This discussion has given us all much to think about and I'm grateful to the others who joined me and for their kind comments about The Candy Bombers. I think we're all in vigorous agreement about the value of history. Yes, analogies can be overused and misused, but history does teach us about present as well as the past. Perhaps I put it less artfully than I should have but when I sought to compare Berlin and Baghdad in my original post, I was not drawing some equivalence between the two. Nor was I saying we are in analogous times. In fact, I made a point to say that we were not. Nevertheless, I do believe that the manner in which we turned around the American occupation of Germany and the way America inspired people all around the world in 1948 are moments that offer lessons about how we should act as a nation - and they serve as rebukes to what has gone wrong in recent years.

Mike Tomasky is right to look forward and ask "What now?" We are in a moment where we need to look again to 1948 - not to replicate what they did then, but to repeat it; to take some of those same principles and apply them to our own time. Now, as then, America is facing new types of national security challenges in a different kind of environment. Then it was a global ideological and military threat at a time that we were - for the first time - operating at the summit of world power. Now it is a set of interconnected threats that know no boundaries - global terrorism, global warming, global poverty, global disease - at a time that most of the world's people live in democracies. Just as Truman and the others had to create new institutions and principles in 1948 to deal with the new situation they confronted, we have to do the same to respond to a world where American foreign policy will no longer just be conducted in embassies but will have to speak directly to people all over the world - to get them to instruct their governments to change course but also to get them to change course in their own lives. To combat terrorism, we will need to convince ordinary people in the Middle East and elsewhere to turn their backs on jihadism and turn in the cell leader who may be living next door. To fight climate change, we will need to convince a factory owner in China to change the way he does his work or change his lightbulb. To fight the spread of deadly diseases, we will need to convince a farmer in Africa to start living his life differently.

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Historical analogizing is essential in private, risky in public. Any time policymakers meet in the White House, at State, Defense or CIA to discuss a thorny foreign challenge, they must have people at the table with an historical sensibility. They don't have to be professional historians, as Andre has proven with his book. But they must be able to "think in time" if they are to have any hope of arriving at a wise decision. The analogizing should not be the primary frame of the discussions; that must be about the interests at stake and the particulars of the situation. But once it's time to drill down into the decision, historical comparisons can help structure the conversation. Exploring how various analogies apply and how they don't will almost always bring greater clarity.

But as Condi Rice's simplistic analogizing suggests, history can be a dangerous weapon in the wrong hands. That is usually the case when it is used publicly in speeches and interviews to sell a policy. There is no time in public forums to explore the complexities of the analogy--where it fits and where it doesn't. Instead you get a crude historical reductionism that actually sets back the debate. It's important for journalists and others to introduce history into public conversation. But policymakers should reserve their insights for private deliberations, or only those public forums that allow for lengthy exploration of the analogy. Otherwise it becomes a talking point instead of an insight.

Having gone on for far too long about the perils of extrapolating from historical similarities, what strikes me most about the history recounted in The Candy Bombers are the overwhelming dissimilarities between 1948 and 2008. Not so much on the international scene as simply in the realm of leadership, if that's not too quaint a term to use here. The John McLoys, the Lucius Clays, the James Forrestals--where have they gone? In place of them, we have who? Sandy Berger? Paul Bremer? Today's smarmy foreign policy elites, for all of their moral posturing and inflated self-regard, don't exactly rise to the level of their predecessors. To put down The Candy Bombers is to feel orphaned.

But Andrei's vibrant chronicle unfolds on two levels, transporting us easily from the White House to the cockpits at Tempelhof. There, at the micro-level, I was encouraged about the present and for a simple reason: We no longer have Harry Trumans among us, but we do have Hal Halvorsens. I have seen them--winning over sheiks three times their age, calling in medevacs, and there in the ruins, dispensing candy to children. Hence, my own take away from Andrei's book: so long as we have candy bombers, there is hope.

I've written many columns over the last three or four years arguing that the Democrats need to recapture the legacy of 1948, referring not just to the airlift but the Marshall Plan and the general atmosphere of building a more humane world after the war. I've never argued that the American men who created that world did everything right by our standards today, because they did not, by a long, long shot. But they were attuned to their times and often chose a sound middle course between capitulation and confrontation, the kind of choice exemplified by the airlift itself. It's not an analogy, specious or otherwise, but an assertion to say that the Democratic Party today needs that kind of creativity and rigor in its approach to foreign policy.

Nothing - nothing - has made me angrier in recent years that the neocon assertion that today's neocons are the true heirs of the (mostly) Democratic foreign-policy makers of 1948. In April 2003, Bill Kristol wrote that proponents of the Iraq war were the real heirs of George Kennan, while opponents represented "the Dominque de Villepin left" (this, while Kennan was still alive, and against the war!). It wasn't only necons of course; some liberals bought into this mendacity too. Joe Lieberman still hauls it out. He is either a disgraceful liar or, if he actually believes that Truman and most of the men around would have backed a war like the Iraq adventure in the aftermath of an event like September 11, an extremely stupid man.

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My fellow admirers of The Candy Bombers seem genuinely puzzled by my opposition to using historical analogies as anything more than an auxiliary to the empirical record. Can analogies be useful as heuristic tools? Sure. As explanatory tools? Sure. As narrative embellishments? Why not (and, again, Andrei barely hints at Iraq and all the rest in The Candy Bombers)?

My complaint was two-fold. First, Andrei writes in his initial post that he set out to write The Candy Bombers, in part, "to excavate a 'usable past' for progressives." Well, to me, that sounds like he set out to write a historical analogy, rather than the careful and meticulous history that he actually did write. (His discussion of Henry Wallace, I suspect, won't be so usable). My concern here is that the search for a "usable past" may end up distorting the actual past. The author in search of a usable past does not ask a question; he makes a declaration. But my harping on the subject responds to Andrei's provocative post, not his wonderful volume.

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I was very struck by Lawrence's post, which seemed to stake out an entirely novel critical response--damning by lavish praise. It was as if his admiration for Andrei's narrative gifts were in inverse proportion to his regard for Andrei's intellectual acumen. I, too, have some reservations about the value of post-war Europe as an analogy to our current situation, but I have to admit that I have never heard what Lawrence describes as an old saw: good history saves you from plausible analogies. I would have thought that good history saves you from facile analogies.

But I want to talk about this whole question of specious analogizing, because I think that this administration, whose foreign policy ranks have been staffed by some quite erudite people, has suffered from rampant, and grisly errorneous, historical thinking. Condoleezza Rice, if I may go back to my favorite hobby horse, famously told Brent Scowcroft that the Middle East was primed for democratic transformation just as Eastern Europe had been at the end of the Cold War. Scowcroft was nonplussed. And yet this parallel was much present in the minds of many of those to whom our addled President listened. In The Case For Democracy, a book which Bush read in the months before delivering his second inaugural, and apparently experienced as revelation, Natan Sharansky treats the analogy as a matter beyond dispute. (Sharansky is also said to have influenced the 2002 speech in which Bush promised to support Palestinian statehood if only the Palestinians would cast out their own leadership.)

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Very sorry, Andrei, for the delay. I only just picked my jaw up off the table from last night. Apropos of which, I was most intrigued by your account, on pages 453-456, of Tom Dewey's calm acceptance of Harry Truman's stunning upset victory in the 1948 election. As you note, just 25,000 more votes for Dewey from the right places would have sent the thing to the House of Representatives. And yet there was Mr. Prosecutor, the day after this heartbreaking defeat (his second, of course), taking matters with equanimity and agreeing that it was "most essential" that America continue to pursue a bipartisan foreign policy. What a model for certain people to follow.

Now, let's get down to business. I'll begin by adding to the encomiums from others. The book is really a terrific piece of work in every way. The research is thorough, the narrative thread is powerful, and the writing! Gore underused you is all I can say. This book would make a great capstone to a career, worthy of mention in the first paragraph of your (far-off) New York Times obit. Not that you won't top it. But it's that good. I recommend it highly to readers of this thread.

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I want to address today's question, but first need to address a couple of Lawrence Kaplan's points.

Lawrence is on target when he hails Andrei's narrative. 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. It's the work, not the sheepskin, that should count. Even crazier is that if Andrei wanted to go teach history at a public high school, even one desperate for teachers, he would be turned down for lacking a teaching certificate. (Some states have alternative certification). I know this sounds like a tangent, but I had to get it off my chest.

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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.

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Andrei,

I do not think your blog post does The Candy Bombers nearly the justice it deserves. I am not aware of a blog posting that has improved the world in any meaningful way--although readers of this site will adduce evidence to the contrary--but your book, which I approached warily and cynically, could do exactly that. Not so much in the way you seem to intend: we cannot have historical writing without analogies, but, honestly, enough is enough. And not so much to judge by your output on this website, as opposed to the sheer loveliness of the volume's prose. For those who prefer blogs to books, consider a typical passage from The Candy Bombers: "One shell hit the riding stables of the Tiergarten, sending a herd of shrieking horses stampeding down the city's streets with their manes and tails on fire...The Siberian [Red Army soldiers] washed their faces in the toilet, believing that this was what they were for. Unaccustomed to electricity, they would marvel at lightbulbs. They demanded the glowing orbs be handed over, held them delicately, packed them away carefully..." Andrei, I thought you were a political operative.

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My 17-year-old son just wrote a paper for his American History class laying much of the blame for McCarthyism on Truman's anti-Commuinist rhetoric. I said to him, among other things, "Read The Candy Bombers." Yes, Truman was not above harvesting political advantage by blurring the distinction between naive admirers of the Soviet Union like Henry Wallace, and outright Communists; but to read Andrei's book is to be struck by how very measured, and how fine-grained, were the responses of Truman and those around him to the very terrible threats of 1946-8. Andrei makes clear that the Soviet blockade of Berlin seemed to many leading figures to offer little choice save withdrawal, on the one hand, or a nuclear strike against a hopelessly superior Russian land force on the other--or quite possibly the one followed by the other. Truman had the steadiness, and also the confidence, to choose the one path which required neither surrender nor cataclysm.

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Hello all! First of all, thanks to TPM - one of the premier places for serious conversations about books - for hosting this discussion. I am truly honored to be joined this week by Jonathan Alter, Michael Barone, Lawrence Kaplan, Michael Tomasky, and Jim Traub - a group of writers and thinkers whom I have greatly admired and learned much from over the years.

I'd like to kick things off with an event that took place a month ago that has been widely noted (including in a story on the front page of the New York Times) but whose significance has been ignored. On April 26, an unprecedented, citizen-demanded referendum took place in Berlin. For the first time in the city's history, enough Berliners signed a petition to put a matter on the ballot of a special election. The subject was whether the city government should shelve its plans to shutter the small Tempelhof airport located smack in the center of the German capital.

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All this week we'll be focusing on Andrei Cherny's book The Candy Bombers: The Untold Story of the Berlin Airlift and America's Finest Hour. Cherny will lead a discussion on what this pivotal event teaches us about democracy and occupation.

Joining him will be Michael Tomasky of The Guardian, James Traub, a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine, Lawrence Kaplan, editor of World Affairs, Jonathan Alter of Newsweek and Michael Barone, a senior writer for U.S. News & World Report.

Cherny's first post will be up later today.