Unsheathing The Dagger

Courtesy of a reader's email, here's a piece in Harper's that's worth a read. The writer, Kevin Baker, posits that since World War II the Right has engineered a series of foreign policy disasters for which it has blamed domestic "enemies." It feels a bit like data mining to fit what's undeniably current reality vis-a-vis Iraq, but Baker makes some good points. One quibble: he goes into detail about how the Nazis propagated the idea of the dolchstoss---"dagger thrust" from within---to explain Germany's defeat in World War I. He should have gone a bit further and pointed out that Hitler and his aides were obsessed with dolchstoss until the very end; in the bunker, Goebbels wrote in his diary about "the delirium of treachery which surrounds the Fuhrer," and various accounts show that in his final days Hitler railed against the "cowardice" of Germans and thought the destruction of Berlin was appropriate because of its citizens' supposed moral weakness.

Also, Baker stretches the Vietnam example a bit too far, glossing over the fact that the war began under a Democrat, escalated under another Democrat, and was ended by a Republican. Moreover, the Right was far from united in support of the war; in August 1965, a young congressman from Illinois named Donald Rumsfeld said the following as he entered a New York Times editorial into the Congressional Record:

I believe the following significant and timely editorial which appeared in today’s issue of the New York Times and which discusses our involvement in Vietnam merits wide attention. I concur in the conclusion expressed therein that the people of the United States must know not only how their country became involved but where we are heading.

Yes, Nixon was obsessed with antiwar protestors, Communists, and "bums," but less out of a desire for a Vietnam scapegoat (after all, ending the war was an implicit part of his 1968 campaign platform) than as a result of the same fatal personality flaws that led to Watergate. Yes, Cronkite's 1968 "stalemate" comment caused a huge stir, but if the Right tried to pin the failure of Vietnam on the press, it didn't stick---at least then. The 1970's were halcyon days for the press; after Woodward and Bernstein, top college graduates wanted to be journalists instead of investment bankers. The scapegoating of the press for Vietnam gained traction only in the Reagan years, as the Right sought to exorcise the war's demons and concurrently embark on massive military spending, while reassuring an American public still skittish about Vietnam that the war was only lost because the media forced us to "cut and run." Obviously, the "media and Left as dagger-wielder" meme has snowballed since then, and now is a chief article of faith among the hysterical set on talk radio, television, and the internet. Baker does a good job in exploring the dynamic of the current dagger---now sharpened, unsheathed, and poised.