger Lowenstein has an epigraph from Cicero,"The sinews of war are unlimited money."

Until now, my simplistic understanding of that conflict was that the Union won because it had more people and productive capacity to prevail in a war of attrition. I know now that deft diplomacy also kept foreign powers from recognizing and supporting the Confederacy and that generalship at key times kept the Union from giving up. What Lowenstein's book tells is how fractious politicians tossed aside their traditional views of money and government and responded creatively to the challenge of wartime financing.

The Union raised revenues by raising taxes, borrowing money,and printing paper greenbacks. The Confederacy did much the same, but less smartly and less effectively. By the end of the war, the South has only raised about 5 or 6% of its spending through taxes. [It had a smaller tax base, of course, but refused to tax the property held as slaves.] The North covered 21% of its spending with taxes, about the same as in World War I. The Republican Congresses also preferred high tariffs, raising them to an average duty of 47% by the end of the war. 

When it came to borrowing money, the Union's efforts were uneven, depending on success on the battlefield and the innovative salesmanship of Jay Cooke, who earned  hefty commissions peddling federal bonds throughout the North, beyond Wall Street. The South had good returns from Europe until after Gettysburg.

Both sides printed money, but the Union showed restraint. Only 1/6th of its war spending was in greenbacks, compared to 60% by the South. As a consequence. inflation in the Union was about 80%, compared to 9000% in the Confederacy.

I was surprised to learn that the value of greenbacks compared to gold plunged 50% after Gettysburg and didn't recover until the final weeks of the war. Until the capture of Atlanta in September, 1864, faith in Lincoln and a Union victory was on the verge of collapse.

The story centers on Salmon Chase, Secretary of the Treasury, whose loyalty to Lincoln was often subordinated to his own wish to be president. One delicious irony: named Chief Justice a few months after Lincoln had accepted a pro forma resignation, Chase was part of a court majority that ruled unconstitutional the Legal Tender Act allowing paper currency, despite having championed the law and having put his own picture on the money.

Congress comes across as ignorant and mercurial when it came to financing, at one point barring trade in gold futures and then repealing that law two weeks later. Many members strongly and openly opposed some provisions, only to embrace them when the votes were taken.

Another theme in Lowenstein's book is how the Republican Congresses during the war greatly expanded the scope and size of the federal government, finally enacting the activist role originally pushed by the Whigs. Lawmakers created an Agriculture Department to help farmers; funded a transcontinental railroad; established Land Grant Colleges; gave millions of acres of land to willing farmers under the Homestead Act; and established National Banks in order to create a single national currency.

After the war, however, the dominant Republicans insisted on a return to the gold standard and presided over three decades of deflation. But they had raised the money when it counted.

how many wars are we in today?

 Though I missed it at the time -- Pearl Harbor day, in fact -- the Biden administration has sent Congress the latest in its twice yearly reports on troop deployments abroad, as required by the War Powers Resolution. It names 16 countries, the same as last time minus Afghanistan. No surprises.

using sanctions to avoid a war with Japan

 I'm always looking for good cases to illustrate the policy process. For diplomatic and military policies, the supply is vast.  For foreign economic policy, however, I haven't found many. Until this week, when I finally had a chance to read Edward S. Miller's 2007 book for the Naval Institute Press, Bankrupting the Enemy: The U.S. Financial Siege of Japan before Pearl Harbor.

Miller also has a revealing summary of U.S. economic sanctions policies starting with World War I, showing how reluctant U.S. officials were to use sanctions for foreign policy purposes. The key law empowering the president for almost any economic sanctions, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act [IEEPA] of 1977, is actually based on a section of the 1917 Trading with the Enemy Act. That law resulted from a bureaucratic fight between the Commerce Department, which historically ran export controls, and Treasury, which claimed jurisdiction over financial transactions laws. Treasury won that fight, not least because the assertive secretary was also President Wilson's son in law.

A similar bureaucratic struggle occurred in 1940-41 over Japan.Secretary of State Cordell Hull, the key interlocutor with the Japanese, resisted harsh sanctions because he considered them too provocative. Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, however, favored pressure but had only an advisory role on sanctions. In key meetings with FDR in July, 1941, the president decided on freezing Japanese assets in the United States and restricting exports of various commodities but not a full embargo. Roosevelt and his cabinet officers even expected to sell oil to Japan, but only after some delay and on a case-by-case basis.

At the sub-cabinet level, however, Dean Acheson dominated the interagency committee that wrote the rules implementing FDR's executive order and did so to prevent any oil shipments to Japan, a red line that many historians argue made war inevitable. Hull was upset to learn of the impact of the rules when he returned from medical leave, but was reluctant to force a change that might be viewed as favorable to the Japanese. FDR himself was preoccupied with his meeting with Churchill in August and the growing naval conflict with Germany and did not force a change back to his original policy.

Miller cites a 1976 paper by a researcher at the National Archives which has even more details of the hawkish cabal in the bureaucracy on the broad range of export restrictions on Japan, including redefining "aviation gas" so as to prevent any oil exports.

The key lesson for me is the power of the sub-cabinet bureaucracy to shape policy by implementation rules, regardless of presidential-level decisions. It happens all the time. The formal policy was to deter Japan from greater conquest by limited but significant export restrictions, not a full embargo. The actual policy Japan faced was an existential threat.

Revenge by a White House staffer

 I followed the career of Peter Navarro in recent years with great interest. He was an outspoken China hawk who advised the Trump campaign and then was an early appointee to work in the White House. Candidate Trump had promised to create a National Trade Council to take on China and otherwise promote an America First economic policy, but he never did. As a student of the presidency, I was not surprised that other officials blocked that action in order to preserve the established system that tilted toward mainstream policies. Instead, Navarro was named head of an Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy that had no clear authority, not even an executive order creating it, but gave Navarro a handful of aides.

Despite his weak bureaucratic position, Navarro was a hustler and he knew the president agreed with him on trade. So he wrote memos and showed up at meetings and got into fights with the more powerful figures like the secretary of the treasury and the head of the national economic council. He also maneuvered to see the president without an appointment and to ride on Air Force One, sitting in the conference room.

Navarro produced major documents criticizing China's trade policy and pushed for even tougher measures. But he repeatedly lost fights with the treasury secretary and the trade adviser, who ultimately persuaded President Trump against extreme measures.

Navarro also did valuable public service pushing the administration to recognize the danger of the coronavirus when most senior officials, including the president, were downplaying the threat. And with no clear lines of authority within the White House, Navarro wound up as the action officer for government officials and company leaders searching for protective gear and medical supplies. As he reports in his new memoir, In Trump Time, he succeeded time and time again with quick results, though he complains of many times he was thwarted by existing laws and administrative requirements.

There's a valuable case study in that memoir, though it's told in a rambling, incomplete way. Navarro tells how, in the summer of 2020, he dreamed up the idea of a special commission to investigate the causes of the pandemic and to report before election day of the human and economic costs. He believes that the virus originated in a Chinese lab and wanted to call the group the CCP Virus Commission. He wrote a draft executive order,  but then ran into resistance from several senior officials. He still can't believe that the president wouldn't agree to his brilliant election ploy.

Navarro is using his book to settle scores -- against all of Trump's national security advisers except Robert O'Brien; against Treasury Secretary Mnuchin; against Jared Kushner; against Anthony Fauci; and even against Mike Pompeo and Vice President Pence. He disparages them all in intemperate language and then describes how he thinks the Democrats stole the 2020 election and what he did to help Trump prevent a Biden inauguration. 

Navarro could have told a story of a lonely fighter for policy change. He has some victories to brag about after all. But his anger and his Trump loyalty outweigh that story.