I'm not going to get into the weeds of what kind of lessons one can or should draw from historical analogy, but I'd just like to say that Mr. Kaplan gets it wrong when he expresses surprise that Andrei could write as well as he does, being a political operative. I went to high school with Andrei and knew him to be, first and foremost, a scholar and a gentleman. :)

Academics should absolutely not belittle journalists trying their hand at writing history. Just look at Iris Chang's The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II as another example. I think journalists who write history pay so much more attention to the socio-cultural margins than many political historians do. And the margins is what makes the page.

it makes perfect sense for Bush to compare talking to one's enemies, with appeasement; to a wingnut, holding your breath til you turn blue is how you display your strength. To the adults in the world, however, it looks like a childish tantrum and shows the very opposite of weakness.

Or maybe Bush equates talking to one's enemies with appeasement, because he is a really piss-poor negotiator and he WOULD give away the store. Look at North Korea (worse deal than Clinton had negotiated), Iran (greatly strengthened by the Iraq debacle) and Russia (Bush got punk'd by Putin).

Neville Chamberlain's mistake wasn't that he flew to Munch and met with Hitler; it's that he gave away half of Czechoslovakia when he got there. Jonathan Alter

A good example of why we need historians to write history rather than bright guys who learn their history from the editorial pages of the Washington Post.

Britain had no defense agreement with Czechoslovakia and no ability to assist it. France had an agreement but equally no ability. And, more to the point, Chamberlain gave nothing away.

Beneš could have fought if he had chosen to do so. He chose not to do so gambling that in a few years Germany and the western allies would tangle and Germany would lose the war, catastrophically (see, WWI). And he was right, though it didn't do him much good, personally.

P.S. Hitler never did understand prickly (arrogant) Albion. Had he, he would have started WWII in 1938 and not sent Chamberlain home to build bombers.

Neville Chamberlain was a Tory. He was brought down when Labour refused to join the government. And he continued as an MP and minister under Churchill.

Yes, he was an appeaser, but he was a Tory appeaser.

I've alway enjoyed history. I've studied it. I've read a lot of it. I even enjoy historiography--the history of history. I think articulate and observant journalists contribute enormously to our understanding of the past. (An outstanding current example is "The Great War for Civilisation" by the legendary British war correspondent Robert Fisk.)

For all my love of history, I think some academics take themselves far too seriously. In the interest of humility, I offer two of my favorite iconoclastic quotations:

"History tells who slept with whom and with what results. It tells who fought and who won and who lived to lie about it afterwards."
-- Ralph Ellison, in Invisible Man

"History, n. An account mostly false, of events mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rules mostly knaves, and soldiers mostly fools."
-- Ambrose Bierce, in The Devil's Dictionary.

The one point in Andrei's original post about his Berlin airlift book that caught my attention, was his statement that the Airlift was relatively uncelebrated in American writing.

Maybe I was re-reading all the books in the house several times, as a child in the late 50's I did feel that I knew a lot about the Airlift, probably from an 8-10 page description in a Reader's Digest publication of some sort.

Treating historical analogies as if they spring fully formed from the head of Zeus is bound to lead us astray. After all, we don't use analogies (pace Cherny), we make analogies.

Analogies are not self-evident (interestingly, myths are self-evident). No, analogies are rhetorical devices we deploy before audiences whom we wish to influence in support of our desires. The advocate argues the similitude between the present set of facts and some prior set and seeks to show how past actions in those circumstances did (or didn't) accomplish the goal he now recommends.

Which, even if we successfully demonstrate the similarity in facts (close or distant), brings us to the problem of counterfactuals -- that is, what would the result have been if different actions had been taken, a result we can never know.

For example, whose fault was the Cold War? Truman, Marshall, and Kennan viewed the Soviet Union as an aggressive, expansionist state analogous to Nazi Germany and adopted policies which they imagined would have stopped Hitler. And yet, Stalin did exactly what any responsible Russian leader would have done and what we, acting rationally in our own interests, would have done in his circumstances.

Russia had been regularly invaded from the west -- by Napoleon, twice by the Germans in the 20th century, by the Poles in the 1920s, and by the English and Americans after WWI. Russian defense policy called for a buffer -- distance. With the Red Army already occupying middle Europe, Stalin would have been a traitor to his people had he given up that defensive zone. Unless --- unless we had traded the "agrification" and complete demilitarization of Germany (the Morgenthau Plan) for the same in middle Europe.

Of course we'll never know how events would have turned out had we recognized the Soviet Union's reasonable security concerns. Rather, Truman analogized (there's that word again) Stalin and Hitler -- they were both dictators -- 1948 Berlin became 1938 Munich -- and we suffered through the Cold War, lost 35,000 men in Korea, 58,000 in Vietnam, and trillions in wealth while turning ourselves into a secretive, militaristic fortress state.

So, was Truman right in viewing Stalin as a Hitler-analogy and in deploying the "never appease dictators" rule learned at Munich? Quien sabe -- which is the problem with analogies.

I have no problem believing that journalists or other non-academic historians can produce excellent works of history. The methods of sound historical research can be learned and applied by people who never studied them in graduate school.

But when an author tells me right off that his purpose in writing the history is to "excavate a usable past for progressives", alarm bells go off in my head. This means that he went into the project with an propagandistic agenda that is bound to influence his choices about how to interpret what he finds, and his selections about what to relay to his intended readers.

My feeling is that human beings are story-telling animals who create narratives of the past with the ease of breathing, but that these narratives are generally filled with factual errors, fantasies, embellishments, moral oversimplifications and lies. I also believe that getting as close as we can to what actually happened, in a way that tends to undermine all the stories we would like to tell ourselves about what happened, is exciting and liberating. I don't want a past that I can "use" to bolster my sense of identity, or make me feel good about who I am or where I came from, or build into a motivational political speech that will inspire the political troops.

"It is superb scholarship, thrilling story-telling and another example of why those academics (you know who you are) who like to belittle journalists trying their hand at writing history should chill. I'm not saying this is a problem among TPM readers, but it's a frequent complaint in the faculty clubs. These folks need to judge the work, not the credentials (or lack of them) of the author. The whole idea that only PhDs can get tenure at even the least prestigious university may be time-honored, but it makes no sense."

Sorry, can't do the block thing.

In deep agreement with this statement, I would say that many academics entered the profession for its relative ease of thinking. It's no big deal to get a Phd. It's work, but it need not be original these days, but merely cater to the ideas of advisors.

This is not to say that there are many academics who are important writers, obviously.

But academics fear the real world, its rough and tumble nature and speed of making a living in it. That's why many a well known musician or artist-as well as a journalist - can't teach at a university other than as a visiting this or that.

History is no secret. Long before "theories" about how to write it came along people just wrote it.

Journalists are well suited to write history, their experience based in a reality other than a review from a faculty. Academics are often flat-out jealous of journalists. The journalists went to Vietnam, the academics got wavers and wrote a thesis about it.

This is also why many academics don't invite journalist or other "real world" people to talk to students. It's about territory. Unethical in my view, when students at a university are deprived of important contact with the direct participants in the events they study.

There are many important exceptions.