Word is that something is going on in politics that is distracting America's top political journalists from weighing in today. (I had to laugh this morning when cable news briefly tuned into a Capitol Hill news conference unveiling the Climate Change Act but then went away once the producers realized the senators were only talking about a threat to the planet and not superdelegates). We'll welcome Mike Tomasky, Jon Alter, and Michael Barone when they're available and, in the meantime, press on.

I very much appreciate Lawrence Kaplan's kind words about The Candy Bombers but must admit to being as confused by his post as he was disappointed in mine. If I read him correctly, he seems to, on one hand, denigrate the idea that we can learn from history in his disappointment with my call for searching for a "usable past" at the same as he admits that those who believed we should go to war with Iraq in 2003 relied on historical analogies to come to their conclusions.

The first part is easily dealt with. Without history we are left without a guide in the world. Every expectation we have about the future - every truth we build our lives around from "the sun will rise tomorrow" to "don't eat shellfish in Nebraska" - comes from our knowledge of history.

I have not - in either the book or my original post - come anywhere close to positing that the World War II bombing of Berlin was wrong while the candy bombing during the Airlift was right as Lawrence seems to imply. To draw that conclusion, he seems to take my criticism of Abu Ghraib as some sort of criticism of the use of military force - a conflating of torture and strength that seems to sum up much of what has gone wrong with American foreign policy over the past few years. (This being said, I also think it is a bit of a stretch to term aerial bombing attacks that killed hundreds of thousands of civilians - no matter how just and worthy and important and necessary they were - "humanitarian aid.")

Of course, historical analogies are dangerous, but the danger lies in their being used in the most ham-handed ways. I have a little internal groan every time I'm asked on the book tour whether we should just drop candy on Baghdad or how we can arrange for an airlift today. The point of the lessons of history is not to use them as a roadmap, but as a compass. Lawrence is right that we should "steer clear from the mischief of obvious analogies," but history does teach us - and I believe this story teaches us that it is important to both win the war and win the peace, to conquer our foes as well as to win them over, to always marry our military and our moral power. Those aren't obvious analogies but they are rules we have not lived by as a country in recent years.

The past, like the present, is complicated. This is why it is troubling to read Lawrence admit that even thinkers of his caliber believed that - based on their own reading of history - we would be greeted as liberators in Iraq. Those of us who opposed the war in 2002 worried about just this sort of fuzziness. There doesn't seem to be any fair reading of history that would support such a conclusion. We were not greeted in such a way in Germany (as The Candy Bombers recounts) - and we certainly weren't going to be in Iraq.

I also appreciated Jim Traub's post. He is right in pointing to the mixture of wise restraint and ambitious imagination that characterized Truman's foreign policy. I a moment that - perhaps surprising to some today - almost every one of his top military advisors repeatedly pressed him to pursue a course of retreat and abandon Berlin even while others wanted to risk World War III over the issue, his instincts guided him toward a policy of preserving his options and eventually Americans blundered their way into a solution. It was a "third way" reminiscent of what Kennedy did in the Cuban Missile Crisis and it is interesting to note that these two crises - the two times we came close to World War III, the two sterling triumphs of postwar foreign policy - were each solved by finding a way avoid both appeasement and Armageddon. As opposed to the choice that President Bush seemed to lay out in his recent speech to the Knesset, there are more than these two options and we used to have leaders who understood that.

On the other hand, it took a sense of confidence to put in place an Airlift that no one in the world thought would work and believe it could feed one of the largest cities on earth almost completely by air, to authorize the Marshall Plan, to begin NATO and the UN. These were not people who tinkered. They lived in a "can do" country that believed that all problems could bend to our will and our work. What a far cry from the America of Katrina and an invasion of Iraq that failed in large part because it was done on the cheap.

Before I move on, I also want to pick up on a point that Bruce Hall (brucejuice2000) made in the comments section. As he alludes to, one of the lessons I do believe we can learn from this book is that in recent years we have been dealt a false choice between democracy imposed by gun and democracy that is fostered through economic opportunity in Marshall Plan like efforts. The history of the American occupation before the Airlift was that efforts to impose democracy or to win over Germans with economic development failed. A faith in democracy came to Germany, and especially Berlin, when their material and security situation was at a low point, not on the rise.

We can certainly keep these discussions going but I also wanted to introduce a new aspect of this story. I found, as I worked on this book, that I couldn't capture what was going on by only focusing on foreign policy. Though I have worked in government and presidential campaigns, I was not looking to write about that here. Yet, perhaps because of that background, I realized it was impossible to write about the Berlin Airlift without discussing what was happening at exactly the same time: the 1948 presidential campaign.

Maybe its just me, though I suspect its not, but it seemed clear going into the work on this book that Harry Truman's fight for his political life might have affected his decisions on national security during that period - and the fact that a war crisis dominated the front pages for the months before the election might affect voter's choices. Yet, most previous assessments of the Berlin crisis only glanced over the 1948 election. And just about every previous work on the 1948 election had argued that Truman won because of a "Give 'Em Hell" campaign of populist, New Deal economic - some even going to so far as to say that foreign policy was not in dispute.

In fact, Truman's decisions were greatly affected by the upcoming election and he would not have won reelection were it not for the success of the Airlift. The Airlift made Truman appear, as he had not previously, as a strong, successful leader. Truman and Dewey engaged in an often vicious back-and-forth over foreign policy. But, most importantly, the Airlift was critical to Truman's defeat of Henry Wallace - a necessary predicate to his reelection.

Theirs was a battle for the heart and soul of the Democratic Party. Wallace, the man many Democrats thought was FDR's rightful heir, was, in 1947, attracting crowds in the thousands all over America - a phenomenon we wouldn't see again in a pre-election year until perhaps Dean in 2003 or Obama in 2007. Spring 1948 polls showed him with double digit support in key states, thereby splitting the Democratic vote. This was the main reason most pundits believed Truman couldn't win.

Last week in a discussion with David Frum, I argued against his contention that the Wallaceites in the Democratic Party are back. And though there are some in the party, and some readers of this site, who would be predisposed to agree with much of what Wallace said (that America should not leading crusades around the world, that we have no business speaking out for democracy around the world while repressing dissent at home, that our military efforts overseas are being conducted to gild the profits of large corporations), Truman decisively beat back what had been an attractive siren song to many Democrats. We are lucky today as Democrats and as a country that Truman succeeded.