History lessons lost on Trump
For Donald Trump, history is not prologue. It doesn’t even exist. There is no history!
The president lives in and for the moment. There are few other explanations for his cascade of tweets on things big and small. He lives in the realm of the instantaneous. He is a moment-dweller.
A contemporary said of President Theodore Roosevelt, “You must remember the president is a 12-year-old.” It was meant in jest.
No sane person is laughing at Donald Trump, not with nuclear weapons and the world at his disposal.
It’s been said the Trumpmeister tapped into the secret soul of (47 percent of) America during the campaign. This is about right, though I suspect the number of Americans heedless of history is even higher. Fewer Americans — count me in this group — actually know how to harness history for present good.
All of which brings to mind a book — “Thinking In Time” — by the historian Ernest May and the political scientist-historian Richard Neustadt, late to life and late of Harvard, the seat of learning millions of Americans love to distrust, representing, as it does, the distant tower of the theoretical over the practical.
May, who was the Marshall Lecturer at Penn State Fayette years ago now, and Neustadt, advisor to presidents Kennedy and Johnson, were hard-headed realists. Their book, written in 1986, was subtitled “The Use of History For Decision Makers.”
We’re all decision-makers now, it seems, though I could be mistaken: social media may only make us think so.
First, let’s be clear — decision making is not for the glib. Neustadt told a Senate subcommittee at the start of the large American escalation in Vietnam in the mid-60s, “Government decisions … always involve weighing the desirable against the feasible.”
Even presidents — maybe especially presidents — must be content with choices and results far from ideal. It’s the nature of things that by the time a problem reaches the White House there are hardly any good options to pick from. Great options? Forget about it.
So when Donald Trump says the equivalent of, “This is going to make things great,” you can pretty much chalk it up to rhetoric, pure and simple. That Trump, or any president or politician, may believe it themselves just goes to show how unschooled they are, how divorced they are from historical experience.
I suppose that’s lesson No. 1.
Lesson No. 2 is that, as May and Neustadt put it, “decision makers always draw on history, whether conscious of doing so or not.” The problem is, they may pick the wrong history, or they don’t follow through.
That’s what happened to Harry Truman in 1950 when he decided to send U.S. ground forces into Korea to blunt a North Korean attack on the South, May and Neustadt write.
Truman based his decision, at least in part, on the woeful history of the 1930s. When the western democracies failed to push back against the Japanese, for instance, after they seized Manchuria from the Chinese, Japanese leaders were emboldened to commit further acts of aggression. (Read: Pearl Harbor.) The same was true for Hitler, or so the theory goes.
As far as May and Neustadt are concerned, so far so good. They agree that Truman’s decision to intervene in June 1950 was the only proper course of action. North Korean aggression had to be confronted.
Then, according to the authors, Truman fumbled by actively permitting Gen. MacArthur, with the North Koreans in retreat, to pursue a war whose aim became unification of the Korean peninsula. Truman forgot that in Manchuria, as in Austria and Czechoslovakia (with Hitler), the goal was limited to restoring “the status quo ante,” May and Neustadt contend.
The push north by the U.S., way past the 38th parallel, was a fatal error. It prompted the Chinese to do some intervening of their own. The result was years of fighting and way more American dead.
And for what?
The same settlement the U.S. could have had early in the war, and the one we finally settled for.
Truman first answered the call of history, and then kicked it aside.
Using history to good advantage is hard. “Thinking in time,” the authors argue, requires mental agility. “Accustomed signposts” lose “their usefulness,” they write, “while other aspects of the past, previously disregarded, take their place.”
It’s rough out there.
“The more history one knows, the better one understands the options,” according to May and Neustadt.
Woe to the nation, woe to the decision maker who thinks and acts otherwise.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown and is the author of two books — “Grand Salute: Stories of the World War II Generation” and “Our People.” Robbins can be reached at grandsalutebook@gmail.com.