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    That is from one of the best-known soliloquies in all of Shakespeare, the first words of the Tragedy of King Richard III. The speaker, of course, is the Duke of Gloucester, who by the second act has become king.
    Shakespeare didn't leave much to the imagination there. Richard's candid self-description lets you know right from the beginning what this play is about. It's about a bad guy, and he's it. Not only is he bored with peace — a hiatus in the Wars of the Roses — and not only is he a physical monster whom even dogs fear at sight, but he's got plans to do some serious mischief for his own profit. By the end of the play, there has been ample mischief done. There are bodies all over the place, including those of Richard's brother, the rightful king, and of two innocent and precious young children — the two legitimate heirs to the throne — and of allies and foes, men and women, innocents and intriguers.
     The carnage, and especially horrible is the cruel murder of the little princes in the Tower, is all in aid of allowing Richard to usurp the crown, which he abuses in good measure before his own death on Bosworth Field, crying “A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse!” at the hands of the good and noble and heroic Henry, Duke of Lancaster, who then becomes King Henry VII, the first Tudor king.
     In all of the theatre's repertoire, it's hard to find a more malodorous fellow than Richard III. The character is so convincing that most of us who think of that king at all instantly see the slit-eyed, snaky, deformed embodiment of evil probably best depicted by Laurence Olivier. If anyone's historical reputation is set in stone, it's Richard's.
     Maybe.
     Since the 1960s, an eager, growing, and — let's face it — occasionally tedious group of people organized in chapters of the Richard III Society throughout the English-speaking world have sought to revise completely the general perception of this man who was king of England for barely two years. While many of them sound like conspiracy buffs everywhere, they have reminded the world that, while Shakespeare was a dramatist, he was also an employee of the crown, at least indirectly — of the Tudor crown. And they also remind us that Shakespeare relied on historical accounts of Richard's time, from which he took the meat of his plot, if not the elegance of his writing.
     The historians whose work most influenced Shakespeare's play were Polydore Vergil, an Italian who lived in England under the patronage of King Henry VII, and the much better known Sir Thomas More, who, until he was beheaded for heresy by his sovereign, was Lord Chancellor of England under Henry VIII, son of VII.
     The indefatigable nit-picking of the Richard III Society makes some interesting points. It seems that Richard's claim to the throne wasn't really that bad, while those of some of the others whose lineage Shakespeare accepts uncritically were, perhaps, subject to question. It also seems that Richard — who may have been noticeably unattractive, for all we know — was at least not the deformed monster Shakespeare describes.
     For a historian, the most telling argument the Richard III Society makes is that the peculiar loyalties of Polydore Vergil and Thomas More have to be considered when their own veracity is examined. Since Richard's claim to the throne may well have been much better than the claim of Henry Tudor, that king had a very strong interest in establishing a historical record to support his own coronation and to discredit his predecessor. He paid Polydore Vergil's salary, and Vergil, who as a native of the Italian Renaissance knew quite a bit about intrigues, regicides, and bloodletting, also knew on which side his bread was buttered. It's really no surprise that the account he wrote makes Richard a rotter through and through. Nor is it any more surprising that More, that saintly martyr, would pick up and continue Vergil's interpretation. He was Lord Chancellor, after all, and his mission was to cement the legitimacy of the Tudor dynasty. Shakespeare, whose occasional patron was that fifth Tudor monarch, Elizabeth I, was predictably following that same road, especially in the early years of his career, when Richard III was written.
    What the Richard III Society is doing, for all its amateur status, is called revisionism, and it is a long-standing part of the process of doing and writing history. In this case, the revisionists are trying to tear down a centuries-old interpretation they believe is based upon the popular whims and political necessities of the moment it was created, by providing new evidence, new interpretations of old evidence, and solid reasons to challenge the veracity, even the honesty, of those who were responsible for that venerable interpretation. They would argue, if they thought about it that way, that Shakespeare and Polydore Vergil and Thomas More were all being terribly “politically correct” when they wrote about Richard III. Their mission, as they see it, is to set the record straight — at least until another generation of investigators may come along with more new information that shows that Richard really was a thorough-going scoundrel after all.
    In my first year of college teaching, at Princeton, I had a student come to my office to complain that he didn't “like historians.” I allowed as how I was sorry about that — though I really wasn't. This kid was absolute proof that even the Ivy League schools can occasionally suffer from making too many “tribute” or “legacy” admissions decisions. He was third generation Princeton and good evidence of in-breeding among the rich — what Monty Python might have called an “upper class twit,” who at least never graduated from that fine institution. So I wasn't really too troubled that he didn't like historians, but to be polite, I asked him why. His answer was stunning in its simplicity. “Because,” he said, “they never tell you the truth.”
     Well, there you have it. Every good student who comes to college should be searching for the truth — but they really can't expect to have it handed to them, especially by any historian worthy of the name. What they are going to get is interpretation, and the better the historian, the more solid and persuasive that interpretation will be.
     Please understand. I am not denying the existence of truth, or right or wrong, or good or evil. But this young man, and others who want the world to be simple, are not talking about facts, which are different from truth. They tend to want a worldview, a vehicle for understanding what those facts may mean, that conforms neatly and easily to their own wish for how things should be. Good historians don't operate that way.
     Real history is modest, at least insofar as it acknowledges the possibility that at some point there may be some new information or a better analysis of the data that will unseat the current interpretation. The task of a serious historian is to make an argument so sound and so persuasive that it can withstand the challenges of other good historians for as long as possible. This is not, in all candor, an objective process — at least not entirely. An honorable historian is objective insofar as he or she seeks to examine all the evidence that can be found about a question of historical importance. The answer to that question — the historical conclusion — is not set out a priori, at the beginning, so that all the evidence would be shaped — or as we say, cooked — to support it.
     At some point, a historian has to say, “I have tried diligently to gather all the pertinent information, and I believe I have seen enough now to draw a conclusion, to answer that question.” As soon as that threshold is passed, writing history is no longer objective, though it must be honest. The historian's task from that moment on is to persuade the reader of the soundness of the conclusion the historian has drawn by arraying the evidence, showing how it supports the conclusion — the thesis — and convincingly shooting holes in other interpretations now found to be wanting. That's revisionism. It happens all the time.
     Some of it, to be frank, is only mock revisionism. I don't know how many doctoral dissertations are written every year that claim to explode one monumentally unimportant thesis by teasing out some incredibly insignificant datum in order to establish some agonizingly trivial argument, but there are a bunch of them. Well, new Ph.D.s have to write something, after all, and the blessing, believe it or not, is that most of those dissertations never get published.
     To be even more candid — though this should come as no surprise at all — the answers a historian may come to, like the decisions a historian may make about what kind of evidence is important and why, are unavoidably influenced by the historian's personal values and experience. Good historians do their best to shed their own prejudices, but in the end there are some influences no human being can escape. They vary, person to person, but they're there, and they're real. No, historians don't tell you the “truth,” if what you mean by the truth is that the world is simple, human behavior is easy to explain, or everyone must now agree and has always agreed on what is good and what is bad.
     In making his or her argument, a good historian acknowledges those influences that cannot be eliminated. We all make value judgments, but we are obliged not to try to disguise the values on which we base them. With every important historical issue, the arguments of historians, the significance of historical events, and the reputations of historical figures will be regarded differently at different times, when those arguments, happenings, and people will be weighed on new scales.
    The further we get from the actual historic moment being considered, the more likely it is that interpretations will be changed. In the 20th century, because things move so much faster than they used to and because we have so much more information available to us than they did in the late 16th century, the shifts of historical interpretation are more dramatic and more frequent. In addition, we have to calculate the nature of the information with which we are bombarded, and its sources. It's not all “history” by any definition. It is too often rumor, innuendo, personal attacks, and the like — none of this historical-balance stuff, no detached search for all the information.
    One of my personal causes throughout my professional life has been to help students discriminate between information worth considering and simple, vapid, noise dressed up to look seductive. I believe strongly that, until this society generally can master the techniques it needs to sift the kernels of useful information from the chaff of sensationalism and self-serving garbage, we stand in genuine peril of losing our precious and fragile public values.
    As a society, we are bombarded with quasi—facts, with interpretations based on little or no solid information. We live in a world in which celebrity has replaced significance, in which that most unlikely prognosticator, Andy Warhol, has been proven right about virtually everyone getting 15 minutes of fame and in which the bastions of privacy have crumbled.
    It's not hard to imagine the impact of that on the way society regards people who can claim some place in history. The important question is how serious historical interpretations change in this kind of world. Revisionism says as much about the society in which it occurs as it does about the information being reinterpreted.
    The people whose historical reputations are most likely to change over time, and over smaller periods of time, are political leaders. That's true because politicians are, while they are working, less the subject of historical analysis than of the pull and tug of political debate: canonized by supporters, damned by opponents. These exchanges may be entertaining or troubling, but they are not rich sources of solid information. Popularity is not the same as historical reputation, and so it is not surprising that the way such people are remembered can change fairly rapidly.
     Political leaders must react to those pressures as they do their jobs, simply to be able to do those jobs. In our system particularly, they need some degree of popularity to give them the authority they need to be effective. They therefore must walk a thin line between appeasing the immediate demands of momentary critics and pandering to public whims and interests. The best of them, the most successful, manage to avoid sacrificing principles and purposes without alienating so many potential allies that they cannot function.
     Even George Washington kept a weather eye on opinion leaders. So did Abraham Lincoln, and both are rightly remembered in history as great presidents, because they managed to husband essential political capital without abandoning the aims and values that shaped their leadership. But, as new questions arise about them and others — questions that may never even have occurred to them but have since become important to a society whose own crucial values have shifted somehow — even the stars of the American pantheon begin to experience some erosion of their historical reputation.
    There seem to be two predictable safeguards against that erosion, though it is clear that neither of them is absolutely certain.
    The first is martyrdom: Lincoln's assassination as the Civil War was ending secured his heroic stature even though he was among the most vilified presidents in history while he lived and even though his own plans for reconstructing the nation faced extremely serious opposition from all quarters. But even martyrdom has its limits, especially in an age when gossip and innuendo so enthrall the popular imagination.
    John Kennedy's moment of secure historical adulation was very brief, indeed, and he is now as much a target as an icon, thanks above all to his reputation as a womanizer. He did not invent caddish behavior, and he lived at a moment when it was, if not exactly condoned, then at least winked at in the circles in which he moved. But, he also lived at the beginning of the modern women's movement. Indeed, when he established a presidential commission on the status of women and set out to increase the representation of women in the upper levels of federal service, he reluctantly but effectively gave the women's movement some of its most important early momentum. The social values generated by that movement reject his personal and private male chauvinism, and as those values have become increasingly salient in the public consciousness, his star has dimmed.
    Such dimming has had a reciprocal influence on the future of his reputation. The recent book The Dark Side of Camelot purports to reveal how Kennedy's womanizing so dominated his behavior that it virtually negated his public service. Seymour Hersh, the author, has already made millions of dollars in book advances and TV rights for his expose´, and he has kept that money even though a major source of “new information” has been proven beyond question to be a fraud.
    Hersh's sources are almost all interviews with people whose own recollections of events 35 years old must at least be questioned and may in some cases be peremptorily dismissed, because the gossip and controversy that have surrounded the Kennedy image for decades cannot help but have colored them. Rumors unrefuted for so long take on the trappings of gospel, and every purveyor of “new information” thereby enhances his or her own place in history. Superficial revisionism, like Hersh's, is also a constant — and, like it or not, serious historians will have to deal with that as they seek to revise the real historical record in the future.
    The second plausible protection for historical reputation could be the existence of a monument. Marble grandeur, especially prominent in Washington, D.C., makes a solid impression on the generations who see it: a persuasive manifestation of the importance and greatness of the person to whom it is dedicated. It is not easy to revise the historical reputation of someone about whose legitimate place in that pantheon the nation as a whole seems already to have agreed.
    That is certainly why you see a sort of monument frenzy in Washington right now. Not just people, but causes, are being memorialized, and the great open spaces of the capital are beginning to look a bit crowded. If the cause's appeal may be at all ephemeral, then it behooves those who support it to get a monument in place as quickly as they can because they know that, once it's literally set in stone, its importance will be difficult to challenge.
    The creation of a new memorial to Franklin D. Roosevelt may serve as a useful illustration. I have spent my career as a historian studying FDR, and I have the highest regard for his leadership, even though I have had to confront several of its more troubling particulars. If pushed to choose whether there should be a monument in Washington to FDR, I would probably agree that there should. What interests me is that he did not think there should. It was his wish that a simple plaque, set in the ground at the northwest corner of the National Archives, be all the memorial he should have. That plaque has been there for 50 years. FDR was not an unduly modest man; he knew that, as a president elected four times and as the leader of the nation through the Depression and World War II, he had had a major impact on American history. His own sense of proportion simply led him to conclude that a plaque, and not a monument, would be a fitting memorial.
    What opened this summer is impressive. Nestled in a grove of trees near the Tidal Basin, it spans several acres and features walls, statues, pools, waterfalls, and a small museum. It is a very tranquil and beautiful setting, and it has sought — largely successfully — to represent the most important elements of FDR's legacy to the country and the world. But what does it mean? What is the significance of its creation now, at this moment? The movement to build it began in the 1980s, when it was obviously a response to political and ideological trends that seemed to fly in the very face of FDR's lifework.
    The FDR Memorial is a celebration of positive government, of active international responsibility, of mutual civic duty, conceived and designed at a time when the quasi-philosophy of “I'm all right, Jack,” revived isolationist attitudes, and the ethic of greed became pervasive. While it surely seeks to put to rest forever the controversies about the man and his accomplishments, it is as much as a celebration of Roosevelt, a declaration of the importance of special values, of a cause, now set in stone and thus, perhaps, more lasting.
    To my mind, it is almost too desperately that, so large and elaborate that it seems a plea as well as a declaration. Lovely as it is, it is almost too much; and that tinge of excess leads me to wonder whether it will actually succeed in making the point it seeks to make for posterity.
    When I walked through the memorial, I happened to be following two young men who were talking fairly loudly about their own reactions. They could see what the memorial was trying to do, but they rejected it. One of them declared how wrong-headed Roosevelt had been: self-interest, he said, total autonomy of the individual — those were the principles on which real freedom had to be based. The other agreed, saying that Ayn Rand had had it all right. Yes, said the first. Then he paused and asked if his companion had read Atlas Shrugged. Well, said his friend, he had tried to read it, but it was such rough going that he couldn't get through more than a third of the book. Me, too, said the first. But he was going to try again this summer.
    I found that a very telling conversation. Those fellows had made up their minds before they saw the FDR Memorial that FDR was wrong. They touted a philosophy — libertarianism — that could explain why he was wrong. But, apparently, their understanding of that philosophy was based on little more than having read the dust jacket of a book or someone else's account. They had found the truth as they wanted it to be, and they could cite an author who supported their preference, but their comprehension of their own position was completely superficial.
    I was also struck by how considerable are the obstacles to opening minds locked shut by laziness and self-interest. The memorial would never make its point with them, not because they could weigh that point and challenge it, but because they already knew what they wanted to believe and were not open to different points of view. They could be content to slap a dignified label on their prejudices because such insubstantiality is the currency of their world.
    Thus we see that not even monuments are certain armor against the winds of revisionist interpretations.
    Another example of this is the impressive memorial in Washington dedicated to Thomas Jefferson, who is now the specific target of a wave of revisionism designed to take from him the hallowed reputation he enjoys.
    The issue is simple and potent: racism. Jefferson was a slaveowner, of course, but his reputation rests chiefly on the Declaration of Independence's immortal assertion that “all men are created equal.” In his monument in Washington, one wall is devoted to his argument that people held in slavery must be free, but revisionists have begun to undermine the basic pillars of Jefferson's legacy. They argue that Jefferson's definition of freedom did not include equality. He did not free his slaves, as did other Founders when they died. He proposed strict separation of freed slaves from white society, for he believed the two races could never live together in a society unaffected by racial differences. Moreover, in the view of at least one historian, his essential pre-presidential writings on liberty, so fundamental to his place in American history, have provided fuel for modern militia groups who define liberty as the right to reject government authority with violence as they see fit.
    Historians are far from unanimous in accepting this revisionist view. Many argue that figures from the past must be judged in terms of the times in which they lived, and in Jefferson's time there were very few people, even among those opposed most vigorously to the evils of slavery, who argued for a society in which race did not matter. Jefferson was a man of his time, and the question is whether he contributed enough to the future and whether he was also enough of a man for all time, that he should be regarded as a giant of American history.
    Those who have studied Jefferson have long noted the differences between his early ideas and his practice as president, when he seems suddenly but understandably to have converted to the belief that governments must have power, that civic obligation is as important as individual freedom. Indeed, he clearly extended the powers of the presidency far beyond what he himself would have tolerated from other presidents.
    This recent criticism of Jefferson arises not from a wave of new evidence but from the assertion of new values the critics believe must be the basis of the American future from now on, values against which the evidence we have long had must be measured anew. In a society devoted to dispelling the evil of racism, in a society in which every citizen must truly have been created with equal value and dignity, in a society in which all citizens must share the responsibility for the common welfare and the efficacy of social organization, they argue that there is no room for hero-worshipping a man whose personal values were apparently quite different.
    The Kennedy and Jefferson cases are instructive, especially perhaps for historians in my own field of diplomatic and political history, for we have traditionally examined questions of power and statecraft, of decisions and actions and consequences, and the values we have dissected have been values related to those things in traditional terms. However, the world in which we live today is much less concerned with those questions. Whether it was brought down by Vietnam or Watergate or the end of the Cold War, the traditional examination of power and those who use it is much less relevant to many Americans than it was only a few years ago.
    Instead, many serious people are now determined that more comprehensive questions about the nature of the society must have priority: questions about race relations, about gender relations, about violence, about religious influences, about cultural differences. They reflect a new and very different definition of power, a novel sense of how power is achieved and use. They subordinate the traditional and rather narrow categories of statecraft to the much larger — some would say fuzzier — issues of worldview that predetermine how individuals will act in the face of various circumstances.
    These questions compel us to look differently at those we regard as heroes, and whether they were questions that occurred to those people themselves or even to the broader society in which they lived is not regarded as relevant. Heroes, after all, are for the living. Whether they were heroes before means little in deciding whether they should continue to be.
    And, there is the additional characteristic of our own society that distrusts heroes anyway. Much as Americans have always loved stars, a part of us has always welcomed news of their fallibility. As far as I can tell, this has been one of those weird angles of the American democratic tradition since at least the Revolution, but it has been perverted in recent years by the proliferation of gossip that passes for news, that lascivious pandering to the lowest common denominator that has come to characterize so much of our public discourse.
    We have demanded to know everything, protesting self-righteously that we have a right to disregard the privacy and personal needs of public figures. Predictably, though to the apparent shock of headline-writers and the delight of headline-readers, public figures have been shown to have human foibles. It is no longer simply a matter of secretly wanting our idols to have feet of clay; today many people expect them to have cloven hooves. We used to analyze public behavior as something separate from private behavior; we seem not to be able to do that anymore. And for a small but vocal part of society Ñ especially a sector of academia — that is especially true if the people whose actions are being examined are white males.
    Generalized condemnations of all dead white males are puerile, of course, but they are also indicative of those changes in widely-held values that affect historical reputation. We can, and I think we should, reject the proposition that all white males are ipso facto undeserving of celebration. But we also must reject the proposition that a white male is automatically deserving of it, too.
    The furor over DWEMs — dead white European men — will pass; it is merely one of the extreme expressions of a new idea that will die of its own stupidity once the small but vocal community of ideologues has left the scene. Still, we may never again be able collectively to accept the values of dead white European men without peering at them closely under new lights.
   For all the hysteria that accompanied the memorialization of the 500th anniversary of Columbus' voyage to America, however readily people accepted the fashionable dismissal of Columbus as a racist imperialist whose primary legacy is the destruction of indigenous peoples, however shallow some of the noisiest rhetoric was, the episode forced us to come to grips with perceptions of which we had generally never known, or which we disregarded.
    It turns out that hindsight is not 20/20 after all. It is refracted through a lens of current ideas that change the view considerably. New sources of information — but also new views of the old sources — produce revisions of the historical record.
    Take Harry Truman, for example. He was never really a popular president while he was in office, but it did not take long for historians to begin to find real merit in his presidency. By the late '50s, at least, historians were taking a new look at Truman and pronouncing favorably on the way he had “grown” in office. By the '60s, he had moved into the top echelon of “effective” presidents in the surveys people in my profession are often asked to complete by people in other professions.
    The reasons for this elevation were — at least are now — fairly obvious. In the context of the Cold War, with the world divided with apparent permanence and rigidity into our side and the other side, Truman's original choices about how to deal with the post-war order seemed to have been proven correct by subsequent events. The Truman Doctrine, the first peace-time military alliance in American history, the creation of the CIA, the war in Korea, even the so-called loyalty program that was distorted and abused by the McCarthyites, all seemed sensible responses to unprecedented challenges. Not that there were not plenty of critics, mostly academic, who faulted him for provincialism, short-sightedness, and cheap politicking. But there were many more, also including academics, who concluded that since he was right in the end, he had been right at the beginning.
    Then came Vietnam and the end of the Cold War and the predictable reexamination of that long and painful episode, and historians began to ask again whether Truman was so effective after all, whether his decisions in the period 1945 to 1948 had not, indeed, plunged the United States into an agonizing conflict it might have avoided. Was his view of the world too simple? Were his aims as noble as he made them out to be? In the alienated mood of the '80s and '90s, a mood highly skeptical of Cold War verities, Harry Truman's stock has slipped again.
    Probably the most obvious example of how those Cold War verities have come under new scrutiny was the flap a couple of years ago about the Smithsonian Institution's exhibition on the first use of an atomic bomb. It was a great illustration of how new interpretations, arising out of newly elevated values, can affect the larger historical memory. There has always been controversy about Hiroshima, of course. Even before the bomb was dropped, some of the leading scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project, men and women who actually produced the bomb, insisted that it need not be used and should not be used. But for most Americans in 1945, the decision to use the bomb was absolutely right. It was so right it was not even controversial. The Japanese had started the war; they had conducted it, for all Americans knew, with startling brutality; and they were refusing to be reasonable and give up in the face of overwhelming odds. GIs were still being killed, even though the war in Europe was over and it was clear to everyone what the final outcome would be. The bomb ended the war, with a bit of special pay-back for Pearl Harbor. American troops did not have to invade Japan and die, along with Japanese, in pointless slaughter. War was war, and a bomb — even a huge bomb — was a bomb.
    By the time of the 50th anniversary of Hiroshima, however, things looked very different to many people — especially, it seems, to many historians who helped prepare the exhibition in Washington. New evidence had surfaced that the explanations for the decision to use the bomb offered in and after 1945 had been at best incomplete and in some cases disingenuous. Was it true, for example, that we could have expected a million American casualties if Japan had to be invaded? It turns out that number was picked out of the air. The questions remain very controversial.
   Equally important, however, was the sensitivity in 1995 to questions that were not considered so important in 1945: What was the impact of the bomb on the Japanese people? If there was any hope that the war could end without the bomb, were there ulterior motives in dropping it? Was the use of the bomb a factor of the limited view of the world, and of humanity, shared by the men who created it and ordered the destruction of two Japanese cities? Were these men so blind to the suffering of innocents? Were they driven by a traditionally masculine value system in which force and power are the first alternatives? Were they desensitized by racist contempt for a non-white people? Had they no conscience? Were they trying to establish American dominance over the post-war world and willing to sacrifice innocent victims to accomplish that goal? Does not the new information about using unknowing human subjects as guinea pigs in experiments with nuclear power support such an interpretation? Could these men not see the horrible consequences for Japan and for the world of what they did?
    Now, the exhibition was not, I stress not, organized by those questions. But they were there; it was much more, and much different from, a paean to the men who flew the Enola Gay or to the Manhattan Project or to Truman and his advisors or to the GIs who fought and died in the Pacific or to the victims of Pearl Harbor. It was no glorification of a great and noble war: it was troubling because it asked questions about all the usual assumptions. It was a context for revisionism, and to many people, it was therefore an outrage.
    What we saw in the exhibition was a collision of beliefs and values in the setting of new questions. It declared that nothing is as simple as it once seemed, nothing as pure, nothing as noble. I will not argue that it was as balanced as its defenders claimed or that it was entirely right that those questions should be asked in that way, at that time, by that institution. But this is a new age, and historical research tends, unavoidably, to be discomfiting.
    The furor in 1995 led the Smithsonian, under intense political pressure, to retreat ignominiously. The revised exhibition featured a great many details about the reconstruction of the Enola Gay and the story of its crew. The final version was shaped as an apology for the original. Perhaps that was the right thing for the Smithsonian to do at that moment for a variety of reasons, but it did not erase the controversy.
    Indeed, the Enola Gay exhibition revealed another important side of revisionism and its consequences. Historians, of course, most often study things outside of their personal experience. They thus bring a view of the world and a set of values that have been shaped only indirectly, if at all, by the people and events on which they work. That detachment is what makes whatever objectivity there is in history possible, but it may also distort the results.
    Another problem with revisionism is that sometimes the revisionists simply miss the point.
    In the 1970s, two well-known historians collaborated on a revisionist interpretation of slavery. They analyzed all kinds of archives, personal and public, and concluded from the new evidence that slavery had not been all that terrible for the slaves. They were not, by any means, defending slavery. They were just saying that, for most slaves, the situation was not as bad as people thought. Relatively few slaves, they found, had actually been killed or worked to death. Relatively few had had to spend their lives permanently shackled. Most had lived in quarters that were fairly decent by the standards of the rural south in the 18th and 19th centuries. And so on.
    Even if the numbers were right, what this analysis missed entirely was the meaning of slavery to the people who suffered it. That relatively few slaves were beaten to death means very little if you consider that every slave knew it was possible, that they knew their very lives depended upon the whims of owners and overseers who were virtually unaccountable to any other authority. That few slaves were shackled or hobbled is insignificant if you consider that almost every slave had seen another in that situation and realized it could happen to him or her as well. Living accommodations may have been adequate, but is that as important as the knowledge that a master could, with neither notice nor second thought, sell your children or your spouse or your parent, and you would never see them again?
    Here's a second example. Some years ago, I was at a symposium on the McCarthy era led by a young historian who was then finishing a major new study. He concluded that, for all the lamentations and hysteria, especially in the academy, the real victims of McCarthy and the Un-American Activities Committee were really very few. Not so many had lost their jobs, even fewer had gone to jail. The damage was very limited.
    When he finished, a highly respected senior professor in the audience stood up and declared, “I do not recognize the period of which you speak.” In a compelling statement — there were 200 people there, and you could have heard a feather hit the floor — he described what had happened to him when he had been accused of having leftist tendencies in the 1950s. No, he did not lose his job — his university stood by him, and the tenure system proved its worth. But for years he had had to endure the attacks, the inquiries, the innuendoes made in whispers, the doubts of colleagues and students and the general public. His family had been ostracized, and he had been blackballed from countless professional associations. His work was not published; he was not invited to participate in professional meetings. He was every bit a victim of McCarthyism but not one who would show up in those revisionist tabulations.
    These two cases illustrate very well, I think, the dangers of a revisionism that is so preoccupied with a new set of values that it cannot comprehend older ones.
    No wonder that some historical figures do everything they can to protect their reputations before historians can get at them. Of course, it never works — they can't possibly anticipate the kinds of questions the future may ask. Besides, if they believe they can preserve the record as they want it, but how they want it is derived from a set of values that will be found severely flawed at some future date, they are participating in their own indictment.
    The best example, certainly, is Richard Nixon — and he is a humdinger. The only possible explanation for the Watergate tapes, for why they were not destroyed when destroying them might have saved his bacon, was that he truly believed they would set the record straight and exonerate him. He simply did not expect the kinds of questions and criticisms those tapes would generate, and he left the White House in disgrace.
    Then, in the years after his resignation,we saw a kind of Nixon historical revival. Playing the role of elder statesman with some skill, he led post-Watergate historians to reexamine his record as president, and they found in it much to be admired, especially in foreign policy. When he died, he was no longer the pariah of American politics, and four United States presidents honored him.
    Yet those tapes have come back to haunt even his ghost. Not the Watergate tapes this time, but recordings from his earlier days in the White House that show even more clearly how he meant to use history, and failed. These tapes reveal the origin of the Plumbers — the infamous White House espionage crew. They show a president who was eager, not only to protect his own historical reputation but to destroy those of his predecessors, especially John Kennedy.
    Nixon wanted to elevate himself by dragging others down, a proclivity he shared with too many Americans. He wanted to show, on the basis of no evidence, that Franklin Roosevelt was responsible for Pearl Harbor. He even wanted his cohorts to break into the National Archives (first having dispatched the Archivist of the United States off on some wild goose chase to the West Coast) to find the proof — which, of course, does not exist. And he wanted proof — which he thought could be stolen from the safes in the Brookings Institution — that Kennedy's incompetence had almost caused World War III over Berlin or Cuba. These new revelations about Nixon are frightening, to be sure, but there is also pathos in this for many reasons.
    Ultimately, history cannot simply be created. Stalin tried it. Hitler tried it. So have countless others. In the end, there will always be those annoying changes in the way the world thinks about things, and those changes will produce new inquiries, new approaches, new interpretations. Invariably, those who have come to feel secure in the old interpretations will be disturbed, or worse, by the effrontery of new ones, that may, in the end, stick. Neither the glorification of an individual, nor that individual's trial by rumor and accusation, will determine a lasting place in history, and how long it lasts. It takes time to settle it all out. And history has nothing but time.

 

 

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Richard A. Harrison
1945-1997

Richard A. Harrison was dean of the faculty and professor of history at Lawrence University. A native of Kingston, Pennsylvania, he earned his bachelor´s degree in history from The George Washington University and the Ph.D. in history from Princeton University. Harrison joined the Lawrence administration and faculty July 1, 1992, after 15 years on the faculty at Pomona College in California. A specialist in American foreign policy and the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt, he was a gifted teacher and scholar, earning the coveted Wig Award for distinguished teaching three times while at Pomona. He also had taught at Princeton and Johns Hopkins Universities and the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, and had spent a year as executive director of the National Project on Contemporary History in Washington, D.C. In addition to two biographical dictionaries on Princetonians of the late 18th century, Harrison published scholarly articles in the William and Mary Quarterly, Diplomatic History, Peace and Change, the Canadian Journal of History, the International History Review, and the Pacific Historical Review. He was the recipient of an Eleanor Roosevelt Institute Fellowship, the Graves Award in the Humanities, an American Philosophical Society Research Grant, and a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for College Teachers. As dean of the faculty at Lawrence University, Harrison provided energetic leadership, an unwavering commitment to excellence, and a deep devotion to helping the college achieve the best in liberal education.

 

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