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Booknotes: Stories from American History

Chapter Excerpts

Gina Kolata  |  Kann & FitzGerald  |  Ben Procter
Bob Woodward |  Jack Rakove  |  Jeff Greenfield
Ralph Nader  |  Peter Bergen |  Bernard Lewis

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• Introduction

Gina Kolata on the 1918 Influenza Pandemic
Influenza is a simple little virus. It has eight genes and only lives in human lungs. While it's there, its only job is to take a lung cell and make it into a virus factory. The virus gets in, just like every other virus, and takes a cell's machinery and forces it to make new viruses. Then the cell dies and the viruses escape and infect a new cell. It's a simple little thing.
The first time the flu came into the United States in a big way, it showed up at a place called Camp Devens, near Boston. At the time, people thought that it might be germ warfare because they couldn't believe it was something like the flu. Many people insisted on putting the word influenza in quotation marks. It was during World War I and there were rumors that there had been a greasy cloud floating over Boston Harbor with these germs in it, or that maybe the Germans had put something into Bayer Aspirin that would kill people. When it arrived at Camp Devens, it was the most horrible thing that anybody had ever witnessed. So many young soldiers were dying that they had to have special trains to take away the dead. The bodies were stacked up like cord wood, as people said when they were there. [top]

Peter R. Kann and Frances FitzGerald on Reporting from Vietnam
FitzGerald:  The first reporters who went there in 1959 tended to come from World War II and to have certain assumptions about what reporters ought to do when America goes to war. Those assumptions were broken by Neil Sheehan and David Halberstam, Mal Browne and others. They found that they had to become critics because they were lied to a lot of the time by Americans on the ground. They became very unpopular with the embassy and with the military command and so forth. There was this antagonism between reporters and the higher officials throughout the war because they were essentially trying to say, 'We're doing fine. We're winning. There's nothing going wrong at all.' Therefore, you found that you had to examine every single statement that was made, practically, to see whether it was really the case or not. It made reporting very difficult. You kept having to go to the Mekong Delta to find out whether what they were saying about it was so or not.
This antagonism created more of a sense that reporters were on one side or another, whereas I don't think they really were. They were just trying to do their jobs. The antagonism did not extend to GIs or to anybody who was on the lower levels. It was really high-level policy. [top]

Ben Procter on William Randolph Hearst and the Rise of Yellow Journalism
Whether he began the Spanish-American War or not, he thought he did. He called it 'The Journal's War' in the newspapers, and he helped shape public opinion. Keep in mind that this was when the United States was still approximately 60 percent rural, and Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer [of the New York World] had the Associated Press wire. Therefore, what they said went out to all parts of the country in rural America.
I realized the type of journalism that Hearst had [created was a tabloid form of journalism,] but I didn't realize how much [news] he fabricated in the Spanish-American War. As long as it was interesting, as long as it gained results, as long as it was entertaining, then he would accept it…. He was one of the forerunners of tabloid journalism. [top]

Bob Woodward on Planning the Persian Gulf War
Key portions of the grand campaign were developed by a half dozen junior officers in their second year at the Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth. These majors and lieutenant colonels, nicknamed the 'Jedi Knights' had been sent to Saudi Arabia to apply the elements of advance maneuver warfare-probing, flanking, surprise initiative, audacity-to the war plan.... These ideas, … that you come at something not necessarily from the front door are all laid out in a very unclassified Army operations manual, which is the Bible for them. In chapters six and seven it takes the [1863] Battle of Vicksburg in the Civil War as a model of how to do that. What really is surprising is that Saddam Hussein or some of the majors and lieutenant colonels in the Iraqi army didn't study our Army and realize what we were likely to do. [top]

Jack N. Rakove on Creating the Constitution
I think the one statement that mattered most to ratification was a famous, much-publicized public speech by James Wilson. The Pennsylvania delegate, the elitist democrat, if you will, gave a public speech right outside the Independence Hall, the Pennsylvania Statehouse, on October 6th, 1787. He made a number of very strong statements, including why there was no need for a Bill of Rights in the Constitution, why a Bill of Rights would have been superfluous and pointless. Wilson was identified as a framer, as not hiding behind a pseudonym. He was speaking in public and his speech was regarded as an authoritative early statement. Anti-Federalists start jumping all over it within a matter of days. If you had to pull one document out of the whole ratification campaign that had the greatest impact at the time, I think that's probably the one document. It's not Federalist 10 and it's not Federalist 51, the classic numbers everybody reads in college or sometimes even in high school; it's probably Wilson's public speech of October 6th that mattered most. [top]

Jeff Greenfield on the 2000 Election
If you had told me, at the start of my life, 'Someday you will see an election, not only where the popular vote loser gets elected, but where it takes a month and a half or so to figure out who won,' I'd have said, 'That sounds like an implausible story to me.'
In the first post-election blush, within 48 hours, it struck me that both sides were picking up . . . rhetoric and banging away, without any regard to its reality. The Bush people were saying, `No, that Palm Beach ballot was fine. Palm Beach is a hotbed of support for Pat Buchanan.' Well, no. It's clear that those votes-thousands of those votes-were cast mistakenly. And, the Democrats were saying, 'Well, we know what to do. Let's have a re-vote, or let's have a judge look at those ballots and allocate them to the guy really meant to have those votes.' You can't do that . . . .Maybe they were overzealous, but clearly neither of those arguments could stand the cold light of day. [top]

Ralph Nader on the 2000 Election
. . . Republican and Democrat state legislators . . . have an interest in excluding third parties, excluding competition, excluding choice to the voters, even though . . . it was third parties [which led] the fights against slavery, for women's right to vote, the trade union movement, the farmer-populist-progressive movement—right into the 20th century. It's a great record, even though only one third party ever won major party status, the Republican Party, which started in 1854 and elected a president in 1860. But they've really pushed the major parties into more humane, progressive, responsive postures.
It's really a disgrace that the two parties can't deliver more than half of the voters for themselves. I think if we had more initiatives and referenda on the ballot, more people would come out. Maybe if election day was a national holiday, more people would come out. Maybe if you didn't have the Florida-type obstruction problems and precinct address changes and so on, more people would come out. [top]

Peter Bergen on September 11 and Osama bin Laden
Bin Laden had been anti-American for a long time. But...on August 7, 1990, he was living in Saudi Arabia, and that was the day that President Bush announced Operation Desert Shield, which effectively meant the introduction of several hundred thousand Americans into Saudi Arabia. There were women soldiers trespassing on the Holy Land of Saudi Arabia—that was terrible, as far as bin Laden was concerned.
Eight years later to the day, bin Laden's men blew up two US embassies in Africa within nine minutes of each other. That was sending a very clear signal. He's been very consistent about the fact that these [Americans] need to be expelled [from Saudi Arabia].... His public statements usually mention this.
On September 11th, he wanted to provoke some sort of trashing of our civilization. It was a total failure. The striking thing to me is that you can't justify the September 11th attacks in Islam, because there is no language to justify it. Bin Laden doesn't even try and justify it. When people ask why the assault on American citizens, he says, `Well, they're Americans—they pay taxes and, therefore, they're complicit.' That's hardly a religious justification. His message has had very little resonance in the [larger] Muslim world. You have not seen millions of people getting on the streets saying, `Osama, Osama, Osama.' On the contrary, the demonstrations have been tiny, and you've seen every Middle Eastern government lining up to help against bin Laden because they understand he's a threat to them. [top]

Bernard Lewis on September 11th and the Roots of Islamic Terrorism
When Osama bin Laden, in one of his pronouncements, said, `We have suffered this shame and humiliation for more than 80 years,' I haven't the slightest doubt that all his intended audience knew exactly what he was talking about. They didn't have to start scurrying around and looking up reference books and saying, `Eighty years? What happened 80 years ago?' Now, we did that here; they didn't.
Slightly more than 80 years ago was the fall of the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman Empire was the last great Islamic empire. In 1918, along with its German and Austrian allies, the Ottoman Empire was defeated; not only defeated, but occupied, partitioned, its capital occupied, its sultan a prisoner and so on. This was seen as the ultimate point in the degradation and humiliation of the Islamic world. [It was defeated by] the allies; that's to say Britain, France and the United States.
At its height, the Ottoman Empire extended from the suburbs of Vienna to the frontiers of Iran and the Persian Gulf in the East, across north Africa, as far as the frontiers of Morocco, and a large part of southeastern Europe. It was a very mighty power. [top]

Publish Date: November 6, 2001

Publisher: PublicAffairs

ISBN: 1586480839

Retail Price: $29.95 Other Books in the Series:

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Booknotes: Stories from American History, the third and newest book drawn from the Booknotes series, now in paperback. It covers more than 80 defining moments during three centuries of America's history.
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C-SPAN \| American Presidents \| American Writers \| Book TV \| Q&A C-SPAN Civics Bus \| Capitol Hearings \| Students & Leaders \| Tocqueville Created by Cable. Offered as a Public Service.