Many of the obituaries that appeared on the recent death of
Arthur M. Schlesinger inadvertently (one can only suppose) made
mention of the Professor’s understanding of political honor as a
significant fact about his life. During the disastrous
CIA-sponsored invasion of Cuba by Cuban exiles at the Bay of Pigs
in April of 1961, Schlesinger found himself in what must have been
the acutely embarrassing position of being the Kennedy
administration’s point man in explaining to the media what was
going on. It would have been embarrassing in any case, but it was
all the more so as he had himself opposed the invasion and argued
against it in the administration’s inner councils. Yet he never
flinched but manfully went to bat for his president and what it was
already apparent was the administration’s badly misjudged
policy.
The New York Times, which describes the historian and friend of the
Kennedys as “a provocative, unabashedly liberal partisan,” puts it
like this: “Mr. Schlesinger distinguished himself early in the
administration by being one of the few in the White House to
question the invasion of Cuba planned by the Eisenhower
administration. But he then became a loyal soldier, telling
reporters a misleading story that the Cuban exiles landing at the
Bay of Pigs were no greater than 400 when in fact they numbered
1,400.” The London Daily Telegraph tells the story a bit more colorfully:
Schlesinger had opposed the venture, though he put his
hand to an official paper justifying the invasion and accepted the
task of speaking for the provisional government of Cuba, which the
CIA had brought to a small hut in the Everglades to ship to Cuba
after the invading brigade established its beachhead. Matters
descended into farce when Schlesinger held a press conference. As
the cameras rolled, television viewers could hear the members of
the would-be government inside the hut shouting in Spanish: “Let us
out. Let us out.” Schlesinger, embarrassed, nevertheless continued
to speak for the members of the supposedly legitimate government,
who had apparently been locked inside the hut because the CIA
feared what they might say about Kennedy “betraying the
invasion.”
The
London Times, by contrast,
wrote by contrast, wrote of Schlesinger’s
“tendency to glory in the rougher side of the power game” and
attributed to that tendency the fact that “he tried, rather too
obsequiously, to defend (while on a special mission to Europe on
which President Kennedy had sent him) the Administration’s
ill-judged, clandestine adventure over the Bay of Pigs invasion of
Cuba.” This is closer to the way in which we customarily view such
matters now, which is to regard it as “obsequious” and perhaps even
shameful for one of its officials to put loyalty to the
administration ahead of his personal opinion — and, presumably,
the advancement of his own career. But in the end where this view
of things leads us is to one or other of the multitude of potential
anti-“surge” resolutions in Congress.
What the anti-surgers don’t understand that the honor of their
country is at stake. So used have they become to performing in the
comparatively diminutive theater of national politics that they
have an exaggerated sense of their own importance. They don’t
understand that, on the world stage, nobody is interested in them
or in whether they are — or were — right or wrong about the Iraq
war. Before the eyes of the world, the performer in Iraq is not
them, or even President Bush, but the United States of America,
with which they are included whether they like it or not. The
humiliation of the United States which they are attempting to bring
about by forcing a withdrawal from Iraq with the enemy still
undefeated will, therefore, affect them every bit as much as it
will the hated Bushites. Their foolishness in not seeing this is
like that of Michael Moore in wondering why the terrorists of 9/11
would have hit a blue state like New York instead of some place
where the war-mongers lived like Texas or Alabama.
That kind of thinking also depends on the liberal assumption
that if we are hit it must be because we have done something to
provoke those who hit us. That’s why the anti-war left thinks that
matters of war and peace are simple ones. All we have to do is stop
provoking the enemy and he will stop hitting us. The thought that
we might be provoking him simply by being who we are, and therefore
that there is nothing we can do to keep from being hit but to hit
him first, is quite literally unthinkable to such people. To them,
it’s a not-in-my-name moment. Like Senator Webb in his reply to the
State of the Union Address, their concern is to get it on record
that they didn’t support the war in the first place. Like Senator
Kerry testifying before Congress in 1971, they think the
President’s concern with avoiding the world’s perception of
American defeat is a mere matter of personal vanity.
But the only thing that will matter to the enemy is that the USA
chose the battlefield in Iraq and then chose to leave it with the
enemy still in control. That is a defeat for our country whether
Michael Moore or Senator Webb or Senator Kerry or Congressman
Murtha or anyone else thinks it is or not. That’s the unforgiving
nature of honor, which they don’t understand. Not only is it a
defeat but, like all defeats, it cannot but breed further struggles
— and further defeats — down the road. Once we are driven out of
Iraq because three or four or five thousand dead — or whatever the
final number turns out to be — seems too high a price for us to
pay for national honor, it will only be a matter of time before we
are driven out of Afghanistan and anywhere else where we meet the
enemy directly. Then, when we think we can retreat behind our own
borders and avoid him, he will come for us here too. And when he
does the anti-surgers will doubtless still be bleating: “Why do you
want to kill us? We were against the war?”
