It is a widespread belief that we can learn lessons from reading history. Of course, it is not often said what it is that we can learn, and historians are divided as to what the lessons of history really are. The opinion of most seems to be that we should read history in order to observe its ironies. That is, no general patterns, no indication of design, no final triumph or final defeat of the human spirit seems to be registered there, only the frustrations of actors working at cross-purposes, and the un­intended consequences of policies once set in motion. The fact is that in reading history, people get out of it what they put into it. If history is a science, it is the most tendentious of sciences; while the facts of history may be inarguable, their meaning is not. For example, what a Marxist historian and a Catholic historian get out of their respective readings of the history of Europe’s Middle Ages is not a different set of facts, but different lessons: the Marxist sees that technological, i.e., material, conditions brought about the transition from a feudal to a capi­talist economy; the Catholic learns that all of Europe is a single social entity brought into being under the auspices of the Church. On more local grounds, we often find conservatives comparing the current state of America to that of Rome before the Fall, while liberals compare it to that of Weimar Germany just before the rise of nazism. We all learn, it seems, our favorite lessons from history, but they are our lessons, not history’s, in an objective sense.

A good example of how not to find lessons in history is Garry Wills’s The Kennedy Imprisonment, a tenden­tious and vulgar book, albeit a high­ brow one. It is, of course, about the Kennedy family, chiefly John Fitzger­ald Kennedy. This is a JFK recogniz­able, though, only to readers of scandal mags, right-wing tracts and revisionist historians: a phony, a womanizer, a creature of  his father’s public-relations machinery, a man who would subject his nation to mortal danger in order to retain political power and give himself psychological reassurance. Wills has culled negative comments from sources ranging from conservative critics of his foreign policy to Judith Ex­ner Campbell and worked them into a complex pattern of cultural and histor­ical explanation. The book is organ­ized into five parts: “Sex,” “Family,” “Image,” “Charisma,” and “Power,” each consisting of three or more chapters. Significantly, since it spells out the message of the book, the final chapter in each part is entitled, “The  Prisoner of …   ” as in “The Prisoner of Sex.” Thus, the saga of the Kennedy family (especial­ly JFK) is presented as sordid and essen­tially self-defeating, a venture in futility. “Johnny we hardly knew ye,” indeed.

Why has Wills turned his heavily in­tellectualized style on the Kennedys and JFK in particular? A number of reasons suggest themselves. First, Wills has always shown an ability to take an off­ centered view of a subject to show it in a new and interesting light. In this, he takes after G.K. Chesterton, whom Wills admires and often quotes, and about whom he wrote his first book. However, Chestenon, who was famous for his oxymorons and seeming nonsequiturs and paradoxes, produced a body of writing structured on strong convic­tions, but he also wrote for fun as well as to make a point in an unexpected way. The moving force behind Wills’s writing seem to be an insatiable quest for per­sonal status, which gives his work a smart-alecky tone that is totally lacking in Chesterton. Another possibility is that Wills, as a Catholic, is offended by the fact that John Kennedy was a parently bad Catholic. There is a final reason, however. Wills’s savaging of JFK takes its place with other recent books on American presidents, particularly Ronnie Duggar’s on Lyndon Johnson and Sey­mour Hersh’s forthcoming tome on Richard Nixon. These books have two things in common: first, to a degree nearly unprecedented in serious political analysis, they relate the most sordid details of their subjects’ personal lives; second, in each case the author is fiercely opposed to American foreign policy as it has been conducted since 1945. Bue none offers a realistic alternative. Each sees our foreign policy as anticommunist, imperialistic, dirty, immoral. While they say this at some length, what can they offer as an alternative to a policy of anti­communism? After all, there is no deny­ing the aggressive nature of Soviet foreign policy, nor the kind of semidark­ness that constitutes life under a communist regime. So writers like Hersh, Duggar, and Wills are reduced to trading in tittle-tattle on the order of the Midnight Star and the old Confidential magazine. Nixon tipsy at a Florida night­club, LBJ afraid that college would sissify him, Rose Kennedy gamely hiding her knowledge of Joe Senior’s infidelities: these are the details that make up the narratives of our new class of historians. Wills can scarcely bring himself to stop detailing the sexual escapades of the Kennedys; he even notes one about Prime Minister Asquith of England be­cause Asquith was of a class of men–the English ruling class–that JFK admired.

The themes of Kennedy sex/family/image/charisma all merge one into another and lead inevitably into the last theme of Kennedy power–American foreign policy, in Wills’s view. For him they are all the same, and the only reason he can see for JFK’s anticommunism is that he had to uphold the Kennedy im­age of cool daring and macho exploita­tion by going mano a mano with Fidel Castro and Nikita Khrushchev. He re­duces the motives for JFK’s foreign policy to the personal need of Kennedy and other members of his administration to fulfill some dirty psychological necessity. The John Kennedy whom Wills de­scribes is a man trying to establish his manhood by playing around with women and by pushing around the Rus­sians. Such a correlation not only smacks of puny post-Freudian platirudes, but as a method of analysis it also obscures the main motives of American foreign policy since 1945 and leads Wills into contor­tions of interpretation. As proof of Ken­nedy’s eagerness to humiliate the Rus­sians, for instance, he cites the fact that we refused to dismantle our missile bases in Turkey but insisted that Khrushchev remove Russian missiles from Cuba. Why should we have missiles in Turkey when they cannot have theirs in Cuba, Wills wants to know. Missing from Wills’s discussion of the Cuban crisis is any sense that the Soviet Union has trampled into naught every previous treaty and agreement, that America is morally right in resisting communist ex­pansion because communism is an evil and totalitarian system. Wills apparencly sees that notion as proof of America’s bilious pride.

There is a particular conception of power, its morality, and America’s use of it behind Wills’s attack on the Kennedy family; indeed, the book is subtitled A Meditation on Power. It is worth examining this conception because it has recent­ly become a powerful influence in debate and discussion about American foreign policy. It is not all that new, however, for the late Jesuit scholar John Courtney Murray described it in We Hold These Truths over 20 years ago:<‘blockquote>

Most Americans seem to have finally awakened to the central relationship between foreign policy and force. But the awakening was to a state of moral bafflement and anxiety, in so far as it took place in the climate or moral opinion…[in which] a cold breath of evil more than faintly emanates from the very words ‘power’ and  ‘force.’ It seems to have been a part of the American dream that this nation could go through history with clean hands by the simple Kantian expedi­ent described in Peguy’s genial phrase: ‘Kantianism has clean hands, because it has no hands.’ Concretely, a nation’s ‘hands,’ where with it shapes the stuff of history, are its in­struments of power–military, economic, and diplomatic power, to­gether with the power of sheer presence and prestige. We have never wanted to have such hands….Now we have become suddenly conscious of our hands–that they are sinewy beyond comparison, that they are sunk in the affairs of the world; that they are getting dirty beyond the wrists.

Given this attitude it becomes impos­sible to detect any moral difference be­tween our foreign policy aims and those of the Russians. An anticommunist foreign policy starts as a moral embarrass­ment and becomes a psychological im­possibility. This attitude has grown stronger in the last 20 years with the trauma of Vietnam, which may explain why no JFK admirer has come forward to defend him. How could they: the same people who supported JFK now claim that Reagan’s budget provides too many guns and not enough butter. JFK’s anti­ communism (“we shall bear any burden… “) has become an embarrassment to the liberals who once supported him.

One final point on Wills’s concept of the morality of power: unlike many others who share his attitude, he is no moral relativist. Wills is a Catholic who believes that the only moral validation a nation may claim is that it permits its citizens to live in relative peace. Thus, a claim of moral righteousness can never be a legitimate basis of foreign policy, and the duty of the truly righteous among us is to recognize the moral vacu­ity of American foreign policy and to de­nounce it. Wills seems to share the idea that the United States should unilateral­ly renounce nuclear weapons; then, either the Russians would do the them or the Chinese would attack them. Such are the lessons of history that Wills and others on the left have learned from the war in Southeast Asia.

Of course, if anyone is expected to learn lessons from history, it is the historians themselves. These lessons would not be answers to large questions about meaning, which might provide a plan for American policies, but about the techni­cal issues involved in the writing of his­tory–the evaluation of certain types of documentary evidence, for example. After the Fact: The Art of Historical Detection by James Davidson and Mark Lytle explicicly intends to draw lessons on the technical questions of writing history. Each chapter describes an epi­sode in American history chosen to illustrate a particular problem or tech­nique of the practicing historian. The book also has the aim of interesting readers in written history–which the authors perceive no longer appeals to people the way it once did. The story of abolitionist John Brown, for instance, is written as psychohistory to show the use of Freudian analysis in the writing of historiography; the development of the A-bomb is used to illustrate how historians must appreciate the influence of bureaucracies to understand decision­ making; Andrew Jackson’s career is used to illustrate how theories, in this case the frontier theory, guide the historians’ selection of facts. There is a peculiar sen­sation in rereading about these events, so familiar to us and yet told in a new way. To see in the career of Huey Long not just the familiar story of the Southern dema­gogue but an illustration of the “Great Man” theory is to gain a new perspective on American history that raises it from the local and parochial to the universal. After the Fact, written by two young his­torians with Yale pedigrees, is interesting and well written and will reacquaint the reader with significant events in a new and refreshing light.

If we do not really learn lessons except in a technical sense, and otherwise tend to see only what we bring to our observa­tion of history, then how can history be of use to us? The answer may lie in the fact that history can be a living tradition as well as a set of facts or a historical nar­rative, and can thus influence our thoughts and actions. This kind of his­tory is experienced–felt, not read, or at least felt after it is read. It constitutes a “usable past” because it becomes an extension of our personal memories. Washington at Valley Forge, Lee and Grant at Gettysburg, MacArthur in the Philippines are not simply events in American military history; they form a tradition which, when imbibed, will inspire mili­tary officers in the 2lst century. Franois Kersaudy’s Churchill and de Gaulle gives a clear indication of how history can function in this mode by what it tells us about its subjects. It provides a clear por­trayal of these men which, while concen­trating on their personal relationship, also enables the reader to see the kind of men they were and the historical forces against which they worked. Churchill and de Gaulle were both deeply im­mersed in the histories of their respective nations, which helped form their con­sciousness of the role that they and their nations should play in World War II. De Gaulle’s France and Churchill’s England, as they perceived them, had special places as originators and protec­tors of the best of the Western tradition of civility. They literally made history, not just by learning lessons from it but by creating a historical memory for future generations. The people who only learned from history were the designers of appeasement and Vichy, for they had learned the lessons of World War I. Alas, they were the wrong lessons.

Historical knowledge is not only the knowledge of the past; it is also the kind of knowledge which enables us to use the past as guide for the future. Yet, if we do not learn lessons from it, how can history guide us? Ironically, a passage from Garry Wills’s Confessions of a Conserva­tive explains it:

Insofar as we steer rationally toward the future, we do so by our rear-view mirror. There is no windshield, be­cause there is nothing to ‘see’ up ahead. We go forward by seeing back­ward. By tracing the trajectory of past events we extrapolate to future positions. . . . The best guides to the future are those whose knowledge of the past is broadest and deepest, who are most cautious and aware of complexity, least confident that they can ‘see’ something up ahead.