Garry Wills: A Man After My Own Heart

Garry Wills is a brilliant political historian and a brilliant religious historian. Wills bestowed nicknames for the Bushies in his last paragraph. Guess whom each aphorism represents: Bring 'Em On, Mission Accomplished, Mushroom Cloud, Forty-Five Minutes, Prague Meeting, Stuff Happens, Slam Dunk, Shinseki Is Wild, Mobile Labs, Iraqis Love Me, Oil Will Rebuild It, Cakewalk), and Ahmed Told Me. Hint: Bring 'Em On is the Commander in Chief (or Thief). If this is a (fair & balanced) appellative, so be it.


[x New York Review of Books]
The Election and America's Future
By Alan Ryan, Anthony Lewis, Brian Urquhart, Edmund S. Morgan, Garry Wills, Ian Buruma, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Mark Danner, Michael Ignatieff, Norman Mailer, Ronald Dworkin, Russell Baker, Steven Weinberg, Thomas Powers

Garry Wills
Evanston, Illinois

What was the last election with great stakes in play? I suppose 1968. It was similar to this race, but (as it were) upside down. Both involve the problem of admitting a tragic mistake. The mistake in 1968 was a belief that where the French had failed in a long and committed colonial adventure in Indochina, we could replace them and succeed. We could do so, we thought, because we were not colonialists but supporters of indigenous freedom against world communism. We came with "clean hands."

The current mistake is a belief that we could enter the Mideast with clean hands as supporters of democratic values in the whole region, in opposition to world terrorism. We would do so with Donald Rumsfeld's swift military in-and-out operation to put friends like Ahmed Chalabi in charge and withdraw—just as we could use Robert McNamara's "surgical" and "counterinsurgent" operations to keep friends like Nguyen Van Thieu in charge of Vietnam before withdrawing. Both mistakes reflected an ignorance of the respective regions, a false view of America's reception by those being "helped," and an underestimation of American resistance to longer-term commitment than was first proposed.

Our election is an upside-down version of the 1968 one because the incumbent party was then most disposed to admit the mistake of Vietnam, though it had led us into the quagmire. President Kennedy's closest advisers had egged on President Johnson to sustain the war—but it was proving unsustainable, as Lyndon Johnson's withdrawal, the Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy presidential bids, and Hubert Humphrey's wobbling demonstrated. Had Humphrey won, his party would not have supported vigorous extension of the war—it had already admitted the mistake. Nixon, by contrast, though he vaguely referred to a plan for ending the war, had constituencies not disposed to that course. The anti-Communist rationale for the war was so strong that even when Nixon achieved his opening to China, Republicans who opposed that move said they would not stay with him unless he continued his commitment to the war—as he did throughout his first term. Only after many more casualties on both sides, and no accomplishment of our war aims, was the mistake finally (indirectly) admitted.

Today it is the incumbent party that refuses to admit the mistake made in the preemptive war on Iraq. Its ideological stake in the venture resembles that of the out party in 1968, while the current out party, despite Kerry's wobbling of the Humphrey sort, has a cumulative opposition to the war like that of the Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy insurgents in 1968 (their equivalents now being Howard Dean, Wesley Clark, and Dennis Kucinich). What will be done in Iraq remains unclear for both parties; but a sane policy must begin from a grasp of the mistake that was made, an understanding of which the Republicans seem incapable.

Will it take us decades and thousands of deaths to see our error in Iraq, as it did to see our error in Vietnam? It may well do so under another Republican term. No one in it has resigned, been fired, repented, or apologized. The air of rectitude is bolstered as the blunders become clearer. What is generally true of presidential elections is imperatively true of this one—that the part of wisdom is to vote the party, not the man. Whether you like George Bush or John Kerry is beside the point. One must vote for the constituencies that are at the core of the candidate's campaign and future ability to govern. That means, in the case of the current administration, that a vote for the Republicans is a vote for Halliburton and contractors in the oil world, for a Rumsfeld policy of destroying the military, for a Cheney vision of unilateral action in a world of nations dismissed as cowards or fools, for an economy based on tax cuts, deficits, and resistance to social programs.

Most elections are referendums on the people in place, and that should be the overwhelming criterion this time. What will four more Bush years do to our relations abroad, our armed forces, our environment, our economy, our civil rights, our separation of church and state? Were it not so tragic in its toll of the dead and maimed on both sides of the conflict, our war in Iraq would seem a comedy of endless errors, featuring such Keystone Kops as George (Bring 'Em On) Bush, Karl (Mission Accomplished) Rove, Condi (Mushroom Cloud) Rice, Tony (Forty-Five Minutes) Blair, Dick (Prague Meeting) Cheney, Don (Stuff Happens) Rumsfeld, George (Slam Dunk) Tenet, Paul (Shinseki Is Wild) Wolfowitz, Colin (Mobile Labs) Powell, Ahmed (Iraqis Love Me) Chalabi, Doug (Oil Will Rebuild It) Feith, Ken (Cakewalk) Adelman, Richard (Ahmed Told Me) Perle, and other supporting players. What will the future say of us if we continue to reward this crew?

Garry Wills is an adjunct professor of history at Northwestern University. Wills received a Ph.D. in classics from Yale and has had a distinguished career as an author, with books such as Lincoln at Gettysburg, John Wayne's America, a biography of St. Augustine, and A Necessary Evil: A History of American Distrust of Government. He has received numerous accolades, including the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction (for Lincoln at Gettysburg) and the NEH Presidential Medal.

Wills is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and his articles appear frequently in The New York Review of Books.

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