Michael Beschloss ain't nonpartisan no more

MSNBC's house historian made news recently when he freaked out about the midterm elections, saying “We’re on the edge of a brutal authoritarian system, and it could be a week away."

In the 2000s, when I interviewed presidential expert and best-selling author Michael Beschloss, he was as reasoned and carefully nonpartisan as any historian can be.

He was critical of JFK, George W. Bush and even FDR.

Last month he freaked out and said a bunch of wild-assed things on MSNBC about what he feared would happen to democracy and freedom in the USA if the ‘MAGA Republicans’ won big in the midterm elections Nov. 8 and took over Congress.

We could be six days away from losing our rule of law and losing a situation where we have elections that we all can rely on. You know, those are the foundation stones of a democracy.

And:

Fifty years from now, if historians are allowed to write in this country and if there are still free publishing houses and a free press — which I’m not certain of, but if that is true — a historian will say, what was at stake tonight and this week was the fact whether we will be a democracy in the future, whether our children will be arrested and conceivably killed.

Any hope that Beschloss would find his meds, calm down and get a grip were dashed when the Ukraine superhero came to Congress on Dec. 21 to say thanks and seek more U.S. aid:

He tweeted, perhaps thinking of how smoothly things worked in Joe Stalin’s USSR:

For any Members of Congress who refused to clap for Zelenskyy, we need to know from them exactly why.

Meanwhile, to show that he’s not always been a political hysteric, here are the interesting and sane things he said to me in 2002 and 2007 when I was a practicing journalist — including this from 2007.

I’m a registered independent and I have tried to keep politics as much out of my history and everything else as I can. At least, I strive to keep as a-partisan as an historian as it gets.

And this from 2007:

Q: Where do you place yourself on the political spectrum?

A: Nowhere. I'm not a member of a party. I'm a registered independent. As a historian, I passionately believe you can really only be sure about presidents 20 or 30 years later. We are watching them in real time -- and we all have to do it as citizens because we have to vote and we have to evaluate them. But at the same time, I always keep my critical eye in check with the knowledge that presidents usually look very different 30 years later than they do at the time.

Michael Beschloss, 2007

Pittsburgh Tribune-Review

Jan. 17, 2007

Historian Michael Beschloss hasn't become known as one of the country's leading presidential historians by accident.

Since 1980 his eight books on U.S. presidents include the 2002 best-seller "The Conquerors: Roosevelt, Truman and the Destruction of Hitler's Germany, 1941-1945."

A registered independent and regular on PBS' "News Hour with Jim Lehrer," Beschloss has a new book, "Presidential Courage: Brave Leaders and How They Changed America, 1789-1989," coming out in May. I talked to him by telephone Thursday from his office in Washington:

2007

Q: Do you have any sense that we are living in an important historic era?

A: How could you not have that sense? This is the time when tectonic plates are changing in the world. Oftentimes you don't quite appreciate how historic a period is until much later on, but if you apply almost any measure to the time that we are living through, it couldn't be more dramatic.

Q: Is there a single event that will be looked back at?

A: If you want to use 9/11 as a tipping point, you certainly could not do better than that because here's a case where leadership really does make a difference. George W. Bush at the time that 9/11 happened, reacted by saying, "This is a wake-up call to us Americans. Terrorism is a problem that has been festering and we've never dealt with it frontally. I'm going to declare a war against terrorism and rip this scourge from the face of the Earth -- which could take decades."

Many other people who might have been president at the time might have dealt with this very differently by saying, for instance, "We'll use the FBI" or "We'll have retaliatory strikes" or "We'll limit ourselves to diplomacy." A lot of things that have happened in history since 2001 have flowed from that one decision.

Q: George Bush is getting a lot of criticism for staying tough on Iraq. Thirty years from now, will this be seen as courageous?

A: I think it will be definitely seen as courageous, no matter what happens, because you have a president who is willing to fly in the face of public opinion ... and that is nothing but courage. The other element is whether it turns out to be wise in the eyes of history, and that's the kind of thing that takes 20 or 30 years.

George Bush is the first one to say this. He knows that his decisions on Iraq will be measured by historians of the future through the lens of whether the war in Iraq and the general war on terrorism worked.

Q: Where do you place yourself on the political spectrum?

A: Nowhere. I'm not a member of a party. I'm a registered independent. As a historian, I passionately believe you can really only be sure about presidents 20 or 30 years later. We are watching them in real time -- and we all have to do it as citizens because we have to vote and we have to evaluate them. But at the same time, I always keep my critical eye in check with the knowledge that presidents usually look very different 30 years later than they do at the time.

Q: Who would you rank as the top three or four presidents?

A: Pretty close to what other historians would. Probably Washington and Lincoln at the top. Franklin Roosevelt perhaps a notch down. But what I tend not to do is evaluate the 42 presidents in rank order -- you know, Thomas Jefferson and Lewis & Clark are better than George H. W. Bush and the Americans With Disabilities Act. I just think the periods are so different.

Q: Who would be your worst presidents?

A: Even that's hard to do. I'd put Warren Harding at the very bottom, whom I think was both an ineffective president and also ran a scandalous administration.

Q: What makes a great president?

A: A number of things, but I think the most important ones are the vision to understand where to take the country and the skills to move the American people to that vision. All of this as blessed by historians and the American people of a later generation.

Q: There's a lot of persuasion in there.

A: Sure. Woodrow Wilson had a wonderful vision in many ways but at the end of his administration he didn't have the skills to get the Senate to approve the League of Nations, so the result was he fell short.

Michael Beschloss, 2002

Pittsburgh Tribune-Review

Michael Beschloss doesn't just play a historian on TV.

Beschloss, a frequent guest on ABC and a regular on PBS' "The Newshour With Jim Lehrer," has written seven meticulously researched books about modern American presidents and global affairs.

They include "The Crisis Years: Kennedy and Khrushchev 1960-1963" and "Taking Charge" and "Reaching for Glory," both of which rely on conversations secretly taped by Lyndon Johnson.

Now comes "The Conquerors," the story — based on newly released secret documents and conversations among the Allies — of how Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman won World War II and made sure Germany would never start another world war.

Beschloss will speak at Carnegie Music Hall in Oakland at 7:30 Monday night, as part of the Drue Heinz Lectures series (tickets are available at 412-622-8866). I caught up with him by telephone in Los Angeles on Wednesday, where he was on his book tour.

Q: How the heck did we ever win World War II? Based on some of the conversations in your book between FDR and Henry Morgenthau and Cordell Hull and Henry Stimson and everybody else, they seemed to be flying by the seat of their pants.

A: Yeah, it was very chaotic and in a way almost scary to watch, because you see all these cabinet members trying to murder one another and Roosevelt almost encouraging the process.

What you have to conclude is what Roosevelt did well was that there were central purposes that he managed to focus on in a way that no one else did and finally get them through – like unconditional surrender in World War II.

When you’re in a war, that can be very important because often times a President can get distracted. But at the same time, as you know, I’m quite critical of Roosevelt for being so obsessed with unconditional surrender that he almost ignored something so momentous as the Holocaust.

Q: What are the best things you can say about FDR as a wartime leader?
A: Well, the best thing I can say is that if it weren’t for him we would have lost World War II, and the world would be a brutal place in which many of us probably would not even be alive.

That is because in the late ‘30s, especially, Roosevelt had the political courage to say to Americans that “Even though you don’t want to hear it, it is possible that we may have to go to war against Hitler and we’d better prepare our defense.”

 Had he listened to his political advisers, who were telling him, “Don’t rock the boat,” we would not have been prepared and we would have lost World War II.

Q: What is the worst thing you can say about him as a wartime leader?
A: I think he did not take the Holocaust as seriously as he should have, this monstrous event in world history. And Churchill, who was given similar information, understood exactly what this was and tried to stop the killing.

 In Roosevelt’s case, he saw it largely as a distraction from fighting the war. And when you’re looking at a president who I think was the great president of the 20th century, it is disappointing to me that on the one hand Roosevelt was someone who I think was responsible for winning the war, but at the same time he could prove to be so cold-hearted and just not get it when he was confronted with facts of the Holocaust.

Q: When they were talking about bombing the rail lines to the concentration camps, did they really know what was going on in the camps?
A:  They had very exact information about the killing, especially by the summer of 1944, which is the period that you’re mentioning. My point is that nowadays there are scholars who honorably argue for or against attacking the death camps.

I happen to feel that if they death camps would have been bombed, you would have saved more people than you would have killed. Also, symbolically, it would have shown history that Americans understood what this was enough to try to put ourselves on the record as having tried to stop it.

My beef with Roosevelt is not simply that he didn’t bomb the death camps. It’s that he never even took that position seriously enough to get systematic advice and convene his advisors and make a decision of the first order, which is what you’d expect a president to do on something as important as that.

Q: There seemed to be an awful lot of consideration of domestic politics in the thought processes and the decisions that were going on with FDR. Was that a problem, with the Holocaust question, for example?
A: Roosevelt was, above all, pretty political. For instance, on the Holocaust, Roosevelt knew that the demands that were being placed on him to speak out against the Holocaust and to try to stop it were coming mainly from Jewish leaders and Jews had voted for Roosevelt by between 80 and 90 percent in his first three elections.

So the way that Roosevelt looked at things, this was a group that was basically in his hip pocket and oddly enough, he probably didn’t feel that he had to work as hard to make them happy as he would have had it been more of  a swing vote. The result was, he did not give it the attention he should have.

Q: Conservatives have always complained that FDR was horribly naïve about Stalin – too easy and too compliant toward him.

A: I guess—and I don’t do this on ideological grounds, because I’m a registered independent and I have tried to keep politics as much out of my history and everything else as I can. At least, I strive to keep as a-partisan as an historian as it gets.

But on this one I think Roosevelt is less culpable, because for most of the time that Roosevelt was fighting the war, the most important thing for him to do to win the war was to keep Stalin and the Red Army in the struggle.

In other words, if he had not been buttering up Stalin from Pearl Harbor, roughly, until the end of 1944, there was always the danger that Stalin would say, “We’re fighting most of this war anyway, why don’t we just make a deal with Hitler or some group within Germany and close down the Eastern Front and save Soviet lives.” Then the Germans would have turned the full blast against the British and Americans and we would have lost.

So, given that, Roosevelt was absolutely correct  to try to keep Stalin as happy as possible during the war. The moment that really changed was essentially the month that Roosevelt died. By then we knew that the war was essentially won and by then there was little danger that Stalin was going to stop the war three weeks before V-E Day.

The point is that, had Roosevelt lived six more months and continued in that mode, I think it would be a very fair criticism, but the point is, we’ll never know.

Q: FDR was under no illusions about Stalin’s true nature and his nasty evil ways, was he?
A: We’ll he’d say ridiculous things, like, “I think Stalin is a Christian gentleman and I think we can deal with him after the war.” I think you can’t take those things at face value.

The real test, and what you’re talking about, is, “Did Roosevelt make any kind of  preparation for the possibility that after the war we would be fighting the Soviet Union.” And the answer is that he sure did.

There was a fall-back plan, which I write about in the book, which had Germany divided between the East and the West, so that there would be a front line in Europe that we could use to defend Europe from the onslaught of the Red Army. That was Roosevelt’s.

In other words, if Roosevelt had been completely saccharine about Stalin, he would not have even thought doing such a thing.

Q: JFK’s serious health problems have come to light recently, but the historian Robert Dallek says he didn’t think those problems impaired JFK’s leadership abilities. Can the same thing be said of FDR?
A: No. Roosevelt’s medical records, oddly enough, have only become open in the last couple of years, too. What they showed me, in any case, was that he was much sicker than even earlier historians had written about.

In the spring of 1944, he was told he was in cardiac failure. By the end of ’44, he was only working 2-4 hours a day, and this is a president who’s fighting World War II.

There are these scenes when Roosevelt is given a paper to sign and he signs it, and then the next day he’s shown the paper and he says, “I have no memory of ever having signed this, and if I had I never would have signed it.”

Q: What’s the most important thing you learned about FDR and Truman  while doing this book that you, a professional historian, didn’t even know?
A: Well, in Roosevelt’s case it would be on the Holocaust. In terms of new information, it would be the fact that previously the view was that the idea of possibly bombing the death camps never got up to Roosevelt.

I found from this interview with  (assistant secretary of war) John McCloy, who said that at the end of his life the idea had gotten to Roosevelt. In terms of how you evaluate that, I guess the good news is that at least the decision did make it to the president, which it certainly should have, and the bad news was that the President did not take it very seriously.

In Truman’s case, you know, you’re always looking at a president’s early life for clues as to how they behaved later on. When he became president there were two options about what to do with post-war Germany.

One is that you be extremely tough on the Germans and the other is, you punish the Nazis, certainly, but you try to help the Germans become a democracy and draw them back into human society.

Truman took option B, and the reason was, he said, was that when he went to defeated Berlin in the summer of ’45, he was shown Hitler’s bunker and all the ruins. And he saw these defeated Germans and he said “It reminded me of what my Confederate grandmother said, which was that at the end of the Civil War in Missouri the Yankees took our horses and burned our barns and we were so bitter that it changed history for the next 100 years.”

Truman’s point was, I don’t want to do the same thing to the Germans and have them so resentful that we have to fight a third world war.

Q: Do you have a lower or higher opinion of FDR after doing this book?
A: I think somewhat lower, because, on the Holocaust, which was one of the great moral issues in history, he seemed to have such a tin ear. At the same time, I feel that Roosevelt was a great president and the fact that he won World War II should always tower above everything else, but that this is a shadow – his performance on the Holocaust.

In Truman’s case, I have a somewhat higher opinion, because I realized that contrary to what some people have written, this is not a case in which  Roosevelt just essentially had everything on track and Truman could follow what Roosevelt had done. The point is that Roosevelt held things so much to his vest that Truman had no idea what his intentions were and had to very quickly figure out what he wanted to do.

Q: Are the accusations of plagiarism among your fellow historians – Doris Kearns Goodwin and the late Stephen Ambrose – fair?
A: I don’t want to talk about the individual cases, because to do that you really have to study exactly what passages they were accused of plagiarizing and look at the original texts. That’s what, for instance, the American Historical Association would do to consider these cases fairly, and I have just not done that, so I don’t want to shoot from the hip.

 But the one thing I would say is that plagiarism – and I hope the American public realizes this – is not what historians do in general. This is not just sort of something you oftentimes see among historians.

Again, I don’t want to say it in terms of the two of them. But in general, plagiarism is about as large an offense as it gets in our line of work. So no one should think that this is something that is like a parking ticket, that historians commit all the time.

Q: Forty years after JFK’s death we get this amazing deluge of information about how bad his health really was. Are there any other big surprises or shocks in store for us, either about our presidents or our country, from you historian guys when you dig into some more boxes?
A: I think there usually are. That’s what makes history so fascinating. Even in my case, here I am writing a book about something that happened 60 years ago and I came up with all kinds of new stuff. And that’s why it’s so continuously fascinating. Plus, not only the information, but with added hindsight you understand things better 50 or 60 years later that you might have even 30 years ago.

The one thing I’m worried about – and I’m not talking about the Kennedy case at all – is that in the future there will be some sloppy scholars who will say John Smith had this disease and therefore that was responsible for all the things I didn’t like about him.

I am so worried that you will have a sloppy scholar who will say that the   reason Ronald Reagan signed the tax reform act of 1986 was because he had early Alzheimer’s and if he didn’t have it, he would have seen that it was a bad idea.

One of the toughest things to establish in history is the impact of physical disease on presidential decision-making. For instance, I wrote a book on Kennedy and the Cold War, which came out in 1991, which was called “The Crisis Year,”  which is about 900 pages, and I got into this. Actually, a lot of Kennedy’s medical problems were known even at that point.

 For instance, the fact that Dr. Jacobson was on the plane with him to the Vienna Summit in 1961 with Khrushchev. I went over the records of what Kennedy and Khrushchev said to one another in May and June of ’61 with a microscope to see if there was anything that Kennedy might have said that you could possibly think may have been under the influences or something he wouldn’t have said if he had not been taking this medication.

I didn’t find anything that stood out in that way. But even if you found something that was a possibility, any historian who’s writing about this better breathe about five times before writing something like this, because it is very difficult to establish.

Q: What’s your next book?
A: It’s a book on Lincoln’s assassination, which I’ve been wanting to write since I was 7 years old growing up in Illinois. I was taken to the Lincoln  sites – new Salem and Springfield. It will be about the period around the assassination, and not just that day, but Lincoln’s last weeks and the change of government.

Particularly the question, what did it mean that Lincoln did not live? Would history have been different had he survived Ford’s Theater and it had been Lincoln dealing with Reconstruction, rather than Andrew Johnson.

Q: Do you expect any surprises?
A: I sure hope so. You always hope for these things when you start a book like that. One thing I’ll assure you is, that I will not come up with a conclusion like the CIA did it.