Looking for the Good War: American Amnesia and the Violent Pursuit of Happiness
(Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2021)
Tim Riley interviews Elizabeth Samet:
80 years ago on June 10th, 1943, the Allied forces invaded Sicily in Operation Husky, a battle that lasted six weeks and drove the Axis forces off the island to open up the Mediterranean sea lanes. Elizabeth D. Samet’s sage book, Looking for the Good War, writes about WWII as our dominant war mythology, and how nobody ever fights one war at a time. I talked with her about how war stories emerge, twining around historical memory, and why the concept of a “good war” can gather misconceptions…
TR: … The importance of the story is kind of central, but the way we tell the story to ourselves reflects more of our own values than the values of the people who live the story.
ES: I do think that there's a certain point at which the way we remember it becomes as important, or in the case of a successful myth, more important than what actually happened, at least in sort of guiding and shaping who we are and what our expectations are, and that's when it becomes a problem. I think that it's a national problem and also an individual problem. So when we're in the midst of things, we have certain feelings about them, and then, when we reflect years later, we become—I think it's just human nature—nostalgic, perhaps. We think that we responded in a particular way in the midst of things when we really probably didn't have time to do that. And it's only later that we sort of ennoble our participation in anything, or make it seem larger than it was, or that we had an understanding of it at the time that we really didn't.
I think that part of the problem with World War II mythology is, as you suggested, that we do need it. It is, I think, one of our most flattering myths and one of our most important in the sense that—and this I make very clear in the book—I believe our participation was necessary. I believe the defeat of fascism was essential and that this was an existential threat and it changed our whole role in the world. I don't diminish the advent of the postwar liberal international order or the rule of law, these things are vital—although I think they're in danger right now. These things are all crucial, but at the time, we didn't feel that way necessarily. There were some people who did, but then we forget that there was such a strong post-World War I isolationist sentiment and that that isolationist sentiment was compounded by what was, in certain quarters—chiefly the America First Committee and one of its big spokesmen, Charles Lindberg, national hero—a real fascist sympathy at work. And we diminish that, we don't talk about it as much because it's harder to incorporate into the myth. Part of the myth is that, after December 7, after Pearl Harbor, everybody changed his or her mind overnight. But only a few months later, the Roosevelt administration was worried that Americans had lost a sense of urgency and that they weren't really focused on the war effort. So that initial zeal seemed to diminish in certain quarters. It's also true that I think the motivation for fighting the war in the Pacific, which was certainly packaged for Americans as vengeance for Pearl Harbor, was clear. But now, when we look back on it, we chose not to focus on the Pacific War; we instead focus on the message of American soldiers as liberators and not people seeking vengeance. And that's a huge difference. So that has shifted our focus. We now focus on the European war, and also, by focusing on the European war, we tend to confuse consequences with causes. So the consequence of our participation was, of course, the liberation of Europe from fascist tyranny, but that was not a sufficient cause to get us to join the effort in the first place. Certainly, there were members of the Roosevelt administration, Lend Lease, all of these things, they knew which side they ought to be on, but that was not universally shared before the war.
“…We're always fighting, not just sort of tactically, operationally, strategically—which is, I think, how this idea of fighting the last war is often used—but that we always can have in our minds the war that preceded…”
TR: So one of the things you write about is that there's this old adage about how we're always fighting the Last War, and you sort of reformulate it into “Nobody wages a single war at a time, or you can't wage one war at a time.” Could you unpack that a little bit for us? It's kind of a fascinating idea.
ES: So this is drawn actually from the war correspondent W.C. Heinz and he has this amazing account. He wrote this wonderful essay after the war in 1950, where he relays the story of crossing the Belgian border on September 2, 1944, and as he crosses the border, he tells some of the soldiers he's with that if they had gotten there nine days sooner, it would have been the 30th anniversary of the British retreat from Mans from the First World War. One of the soldiers says “Who cares?!” and Heinz replies “Nobody cares, but you don't have to get sore about it.” “Nobody's sore about it,” the soldier replies, “just let's fight one war at a time.” And Heinz says “I don't want to fight any of them. I'll give you both of them.” And so the soldier, who has a completely normal reaction to that, is wondering “What are you bothering me with this for?” I love Heinz's point there, because, of course, in this case, the war is being fought on the same ground as well, but it's the idea that we're always fighting, not just sort of tactically, operationally, strategically—which is, I think, how this idea of fighting the last war is often used—but that we always can have in our minds the war that preceded.
And so this becomes important, I think, for World War II. But it becomes really important for all the wars since, which, as I suggested in the book, are really fought in World War II’s shadow, and with often an unreasonable expectation that they will end the same way. We seem to have retained, despite Vietnam, despite our experience in Afghanistan and Iraq, this capacity for surprise when wars don't turn out the way World War II did. And I think part of that is set up by the vocabulary used by those who articulate the reasons why we're fighting. So we have comparisons often made with that. In the first Gulf War, George Bush talked about Saddam Hussein as a Hitler. In the more recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, you had Rumsfeld drawing that connection once again to Hitler, and you had the term “Islamo-Fascism.” So there’s this ability to repurpose fascism to suit the moment, which is something Orwell warned about a long time ago. And you have the “Axis of Evil,” which is, of course, a reference to the Axis powers. So all of this language, this vocabulary that defined the world at a moment, is now being repurposed and has been repurposed. I think that the way in which wars are packaged makes us think that they will turn out in the same way, and of course, they have not done that. So that, I think, is the real danger, or the real sense in which you can never fight one war at a time and that there's always something hanging over you as a nation, sort of thinking about who we are, why we fight, and why we might fight in the future…
also mentioned:
Elizabeth Samet, Looking for the Good War: American Amnesia and the Violent Pursuit of Happiness (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2021)
Timothy Snyder’s Making of Modern Ukraine lectures, Yale University, 2022
Max Hastings on Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy, 1945-1975 (Collins, 2019)
Bob Dylan’s Triplicate: Hero Blues
June playlist: Tina Turner (1939-2023)
You want some version of Ike and Tina Turner’s Greatest Hits that contains “It’s Gonna Work Out Fine” and “A Fool In Love,” since there’s no one Ike and Tina album that gives you everything you need. But her 1984 solo breakout, Private Dancer, works on so many different levels, not least the invention of VH1, or the “grown-up” MTV, which followed her lead in rock’s future. It also contains her cover of “I Can’t Stand the Rain,” John Lennon’s favorite single of 1972, original by Ann Peebles. It also defines its moment as it reaches around time. See also “The Elvis of Feminism,” a presentation from last year.
Not Funny’s Jena Friedman in the New Yorker:
noises off
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