Month: October 2024

20. Baker and Glassner, Man Who Ran Washington (13 October 2024)

by kurto

The career of Jim Baker, a corporate lawyer from an upper-crust Houston family, epitomizes a bygone era of Washington DC dealmaking, crowned by his successful tenure as Secretary of State during the collapse of the Soviet Union. Baker, who chafed at his campaign director and chief of staff roles, premised authority on power not wisdom as well as skill in sidestepping responsibility, with legal know-how acting as guarantor. The approach falters when the fundamental questions stretch the paradigm, in Baker’s case, the Baby Boom-era welfare state politics and Cold War arms control. Despite the authors’ frequent contention that dealmaking is out of fashion, Baker’s successor is Obama, the president himself the knife fighter.

A product of Princeton-as-finishing school, he turned to politics not because of his first wife’s death but from weariness with corporate law. His second marriage made for tempestuous family life. Still, over the 10 years from age 48 to 58 he soared from an outsider to Secretary of Treasury and then State, Nixon’s resignation having opened the way. Baker’s modus vivendi was to leak but not lie to the media; to keep a file of unethical requests; as negotiator, to allow the opposite side to show concerns had been expressed, without conceding the substance of his position. He used ‘double option’ positions to take credit or disavow the outcome. No permanent enemies, but equally no clear mechanism for driving consensus; there are compromises with Democrats but fewer examples of conciliating Republicans. Quayle, Rumsfeld, and Cheney are exemplars of conservatism. Buckley is said to be an eminence grise.

Baker preserved Social Security, and is credited with Canadian free trade by Mulroney. He was the first American leader to accept Chinese tyranny as concomitant with economic growth, and responsible for Willie Horton campaigning. His great rival was Henry Kissinger, the strategist being a very different prototype to the dealmaker. Nixon thought him prone to illustory international consensus. Thatcher thought his decision making average, e.g., allowing Germany to come together without any concern for proto-European Union (given Merkel, was she wrong?). He ended his days trading on influence, rallying to put the second Bush in the presidency.

Where is the line between duplicity and personal honor? He didn’t waste time on guilt over Machiavellian moves, according to his wife. The authors recur to the theme of Baker being out for himself, e.g., as Reagan’s chief, versus Bush’s consigliere; Nancy Reagan is said to have been pleased, Barbara Bush unhappy.

Well sourced, though from a historiographic perspective, the authors tend to describe characters as they would be remembered, rather than contemporaneously viewed (e.g., Oregon senator Bob Packwood). Reagan ‘stoked division’ by campaigning on welfare queens, apartheid was failing in 1992, left-liberal homogeneity pervades.

19. Kenyon, History Men (5 October 2024)

by kurto

Surveys the development of English historiography to the 1980s, focusing on the distinction between literary (i.e., politically minded, aristocratic, and/or ‘amateur’) and professional (postwar, specialized university) work. New social history, inspired by Namierite prosopography, sociology, and so on is prematurely seen to have failed: Kenyon didn’t account for ideology. As the Marxists and the Annalistes never much figured in the literary specialists’ treatment of the ancient constitution or the Tudor and Stuart dynasties, so their long march through the schools was not yet evident.

Raleigh was the first to discern political uses of antiquarian writing. Whiggish history commenced with Hume, whom Macaulay sought to eclipse. The contemporaneous opposition was not Voltaire’s philosophical reflections of universal relevance, but Ranke’s emphasis on re-creation of events and ideas. William Stubbs initiated premodern academic study at Oxford over 1866-84, unusually for his time working back into the medieval era to discern the origins of the modern British nation. English professionals (i.e., Oxbridge) trailed Paris, Göttingen, and Vienna. Early 20th-century practitioners were infatuated with scientific history, lacked degrees to rival the continental schools, and were already becoming overspecialized even as new institutions such as Manchester sprung up. Albert Pollard of University College Lond was the era’s driving force.

Trevelyan was perhaps the last of the aristocratic literary men. Elton, co-star with Namier of the postwar era, was England’s most Germanic practitioners; curiously both were immigrants. The former opposed conceptual history; history is the only truly empirical discipline, in which the author starts not with a thesis or paradigm to test but criticizes evidence, asks questions, examines authoritative claims – especially when the subject moves from narrow intellectual concerns (sexuality) to political matters that concern all. Plumb contended the point of undergraduate history is to prepare for public service and statesmanship, to embrace ideas and policies, the better see through forthcoming events. The quality of an age is not the work of the common man, though they must labor namelessly to support it.