Last Sunday, in The Washington Post, Jonathan Yardley reviewed Margaret MacMillan’s book Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History. I have not had the chance to read MacMillan’s book yet, but it sounds like an interesting and useful commentary on the responsible use of history in discussions of public policy. This is of course an evergreen topic, never more timely than in the week after the passing of Robert McNamara, whose role in the Vietnam War (and his account of that role) has given rise to hundreds of comments on the use of history. The topic also seems timely given the death, only a couple of weeks ago, of Prof. Ernest May of Harvard. Ernie, with his colleague Dick Neustadt, was one of the first to offer courses in a public-policy school on the use of history — and for years the May-Neustadt book “Lessons” of the Past: The Use and Misuse of History in American Foreign Policy (1975) (note the use of quotes) was the best book on the subject. Given its subtitle, MacMillan’s book must be a self-conscious follow-on to “Lessons”.

The use of history to formulate (or justify) public policy is always difficult and frequently contested. Yardley comments that “When political leaders are ignorant of history, as the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld triumvirate most certainly was, yet seek to employ it toward their own ends, the inevitable result is a distortion of history that is unwitting at best, deliberate at worst. . . . It is rather more difficult to examine the past thoroughly and objectively and to learn whatever lessons it may teach us, however inconvenient they may seem.” This is correct, though identifying historical “lessons” is a tricky and uncertain business. My personal opinion is that the least of Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld’s problems (I may well have sat in history courses with Rumsfeld at our Chicago area high school) was their ignorance of history. If you are challenged by the truth, nuanced history is not likely to be your thing. Yardley goes on to comment that “If the American public knew history better than it does, it would be harder to pull off these deceptions, but unfortunately most Americans have been taught history badly and prefer not to think about it at all. That makes us suckers for warped history that gets us into trouble overseas, and at home as well.”

Where to start? Yardley has been on this kick for nearly two decades now, but repetition does not make a weak argument any better. I think there is little evidence that Americans are especially poorly educated historically, and there is even less reason to think that a more historically literate electorate would have seen through the deceptions perpetrated by the last administration. The problem is not with history, but with political complacence and the lack of critical judgment in a formally literate population. We now know that you can fool most of the people some of the time, and I think address that problem, not by criticizing historians, but rather by asking for much more from the Congress and the press. Of course more and better policy history would also help.