89 Years Of Liberalism
March 2, 2007 at 4:33 pm
Any doubt that Arthur Schlesinger was 100% liberal to the end?
Check out his last interview, conducted just last week with C-SPAN’s Book TV:
C-SPAN: Do Americans learn from history?
SCHLESINGER: No. The stupidity… I mean, 30 years ago we were entangled in Vietnam and we were faced with nationalism and an unwinnable war… in Vietnam. And 30 years later, we are entangled in the Iraq War which is longer than our participation in the second World War, not to speak of the first World War. Rumsfeld, Vice President Cheney, George Bush, do not know enough history and they duplicated the stupidity of the Vietnam War.C-SPAN: Why do we write history and read history if people don’t learn from it?
SCHLESINGER: Well, they learn from it. Franklin Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Harry Truman. …. They knew American history. But some presidents flunk history. Buchanan for example, and Herbert Hoover. Buchanan cost 600,000 lives and Herbert Hoover, he didn’t send people to be killed, but he starved them to death through the ideaology of laissez-faire.
No wonder E.J. Dionne calls Schlesinger a “lion of American liberalism.” Any chance a conservative historian would be similarly canonized?
richard said,
March 3, 2007 @ 4:41 pm
Got to find one that’s been lionized, first.
Peter Roff said,
March 5, 2007 @ 10:10 am
His observation about Hoover — who was no conservative — obfuscates (intentionally in my view) the fact that he is widely credited a hero for his work feeding the people of Belgium during World War I. In fact, he was so widely lionized for it that he was pursued as a potential presidential candidate in 1920 by both the Democrats and the Republicans.
Richard said,
March 8, 2007 @ 1:24 pm
Schlesinger wants to talk about who doesn’t understand history. We did not loose Vietnam we have it away. The commander of the NVA considered surrendering after the TET offensive in which the U.S. destroyed them. But he didn’t because of the anti-war protests going on in the U.S. From the test offensive to the time the troops came home we lost over 29,000 soldiers…half of what we lost in total. There there were over 3 million people slaughtered in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. To me, it is very easy to lay those deaths at the feet of the human excrement like Schlesinger, Kerry, Fonda and the reast of the gutless cowards who think we ought to pull out of Iraq.
How many people do you want to ket killed in this conflict, Schlesinger?