Yes, Virginia, You Can Try a Former President

That's William W. Belknap in the photo. And his story has much to say about whether it's constitutional to impeach Trump now that he has left office?  The short answer is: Yep.

To begin with, the House of Representatives *impeached* him before he left office.  It's only the required Senate trial that's taking place after he's left office.

As for *trying* him after he has left office, there's historical precedent for impeaching and trying a federal official after they have left office.  You've got an uphill climb if you want to argue that trying Trump is unconstitutional.  You certainly cannot say, as the GOP has done, that it's unconstitutional on its face.

On January 15 the Congressional Research Service  (CRS) produced a report entitled "The Impeachment and Trial of a Former President," that explores the history of impeachment in the United States, and notes that federal officials have been impeached after they have left office.  In other words, it has been regarded as constitutional.

The CRS is a  public policy research institute created by Congress in 1914.  Like the Congressional Budget Office and the General Accountability Office, it works directly for Members of Congress on a bipartisan basis.

The report points out that federal officials have been impeached and tried after they have left office.

The most notable case involved the impeachment of Secretary of War William Belknap in 1876, essentially on grounds of rampant corruption.  Here's what the U.S. Senate Historical Office says about it:

On March 2, 1876, just minutes before the House of Representatives was scheduled to vote on articles of impeachment, Belknap raced to the White House, handed Grant his resignation, and burst into tears.

This failed to stop the House. Later that day, members voted unanimously to send the Senate five articles of impeachment, charging Belknap with "criminally disregarding his duty as Secretary of War and basely prostituting his high office to his lust for private gain."

The Senate convened its trial in early April, with Belknap present, after agreeing that it retained impeachment jurisdiction over former government officials. During May, the Senate heard more than 40 witnesses, as House managers argued that Belknap should not be allowed to escape from justice simply by resigning his office.

On August 1, 1876, the Senate rendered a majority vote against Belknap on all five articles. As each vote fell short of the necessary two-thirds, however, he won acquittal.

Republicans undoubtedly know about this precedent.  They rely on the fact that the American public does not know about it.

Sounding Taps for Military History--Again

Yet another lament for the supposed demise of academic military history has appeared, this time from the pen of the distinguished military historian Max Hastings.  These op-eds appear every few years, apparently oblivious to the ones that preceded it and the pushback they received from military historians like myself.  My own commentary focused mainly on an op-ed by John J. Miller in National Review Online September 2006.  Since it appears to have disappeared from the Internet, I reprint it here.

EDUCATION 2006 [September 26, 2006]
Sounding Taps
Why military history is being retired

JOHN J. MILLER

A decade ago, best-selling author Stephen Ambrose donated $250,000 to the University of Wisconsin, his alma mater, to endow a professorship in American military history. A few months later, he gave another $250,000. Until his death in 2002, he badgered friends and others to contribute additional funds. Today, more than $1 million sits in a special university account for the Ambrose-Heseltine Chair in American History, named after its main benefactor and the long-dead professor who trained him.

The chair remains vacant, however, and Wisconsin is not currently trying to fill it. “We won’t search for a candidate this school year,” says John Cooper, a history professor. “But we’re committed to doing it eventually.” The ostensible reason for the delay is that the university wants to raise even more money, so that it can attract a top-notch senior scholar. There may be another factor as well: Wisconsin doesn’t actually want a military historian on its faculty. It hasn’t had one since 1992, when Edward M. Coffman retired. “His survey course on U.S. military history used to overflow with students,” says Richard Zeitlin, one of Coffman’s former graduate teaching assistants. “It was one of the most popular courses on campus.” Since Coffman left, however, it has been taught only a couple of times, and never by a member of the permanent faculty.

One of these years, perhaps Wisconsin really will get around to hiring a professor for the Ambrose-Heseltine chair — but right now, for all intents and purposes, military history in Madison is dead. It’s dead at many other top colleges and universities as well. Where it isn’t dead and buried, it’s either dying or under siege. Although military history remains incredibly popular among students who fill lecture halls to learn about Saratoga and Iwo Jima and among readers who buy piles of books on Gettysburg and D-Day, on campus it’s making a last stand against the shock troops of political correctness. “Pretty soon, it may become virtually impossible to find military-history professors who study war with the aim of understanding why one side won and the other side lost,” says Frederick Kagan, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute who taught at West Point for ten years. That’s bad news not only for those with direct ties to this academic sub-discipline, but also for Americans generally, who may find that their collective understanding of past military operations falls short of what the war-torn present demands.

The very first histories ever written were military histories. Herodotus described the Greek wars with Persia, and Thucydides chronicled the Peloponnesian War. “It will be enough for me,” wrote Thucydides nearly 25 centuries ago, “if these words of mine are judged useful by those who want to understand clearly the events which happened in the past and which (human nature being what it is) will, at some time or other and in much the same ways, be repeated in the future.” The Marine Corps certainly thinks Thucydides is useful: He appears on a recommended-reading list for officers. One of the most important lessons he teaches is that war is an aspect of human existence that can’t be wished away, no matter how hard the lotus-eaters try.

A DYING BREED
Although the keenest students of military history have often been soldiers, the subject isn’t only for them. “I don’t believe it is possible to treat military history as something entirely apart from the general national history,” said Theodore Roosevelt to the American Historical Association in 1912. For most students, that’s how military history was taught — as a key part of a larger narrative. After the Second World War, however, the field boomed as veterans streamed into higher education as both students and professors. A general increase in the size of faculties allowed for new approaches, and the onset of the Cold War kept everybody’s mind focused on the problem of armed conflict.

Caught in the Cross Fire: A Visit to Lynndie England's Hometown

The following is a re-printed post I published twelve years ago, back when this blog was in its infancy and entitled Interrogating the Project of Military History.  The post was originally entitled "Drive-by Journalism," but since Rush Limbaugh long ago adopted "the drive-bys" as an epithet for mainstream media journalists, I felt obliged to change it.  This is one instance, though, when the term seems entirely appropriate.


June 7 [2004] - The Society for Military History had its annual meeting on May 20-23 in Bethesda, Maryland.  The Iraq war hung heavily over the whole affair, partly because the war hangs heavily over the whole country, but mostly because the conference organizers looked deliberately toward the strategic policy-making community.  Bethesda, after all, is cheek by jowl next to Washington, DC.

Between one thing and another, I had not attended an SMH meeting since 1997.  I went this year strictly out of a sense of professional obligation.  I wasn't looking forward to it.  (I wound up having a far better experience than I expected, but that's for a future entry.)

Consequently I took my sweet time getting there, stopping off at the National Road/Zane Grey Museum in eastern Ohio, then at a nearby antique store.  I stuck with the Interstate until I reached Washington, Pennsylvania, at which point I decided I'd take US 40--the old National Road--down to Fort Necessity National Battlefield.  I'd never been there before.  It's the most poorly-chosen military position I have ever seen.  I had read about it, but jeez.  You look at it--a tiny stockade in a marshy meadow, too close to the woods and with a constricted field of fire--and you can't believe the guy who selected it wound up winning the war for American independence.

I didn't think beforehand about the route I'd take after visiting Fort Necessity, but it turns out that US 40 dumps you onto I-68 a few miles west of Cumberland, Maryland, which, it suddenly occurred to me, was only a few miles from Fort Ashby, West Virginia, home town of Lynndie England.  These days everybody knows Pvt. England by sight if not by name:  she's the female MP pointing at the genitals of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib with one hand while giving a "thumbs up" with the other.  Even after a day of dawdling down the highway, I was in no hurry to reach Bethesda, so I found the exit to West Virginia's State Route 28 and drove the thirteen miles to Fort Ashby, population 1354. [1380 per the 2010 census]

The community, about a mile square, spreads out from the single major intersection--Washington Street and Green Street-- which sports a solitary traffic light.  It has a gas station, a convenience store, a Dairy Queen clone, but no McDonald's (whether a town has a McDonald's is my rough-and-ready way of determining if it's a real town or merely a wide spot in the road).  After the prisoner abuse story broke in late April, a flurry of journalists showed up to evaluate Fort Ashby on the theory this would tell us something about Lynndie England, who had immediately become the poster child for all things nasty at Abu Ghraib.  Since the easy thing was to portray Fort Ashby as if it were so far removed from civilization that its residents had to pipe in daylight, that's the way the media tended to portray it.  And yes, there are a few double-wide trailers and maybe the odd junker on blocks in the front yard.  Mostly, though, the houses looked like this one:

The house looks remarkably like the split-levels in my own subdivision, except that the shrubs are better pruned. 

My plan was to find a diner or, preferably, a bar where I could nurse a drink while eavesdropping on the local conversation.  Initially I was disappointed:  nothing suitable caught my eye.  I was about to leave Fort Ashby when I belatedly realized that at the southwest corner of the main intersection stood a ramshackle building that looked as if it might be a bar and--yep--turned out to be just that.  According to a newspaper article I found this morning on LEXIS-NEXIS, the place is called the Corner Club Saloon.  But since almost nothing in the article resembled anything I saw, I give no assurances the name is correct.
I was wearing Dockers, a button-down shirt, and a sport jacket:  much too dressed up for the Corner Club Saloon.  But nobody called me a dude, challenged me to explain what I was doing there, or offered to rearrange my face.  Instead the bartender served me one of those low-carb Michelob Ultras and said, in response to my question, that yes, he sold quite a few of them.  The guys to my right continued to shoot pool.  The women to my left continued an urgent discussion of something that very obviously had nothing at all to do with Iraq, Abu Ghraib, or Lynndie England.

As the minutes ticked by and I reflected with each new sip that $1.75 spent on a Michelob Ultra was $1.75 utterly wasted, I hoped against hope that a) the television above the bar from which CNN Headline News silently flickered would yield an image of the prisoner abuse scandal and, ideally, Lynndie England; and b) somebody in the bar would see it and comment on it.  No such luck.  But there was something homey and comfortable about the Corner Club Saloon.  After a while I didn't give a hoot about my original mission.  Instead I got another beer, looked over the menu, and ordered some chicken tenders for supper.

About the time that the chicken tenders arrived, the woman at my left turned to me and asked, in a neighborly sort of way that was neither challenge nor come-on, who I was.  It was just her way of including me in the group.  I gave her my name and said I was passing through on my way to Washington, DC.  We must have chatted for five or ten minutes before she asked, inevitably, what had brought me to Fort Ashby.  Any story I made up would sound so obviously made up as to be insulting, so I said, "Well, to tell you the truth, it was originally because I knew this was Lynndie England's hometown.  But I don't want to speak of rope in the house of the hanged, so we don't need to talk about that."

It turned out that my new friend, whom I'll call Kitty, did in fact want to talk about that--or, more precisely, about the town's recent experience with the media.  In fact, she wanted everyone within earshot to talk about it.  "Hey, do you know why he's here?  It's that Lynndie England story."

Retired Colonel Peter Mansoor, Lifelong Republican, Will Vote for Hillary Clinton

My friend and colleague Pete Mansoor, a retired Army colonel, has just completed a series of interviews with CNN, MSNBC, and other outlets. Pete is a life-long Republican. In all of of these interviews he goes on record to state that not only does he regard Donald Trump as unacceptable as a commander in chief, he will vote instead for Hillary Clinton.

Pete's qualifications as a military analyst could hardly be stronger.

Pete isn't simply a retired colonel, he graduated first in class at West Point,  commanded a brigade in Iraq, served as the founding director of the U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Center at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. There he helped to edit FM 3-24 Counterinsurgency, published in 2006, which was used to reshape the conduct of the Iraq War.

In the fall of 2006 he served on the so-called "Council of Colonels," a task force of senior officers created by the Joint Chiefs of Staff that reexamined the strategy for the war in Iraq.

The capstone of his 30-year career was as Gen. David Petraeus' executive officer in Iraq during the 2007-2008 Surge.

Pete, a fellow in the Council of Foreign Relations, currently holds the Raymond E. Mason Professor Chair of Military History at The Ohio State University, where his duties divide equally between service to Ohio State's Mershon Center for International Security Studies and teaching in OSU's Department of History.

He is the author of three books, two of which--Baghdad at Sunrise:  A Brigade Commander's Experience in Iraq and Surge: My Journey with General David Petraeus and the Remaking of the Iraq War--recount his experiences in the Iraq War.

With all these qualifications--as well as Pete's quick, sharp mind and ability to present his views lucidly, forcefully, and concisely-it's no wonder that he's a much sought after figure for media interviews.


He is also one of 100 national security analysts who came out in opposition to the Trump candidacy in March.

As I can attest from numerous discussions with him, Pete is a die-hard Republican with a formidable ability to articulate the Republican political philosophy.  When he decided that he had to reject the GOP presidential nominee in favor of Hillary Clinton, hell did not exactly freeze over, but a skin of ice had definitely formed.

Here is Pete's interview with Chris Hayes's All In on MSNBC. He has made similar statements on  other venues, notably CNN's Anderson Cooper 360:

Why Military History Sucked

Recently a graduate student sent an email telling me that my online essay "Why Military History Sucks" was on her reading list but that she couldn't find it on the Internet.  (My university some time ago discontinued the faculty web pages where the essay originally reposed.)   It seemed to me that the easiest way to provide her with it was to re-publish the essay as a blog post.

The title I have given the post--placing the provocative verb in the past tense--is done pointedly.  The essay originated twenty years ago.  In those two decades military history has greatly matured as a field. Many of the points in my critique no longer apply; certainly not to the same extent.  I'm especially pleased that the sense of persecution that the essay rebukes is no longer a common sentiment within the field.

With that said, here's the essay in its original form:

Why Military History Sucks

In November 1996, H-CIVWAR featured a number of posts from individuals frustrated by a belief that military historians were the victims of a kind of blind prejudice on the part of non-military historians. This was my response.

I've read with interest the views of those who think that military history suffers from a bad rep in the groves of academe. I agree that prejudices such as those described exist. But I also believe that we military historians have done much to perpetuate our own marginalization within the academy. Since others have made the case for a political bias against military history, let me make the case for an adverse judgment based on the real shortcomings of military history.

To begin with, those who compare us with women's history, ethnic history, and so on, overlook the fact that such fields have created categories of historical analysis that command the attention of historians in other fields. No one any longer would argue that gender relations have not powerfully shaped human affairs; historians of gender have created sophisticated conceptual tools by which to understand those relations. The fact that the more mediocre scholars dress up commonsense ideas in the language of gender, or construct pseudosophisticated towers of Babel, should not blind us to the fact that the best gender history is imaginative and illuminating. Few human activities are more completely dominated by gender than warfare--it is a preeminently masculine activity--yet how many military historians have ever read the work of Cynthia Enloe or Jean Bethke Elshtain, each of whom has dealt explicitly with women and war; to say nothing of gender historians who do not look at war directly? If we fail to engage with them, why should we expect them to engage with us?

Much more damaging is the fact that we military historians have yet to create a category of historical analysis with anything like the interpretive power of gender, race, or class. You can sneer at the "holy trinity" but you can't deny that these things fundamentally shape our lives and have been doing so--with the possible exception of race--for many centuries.

We military historians can point out again and again that much historical change occurs violently, but that's not enough. Any rube can see that such is the case. But what can military historians tell other historians that they can't figure out on their own? Why exactly do we need experts in the subject? And what exactly is our subject? Most military historians think our subject is the history of "war," but war is an inherently politicized concept. Indeed, most of our intellectual definitions are borrowed from diplomatic, government, and professional military authorities. We haven't examined our field afresh. Women's historians sometimes seem morbidly absorbed with theory. We're not nearly theoretical enough. Even if we ultimately fail to create a "coercive variable" in history that is as powerful a tool as the trinity, we can at least systematically explore the sources of social power and show how military affairs relates to them.

I think it's nuts to assert that the rest of the historical community isn't interested in the military dimension of human affairs. Political historians, social historians, cultural historians have generated enough work on this subject to choke a horse. Indeed, I would argue that the best military history is usually done by people who were not trained as military specialists. And the fact that they do do it should suggest not only their interest in military affairs but also the fact that they have to do it--that when they pose a historical question related to military affairs, too often no military historian ever thought of the question before or thought it was worth exploring. We were too busy writing about our subject in a way that did not connect with the concerns of non-military historians.

I would argue that we are not good military historians even on our own terms. At a minimum, military historians ought to be historians of warfare. Too often, we're really historians of specific wars. At a minimum, military historians ought to have a working knowledge of non-western military history. Instead few of us do, including myself. In fact, I am scandalously ignorant of non-western history and the only reason I'm not ashamed to admit it is that I know most of you are in the same boat. How much comparative military history gets written? Not much.

I will add one final observation, based on a number of years spent observing my peers. The best military historians are among the best historians around. They possess a wide knowledge base; they are conversant with--and sincerely interested in--nonmilitary history as well as their own specialty; they have thought deeply about their intellectual assumptions and search diligently for appropriate conceptual frameworks to inform their work. But too many military historians are as prejudiced against nonmilitary historians as they claim nonmilitary historians are prejudiced against them. They dismiss new trends in history as a lot of P.C. fadmongering. They don't engage with, for example, the new cultural history and find it wanting. They ignore it--and then complain when cultural historians ignore them.

You want to get hired by a history department? Learn to talk about something besides military history. Learn what other historians care about, and show them how an understanding of the military dimension can illuminate the issue. Don't expect that just because a lot of students are interested in military history that that should be a credible reason to have military historians on the faculty. A lot of students are interested in beer, too; it doesn't mean we have to offer courses in the subject. Given a choice between creating a faculty position for world history or one for military history, I would choose the former--the military history enthusiasts in the student body can get their fix from A&E, the History Channel, and the bulging military history section of the local bookstore.

But if a person trained in military history applied for the job who could show me credibly that she or he knew more about world history than the rival candidates, and that their expertise in military history strengthened their ability to understand and teach world history, I would hire them. And so would many historians. When it comes to military history, most nonmilitary historians are not antipathetic toward the subject, just skeptical. In effect, they're from Missouri: we are going to have to show them.

Finding Common Ground

Cross-posted from Sibling Rivalry
By Scott Grimsley

Honoring Our Dead With Taking Chance

As anyone who knows him can attest, my brother Mark loves movies.  His DVD collection is, to say the least, extensive, and he is actually a true scholar of films.  He has published numerous movie reviews about World War Two movies that I have really enjoyed for their insights and examination of deeper themes contained in the films.  Interestingly he is also passionate about films concerning Jesus, and has taught several studies privately on the subject.

I read his blog entry this morning and saw his comments on the movie Taking Chance.  I had never seen the movie and was intrigued by its premise and how he had used it to instruct his daughter Chloe on the meaning of Memorial Day.  (Chloe, by the way, is adopting her father's appreciation for classic film: on one visit she wanted me to watch Singing In the Rain with her as opposed to the more conventional Disney or Pixar offerings my kids grew up with). Fortunately I had access to Taking Chance on one of my internet subscription services, and so I watched it.



The film is incredibly moving and really had no message except it told the tale of how the body of a fallen soldier was treated with respect and dignity throughout his journey from the combat zone to burial in his Wyoming hometown.  I admit I cried like a baby watching it.  I was reminded of the famous quote attributed to Joseph Stalin "the death of one man is a tragedy; the death of millions is a statistic".  Sometimes, unless we know the deceased personally, we fail to acknowledge the real human impact of war, and that is another valuable reminder of the film.  I understood the conflict experienced by Kevin Bacon's character as well, about whether his service as a staff officer working basically a military job on civilian work schedule allowed him to claim the title of a "real" Marine compared to the obvious sacrifice of those who are actually fighting.  I am a Desert Storm era veteran who did not go to Desert Storm.  I spent that time assisting in refresher training of reservists recalled to active duty to backfill units in Germany, but still was the beneficiary of the outpouring of public affection for the military during that conflict, and sometimes felt like an impostor.

However the point I want to make is about the diversity of backgrounds of the people honoring Chance Phelps, the fallen Marine, and his escort officer, LTC Michael Strobl.  Throughout the film, spontaneous gestures of respect take place, ranging from the complimentary upgrade of the outbound flight to first class Strobl receives at the airline ticket counter, to the stewardess who wordlessly hands Strobl a crucifix on the plane, to a baggage handler getting bedding for Strobl to sleep on so he can stay with Phelps' body during an overnight layover, to finally an impromptu funeral procession that forms as Phelps' body is driven 5 hours from the airport to his home.  This is where I see hope for us as a nation.  There are points that divide us, sure, but there are also those where all of us as Americans can agree.  Honoring those who have died in the defense of our freedom is definitely one.

So, thanks to my brother, I feel I celebrated Memorial Day with a proper attitude of respect and remembrance.  Despite the gulf of what often seems to divide us, and our very real differences, there is common ground.  This is what we can build on.

The Impact of "Taking Chance"

Today is Memorial Day. Two years ago I took my daughter Chloe to a Memorial Day parade and tried to give her some idea of what it was about, but as she was just 2 1/2 years old I naturally had limited success. So last evening we sat down together and watched "Taking Chance." It's a 2009 HBO film based on the true story of Marine Lt Col Michael Strobel's experience escorting the remains of Lance Corporal Chance Phelps from Dover Air Force Base to his parents' home in rural Wyoming.  Here's the trailer:




I'd seen the film before, enough to know that it was perfectly suitable for a 4 1/2 year old to watch. It contains no violence and (with one brief exception) no profanity. Chloe asked a number of questions, and periodically we'd pause the DVD while I answered them. One of them had to do with the term "service"; as in "Thank you for your service." Chloe had previously encountered the term only in the context of food service, so I had to explain the larger meaning of "service," what it means "to serve," and so on. Particularly what it means to serve in the military and, by extension, to serve one's country.

Whenever I get a little choked up about something, Chloe interprets it as sadness, and has continued to do so despite my efforts to explain that such shows of emotion often do not signify sadness.  Several times during the film she turned to me and said, "Don't be sad."

The movie had an impact on someone made of sterner stuff than myself.  Early in the Obama administration, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates conducted a review of the Defense Department's policy of barring media access to the military mortuary facility at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware.  The media cried foul, with some charging that the policy was a politically-motivated effort to hide the human cost of war from the American public.  But the military services and a number of groups representing the families of fallen soldiers considered it almost sacrilegious to allow cameras to film the flag-draped coffins returning from overseas.  Gates ultimately decided to modify the policy so as to allow press coverage as long as a grieving family did not object.

In his memoirs, Gates wrote:

In the case of my decision on Dover, an HBO movie, Taking Chance, released in February [2009], had an important impact.  The story follows a Marine lieutenant colonel (played by Kevin Bacon) as he escorts the remains of Marine Lance Corporal Chance Phelps from Dover to his hometown in Wyoming, ordinary Americans making gestures of respect all along the way.  After seeing the film, I was resolved that we should publicly honor as many of our fallen warriors as possible, beginning at Dover.  -- Duty:  Memoirs of a Secretary at War (New York, 2014), 307. 

(For more information on the film, see the  "Taking Chance" web site on HBO.)

Enduring the Unendurable: Japan's Longest Day

Reprinted with permission of World War II magazine

At noon on August 15, 1945, millions across Japan craned their ears to radios, listening in amazement to their emperor’s voice, reproduced on a 78-rpm phonograph record. Hirohito gravely read an imperial edict announcing that his government had acceded to the Allies’ demand that the Japanese military surrender unconditionally. In and of itself, this was a stunning moment. Most commoners had never heard an emperor speak. Hirohito delivered his remarks in a classical form of Japanese difficult for most of his countrymen to follow. He never used the words “defeat” or “surrender,” so many listeners did not grasp the meaning of his address. As previously authorized, an announcer afterward drove home the god-king’s stunning point. For the first time in its 2,500-year history, Japan had met defeat.

Twenty-two years later Toho Studio—which had won fans among American moviegoers with its Godzilla franchise—released Japan’s Longest Day, an account of the 24 hours that led to Hirohito’s radio broadcast. Directed by Kihachi Okamoto, a veteran of the Pacific War whose 40 films include many with World War II themes, Japan’s Longest Day—like The Longest Day, its 1962 Hollywood namesake—featured an all-star cast memorably led by Toshiro Mifune, Japan’s John Wayne. The film, closely based on fact, became Japan’s second highest grossing film of 1967, inspiring Toho to make other movies about the Japanese military during the Second World War. Japan’s Longest Day, little known in the United States, was almost unobtainable until 2006, when Wilmington, North Carolina, video distributor AnimEigo (animeigo.com) released an excellent DVD transfer.

The title refers to the gripping sequence of events between noon August 14, when Hirohito importuned his cabinet to end the war, and noon August 15, when Gyokuon-hōsō, “the Jewel Voice Broadcast,” signified the end of the Japanese empire.

In a 21-minute documentary-style open, Okamoto portrays the cabinet struggling to answer Potsdam Declaration demands for unconditional surrender, with the only alternative “prompt and utter destruction.” The cabinet splits. A pro-peace faction centers on Prime Minister Baron Kantaro Suzuki (Chishu Ryu). The diehards’ strongest voice is Japan’s war minister, General Korechika Anami (Mifune).  Reluctant at best to accept surrender, Anami argues that the Potsdam Declaration does not offer adequate assurance that the Allies will permit the emperor to the keep the throne,    The Cabinet, he insists, must force the Allies to be clear on this point. “Because if that is not the case,” the general tells the Cabinet, fist on the hilt of his long sword, “we must fight to the last man.”

Unable to decide even with Hiroshima and Nagasaki in radioactive cinders and the Soviets invading Manchuria, the cabinet finally meets with the emperor to seek resolution.  Suzuki and Anami each make their cases. As Hirohito (Hakuo Matsumoto) rises to respond, Okamoto superimposes a clock, then the film’s title. The documentary structure falls away and Japan’s Longest Day plays out as a drama inter-cutting the cabinet and emperor in their final deliberations, the push to record and broadcast the surrender edict, and hardcore militarists plotting to keep the speech from reaching the Japanese people.

“It is impossible to continue to prosecute this war,” Hirohito tells the cabinet, voice halting as he tries to control his emotions. “No matter what happens to me . . . my people . . . save my people.  I can no longer endure letting them suffer any longer.” Kihachi photographs this scene carefully, not revealing Hirohito’s face. Besides showing deference to the emperor, still on the throne at the time of the film’s release, this framing focuses our attention on Anami’s reaction to his sacred leader’s declaration. When the rest of the cabinet is bursting into tears, the dry-eyed Anami, who knows of the would-be coup, wears an expression of austere resignation. His heart is with the hard-core militarists, but to join the resistance would be to defy his emperor, and he is too much the man of tradition to do so.

Over the next two hours, characters race one another and time. The cabinet wrangles over the language of the edict the emperor will sign and record for broadcast. A cadre of staff-level officers deduces what is underway and plots a coup d’état. Commanders at two key air bases, Atsugi and Kodama, vow to fight on by sending kamikazes against an American fleet off the coast. Anami, after sternly instructing his staff to obey the emperor’s will, goes into foreboding seclusion.

Okamoto’s juxtapositions can be startling. Civilians, including many schoolchildren, throng an airfield to sing an anthem of support for pilots preparing to fly to their deaths. The song continues as the perspective cuts to officials placing the finished edict before the emperor, who signs it. The recording session takes place; the emperor’s men hide the disk at the Imperial Household Agency. The plotters invoke the impending kamikaze attacks as they plead with General Takeshi Mori (Shogo Shimada), commander of the Imperial Guard Division, to join their coup. Rebuffed, the conspirators murder Mori, forge orders in his name, and transmit them to the empire’s remaining forces. Imperial Guard detachments surround the palace and ransack the royal household looking for Hirohito’s surrender recording.

The coup begins to fall apart. The guardsmen cannot find the record. The forged orders’ origins come to light. General Shizuichi Tanaka (Kenjiro Ishiyama), commander of the Eastern District Army, arrives at the palace to stop the plot for good. In counterpoint, Anami, alone but for two young subordinates, resolutely prepares to commit seppuku—self-disembowelment. He tells his companions, who are there to witness his suicide, that they must help to rebuild Japan. “Each and every Japanese must stand by their station, live on, and work earnestly,” Anami urges the pair. “In no other way can the nation be rebuilt.”

Anami kills himself. Separately, so do the plotters, whose bodies are on screen as we hear the announcer’s voice introducing the emperor’s recording. Japan’s Longest Day ends not with an outright rejection of militarism—70 years on, Japan has yet to come to terms with what its aggression wrought—but with the suggestion that for a new Japan to rise the old Japan had to die.

War is Rude: Mrs. Miniver

Reprinted with permission of World War II Magazine

 

Mrs. Miniver tells the story of life in the U.K. 1939-1941 experienced, as the opening crawl explains, by an “average English middle class family”—which just happens to be able to afford servants and a spacious residence whose lawn extends to a dock on the Thames River. Shot in Hollywood starting on November 11, 1941, and released in June 1942, the MGM film became that year’s highest grossing picture and garnered six Academy awards, including Best Picture, Best Director (William Wyler), Best Actress (Greer Garson in the title role), and Best Supporting Actress (Teresa Wright). Its appeal has endured; the American Film Institute ranks the film 40th on its list of “America’s most inspiring movies.”
 

Based on Jan Struther’s 1940 bestseller Mrs. Miniver, a compendium of anecdotal British newspaper columns, the movie has only tenuous ties to the book, whose arc barely reaches the war’s outbreak. Working with six screenwriters, director Wyler extended Struther’s timeline to incorporate Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain.

At the outset, Kay Miniver (Garson), husband Clem (Walter Pidgeon), and eldest son Vin (Richard Ney) are—as that crawl puts it—among England’s “happy, careless people . . . in that happy, easy-going England that was so soon to be fighting desperately for her way of life and for life itself.” Even when war breaks out the Minivers’ comfortable lives change little, though Vin does become an RAF fighter pilot. Reality intrudes only when Clem sails his motorboat to join a  flotilla that—offscreen—rescues the British army from Dunkirk.

While Clem is busy across the Channel, a downed German pilot (Helmut Dantine) finds his way into the Miniver home. The screenwriters, responding to Americans’ increasing admiration for England, reworked this sequence several times. In a draft predating Pearl Harbor, Clem is present; the German, wounded and frightened, yields to Kay’s entreaty to give himself up and get medical attention. But in a post-December 7 version, Clem is absent, the German has a pistol, and Kay clearly in peril. And the finished film portrays the flyer as a fanatic. He holds Kay at gunpoint, demanding food he wolfs down like a wild animal before fainting from blood loss. Barely rattled, she takes away the pistol and phones the police. When the pilot revives, too weak to be dangerous, Kay sympathetically tends him. He’ll soon be “wonderfully looked after in a hospital,” she says. “The war won’t last forever.”

Mrs. Miniver’s trademark benevolence enrages the German. “We will bomb your cities,” he storms. “Rotterdam we destroy in two hours. Thirty thousand in two hours. And we will do the same here!” This is unspeakably rude (as well as inaccurate, since the Rotterdam bombings claimed only 884 people) and Mrs. Miniver slaps the brute. No sooner have the bobbies collected their prisoner than Clem chugs up to the Miniver dock. His Dunkirk circuit has battered his boat. Nonetheless he behaves much as a man just back from a particularly grueling business trip. Clem greets his family, falls asleep, and upon waking ten hours later asks if news of the Dunkirk evacuation is in the papers. It is, Kay says.
 

“Thank heavens,” Clem replies. “I shan’t have to tell you about it.” And he doesn’t.

Neither does Mrs. Miniver mention her adventure, until the household cook interrupts to announce that she has no ham for Mr. Miniver’s breakfast, explaining to Mrs. Miniver: “You gave it all to that German pilot.”  Not a problem, Mrs. Miniver replies; Mr. Miniver likes bacon, too. Naturally Clem asks what German pilot, and in a playful scene Kay treats the episode in an elaborately coy manner that is utterly typical of the film. 

Come what may, the Minivers’ lives remain idyllic. Yes, there are air raids, but the family hunkers in its Anderson shelter and Clem talks about how much he likes Alice in Wonderland. Vin weds the lovely Carol Beldon (Teresa Wright), adding another Mrs. Miniver to the household—and not incidentally a status dimension to the film. Carol’s grandmother is Lady Beldon (Dame May Whitty), a local aristocrat who frequently sniffs about the “middle classes” in a successful bid by the filmmakers to make the unpretentious but well-to-do Minivers more sympathetic to egalitarian American moviegoers. In the same vein, the film generally conveys that in wartime England class distinctions do not matter. Even Lady Beldon unbends; at the annual village floral competition—which by tradition she always wins—the grand dame permits a kindly stationmaster’s entry, dubbed the “Mrs. Miniver rose,” to claim first prize.

Tragedy invades only near the conclusion. Just hours after the floral show an air raid claims several villagers, including the stationmaster and Vin’s new bride, Carol. At a memorial service in a heavily damaged church, the Vicar (Henry Wilcoxon) delivers a powerful sermon. In the October 1941 shooting script, his homily was the 91st Psalm, which presents the Almighty as a refuge and a fortress. But after Pearl Harbor, a stirring peroration was inserted just after the scripture passage, composed by Wyler and Wilcoxon just hours before the scene was filmed. In it, the Vicar laments the dead innocents, declaring that theirs is a war in which everyone must share the burden of freedom’s struggle against tyranny. “This is the people’s war,” he concludes. “It is our war. We are the fighters. Fight it, then! Fight it with all that is in us!  And may God defend the right.” The camera holds on Mr. and Mrs. Miniver, resolute and dry-eyed, as the congregation sings “Onward, Christian Soldiers.” It then pans upward toward a gaping hole in the church roof.  The camera then dollies toward it, enlarging the hole so that the audience gets the full effect when a squadron of Spitfires passes overhead, flying toward the foe.

The film works because strong performances—especially Garson’s—redeem preposterous characters, and the Vicar’s concluding oration has enduring power. However, Mrs. Miniver presents war more as a case of dreadful manners than as something truly fearful: a sanitized way to promote American solidarity with Britain without hinting at how horrible that “people’s war” would be.

American Iliad: The Sword of General Lee

Millions of American love the Civil War. Last summer I began work on “American Iliad,” a new regular column in The Civil War Monitor that examines one of the major reasons that they do. Some episodes from the conflict are so compelling that readers know them by heart. These episodes transcend mere history because human beings are story-telling creatures who make sense of the world through stories. They have an out-sized importance because they reveal what we want to believe, not just about the nature of the war, but also about the nature of life. Just as the ancient Greeks conveyed profound truths about the human condition through myth, so too does our national myth, the American Iliad. Each column explores a classic story from this myth and discusses the reason it continues to exert such a powerful grip on our imagination.

Here's the inaugural column, published in The Civil War Monitor 6/3 (Fall 2015):28-29, 72. Republished with permission.

Coined by the popular historian Otto Eisenschiml in 1947, the term “American Iliad” brilliantly captures the essence of so many Americans’ passion for the Civil War. A man once told me, in complete seriousness, that the story of the war was his religion. And while a conflict that killed over 2 percent of our country’s population may not be the best thing to construct an entire worldview around, it is probably not the worst thing, either. Abraham Lincoln’s magnanimity, Ulysses S. Grant’s perseverance in the face of all obstacles, and Robert E. Lee’s grace in defeat all provide strong life lessons. Although it is plainly exceptional to regard the Civil War a religion, it is obvious that the Civil War routinely functions as a national myth, a way to understand ourselves as Americans. And like the classic mythologies of old, it contains timeless wisdom of what it means to be a human being. Homer’s Iliad tells us much about war, but it also tells us much about life. The American Iliad does the same thing.

Foundational to the American Iliad is the conviction that the conflict was not a struggle between darkness and light, freedom and tyranny, but rather between two sides, equally gallant, committed to different but morally equivalent visions of the American republic, and therefore caught up in a tragedy larger than themselves, “a war of brothers.”

In his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Killer Angels, arguably one of the most influential modern re-tellings of this Iliad, Michael Shaara has Confederate general James Longstreet muse, “The war had come as a nightmare in which you chose your nightmare side.” Robert E. Lee provides the most prominent example of a soldier forced to make this choice. With the exception of Lincoln, Lee is perhaps the foremost protagonist in the American Iliad’s pantheon. In mythic terms he is the ideal man, the perfect warrior, the flawless gentleman—“the Christlike Lee,” as historian Kenneth Stampp once put it. On the eve of the war he is a full colonel, so obviously gifted that Lincoln offers him command of the armies that must extinguish the rebellion should war break out. Lee declines. Despite a lifetime’s service to the United States—and despite telling his siblings that “I recognize no necessity for this [rebellion]”—he feels honor-bound to resign from the U.S. Army when Virginia, his homeland, secedes. “Save in defense of my native State,” he says, “I have no desire ever again to draw my sword.” But of course he must defend his native state. Thus it is the protection of hearth and home, not the abstract principle of states’ rights and certainly not the preservation of slavery, which governs his decision. “I did only what my duty demanded,” he would write in 1868. “I could have taken no other course without dishonor. And if it all were to be done over again, I should act in precisely the same manner.”  Historian Alan Nolan once questioned whether Lee’s fateful choice to draw his sword against the United States was as ethical as the great captain maintained. But the American Iliad is emphatic that it was indeed Lee’s only path.

Lee’s decision provides the opening of the American Iliad, for, like Homer’s Iliad, this Iliad begins with the war underway. It is the first iconic episode, by which I mean an episode that Civil War buffs know by heart. A typical buff can take you step by step through the three days of Gettysburg but generally knows far less detail about the origins of the conflict.  Instead they have rather vague ideas that the South left the Union in defense of states’ rights against a government that embodied centralized political power, or that the war pitted the agrarian South against the industrial North; or even that it was a cultural clash between a supposedly Celtic South against a supposedly Anglo North. These explanations are nearly always asserted, not argued. They function simply to push the sordid political details (particularly the defense of slavery) out of the picture and just get on with the almost purely military story, for the American Iliad is all about generals, soldiers, and battles. The war, in mythic terms, is not “a continuation of politics,” to use the famous definition of war espoused by the Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz. It’s not a continuation of anything. It’s just there.

And thus Lee is helplessly in the grip of something that resembles a natural disaster more than a human-created event. The war forces upon him a choice that is no choice at all, for his honor and integrity require that he serve the Confederacy. And in mythic imagination, Lee’s decision symbolizes the honor and integrity of every one of the 800,000 southern men who take up arms not from any political ideology, but rather because they must protect their families, their neighbors, their homeland.