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is to speak truth to one's fellow citizens. As the end is restoring
democratic process, so the means should be democratic.
The mechanisms inhibiting opposition to state power,
especially when backed by electoral majorities, are not some
thing new. Even in the freest countries there is at all times a
conventional wisdom, which may wander more of less far from
reality. Sometimes it strays into a fantasyland. Then marginal
voices (which of course are not correct merely because they are
marginal) have a special responsibility to speak up, and some
times they shift the mainstream — as happened, for instance,
in the 1960s regarding the Vietnam War and legal segregation.
For the better part of a century, segregation fit squarely within
the banks of the American mainstream. Then it didn’t.
As the mere mention of Vietnam suggests, the repetition
dilemma has causes that go deeper into the past. I embarked on
journalism in 1966 as a reporter in Vietnam. The experience led,
naturally and seamlessly, to a decade of writing about the war
and, finally, when the war “came home,” to the constitutional
crisis of the Nixon years and its resolution via Nixon’s resignation
under threat of impeachment. The war and the impeachment
were connected at every point. It wasn’t just that Nixon's wiretap
ping was directed against Daniel Ellsberg, war critic and leaker
of the Vietnam-era Pentagon papers; or that the “plumbers” outfit
that carried out the Watergate break-in was founded to spy on,
disrupt and attack war critics; or that Nixon’s persistence in trying
to win the war even as he withdrew American troops from it
drove him into the paranoia that led him to draw up an “enemies
list” and sponsor subversions of the electoral process — it was
that his entire go-it-alone, imperial conception of the Presidency
originated in his pursuit of his war policy in secrecy and without
Congressional involvement.
And now, 30+ years later, we find ourselves facing an
uncannily similar combination of misconceived war abroad and
constitutional crisis at home. Again a global crusade (then it was
the Cold War, now it is the “war on terror") has given birth to a
disastrous war (then Vietnam, now Iraq); again a President has
responded by breaking the law; and again it falls to citizens,
journalists, judges, justices and others to trace the connections
between the overreaching abroad and the overreaching at home.
In consequence, not only are we condemned to repeat ourselves
for the duration of the current crisis but a remarkable number of
those repetitions are already repetitions of what was said more
than three decades ago.
Consider, for instance, the following passage from a
speech called “The Price of Empire,” by the great dissenter
against the Vietnam War, Senator William Fulbright.
Before the Second World War our world role was a
potential role; we were important in the world for what we could
do with our power, for the leadership we might provide, for the
example we might set. Now the choices are almost gone: we
are almost the world’s self-appointed policeman; we are almost
the world defender of the status quo. We are well on our way
to becoming a traditional great power — an imperial nation if
you will — engaged in the exercise o f power for its own sake,
exercising it to the limit o f our capacity and beyond, filling every
vacuum and extending the American “presence" to the farthest
reaches o f the earth. And, as with the great empires o f the past,
as the power grows, it is becoming an end in itself, separated
except by ritual incantation from its initial motives, governed, it
would seem, by its own mystique, power without philosophy or
purpose. That describes what we have almost become...
Is there a single word — with the possible exception of
“almost” at the end of the paragraph — that fails to apply to the
country’s situation today? Or consider this passage from Full-
bright's The Arrogance o f Power with the Iraq venture in mind;
Traditional rulers, institutions, and ways o f life have
crumbled under the fatal impact o f American wealth and power
but they have not been replaced by new institutions and new
ways o f life, nor has their breakdown ushered in an era o f
democracy and development.
Recalling these and other passages from Fullbright and
other critics of the Vietnam era, one is again tempted to wonder
why we should bother to say once more what has already been
said so well so many times before. Perhaps we should just quote
rather than repeat — cite, not write.
Of course, people like to point out that Iraq is not
Vietnam. They are right insofar as those two countries are
concerned. For instance, today's anarchic Iraq, a formerly unified
country now on or over the edge of civil war, is wholly different
from yesterday's resolute Vietnam, divided into north and south
but implacably bent on unity and independence from foreign rule.
And of course the two eras could scarcely be more different.
Most important, the collapse of the Soviet Union has effectuated
a full-scale revolution in the international order. The number
of the world’s superpowers has been cut back from two to one,
China has become an economic powerhouse, market economics
have spread across the planet, the industrial age has been
pushed aside by the information age, global warming has com
menced and rock music has been replaced by rap. Yet in the
face of all this, American policies have shown an astonishing
sameness, and this is what is disturbing. In our world of racing
change, only the pathologies of American power remain
constant. Why?
Perhaps a clue can be found in the famous speech that
Senator Joseph McCarthy gave in Wheeling, West Virginia, in
February 1950. This was the occasion on which he announced
his specious list of Communists in the State Department, launch
ing what soon was called McCarthyism. He also shared some
thoughts on America’s place in the world. The Allied victory in
World War 2 had occurred only five years before. No nation
approached the United States in wealth, power or global
influence. Yet McCarthy’s words were a dirge for lost American
greatness. He said, “At war's end we were physically the
strongest nation on earth and, at least potentially, the most
powerful intellectually and morally. Ours could have been
the honor of being a beacon in the desert of destruction, a
shining proof that civilization was not yet ready to destroy
itself. Unfortunately, we have failed miserably.” On the contrary,
McCarthy strikingly added, “we find ourselves in a position of
impotency."
By what actions had the United States thrown away
greatness? McCarthy blamed not mighty forces without but
traitors within, to whom he assigned an almost magical power
to sap the strength of the country. America's putative decline
occurred “not because our only powerful potential enemy has
sent men to invade our shores, but rather because of the
traitorous actions of those who have been treated so well by
this nation." And, he raved on in a later speech, “we believe
that men high in this Government are concerting to deliver us
to disaster. This must be the product of a great conspiracy, a
conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous
such venture in the history of man. A conspiracy of infamy so
black that, when it is finally exposed, its principals shall be
forever deserving the maledictions of all honest men.”
McCarthy seemed to look at the United States through
a kind of double lens. At one moment the nation was a colossus,
all-powerful, without peer or rival; at the next moment a midget,
cringing in panic, delivered over to its enemies, “impotent.” Like
the genie in Aladdin’s bottle, the United States seemed to be a
kind of magical being, first filling the sky, able to grant any wish,
but a second later stoppered and helpless in its container.Which
it was to be depended not on any enemy, all of whom could
easily be laid low if only America so chose, but on Americans
at home, who prevented the unleashing of might. If Americans
cowered, it supposedly was mainly before other. Get them out
of the way, and the United States could rule the globe. The right-
wing intellectual James Burnham named the destination to which
this kind of thinking led. “The reality," he wrote, “is that the only
alternative to communist World Empire is an American Empire,
which will be, if not literally world-wide in formal boundaries,
capable of exercising decisive world control."
McCarthy’s double vision of the United States must have
resonated deeply, for it turned out to have remarkable staying
power. Consider, for example, the following statement by the
super-hawkish columnist Charles Krauthammer, penned 51
years later, in March 2001 (six months before September 11)
Again we hear the King Kong-like chest beating, even louder
than before. For the end of the Cold War, Krauthammer wrote,
had made the United States “the dominant power in the world,
more dominant than any since Rome.” And so, just as McCarthy
claimed in 1950, “America is in a position to reshape norms,
alter expectations and create new realities.” But again there is
a problem. And it is the same one — the enemies within. Thus
again comes the cry of frustration, the anxiety that this utopia,
to be had for the taking, will melt away like a dream, that the
genie will be stuffed back into its bottle. For the “challenge
to unipolarity is not from the outside but from the inside. The
choice is ours. To impiously paraphrase Benjamin Franklin:
History has given you an empire, if you will keep it.” The
remedy? “Unapologetic and implacable demonstrations of
will."
We find expressions of the same double vision —
a kind of anxiety-ridden triumphalism — again and again in
iconic phrases uttered in the half-century between McCarthy
and Krauthammer. Walt Rostow, chair of the State Department’s
Policy Planning Council, articulated a version in 1964, on the
verge of the Johnson administration's escalation of the Vietnam
War, when he spoke in a memo to Secretary of State Dean Rusk
of “the real margin of influence...which flows from the simple fact
that at this stage of history, we are the greatest power in the
world — if only we behave like it.” Madeleine Albright, then UN
ambassador, gave voice to a similar frustration when she turned
to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell and asked,
‘ What's the point of having this superb military you are always
talking about if we can't use it?” But it was Richard Nixon who
gave the double vision its quintessential expression when, in
1970, at the pinnacle of America's involvement in Vietnam, he
stated, “If, when the chips are down, the world’s most powerful
nation, the United States of America, acts like a pitiful, helpless
giant, the forces of totalitarianism and anarchy will threaten free
nations and free institutions throughout the world.” For Nixon, as
for McCarthy and Krauthammer, the principal danger was on the
home front. As he said on another occasion, “It is not our power
but our will and character that is being tested. . The question ail
Americans must ask and answer is this: Does the richest and
strongest nation in the history of the world have the character to
meet a direct challenge by a group which rejects every effort to
win a just peace?” And, even more explicitly, “Because let us
understand: North Vietnam cannot defeat or humiliate the United
States. Only Americans can do that."
The question is how the United States could be a “giant”
yet pitiful and helpless, the “richest and strongest" yet unable to
have its way, in possession of the most superb military force in
history yet unable to use it, the “greatest power the world had
ever known” yet at the same time paralyzed Why, if the United
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