The Chronicle: Colloquy Live Transcript

'Critical Oral History' as a Scholarly Tool

Thursday, October 17, at 1 p.m., U.S. Eastern time

Does "critical oral history" yield new insights? What are the limitations of this research approach?

Some scholars are embracing a new research approach called critical oral history to examine key events in recent times. In critical oral history, key policy makers (frequently those who were on opposing sides of an issue) sit face to face with scholars who have studied their decisions and who have access to documents about the period in question. The result, say advocates of the approach, is a fresh and open discussion that yields insights unavailable through standard historical approaches. Other scholars, however, worry that public discussions with policy makers are less likely to yield the truth than private interviews.

» Revisiting the Brink (10/18/2002)

(Photograph by Rick Friedman, Black Star)

James G. Blight, a professor of international relations at Brown University, is the architect of critical oral history. He has held a series of conferences -- using the technique -- on the Cuban missile crisis and on the Vietnam War. Mr. Blight will respond to questions and comments about the approach on Thursday, October 17, at 1 p.m., U.S. Eastern time. Advance questions are encouraged and may be posted now.

A transcript of the chat follows.

Danny Postel (Moderator):
Welcome to The Chronicle's live discussion with Professor James Blight of Brown University's Watson School of International Studies, the architect of the method of critical oral history. Thank you, Professor Blight, for joining us today. Would you like to make any opening remarks?

James G. Blight:
This research method that we call "criticl oral history" has evolved over fifteen years. It began with a new look at the Cuban Missile Crisis, whose anniversary we're recalling during the next two weeks, and it was exemplified last week in Havanna Cuba with Cubans, Russians, and Americans -- undoubtdly the last time that such a meeting on the crisis will ever occur, due to the advanced age of some of the participants such as McNamara, Castro...And I'm grateful to The Chronicle for the opportunity to begin a discussion about the method since, for the last fifteen years, my partner (Janet Lange) and I have been too busy gathering data and using the method to stop and ask ourselves, "What are we really doing? How might we improve it?" And, as a matter of fact, the exercise of self-examination has led Janet and I to some further thinking about some things that we need to write specifically about the method.

Question from Alan Harris Stein, Northwest Oral History Assoc. Online:
How does "critical oral history" differ from a public policy "debate" - or the "town hall" approach - again in which contemporary issues are addressed, face-to-face? Was this also the approach to "Truth and Reconciliation" in South Africa? Does the paper-trail (access to documents) legitimate this public approach? Is it not more akin to public history than oral history?

I am compiling an oral history guide to projects in the U.S. and Canada for ABC-CLIO publishers and would like to include this "Critical Oral History" as a chapter. Thank you, and looking forward to the on-line.

-Al Stein, http://www.nohaonline.net

James G. Blight:
I had not thought before of the similarities between critical oral history and public policy debates. There is some superficial similarity. But there are important differences. First, we do not "debate" anything. Rather, if the process is working properly, we learn to collaborate in an effort to get a more comprehensive picture of the historical reality during whatever events we are studying. Second, we deal with the lessons of the events in a final session, in which participants reflect on how their experience might help to avoid similar events in the future. We do in these final sessions give some thought to policy issues. But these reflections do not really amount to a discussion of specific policies. Finally, and most important, the principal participants in our projects--the missile crisis, Bay of Pigs, the escalation of the American war in Vietnam, the collapse of detente in the Carter-Brezhnev period, et al.--our participants have been responsible for a lot of human suffering. That is in the nature of holding high public office, and of having made mistakes. It takes a great deal of courage to come to the table when it is possible that the results of a meeting will be a reevaluation of responsibility for, in the case of Vietnam, the deaths of more than three million people. In this sense, critical oral history does bear some resemblance to a truth commission, the main difference being that we convene not to elicit confessions, but to seek the truth in a spirit of objectivity.

Question from Danny Postel:
How much do you encourage policy makers to prepare for these sessions by reviewing their diaries and documents beforehand? Do you want their memories or their refreshed memories?

James G. Blight:
Documents are absolutely critical and necessary. Without a documentary base, decision-makers generally have a tendency to repeat their stories and reflections as they have for decades. Thus, memories need not just to be refreshed, but corrected, in many cases. In addition, it is important that they familiarize themselves with the documentary flow of their adversaries (at the time of the events to be reexamined). This material is generally very discrepant from what they believed at the time about them--hence the disaster or near disaster that is being put under the scope of critical oral history.

Question from Nicole Bowman, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Mohican Indian Tribe:
Do you have any experience or know of any researchers using critical oral history with American Indian tribes? We call this Elder Epistimology and I am curious if there are similiarities.

James G. Blight:
I'm afraid I know nothing about either the topic or the method, and so I will have to pass on this one.

Question from john kelly:
How does one separate the intentions of enthusiastic participants like Bob Mcnamara in "critical oral" history who want to clean up the "bad" weight of history of Vietnam from the "good" weight of their participation in the Cuban Missile Crisis?

How do the proponents of "critical oral" history factor that kind of dilemma historically into their gathering of evidence?

James G. Blight:
We don't care about an individual's personal motivation for entering into a critical oral history project. Even if we did care, I doubt we would learn much in this area. Even Freud admitted to being confused about what really goes on in the depths of the human psyche. The key, instead, is that all participants agree to come to terms with the declassified documents regarding their own decisions, and the decisions of their former adversaries. In addition, they must agree to hold the discussions in the active presence of the best scholars available--scholars who know the historical record cold. Nobody gets away with anything in our meetings. If someone tries to steer the discussion toward a favorite hobby horse, it just doesn't work, because most people, most of the time, are working within a spirit of inquiry. And the sheer curiosity of many people needs to be emphasized. The sessions often combine aspects of "This is Your Life" with a truth commission, with a scholarly inquiry. This is very demanding work, made possible only because the material is often so interesting, so shockingly new, that curiosity wins out over all other tendencies. When this happens, we know we are doing our job pretty well.

Question from Danny Postel:
I'd like to ask you about last week's conference in Havana. Would you give us a thumbnail sketch of the proceedings? Any highlights to report? Any revelations or insights that add to what is known about the Cuban missile crisis?

James G. Blight:
The conference involved roughly 19 hours of discussion over two days, followed by an early morning departure on the third day when we traveled out to western Cuba to visit the remains of a Soviet missile site...a little like visiting the Roman Coloseum...parts of a bunker, pieces of a warhead. We took to calling it a "geek's vacation"-- the missile crisis geeks begin as a very small group of people who care intensely about the event. About historical revleations, I can mention a couple, although I think there were many more, but it really requires reading the transcript of the meeting and comparing that with what we already know. Particuarly when one of the particpants is Fidel Castro, whose speaking style is more like Miles Davis with a trumpet -- improvisational; full of unexpected allusions to the past, present, and future; definitely not the sort of linear presentation that Western academics tend to favor, but very interesting. Well, first we learned about a January 30, 1962 meeting between President Kennedy and Khrushchev's son-in-law, who was editor of a major Moscow newspaper. It appears that something Kennedy said, inadvertently or in passing, frightened the Russians when this was reported back to them. The topic under discussion with the son-in-law was the Bay of PIgs disaster which happened less than a year before. Kennedy said a couple of things: first of all, that the Bay of Pigs was a mistake. Secondly, (and this is where the inadvertent scare was put into the Russians, it seems) he said (paraphrasing) "You know, you Russians know how to do this...for example in Hungary in 1956." Why was this such a key point? Well, Kruschev in 1956 sent over 2,000 troops into Hungary and crushed a rebellion brutally. So, the message picked up via Kennedy's interviewer and taken back to the father-in-law was that the Americans were planning a similarly large and brutal invasion of Cuba, the purpose of which would be to utterly destroy the Cuban revolution. Now, the fact of the matter is, Kennedy had actually concluded the opposite -- that Cuba was more bother than it was worth (as evidence by the Bay of Pigs disaster). But, of course, the Russians and Kruschev, being so deeply involved in Hungary, filled in the blanks in an indirect way, and thus began the thought pattern within the Russian leadership which culminated with the offer to the Cubans to put nuclear weapons on the island. It was Fidel Castro himself, who at the conference, never having seen this document himself, that Kruschev specifically mentioned that conversation to him after the crisis as a turning point. That's just another example of how misperceptions on all sides created the crisis that very nearly produced a war that no one wanted. There were others, but that one comes to mind as typical of the way that all three sides misunderstood one another's intentions.

Question from Philip Brenner, American University:
You and Robert McNamara wrote about empathy in Wilson's Ghost. How have you applied this to your work in general and to your work in particular on the Cuban Missile Crisis?

James G. Blight:
This is an insightful question, which is worthy of a very long answer which, alas, is not possible in this format. But let me say this: empathy is the key, the methodological Rosetta Stone of critical oral history. By empathy, I mean nothing more exotic that seeing the events in question more or less the way they are seen by a former adversary, or even a former colleague, with whom one may disagree in some fundamental way (such as, for example, whether the risk of nuclear war in the missile crisis was great or small). I am not talking about agreement, or sympathy, or anything of the sort. I am just talking about getting inside the shoes of the other, long enough and profoundly enough to see his or her reality. Then, whatever judgments one might make are based on an accurate assessment of another's reality, rather than (as is so often the case in real time) a mistaken assessment of it. American decision makers in the Johnson administration saw North Vietnam as a puppet of the Soviet and Chinese communists. They were wrong. Communists? Yes of course. But puppets? Hardly. The North Vietnamese, on the other hand, saw the Americans as the latest in a long line of imperialists, like the Chinese and the French. But they were wrong. Americans were typically more like Pyle, the protagonist in Graham Greene's The Quiet American--idealistic, ill-informed, full of missionary zeal to transform the world in their image. Mistaken judgments such as these were absolutely central in the decisions of the period that led to the bloodbath of the 1960s and 1970s. Our work in critical oral history is to facilitate the arrival of our participants to a point where they see that they may have been mistaken, and to provide a context in which they are comfortable stating the difference between what they believed then, and what now, in the light of history, they believe to be the case. This often brings with it the stunning realization that, whereas before they had blamed their adversary for the tragedy, in reality they too have some responsibility. This is the hardest moment in most meetings, but the most moving and poignant.

Question from Danny Postel:
How do you respond to the concern that policy makers may be more honest in answering questions if they are one-on-one with a researcher? Do you worry about people trying to impress or not trying to offend the other participants in the room?

James G. Blight:
Frankly, this never happens. The problem runs in the other direction. At a missile crisis conference in 1991, a Cuban general, staring straight into the eyes of former Kennedy administration officials, called the covert action programs against Cuba "murderous," and called the people he was looking at "war criminals." He then began to read the names of some of the people who had been killed by CIA-backed Cuban exile groups. At a 1999 conference on the Vietnam war, a Vietnamese official pointed his finger at two Johnson administration officials and held them responsible for the death of his sister, a civilian, in bombing raids on Hanoi. Just last week, in Havana, a member of the U.S. delegation walked out of the conference because he was offended not by what the Russians and Cubans said, but by a statement by a former colleague in the Kennedy administration. On those rare occasions when hyper-collegiality gets in the way briefly, our scholarly participants tend to end it quickly, by reminding the former decision-makers of what is in the documents--which tends to be things like bitter internal debates, blaming, and so on. So we worry not about too much niceness, but about keeping the lid on the pressure cooker, so it does not blow up in our faces. And this can happen. Remember, we are often dealing with events which caused tremendous suffering to large numbers of people. In these circumstances, people can get very defensive, or even offensive.

Question from Lee Wm. Russell Eastern Arizona College:
As part of the process of doing a critical oral history do you look for any way of identifying the emotions that were present at the times of these crises? Don't emotions color our perceptions and therefore influence our decisioning making?

James G. Blight:
The anwser is yes, aboslutely. There's a saying we all subscribe to -- we need to put ourselves in the shoes of the adversary. We tend to call that empathy, and it's very important in this process of historical research. As Lee Wm. Russell suggests, there is something that must be done before you try to put yourself in someone else's shoes way back when -- you've got to put yourself in your own shoes way back when. How do we do this? Well, we use video a lot. We run the nightly news casts from the very night we're studying, 10, 20, 40 years ago -- commercials and all, as a way to build a time machine, essentially. We require all participants to read, and reread, over a thousand pages of preparatory material. And all of this material is drawn from the time we are studying. A time machine is not a bad way to think about it. Mr. Russell's comment about the importance of emotions is well taken, and without going into detail, I can say that if you sit down with a former decision maker (oh, let's say Dean Rusk, as we did back in 1987) and you show him the October 1962 nighly newscast by Walter Kronkite in which he asks his audience "Is World War III about to begin?" I can report to you that sweatbeads broke out of the forehead of Dean Rusk, which indicated that we were going to have a very interesting conversation about 1962 from someone who was there and would have been partly responsible if war had broken out. I'd like to thank Mr. Russell for a very good question; it gets right to the heart of what we try to do.

Question from Danny Postel:
How do you respond to the point that Mary Marshall Clark, the president of the Oral History Association, makes in the article: that your picture of oral history is dated--that oral historians are doing a lot more than simply recording people's stories?

James G. Blight:
Well, I accept that. She is a very well-known scholar in the field of oral history. I actually have had some e-mail coorespondence with her, but I will just give my very superficial impression of her position, given that I'm not coversant at all in the field of oral history. My impression is that, developments in that field have more to do more with theory of oral history and its connections to anthropology, psychology, etc. rather than to the practice of the art form -- I would call it -- of oral history. The significance of that, if it's true of course, is totally different from what we're doing. We try to generate new data -- that's what our task is about, as we discovered in 1992 that the Soviets had actually put nuclear warheads on the island. We had documents, etc...that was a genunine discovery of something new. I have the distinct impression that what oral history is about, as practiced, is a retelling of tales that are connected to something rather old - -with the purpose of not allowing these stories to go to the grave with the storytellers. Now that's a very important contribution, especially in keeping alive cultures (particularly those that are threatend-- Native American culture is an example), but I think there is a difference between the objective of keeping alive something old, tradtional, and important as opposed to trying to discover new truths, new understandings of an event and apply those to lessons in the future. That is what I feel we do.

Question from Danny Postel:
Tell us a little bit about your erstwhile career as a professional baseball player.

James G. Blight:
There's not much to tell. The way I generally descibe that part of my life, drawing from Thomas Hobbes, is that my career was "nasty, brutish, and short." I can maybe give some indication of what that was like by revealing the one record I held. I played minor leagues in the late 1960s in the Detroit Tigers' organization. I emphasize minor. I was for many years the only player in the history of professional baseball, and I was the pitcher, to have given up two home runs to the same player in the same inning. The guy's name was Moses Hill, and he played in the Baltimore Orioles' organization, and he just loved me. Now the reason why this was so hard to break was because most pitchers would have been sent to the shower long before the same batter ever came up again in that inning. The reason my manager didn't send me to the shower was that he had sneaked back into the shower room himself to smoke a cigarette, or a couple, but by the time he emerged onto the field, we were already behind -- 10 to nothing. Needless to say, he was a little surprised. I was thrilled for two reasons: One, the crowd could boo him for a while instead of me. Secondly, I thanked God above that he'd finally come up to get me off that field -- except of course, he hadn' t come out for that reason. I'm very tall and he's very short; when I stood on the mound, and he stood below me, he barely came to my belt buckle. He looked up at me and said, "This game's lost. I'm not going to waste another pitcher on this game. You're in there for the duration, kid. Best of luck to you." Whereupon, people started throwing things on the field at him -- but when he disappeared, at me. According to the records in the baseball Hall of Fame, which in my case should be called "Hall of Shame," I gave up no fewer than 21 runs in the game. And, when I returned to my car, our fans had let the air out of all the tires in my car. This was a standard procedure in those days for fans to express their displeasure. So, is it any wonder why I got into another line of work -- which turned out to be critical oral history?

Question from Danny Postel:
Are there some key events that have yet to be examined through critical oral history where you think the technique would be particularly valuable?

James G. Blight:
I receive inquiries every week about whether, or how, one might apply critical oral history to events in the recent past. Some examples are: the Iranian Revolution, beginning with the capture of the U.S. embassy in 1979; the Turkish-Greek struggle for Cyprus, beginning with the Turkish intervention in 1974 that resulted in the "green line," or DMZ, on the island; the U.S. opening to China in the 1970s, including the Shanghai Communique of 1972; various possibilities regarding the Middle East conflict; and on and on. All of these are worthy subjects. The problem, from my point of view, is that few realize what an all-consuming, labor-intensive process critical oral history actually is. It can take years of almmost non-stop effort to get documents released, and get the right people to the table for the kind of discussions that need to be held. At certain stages, it more resembles shuttle diplomacy that anything else. During the sequence of conferences on the Cuban missile crisis, for example, janet Lang and I made emergency trips to Moscow and Havana just days before a conference in Havana, in 1992, because the governments in question got cold feet at the last minute, which is another way of saying that people in high places worried that their images might be tarnished in some way if the truth was told. It took the intervention of President Gorbachev and President Castro to clear the way. This kind of negotiating--with heads of state, on occasion--is, to say the least, not something for which one is trained in graduate departments of history, or political science, or anything else, for that matter. janet Lang and I are now in the early stages of developing a plan for passing the torch of critical oral history to others, via a methodlogical primer, a "how to do it" handbook, and via summer institutes here at Brown University's Watson Institute for International Studies.

Question from Danny Postel:
Do you worry that critical oral history could have the effect of legitimizing controversial historical figures by giving them the opportunity to shape history? (Many would put McNamara and Castro in that category.) Are there any people you wouldn't have at the table for one of these sessions? Osama bin Laden on September 11?

James G. Blight:
This is a mistaken perception. No one shapes the history that comes out of critical oral history. Documents play a big role, and the decision-makers do not decide which documents to put in the briefing books. Scholars play an important role, and we, the organizers, decide who to invite, not the decision-makers. Moreover, no one--not me, not anybody--knows what will happen once the discussion begins. One example. In January 1992, the American delegation to the first Havana conference on the Cuban missile crisis had, as its first priority, getting Cuban President Fidel Castro to speak candidly about Cuban support for Revolutionary movements in Latin America in the early 1960s--actions the Kennedy administration believed were serious enough to warrant the policies that led to both the Bay of Pigs and the missile crisis. Yet the conference had barely begun, when former Head of the Warsaw Pact, General Anatoly Gribkov, revealed the prsence of tactical nuclear weapons in Cuba during the crisis--a possibility scarcely dreamed of at the time by Kennedy and his advisers. This single revelation led to the reevaluation of the missile crisis over the next decade. None of us knew Gribkov would say what he said. And he only alluded to it because he thought, mistakenly, that we already knew about the tactical nuclear weapons on the island. But we didn't. And the force of this single revelation sent chills down the spines of all of us, because the American invasion -- which was, in late October 1962, only hours away -- would have resulted in the nuclear incineration of U.S. Marines on the beaches of Cuba, leading, in all probability, to an unthinkable nuclear holocaust.

So you see, a revelation like this cuts many ways. But one of the most important implications is that the Kennedy Administration pushed the crisis much too far, much too close to the brink of nuclear war. And Bob McNamara, as a senior member of that administration, had to admit that all involved really escaped without a war not mainly by cool, calm management, but by luck. A man trying to polish his image would not like such a conclusion, I think. But then, I don't think Bob's participation in critical oral history projects is driven by such a need. I think he is just curious, on the one hand and, on the other, he is concerned to pass along the lessons derivable from his experience to succeeding generations.

Question from Danny Postel:
You were a leftist in the 1960s but became disillusioned with radicalism in the 1980s. Where would you place yourself on the political map today?

James G. Blight:
Well, let's see. I deal better with specifics. I can tell you that I voted in 1968, the first election I was eligible to vote in (an unbelievable year -- Hubert Humphrey v. Richard Nixon), for the Socialist Workers Party ticket -- Eldrigde Cleaver and Tom Hayden (who later became much more famous as Jane Fonda's husband and is now a legislator). In 2000, I voted for Al Gore and Joe Lieberman -- I still think they won, but they were declared the losers. I guess I would consider myself to be on the liberal side of the Democrat continuum. I thought Bill Clinton was actually a pretty good president, although a rather flawed genius of a politician. There's an old saying that as we get older we become our parents. In my case I think I'm becoming my grandparents -- my German grandfather was a socialist who later became a local organizer in Michigan for Franklin Roosevelt, and I lived with my grandparents for many years growing up. So, the environment in the household was intensely political, and shifted over time from radical to more mainstream. And, I think that's what's happened to me -- it's hard to stay radical when you're older, because you get tired of marching around. But I'm inspired by kids who still feel that they want to exercise their right to demonstrate, as happend at the World Bank in Washington about three weeks ago. I didn't join them, but I certainly supported their right to do so.

Question from Danny Postel:
What are some of the bigger lies that participants have tried to make at one of your sessions? Was your team able to show the policy makers that they were off base?

James G. Blight:
Lying, as such, is almost never a problem. By the time we reexamine the events, a great deal is known, or believed, about the episodes in question. If in an interview, someone just lies, it is almost always obvious, and these people never make the cut into the conferences. An example: Almost 20 years ago, we held a conference to examine how Permissive Action Links (PALS) came into being--the safety devices on nuclear weapons that prevent accidental firing. No fewer than seven people participated in the discussions who claimed to have invented PALS. Were some lying? No. Were they ill-informed, unaware of what others had done? Yes. This is really the issue: getting people to see that that there are other ways of looking at an event, for which they have only one perspective.

Danny Postel (Moderator):
Thanks very much, Professor Blight, for entertaining these questions.

James G. Blight:
I'd like to thank both The Chronicle and its readership for forcing me into a serious self examination regarding the method of critical oral history. I think two or three years from now my colleague janet Lang and I will look back on this moment as a point of origin for a new phase in which we endeavored to pass the torch to the next generation of researchers. So I'm grateful for this opportunity -- for backing me into a corner and asking me to hold my hands up and say what it is I do. Thanks to one and all.