Transcript: The question takes me back to a time when I was a student in Italy in 1961. And I found myself on a hillside in Sardinia, which at that time was extremely isolated from Italy and from the rest of Europe. It was before all those big resorts on the coast _____ were built and so on. And I found myself talking to a shepherd up on this hillside. We could barely converse. I spoke reasonably good Italian, but he spoke a dialect and not very good official Italian. But we managed to have a conversation. And he was filled with misconceptions about the world – gross misconceptions – about things that just weren’t . . . had no factual basis whatsoever. And I . . . If I could have a conversation with somebody, if I could reincarnate him – I’m sure he’s deceased by now – it would be with him and to ask him what he aspired to. If we could imaginatively transport him to a place where we could give him an idea that he had a range of choices in the world, what would he choose? What would he want for himself? What would he want for his family? It’s people like that – people who don’t have the resources to have the imagination, to even wonder about changing their circumstance, or how they might do things differently in the world. And that’s a billion plus people in this world today that are in that circumstance – living barely at subsistence level. They’re not free in the sense that they have the capacity to concern themselves with anything other than their very meager, daily bread. That’s the kind of person I would like to talk to if we could give them some kind of injection so that they could imagine a world in which their lot could be different.

Recorded on: 7/4/07

Transcript: Well I think individually, if we believe in the notion of democracy, as I do hope and trust citizens of this country do, I think what we must do is be well informed and engaged in the deliberative process that gives us the policies, and the practices, and the habits that we will all adopt going forward. And they’ll either be adopted with our participation, or without. And I have to believe that the policy . . . At the end of the day that we’re going to do better the more people are well informed, and the more engaged we all are. So to live in a country that is the historic home of mass participatory democracy – that is the United States – we invented the institutions, and the practices, and the values of democracy practice on the scale of millions of voters. More than a million people voted for Andrew Jackson in 1828 at a time when other societies that called themselves democratic – like Britain and France – had fewer than 100,000 voters in countries that were then quite a bit larger than we were. So we invented this thing called modern democracy; and yet in this society, only about half the people who are eligible actually exercise their right to vote. There’s something fundamentally, pathologically wrong about that. So that’s one place to start, is to get more people engaged in the delivery processes from their most local – school board, sewer district, irrigation district – that go right up to the federal level in the making of decisions that will affect us all

Recorded on: 7/4/07

Transcript: Well I do think collectively on the planet as a whole, we need to rethink the institutional structure that came down to us from the World War II era, which has been very effective in its own terms in promoting this general phenomenon that goes by the name globalization and human interdependence with the world around. That institutional structure I think still has a lot to recommend it; but I don’t think it’s adequate to the task of the 21st century. So I think the collective task for all the peoples and all the sovereign states of the earth is to look at that institutional structure, update it, add to it, eliminate those institutions that are no longer historically necessary; but to start thinking about institutional structures that will address environmental issues and their global and planetary contexts. We don’t have anything like that now. We have national organizations that do so in this country – the Environmental Protection Agency. But our . . . And we’ve . . . We’re groping towards international institutions to serve these kinds of functions, as in the Kyoto Accords, something that this country has repudiated. But the dawning consciousness, it seems to me, that these are issues that transcend national borders and must be dealt with in a planetary way, and therefore require institutional apparatus to do so. And I think that’s a big agenda.

Recorded on: 7/4/07

Transcript: I think the big issues of the 2008 presidential election are likely to be Iraq, Iraq, and Iraq. Whether Iraq is still some kind of shooting conflict at that time or not, its legacy, I think, is going to be with us for a long time to come. I think there will be other issues on the table. My own view is the time . . . that the country at large feels that the time for a solution at long last of the issue – healthcare provision, and universal healthcare, and bringing healthcare costs under some kind of control as a society. That will be on the table as well. I think environmental issues will be prominently on the table. I think immigration will still be on the table, because the opportunity to take it off the table with legislation just recently has failed. But I think dominating everything is going to be Iraq and its penumbra. That is to say what Iraq has to tell us about America’s role in the world; about the definitions of national security policy that we feel comfortable with; about the means we have with which to relate to the rest of the world and try to bend the rest of the world to our objectives. I think all of that big complex of issues that . . . at the center of which Iraq stands rather dramatically is going to be the dominant issue of the campaign.

Recorded on: 7/4/07

Question: What is the world’s biggest challenge?

Transcript: The planet has a lot of difficulties at the moment, I believe. Many of them have an environmental character; but a lot of them are political and cultural character as well. I think that one way, in a simple statement, to capture a lot of these complicated issues is to point to the disparities between the “haves” and the “have nots” – what’s sometimes called the “north/south disparity” between the developed . . . the difference in the standard of living between the developed world and the less developed world. Many nations have quite miraculously or remarkably entered into the club of developed, and prosperous, and affluent, and secure societies in the last couple of generations. Again, that’s part of the general project of globalization in which the United States took the lead to a large extent. But a lot are still left behind, and history is _____ the record of peoples who figure out, in one way or another, that their standard of living, their way of life, their range of choices, is much less than and inferior to that of their neighbors, or their fellow citizens or what have you. That’s the stuff of deep and friction-loaded relationships that often erupt into fully armed conflict. That’s true internally of any given society. Look at the American Civil War. Look at the populist upheaval of the late 19th century in this society. The Civil Rights Movement of the mid-20th century. All instances where people who felt their way of life was inferior to that of others, or threatened resorted to one means or another to readdress the balance. Globally, if we don’t find ways to incorporate those peoples who still work for, for example, $1 a day – and there’s a billion of them roughly out there in the world . . . sixth or more of the planet’s population – if we don’t find ways to get them on the train to a different standard of living . . . And I don’t just mean material possessions or material goods, but the capacity to really be masters of their own destinies and fates, and have the kind of range of choices and individual lives that citizens in . . . people who live in advanced, industrial societies like ours now take for granted. The planet will be in for some very, very tough confrontations going forward, I think. And this is not just civilizational, or religious, or cultural in character. I think at the bottom of it is a lot of just plain economic resentment, or potential for economic resentment if we don’t bring the “have nots” of the world into the party.

Question: What are the challenges confronting the U.S.?

Transcript: Well the United States has more capacity for action in the world than any other society. We’re richer. We have now a tradition that’s at least a half century old of playing, for the most part, a responsible role in the larger international order. We have our own internal experience of having . . . growing this society into the world’s richest society, and one that has incorporated many different peoples into its cultural fabric. So we have the resources –the historical resources, the cultural resources, the technical resources, the economic resources, the financial resources, the institutional resources – to play a leading role in integrating the planet in a way that improves the lives of others and not just ourselves. And this is not a zero sum game. I think a planet in which more people feel secure – feel that they are part of the ongoing human enterprise, they aren’t left out of the advance of civilization generally speaking – is gonna be a more peaceful world, as well as a more prosperous one.

Recorded on: 7/4/07

Transcript: The connection between fear and war? Well war is, or should be, a last resort in human affairs. It unfortunately is not always the last resort. But when it is, I think it’s often propelled by fear. Maybe not even a specific fear of this adversary’s role, but just a generalized fear of uncertainty about the future. I think nations are often driven to war by a very ______, generalized, free-floating anxiety about what the future might hold; and by the . . . it usually turns out to be vain hope that by force of arms – by the application of organized disciplined force, which is another name for war – that the future can be held secure, or at least less insecure than it would be otherwise. But that’s usually a pretty forlorn aspiration.

Recorded on: 7/4/07

Transcript: Well this particular moment, the issues that worry me a lot, concern me a lot, and generate a lot of anxiety to be quite particular about it and bring it right down to the current moment are the ways in which this society – this country – in the last several years has substantially squandered a bank of moral and political capital that it built up in the world at large in the two generations or so following World War II. I do think that on balance, again, there are major exceptions to this statement; but I think on balance, the United States played a beneficial role in the history of the larger world for a couple of generations after World War II. The Vietnam episode is a major exception to that, I believe. But in essence, the United States at the end of World War II took the lead of creating a lattice work of institutions – the United Nations, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the General Agreement on Terrorists and Trade which morphed into the World Trade Organization at the end of the century, NATO . . . you could go on and on – the net affect of which was to raise standards of living and expand the scope of choice and liberties for people not just in this country, but in the world at large . . . the big sectors in the world. And that was a project I think that this country can be quite proud of. And I think people admired us for our role in that, in helping those kinds of things to happen. We have lost a lot, if not virtually all of that moral and political capital as we’ve become something quite different from the humble nation that we thought we were, that we were promised the current leadership would keep us as. I think it’s going to take a long time for this country to rebuild its reputation of the world at large and to kind of reclaim the kind of moral and political leadership role that it had for the two generations after 1945.

Recorded on: 7/4/07

Transcript: Well I think the founding fathers were time warped to the present moment. And to someone ask their opinion on things . . . First of all, I think we’d have to allow them a long period of observation before they could form a cogent opinion. And that in itself would be . . . The way we could inform them . . . the technological means we would have to give them an idea of what was going on in this continent today would itself be among the things they would find mind boggling. But I think on balance, they would . . . particularly if they had some points of comparison of how other societies in the 21st century are conducting their affairs, they’d be reasonably proud of the fact that we have maintained a larger and more robust, more vital civil society, and managed to keep the state more or less to Jeffersonian proportions compared to a lot of other people. That would be one thing they would find to be consistent with their intentions and the charter that they laid out for the future of the society. I think they’d be of two minds about the role the United States plays in the world at large today. I think they had aspirations – many of them did, at least – to make the United States some kind of example to the world about how to organize a civil society and a democratic or representative government; and indeed how to revolutionize not just domestic society, but the international system itself. And I think they would find much to be proud of there, that the United States has played an exemplary role in the world, particularly in the 50 years or so following World War II. But I think they would be plenty nervous about the overreaching aspects of a lot of recent American policy and role in the world, which we try not merely to exemplify how a praiseworthy or meritorious society does its work. But we try to impose that way of life on others, and I think they would find that a fool’s error.

Recorded on: 7/4/07

Transcript: Particularly if we ask the question, “What does American history have to offer to the rest of the world today?” What are the experiences that have characterized life in this society in the last several centuries that might provide guidance to other peoples going forward? I do think it’s something in the realm of how people of very different historical, and cultural, and religious, and so on backgrounds have managed to . . . if not exactly make common cause, at least make space for one another. I think we can get over-romantic and mythologize the idea of how we are one people. I think our genius is we are a lot of different peoples that have managed to get along with one another reasonably well over historical time. That record is not perfect either by any means. But that’s the genius of the American experience, it seems to me, or part of the genius. Another part of it, I believe, is again the rather peculiar relationship – at least in the framework in the history of the western world – that we’ve had between political society and civil society. That is the role of government and the role of just citizens in their own individual capacities. It’s a distinctive feature of American history from the beginning right down to the present, that the public, or political, or state sector is much smaller than it is in the societies that we usually compare ourselves with. One rough and ready index of that is the tax burden in the United States, which took the sum of all taxes and all public revenues – state, local and federal – in the United States is about 30 percent of gross domestic product. And most of the west European countries that we typically compare ourselves with, and from which we are culturally and historically derived . . . that percentage is usually in the 40 to 50 percent range. So again, it’s just a crude indeed of how, in the balance between state and society, or the political realm and the civil realm, we’ve maximized or maintained a larger civil realm than other societies. Among other things, that means that we’re kind of looser, more porous, and some would say an even undisciplined society than others. And that’s maybe the price that we pay for this. But it has . . . For whatever price we’ve paid, it has liberated enormous energies amongst the people that constitute American society. And it’s what makes us so dynamic, and such a source of innovation – not only technological innovation, but cultural and institutional innovation. This is, you might say, the payoff that we get for the kind of chaotic . . . sometimes loose and undisciplined society that we have. I think it was George Santayana – he taught philosophy at Harvard at many years. I think it was he who said that the American society is like a treeless prairie constantly swept by a tornado. That we’re just a wide open, “let her rip” society in many ways, at least compared to the west European societies that we typically compare ourselves to.

Recorded on: 7/4/07

Transcript: There was a British philosopher who wrote a book in the 1920s, and he asked the rhetorical question: “Why do I study history?” And he said, “I study history for three reasons. One, to learn what it means to be a man.” We would say today what it means to be a human being. “Secondly, what it means to be a man in this time and place. And thirdly, what it means to be a man different from all other men.” So we learn from history, first of all, our common membership in the human family. We learn, secondly, what’s the nature of the historical circumstance in which we find ourselves. All of us necessarily – this is a fact of biology – have only been given a very narrow window in time given the geological time by which we measure the life of the planet, and only one physical circumstance in which to live it out. So that’s something else that history teaches us – what’s unique to our particular allotment of time, and the place where we are, and the culture we’re in and so on. And then we also learn – I think if we’re really serious about the deeper rewards of the study of history – about our own individuality and about why we’re different from other people. And none of us is quite the same as anybody else. Even identical twins are different from each other in many different ways. So there’s the . . . That’s a kind of microscopic way of describing what’s been my principle preoccupation of what’s been the study of American history and what are its particularities. I think that lesson can be extrapolated out to the world at large. And one of the things that I believe this society and all other societies of the world are gonna have to learn to appreciate going forward is that for all of our common fated inhabiting the same relatively small planet – and all the interdigitation of our fates that are a result of the process that we call, broadly speaking, globalization – there are going to be stubborn and persistent differences in our ways of viewing the world, and our religious beliefs, and our cultural preferences, and our schedule of values. And the friction that arises at the points where those different cultural schemes come into contact with one another – that is going to be a fact of life going forward that we’re going to have to learn to deal with.

Recorded on: 7/4/07

Transcript: I think I am inevitably the product of my upbringing in the Catholic faith. I’m not an avidly or zealously practicing Catholic today, but neither have I had any traumatic separation from the church over my lifetime. And I think this basic idea that life on this earth is a veil of tears; it will never yield perfect happiness and perfection. That is at the center of Catholic tradition and teaching. And I do believe that that has reinforced and mutually interacted with what I’ve taken from the secular study of history. There’s an old joke about what Catholicism teaches – that it teaches that every one of us is special in the eyes of the Lord; but it also teaches that none of us is really too great. (Laughter) So that’s . . . There’s some mixture of recognizing, or appreciating – celebrating, even – human dignity and the dignity of the human experience; but not being too naïve about the possibility of perfect goodness, or perfection, or utopia in this earthly life. And I think it’s that balance in some semi-articulate way probably makes up whatever passes for my philosophy of life.

Recorded on: 7/4/07

Transcript: I would say my own mentors, particularly David Potter. I was also blessed with some great scholars who were my mentors when I was a graduate student. Some of them are still alive – John Morton Blum in particular was a great inspiration and mentor to me at graduate school at Yale. _______ Woodward, by most people’s acknowledgement – the dean of American historians of his generation, a great historian of the South and particularly the Jim Crow system – was another great inspiration to me. And in fact, Woodward had . . . He taught me something that I’ve tried to pass on to my students. Woodward believed that among the glories of history as an academic discipline was its capacity to speak to the general educated public, and it’s refusal to develop its own hermetically sealed jargon that was understandable only to other practitioners who had been baptized into the particular discourse. He dug that into us, that it was our responsibility to speak more broadly to the society at large. And that’s something that I really took to heart from him.

Recorded on: 7/4/07

Transcript: I think the biggest challenge that the field of history faces going forward . . . well there are at least two of them that I can think of. One of them is the sense that because we live in a society that is so dynamic, and so fluid, and porous, and mobile, and future oriented, and in which change happens with such rapidity, that it’s an easy assumption to make that the past is irrelevant to us and that we don’t need to understand it. That’s kind of a constant, it seems to me, of being preoccupied with the importance of history in a highly dynamic society such as ours. It’s just convincing people that the subject is important at all. So that’s one challenge going forward. The second is the nature of the documentary record from which we professional historians build their accounts of the past. And it used to be . . . In fact, the further you go back in time – the time of the Egyptians, or classical Greece or what have you – the problem there is the paucity of documentation and the difficulty of wringing anything cogent or comprehensible out of the very fragmentary and small amount of evidence we have. Today we have just the opposite problem. We have so much evidence, and the historical record is so thick and weighty with electronic communication and so on and so forth, that sifting through that great Everest of documentation to come up with a coherent narrative line or analytical line is just an enormous challenge. And it’s one that’s building, you might say, almost daily and weekly as we go forward through time.

Recorded on: 7/4/07

Transcript: Teaching is a very difficult thing to do well, and it takes an enormous amount of energy, and time, and what you might call just generally psychic resources. I’ve recently learned to fly an airplane, and I have a flight instructor. And teaching a 60 year old guy to fly an airplane is a pretty challenging assignment. And we talk a lot, he and I, about the nature of teaching. Now he’s teaching me a technique and a set of rules and practices and so on. I try to teach people habits of mind and methods of inquiry and so on. So it’s quite different results that we’re aiming at. But when he and I, when we’re up there in the airplane, we have a lot of occasion to discuss what works. What’s effective teaching? How do you really make someone internalize an understanding of something that’s new and exotic to them? And maybe there’s something we ourselves don’t understand perfectly, although we have a better understanding than the student – maybe not a perfect understanding. How do you guide someone to enter a domain of knowledge or a field of expertise in which you’re ahead of them, but maybe not absolutely terrific at it? Those are big challenges, and I’m still learning how to do it I think. I once heard a lecture from a British professor whose name is escaping me at the moment. And he said he began every . . . he was a literature professor. He began every new course that he taught by announcing to the students, “I know a whale of a lot about English literature and you don’t. And my objective is to change that equation in your favor.” And that is a pretty good, rough and ready definition about what my idea of teaching is about.

Recorded on: 7/4/07

Transcript: I think if my work has had any effect on the larger field of American history, it’s been to keep alive a style of political history that went out of fashion shortly after I finished my graduate training. Amongst American historians, there was a very significant, almost tectonic shift of emphasis from political and diplomatic history and the history of American foreign policy and national security policy to social history. And again, this was all swept up in the great era of multiculturalism and the awareness of all the ethnic, and racial, and religious variety of the society. And a lot of subjects entered into the agenda of professional historians that weren’t there before. And justifiably, I think the historical profession as a whole paid a lot of attention to them in the last three decades of the 20th century – African-American history, women’s history, immigrant history, ethnic history, religious history and so on . . . social history broadly construed. And though I do believe I incorporated a lot of that into my own work, my own interests have been at a somewhat different level – the history of policy, the history of high politics, the history of diplomacy, national security policy, the history of institutions. And I hope that if I made a contribution to the larger field is to keep that level of discussion reasonably vibrant, even while many – if not indeed the majority of my colleagues – particularly the generation just behind me – were really turning their attention to other subjects.

Recorded on: 7/4/07

Transcript: Well the easiest way to answer the question of how our participation in that war was different, I think is . . . This is a crude answer, but I think it gets at the essence of it. If you look at the other societies that were major participants in this war . . . let’s take the Soviet Union, our ally. Soviet Union lost about 24 million people in the war, of which about 16 million were civilians. The United States lost 405,399 military dead in all branches of service. Not a trivial number, and I don’t mean to make light of it. And in the 48 continental states – the states that had a star on the flag in the World War II era – the civilian death total of persons whose deaths were directly attributable to enemy action was exactly six people, all of whom died together, oddly enough, in the very improbable place of a mountainside near Bly, Oregon, which is in South Central Oregon . . . almost in California. Those numbers themselves tell us a very large story about who actually paid the greatest price in blood and treasure to achieve the results that we got in 1945. And the incidents of the war’s destructive impact on other societies was just geometrically greater than it was on the United States. So we’re the only society that fought World War II that managed to improve its civilian standard of living even while waging a war. And indeed in the entire history of warfare, there are very few societies that managed to wage protracted, large scale, deeply mobilized wars of attrition like we did in World War II and at the same time lift the civilian standards of living. So we fought a very peculiar kind of a war, just as we’ve had a very peculiar kind of history.

Recorded on: 7/4/07

Transcript: Well there’s 300 million of us, so any generalization, we should be suspicious about it. There is an older school of thought actually that I grew up with in a sense in my early professional life, and when I was really turning my attention to American history is when I wanted to spend my time with it for the rest of my life. It was called National Character Studies. There were a number of books in the post World War II era that took this subject on. Probably . . . Some of the more famous ones were David Reesman’s “The Lonely Crowd”; William White’s “The Organization Man”; and then the one that had the greatest influence on me was a book by David Potter called “People of Plenty”. And David Potter was, in fact, my mentor when I was an undergraduate student. And their general approach was to try to locate distinctive attributes of the national character we might say in the heads and hearts of every single individual in the society. And it was kind of a social psychology approach. How did being socialized into a given environment compel everybody in the society to internalize certain values? That approach fell into a lot of disfavor at a certain point, particularly in the age of multiculturalism when we became acutely sensitive to all the many differences among us. So that is not exactly my approach, though I wouldn’t deny that everybody who lives in this society for a generation or so does share some stratum of shared values in one sense or another. But that’s not exactly my approach. I’m more interested in institutional factors, situational circumstances that have determined the range of choices that people have in this society. And collectively, ________ determine our institutional . . . pardon me, our historical pathways in these various eras. When I was on my way to graduate school – literally, figuratively driving across the country from California to Connecticut in 1963 on my way to begin my graduate studies at Yale – I drove a car, an old beat up Dodge. And I started out in Seattle, and then I drove down to visit friends in Oklahoma, and then up to Chicago, and then on to New Haven, Connecticut. And I was filled with this notion, you know, I was driving across my subject. I was literally transiting the physical subject that I was gonna study. And it was about a two-week trip, and I can remember thinking on the way, “Boy, I’d better take on some humility here because this place is so big and so diverse that really, the kinds of easy generalizations that I have been thinking I could apply into the life of this society are probably not gonna cut the mustard.” So we’re almost at the beginning of my lifelong endeavor with this. I was given a very chastening lesson on the complexity of the subject. Our history constrains us even as it opens special opportunities to us; but we live and we will always live in an environment that is given to us by the past. And our capacity to just throw that overboard and start all over again . . . I mean history is full of very few successful attempts at that kind of thing. So the better we understand how we got here, the more cogently we’re gonna be able to take ourselves forward. What has made us capable of functioning now for several centuries as a unified, political entity? What has made us one people despite – or perhaps even because of – all of the various differences amongst us? We don’t have . . . This is a cliché, but it carries a lot of analytical weight actually. We don’t have the natural inheritance of common language, and culture, and religion and so on that binds us as a people the way, for example, the Italians do, or French people do or what have you. We’ve had to make a country, and remake it, and renew it generation after generation. And how we’ve made that work . . . I do not believe it was divinely ordained, or in the historical cards, or part of our collective karma. That’s been a historical project to make this country work as a unified entity over many, many generations. So that’s the fascinating topic.

Recorded on: 7/4/07

Question: Why is American history important?

Transcript: Well Americans should care about American history the way individuals should care about their own past and their own memory. A people without a collective memory is a people without a collective identity – in our case a national identity. So it seems to be self-evident why, in our society and any society, if members of that society don’t understand how they came to be a people, and how they came to be an organic and integrated society, they really have no collective identity whatsoever. Others, I think, need to understand in this day and age – this particular historical moment – need to understand something about the character of the society because we just loom so large on the world’s horizon. And we – for better or worse – have so much influence on what happens in all corners of the globe. So it behooves others to understand us, I think, as well as they can.

Question: What lessons can we take away from American history?

Transcript: Well if American history has any lessons about, again, the current historical moment that we’re passing through globally – not just in the United States – I think its most valuable and positive lessons have to do with the way in which many, many diverse peoples from all kinds of different origins, and religious backgrounds, and confessions, and cultural proclivities and so on can come together and form a viable society that maximizes opportunities for a lot of people and that works . . . functions as an organic society. Now I think in an era . . . To use the cliché and word of the day – in an era of globalization – a phenomenon of our time that I think has . . . building an inevitable momentum to it, these are lessons that are going to need to be, in some way, learned by the peoples of the planet at large. It’s how we can live together in a global community that respects individual identities and cultural particularities, but yet functions as a peaceful and productive planet.

Recorded on: 7/4/07