“Lessons” Of The Past? A Conversation On The Uses And Misuses Of History

>> Joseph Ledford: Welcome to the Hoover Institution. My name is Joseph Ledford and I'm a Hoover Fellow and the Assistant Director of the Hoover History Lab under the Director Stephen Kotkin. The Hoover History Lab functions as a hub for research on consequential history and pursues a host of initiatives all aimed at bringing the study of the past to to bear on contemporary policy issues.

With over 40 fellows involved, ranging from the most senior distinguished historians in the nation to the rising superstar next generation scholars and our brilliant student fellows, we have the most phenomenal group in the world. Applying historical reasoning to policy challenges. We are united in our belief that rigorous empirical history, judiciously deployed, can help those engaged in public policy make better decisions.

Of course, we are not alone in our endeavor, and we work in a tradition that began decades ago at another institution by a historian whom you may not be familiar with, but whom you will know by the end of this session, Ernest May. As you'll hear this afternoon, this tradition began to take shape with the 1973 publication of this book by Ernest May, Lessons of the Past, the Use and Misuse of History in American Foreign Policy.

As you can see, it's a small book, but it has big ideas that left a grand legacy. In the book, May presented three simple but powerful interrelated arguments. One, those who make foreign policy are influenced by history. Two, those who make foreign policy use history badly. And three, those who make foreign policy can use history more discriminatingly.

Those arguments hold true today and animate our work at the Hoover History Lab. And I can't think of three people better suited for discussing May's legacy and whether the study of the past holds lessons for us than our guests this afternoon. Philip Zelikow is the Botha Chan Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution.

For 25 years, he held a chaired professorship in history at the University of Virginia for seven years. Before that, he was an Associate professor at Harvard University where he worked alongside Ernest May. He is the author, co author and co editor of many works, including the most recent book, the Road Less Traveled, the Secret Turning Point of the Great War, 1916-1917.

An attorney and former career diplomat, Zelikow's public service includes work across five administrations from Reagan to Obama, including serving as a strategic consultant for the recent Biden Administration. On the National Security Council staff for George H W Bush, he took part in diplomacy to unify Germany and end the Cold War.

As counselor of the Department of State under George W. Bush, he held a deputy level policy responsibilities on issues around the world. He is one of the few Americans to have served on the President's Intelligence Advisory Board for presidents of both political parties. Zelikow has also directed three successful and bipartisan national commissions which you may hear about today.

The Carter Ford Commission on the Federal election forum, the 911 Commission, and the COVID Crisis Group. Next we have Drew Erdman who has for more than 25 years served as a public servant and a consultant. Drew is currently a partner for the second time at the global consultancy McKinsey & Company.

Drew helps lead McKinsey's support for state and local governments across across the United States, before that, Drew served as the Chief Operating Officer of the State of Missouri between 2017 and 2021. For 12 years before that, at McKinsey, Drew advised senior executives on their strategies and organizational transformations in the aerospace and defense sector.

Drew has also served in a variety of national security roles. Between 2001 and 2005, he was a member of the Secretary of State's Policy Planning Staff, Security Senior Advisor to the Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research in Iraq, and Director for Iran, Iraq and Strategic Planning on the National Security Council.

He has taught international affairs at Harvard and George Washington University. Drew is currently a Research Fellow of the Applied History Project at Harvard, where he also received his PhD under Ernest May. Our moderator today is Daniel Sargent. Daniel is an Associate professor at the University of California, Berkeley where he holds appointments in the Department of History and the Goldman School of Public Policy and he co directs UC Berkeley's Institute of International Study.

And I should note as of July he will be the Alexander and May Morrison professor of American History and Citizenship at Berkeley. He's the author of A Superpower the Remaking of American Foreign policy in the 1970s and the forthcoming and highly anticipated Pax A History of the American World Order.

And in 2018 and 2019 he was William C. Bart National Fellow here at the Hoover Institution. And he has also held fellowships at Yale and Harvard where he also received his PhD under Ernest May. Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming Daniel, Philip, and Drew.
>> Daniel Sargent: Great, thank you.

>> Andrew Erdmann: Thanks very much for the introduction. I'm going to say a few words just to help frame our conversation again. Drew Erdman. I'll start by asking the question how many people knew Ernest May before you came in the room? At least a scholarship. Okay, not everyone. So that's helpful to level set and where we at, so just a few words to set us up today.

We have a lot of history these days, maybe too much history. We are living through a period of uncertainty, change, disruption and at Times like this, we look to history sometimes as a compass, sometimes even as a map. And I would argue to switch the metaphor, it's the water in which we swim at times like this.

I encourage you to. How many of you listen to podcasts regularly on our current transition? If you look at a transcript and just go through how many times do they make historical allusions or arguments? It is like this. It is not like this. This reminds me of. There's a precedent for this, right?

Almost every op ed, every podcast, actually. It permeates how we try and make sense of what we do. We're storytelling creatures and it's about the lessons. How can they be helpful? Not helpful. That's going to be our frame today. The second thing is, and that's why I asked about Ernest May.

Whether you know it or not, whether you knew him personally, as we did at different points in our careers, whether you knew him in terms of scholarship or actually he did non popular things as well. Non popular scholarship. Whether you know it or not, your history today, the reason why you're here is because of this person, Ernest May.

It's not going to be about Ernest May, but it will infuse actually why we're here. So why we're all here. Your history at this moment in time is shaped by Ernest May. And it is well worth asking why. And I'll just read one quote related to Set the Stage.

He was the most, this is a quote from an assessment of his career. The most influential 20th century academic in the field of history and public policy. That's a close quote from one of his colleagues. So, okay, very briefly, why then, Ernest May? Why are we here? I hope that by the time you leave here, you will know Ernest May, as Joseph said, and that you'll want to read more.

But I want to set up why was it this individual who was a professor at Harvard for 55 years, he was joined Harvard at the ripe old age of 25, was tenured by the age of 30, which is intimidating for anyone who's an academic. But why is he still worth encountering?

Not going to go through his entire career. I'm going to start at the beginning, which is why was this individual so creative and got us to the stage today. So here's a couple things. First, I'll start with his parents. There's the Bertrand Russell quote, choose your parents wisely.

Okay, so Ernest May chose his parents wisely. They were both brilliant, his mother was from Texas. His mother was the first Hispanic woman to get a graduate degree from the University of Texas. She was pursuing a PhD. She was a linguist along with her younger sister. His father was a successful lawyer, a self made man from Weatherford, Texas who got a scholarship to Texas because he won a statewide debating competition.

He became a lawyer and in the mid-1920s he was an Assistant Attorney General in the state of Texas, fighting the Ku Klux Klan and fighting political corruption. They were a power couple. First in Austin. Their wedding reception was at the Governor's mansion. And the governor was the best friend of Ernest May's father, who was also Ernest May.

He was Ernest A May, not Ernest R May, but they were a power couple. In the society pages. Ernest May's mother traveled to Europe and would come back and give lectures on the League of Nations, et cetera. Amazing. He was born in 1928, so maybe genetics had something to do with it.

But what I would note is the absence is the presence. The absence is the presence. Tragically, Ernest May's mother died before his fourth birthday. His father and his mother were driving to Mexico to go on a long sought vacation. His father lost control of the car. He rolled it on a country road in Texas.

And his wife then lingered for a week, a little over a week in a hospital before she died. Ernest May's first memory is seeing his mother in the hospital. It is his last of her alive. And his father was never the same. He was driving the car and even in the military intelligence background check for Ernest May.

Ernest A May a decade later talked about him being a changed man, the father, because of what happened. And Ernest grew up mainly alone, accelerated through school. He graduated when he was like 15, 16 years old. He was very bookish, well read a lot of time alone, maybe picked on a little bit, but he found his way.

Actually, his first publication as a historian was while he's a high schooler in the August Journal of the State Historical Society of Texas. The Junior Historian, 1944. He published his first piece at about the age of 15. And it began to give him a sense of what he might be.

Second thing so that's the family. And I should note, when he graduated from high school, his father was off in World War II, and he literally was alone, apparently living in a YMC in Fort Worth, Texas. So he graduated, took care of himself. And again, absence is the president.

The second thing, though, that. Okay, so he's very smart, and he had this bookish inclination early on. Incredibly intelligent. The second thing, though, is his heritage. His heritage. He was a Texan. So when you think Harvard professors, 55 years, he was a real Texan. I didn't mention his mother's name was Garza, that is a long family in this part of Texas, 13, 14 generations, back to the Knights of Castile.

He was a direct. Ernest May was a direct descendant of one of the viceroys of New Texas. His family brought cattle to Texas, literally. And so there's a deeply embedded part of his life where he would travel to Mexico and there was the connections to that part of the family.

And he was inspired also by seeing documents in the state Capitol signed by one of his descendants. He was a descendant of one of his ancestors. And then on the May side of the family, the May side was, in a way, an archetypal American Southern family. They came from around 1700.

They settled in North Carolina and Virginia. At the end of the Civil War, they crossed the Appalachian Mountains. One of them had been an officer in the Revolutionary War. And then they worked their way across the south, settling in the Mississippi and Alabama. There were farmers, slave owners, but very Southern and they came to Texas only after the Civil War.

And so why does this all matter? So, first of all, Ernest May grew up in a context where actually he didn't learn about the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution as being the pivotal things in American history. He learned the Alamo. He learned Texas history. That is what he was steeped in, number one, number two.

But he was also steeped in the other side of the border, so to speak, that he and his family would get together, his extended family, and they would share stories of how the United States dispossessed their families. And they would have a competition. 1848 versus 1865, whose family had been more disrupted by the United States military, the Spanish side of the family or the Southern side of the family.

So there was a sense of the might of American power, but from a different perspective than what you might expect. Then the third influence, a name that you maybe never heard, but actually was an incredibly prominent historian. It's his dissertation advisor, Coyote John Coy, he was a historian in California.

You may See in bookstores still histories of Los Angeles or California written by him. He was one of the leading historians. He's at UCLA. His wife, Loree Coy, and most important, their daughter Nancy, who became Ernest May's wife. So his dissertation advisor was also his father in law.

Ernest and Nancy actually sat next to each other in John Coy's history class at ucla. Have the seating chart to verify, could go on quite a bit on this, a little bit, but I won't. But actually a coincidental University Texas connection. They actually knew the Garza May couple back because they had migrated to learn Spanish at the University of Texas.

What are three impacts? One, anyone who admires Ernest May's writing, I think was profoundly shaped by the cois in their editing, including Nancy, especially in the first few books. Second, a sense of history matters. It matters that John Walton Coy, as Ernest May was finishing his dissertation, was fired by the University of California system for refusing to sign a loyalty oath during the era of McCarthyism.

He was the person at UCLA who held firm, a few did at Berkeley and so literally imagine going, you're entering your dissertation, your advisor, father in law gets fired, and for the next few years, there's legal actions and things like that. And his father in law becomes a major voice against McCarthyism.

Okay, they go on to write a textbook together in the 1960s, driven by this mission and purpose, Land of the Free, which is actually like the first multicultural history book for middle schoolers in the United States. And then, last thing I'll say in terms of the Coy's influence, he was a great career counselor, and he actually explains how Ernest got to Harvard.

That's a whole other story, but he was pivotal in that. And then lastly, just to tie this together. So we, you know a little bit about the family, the tradition, you know, getting on a professional career. But I would say the reason why he's so distinctive, pulling this together, was that he joined the United States government at the age of 22.

He almost became a diplomat. He was offered a job, but it came too late. It was not the first time in US history that the State Department lost to the US military in shaping offense. He was offered a job in 1950 from the United Department of State after doing very well on his Foreign Service exam.

But the military got him first draft board, et cetera. He had to go to the Navy. So he went to the Navy in June, literally did his dissertation defense, went to the airport and flew to Newport to Officers Candidate School. He started off as an amphibious warfare officer, this is during the Korean War, was in the Pacific.

But then in the spring of 1951, when he got to Japan, there was a message for him, which is you were to return to Washington, DC with all deliberate speed to join the Historical Office of the Joint Staff. And so he then, as a young officer, was actually applying his history.

And you may not know this, but he was the author of the first official history of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Cold War era. And he not only had access to all the documents and all the classified materials, but he had access to the people as well, which is something that came through.

He went on to do a series of projects. And this is one of the interesting things. He was also a staff, because the staffer to the Chairman of Joint Chiefs, Arthur Radford, because Arthur Radford didn't have a strong position for those who want to go to bureaucratic history.

But he did have control of the Historical Office, and so he had the Historical Office do staff work for him. So Ernest May was doing staff work at the age of about 24 for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. And he was offered a job at 24, 25 to be the chairman's military aide for all National Security Council affairs.

He was going to be the plus one with the chairman. And Ernest May decided to turn it down to become an instructor at Harvard instead. And his patron, the first of his government patrons, was a colonel. He said to him, do you really want, would you prefer to make history or write history?

And he said, I'm gonna go and write history. But what I would note is that from that experience, very briefly, he was really grounded in reality, not realism. He actually, from the beginning, was not a fan of Hans Morgenthau, not A fan of George Kennan's interpretations, He was also not a fan of the New Left intellectually because he was an anti reductionist in much of what he did.

And he also acquired this ability to be empathetic and reconstruct how governments work and use documents, I would argue unlike anyone of his generation, precisely because at this young age he was in it at such a formative phase. So I'm gonna stop there. Probably have given you too much about Ernest May, but it's to set the stage, because where it got to is these questions.

And if there's one thing I encourage you to read from a long time ago, it's 1962. But he published an essay, the Nature of Foreign Policy, the Calculated Versus the Axial Axiomatic. It was published in Daedalus, but that's where he came out, after already publishing his first few books with the idea that foreign policy is driven by these axioms, oftentimes, but in competition with calculated kind of rational decision making.

But these axioms that are in people's heads, as he said, they're nearly always historical. They're nearly always historical. And quite frankly, that's what he devoted then the rest of his life, just figuring out which is where do these ideas come from, how important they are, and then eventually how to use them, or well, or at least practice, as he might say, a Hippocratic oath.

So I will stop there with that, but that's to set the stage for a conversation and hopefully you'll enjoy a little Ernest May after this. Thank you.
>> Daniel Sargent: Thank you, Drew.
>> Daniel Sargent: September 11, 2001 is a date with many meanings for me. It was my first day of graduate school and I was actually meeting with Ernest in his office in Widena Library when the first of the planes hit the Twin Towers.

Over the weeks that followed, I found myself experiencing real misgivings over my own decision to commit the next stage of my life to the study of history in graduate school. In a world experiencing immense upheaval and tumult, dedicating myself to the study of history as a vocation seemed in many ways like a frivolous and self indulgent choice to pursue.

The reason I stuck with it, the reason I earned a PhD was Ernest May. His class on the uses of history in public policy convinced me that there could be a value, a purpose to what we historians do beyond our own intellectual self gratification. That history, good history, is necessary to serve the public interest is a powerful lesson that I took from Ernest May.

We're very fortunate this afternoon to be able to talk to a former student of Ernest, Drew Erbman, and a former colleague of Ernest May, Philip Zelikow, Ernest May's closest intellectual collaborator, about Ernest May's legacies and about the uses, the misuses and the limitations of history as a way of knowing about world affairs.

I'm going to start out with a big methodological question and ask each of you to reflect upon the question, how do we learn from history? What can history teach us about the complex, challenging world in which we operate? And how best we apply history to the purposes of the present?

Philip, let's start with you.
>> Philip Zelikow: Sure. There are two ways you can look at the question of how to learn from history. One is you can step back and be an amateur anthropologist or sociologist or cultural historian, which in this context, amount to the same thing, which is, what are the folk beliefs about the past they carry in their heads?

And so you're observing a society, you're analyzing what folk beliefs they have and how they have learned from history, and then you comment or critique that. But what I'd rather focus on is a different question, more of a normative question is how should you learn from history? So we're now in an active sense, like how best should you learn from history?

How best do you learn from history? And my answer is relatively straightforward. You learn from it in two ways, directly and indirectly, direct knowledge. You have direct knowledge of the past, of things, of the backstories of things. And this is a key point that Ernest made and that Ernest and I made when we taught together.

We taught courses together on the uses of history and reasoning from history when I was at Harvard. Is we would say people are constantly using analogies, which is a form of indirect learning from history, I'll come to that. But they actually tend to neglect the simple direct knowledge you get from history.

I'm studying this person. What's that person's backstory? I'm studying this issue. What's that issue's backstory? I'm working in or examining institutions, defense departments, armies, navies, atomic energy commissions. What's its backstory? It turns out that direct knowledge, that is, I have an issue at hand, direct knowledge of the people, the institutions.

And the issue at hand turns out to be hugely valuable historical knowledge about those things actually is an immense source of learning and frankly just does not get enough attention. It's hard to do. You have to work a little harder instead. What is very common is people confront some situation, and instead of exploring the direct historical knowledge they can bring to bear on it, they try to analogize the situation they face to some other situation and then try to indirectly infer what they should do about it.

That's the indirect knowledge. Now, that's fine. And everyone does this all the time. In a way, it's like the knowledge you have about life. You gain life. You gain knowledge in your life through direct experience and vicarious experience. Yes. So you can get the direct historical knowledge or vicarious knowledge.

Well, this episode seems like other episodes that I have experienced vicariously because I've read about them. And it helps if you've actually read good things. So in a way, the way you learn from history is simply learning from history is like learning about life. Direct knowledge about life, indirect knowledge about life.

And the best ways, if you think about it, says, okay, what's the best way to learn from life? First, you might be reflective about the direct experience and the direct knowledge. But second is higher quality vicarious experience. That's why people read high quality literature. You learn more about the portraits of life in literature.

In better literature. You learn more about the portraits of life in history. From reading better history, from reading history that actually is more life like. And thereby the episodes you encounter in that knowledge is more life instructive.
>> Daniel Sargent: So let me ask you both then, to reflect upon what each of you learned about the uses of history from your direct experiences of working with Ernest May?

>> Philip Zelikow: Well, I had to teach people how to do it. And so I actually encountered May as a student at Harvard in the early 1980s. And mainly, actually, what we did in that sense was work through detailed case studies as a mode of instruction. I took a class that he taught with Dick Neustadt, prominent political scientist, but for example.

So rather than actually reading large survey historical works, the characteristic way they ran their course back then in the early 80s, was to offer very dense case studies of some historical decision. Let's say American intervention in Vietnam, where you then read all sorts of document sets and so on.

Ernest was already actually trying out pieces of his book on the fall of France that he had been working on in manuscript form. But put you basically, it was a form of vicarious experience. But I'd give you this vicarious experience in the form of an immersive case study that was more detailed and lifelike.

And then you would then reflect on the quality of choices and reflections people made in that situation from that encounter, so that you'd reflect more intelligently about the vicarious experience you had just gained. And then in our classes now, May and I would later spend a lot of time in our classes reflecting a little bit about the philosophy of history and how that related to things like the philosophy of science.

That is, we would think a little bit more on how these different disciplines thought about the way they learned. There's a whole little subfield called the philosophy of history that's actually has fallen significantly out of fashion. And the literature is pretty arcane and some of it is somewhat technical, like much of the literature in the philosophy discipline.

But it is somewhat valuable to contrast the philosophical underpinnings of historical knowledge and insight with the way the philosophy of science works, for example. But rather than burden you with all that technical stuff, I've kind of summarized for you the takeaway from it about both direct knowledge and indirect knowledge and the way to evaluate those qualities.

>> Andrew Erdmann: Yeah, I was going to add personal reflections, though I trained in philosophy at one point in time. What I took away from Ernest was really practical stuff when I entered government service. So when I finished my PhD, had the distinct pleasure of being able to join the policy planning staff for Secretary Powell and worked for someone by the name of Richard Haas who appreciated history.

That's why he hired me. So in a very immediate sense, what was the impact was Ernest May's recommendation, But also the case studies, if you stop. I spend most of my time or have spent a large amount of my time in the private sector. And if you look at any consultant deck, there's oftentimes things that are case studies, there are analogies.

Pick up anything in business history, or I should say, go to an airport bookstore and it's advice for CEOs. It's usually little stories that are woven together. So I do think that that is one way in which people do. So how do you learn? And in my case, I can say that some of the insights from Ernest.

For example, there's a wonderful little essay on The Origins of NSC 68, which describes how Paul Nitze maneuvered his way through the bureaucracy. And that was incredibly instructive as I entered the bureaucracy. It's like that sensitivity. I think that what history can provide you is alternative lenses through which to look at the challenges that you have, and you may see features of it that you wouldn't have seen before.

And what I mean by that is that, quite frankly, those who are not trained in deep understanding of some of the dynamics of the American government. And I've worked alongside them in the government, they are not successful when they come from an academic background. And they kind of have a view of the way things should work, which is totally disconnected from the organizational and bureaucratic politics and things like that.

Where you need to know what tribe is someone from, like, if you're in the State Department, there are different tribes. If you're in the intelligence community, there are different tribes. And it's the question of, like, did the person. And I'm going to use a very practical example. But it goes to, you learn these questions from Ernest May of placement.

But one of the most important questions I had when I was working in the intelligence community was did the. Did the person serve downrange or not? Didn't matter whether they're operations or technology or analysts. The question was, did they serve downrange in Iraq and Afghanistan? They will approach problems differently than those who had stayed only in Washington DC or only been in an embassy.

And so that's the kind of sensitivity to a unique. What I would emphasize is you get lenses or questions to ask. So I was, you know, history gives you not answers, but questions. So hopefully that helps a little bit.
>> Daniel Sargent: Great.
>> Philip Zelikow: It's worth just chiming in since I want to key off Drew's last sentence.

History gives you questions, not answers. So huge part of what we taught about analogical reasoning can be boiled down to one sentence of advice. Analogies suggest possibilities, not probabilities. You use analogies to enrich your mind and broaden it, not to narrow it and foreclose and fix on what's likely to happen.

If you use analogies in that way, they almost always steer you wrong. If you use them as mind closing axioms instead of mind opening possibilities, analogies often lead to some of the most disastrous decisions people make.
>> Daniel Sargent: I would like to invite you both to situate sort of the historical methodology that we're discussing in relationship to the variety of methodologies that we could loosely term econometric, that dominate so much of the sort of epistemological work of government, of the university.

History, as you describe it, seems in many ways to be a discipline that has the potential to be immensely enriching, but also situates in a somewhat orthogonal relationship to, to the needs of leaders, to the needs of business. If you can't put a probabilistic estimate on what is likely to happen in a given situation or crisis, what use is the historian's counsel?

>> Philip Zelikow: So let me hit this a little bit. The philosopher of science, John Dewey, about 100 years ago wrote an essay where he talked about the human quest for certainty, the hunger for certainty. And we want to turn things into probabilistic statements because we want the reassurance that the statements provide us about our conjectures.

And actually, Dewey argued very strongly, basically work as hard as you can to resist this. Just kind of down that road lies madness. It turns out that probabilistic statements and numerical calculations work best for fundamentally quantitative questions. If I want to predict voting behavior in the 8th district of Massachusetts, quantitative methods work very well for this.

I've got basically a scientifically homogeneous data set, so to speak, that is replicated in relatively standardized ways and so forth. It turns out actually that probabilistic estimates work very poorly in analyzing complex human situations that are not where the questions about them are not fundamentally quantitative. Quantitative methods rarely work well except for quantitative questions.

So therefore, and one of the things to guard against is what I call the n plus one fallacy. Let's suppose, for example, I have a perfect social science setup in which I've got 300 cases, I've got a problem. The cases are all truly scientifically homogeneous, which actually they rarely are.

Usually the homogeneity is a quality of the coding of the cases rather than the intrinsic quality of the cases themselves. But all right, let's suppose it's perfect, and out of this 300 you get a probability statement of 63%. And the question is, what is the probability of what will happen in the 301st case?

So 63% in your 300 sample probability statement for the 301st case. If any of you think that probability statement is 63%, that is a fundamental error. That is a logical Fallacy. No, the 63% is not a prediction for the 301st case. It's a prediction for the next 300 that over the next 300 cases they should sort out at about 63% if the original scientific generalization was valid.

The truthful answer for the 301st case is, I don't know. I can't make a reliable probabilistic generalization about the 301st case. I might hazard one for the next 300. Now, why is that so important? That's n +1. Every policy problem is an n +1 problem. Every policy problem is an n+1 problem.

And also in every policy case, you're not handicapping a horse race. Your job is not to predict the future. Your job in policy is to shape the future, not to predict it. You're actually, your whole work is to change odds, not to reflect them. Therefore, even if you were to get at a valid probabilistic statement, which you can't for the n plus one case, all you can do is use that study to suggest possibilities with really no knowledge of what you're then actually, even if you thought, well, it's probably going to be that way, you may be wanting to change that.

And so the interesting thing is not then to fall back in passive obedience to what is probably a false probabilistic statement, but instead to work through what is it I can learn about this situation that helps me figure out ways to change this future in order to achieve the objective that I or my government wants.

>> Andrew Erdmann: I find that I always enjoy Phillip's take on these things philosophically. I'm gonna push back even on the premise of the question, okay? So I think you framed it in terms of basically, why doesn't history have purchase compared to other methodologies? I think that's flawed. What I mean is academic history may and I'm not going to start that.

But what I'm simply saying is that, that among those that I've worked private sector, public sector, across sectors in the economy, internationally, it's amazing what they thirst for. Why does military history get read by leaders? Partly by ego. Like, am I a great leader under the most strain?

But it's also like, how do I navigate the most strained. Implicitly, what are some of the lessons to be learned? Why is memoir and biography a staple? If you walk into, you know, bookstores or on New York Times best seller lists or things like people are consuming this.

Listen to the podcasts that are the history podcasts or even, you know, adjacent to that space. If you take up the readership and the listenership, the there is a thirst for and people find it where they can. And again, that's why I come back to. If you open up most things that are business, they aren't statistical texts and they aren't methodological.

Although I'm as a McKinsey person, I love that world and getting into. But actually, if you go and look at what most people consume, they're things on management or literature or leadership or organizational or change management. If you start to unpack those, those are usually history, sometimes with numbers or surveys or some other things woven in.

But what sticks with people usually is because we're storytellers. We tell ourselves stories. Our identities are stories. Explicitly, for example, and I just will share one explicitly. In some of the work on CEO effectiveness that my colleagues have done, there's a section explicitly on how CEOs have to understand the organizational cultures and need to fashion their communications to connect the future to the present to the past, and vice versa.

I mean, so that's what I would just say is that there's an acute awareness, because that's what humans do. We're storyteller, every person, their own historian.
>> Daniel Sargent: And this is a point, Drew, maybe to amplify a metaphor that you used in your introductory remarks in which you described history as the water we swim in.

It's a very powerful metaphor. And the truth of it is something that I demonstrate to my students in my Introduction to History for Policymakers class at the Goldman School at Berkeley, when I have them go through the day's New York Times with a highlighter pen and identify every single instance in which history is drawn upon as a source of direct knowledge, as a source of analogical insight.

It really is ubiquitous once you pause to recognize it. But I want to introduce what feels to me like an important question. Knowledge about history, the pervasiveness of history is not necessarily commensurate with having a well formed understanding of historical processes. Ernest May was always intensely concerned with beliefs about history, with the assumptions that we extrapolate about how the world works, about how we relate to it.

From our understanding of historical processes, could you each sort of reflect upon how history done properly Might help us to challenge beliefs that may turn out to be erroneous or fantastical.
>> Andrew Erdmann: I think. Let me offer a starting point, and it relates to some of what we've already said, but maybe gives it a finer point.

So here's an example, and this is from experience, having worked inside a state administration, trying to respond to something like Covid.
>> Daniel Sargent: Yeah.
>> Andrew Erdmann: Or business environment now where people are trying to respond to what does this mean? And then the analogies are the shock to the system of tariffs.

Is it like Covid? You know, I mean, those are the kinds of analogies that people are using. And you can find. But what I found interesting, and this goes to the mind expansion potential of historical. The agencies and individuals that had the hardest time during COVID were those that were deeply embedded with experience and standard operating procedures.

And this is a surprise. You would say, like, no, they're emergency management experts or they're public health experts or whatever. But quite frankly, in many cases, they were so routinized and the stories were so truncated that the art of the possible, where you would encounter, and I don't mean to speak disparagingly.

But when a public health authority would say, when can we get back to normal and worry about vaccinations and doing physicals for high school sports in the middle of the worst global pandemic, it's like, what's going on here? There's a certain sense of even self and what they do.

And so I use that as one extreme example of what can happen when you have a very truncated sense of the stories you tell, the habits you've built up organizationally. And I would turn it around to be what was very interesting was to see those who in a way flourished in that environment, had more diverse backgrounds, had different histories they could draw upon.

And so I think that this comes to back to Philip's point and something Ernest May wrote in an essay that no one knows about. He wrote on Croce in, like, 1952. It doesn't even appear in his bibliographies when people cite it. But it comes back to the vicarious experience.

There's a lot of ways to get vicarious experience. There's a lot of ways, and history's one of them. But other people read literature, other people embrace the arts, Other people, their minds are expanded. If you just engage in, like William Shakespeare. And I'm not saying that. I'm saying that very seriously.

So I think what you see is these patterns, for example, in the military, where there are certain cultures that greatly value understanding and this, you know, you have HR McMaster here, Jim Mattis. But if you go back to a great essay written by Michael Howard in the early 1970s, war in the Time of Peace, I think is what it's called.

It is, you know, here's a profession where we go our entire lives with maybe never practicing our profession. How do we expand so that we're prepared for that and that kind of mindset, then that's a reason why the military has, you know, often military leaders engage in the past.

Sorry to give a somewhat unstructured response, but I do think that we live with it. It can be a prison, seen it in action. Then there's a question of how do you expand it? I think there's a great appetite to have it expanded through multiple different ways, depending on people's aesthetics.

>> Philip Zelikow: So let me use a very concrete illustration, and I'll take something dry and dusty, like organizational history. I learned about how to do this from working with Ernest May. Now let's apply this to the COVID crisis. I led, I think what's still the largest investigation done in the United States of what happened in the COVID crisis, which was published about two years ago as Lessons from the COVID War.

So everyone in this room has an acquaintance with the COVID crisis. It was one of those traumas that touched every household in America and in much of the world. Therefore, it's relatable. So in the COVID The United States entered the COVID crisis in an almost unique position. It was the only advanced country that had a public health system that had been designed around 1890.

The American public health system represents the state of the art of the Cleveland administration. I kid you not. The United States of America invented a public health system mainly to cope with outbreaks of infectious disease like yellow fever and cholera. It was concentrated overwhelmingly on vaccination and land use problems, slum clearance, vaccinations often in the slums, sometimes people who didn't want to be vaccinated in poor communities and then clearing away like swampland that could breed mosquitoes.

So therefore, the United States public health system was entirely, entirely state and local. And that is the case to this day. Now people may be saying, well, what about the CDC? The CDC, the center for Disease Control, which was first created under a slightly different name in the 1940s, has no executive operational authority in America.

None. The CDC can't tell anybody what to do in any jurisdiction in the country. So all public health executive authority in America is consigned to thousands of state and county entities. In fact, in about half of America, it's mainly state centered. And in about half of America, it's mainly county centered.

We happen to be here in California, for example, and people think, California blue state. Actually, in California, Covid, public health policies were all over the place because the public health policies are decided in California principally at the county level. So, you know, here in Santa Clara county, you might get actually a quite different policy than three counties over.

And then they're all thinly staffed and thinly funded with these old missions. So you enter, this was not a system developed to manage a global pandemic. This was not a system that was built to like, let's create a nationwide program to test people for a disease. The center for Disease Control was created as a research arm to offer research advice to the executive authorities at the state and county level.

And so then you're asking poor CDC develop a nationwide testing program first. They had no experience in doing that. And no, it's like asking the biology department here at Stanford to design a nationwide testing program. You know, they don't do policy. They do lab science in a university.

CDC was a public health university. Now, I say all this, and as you begin to realize that this is a fundamental piece of knowledge you would want to have if you went into pandemic policymaking in the year 2020. Is, I've just spent, what, five minutes giving you some direct historical knowledge about the basic institutions we have in America to manage this.

Which right away tells you a huge amount that you need to know about where policymaking responsibility is going to reside and the problems you're going to need to resolve if you confront a pandemic. No one running the government at the time in 2020 really had this knowledge. And by the way, the CDC wanted people to believe it was the National Public Health Agency because, frankly, that appealed to its vanity and its sense of symbolic importance.

Just as Tony Fauci didn't mind going on those television shows and pontificating from his position at the National Institutes of Health, which, by the way, does no public health at all, they did a lot for scientific R and D on things like, you know, mRNA. But when it came to, you know, setting up public health programs, the National Institutes of Health has no role.

But all right, and then just from what I've just told you, all of a sudden, quite a lot about what happened to America in 2020 becomes understandable. And then you reflect, yes, and as a reaction to the COVID crisis, have we actually done anything about what I have just described?

And the answer is, we have done zero about what I have just described. Because what I have just described never became either party's story. About what went wrong in the crisis, even though taking a historical approach to this would immediately call all this to light, and you can see how fundamental it would be.

By the way, Drew was the chief operating officer of the state of Missouri at the time all this was going on. And I believe he could confirm very firsthand the empirics of this description.
>> Daniel Sargent: I want to push this in a slightly different direction. I think it would be fair to say.

Others may disagree, but the discussion we've had so far has been fairly hortatory as to history's capacity to intervene constructively and creatively in the public arena. Drew, you've argued that history could expand the reach, the imaginative reach of the decision maker. Philip, you've told us very persuasively that historical awareness can alert us to the limitations and the capabilities of those institutional structures within which we operate.

But what about history's capacity to beguile and mislead? You know, we're 50 minutes now into a discussion about history in relation to public decision making, and nobody has yet mentioned Munich. Isn't that a powerful example of our discipline's capacity to teach regrettable lessons to decision makers?
>> Philip Zelikow: Historians bear a heavy burden.

For example, I've done some work on the First World War. So, by the way, I've told a story about how I think America got into the First World War that basically had remained secret mostly until my book came out. Actually the evidence on which one could have told the story became more and more available during the 60s 70s and 80s in the United States and Britain and some of it was already available in Germany but remains so here's what happened in life.

In life Americans very quickly regretted having gone into the First World War, having gone into the Great War as they called it. Historians immediately cropped up to explain why America had gone into the Great War. The popular explanation among a group of scholars and actually another historian named Warren Cohen who passed away recently has chronicled the work of these scholars.

A group of about five or six leading historians who basically they had an explanation for why America had gone into the First World War. It was all about greedy arms merchants and greedy bankers having leveraged their economic influence to persuade America to go in the war to basically bail out British loans and maintain the orders to the manufacturers.

That was enormously persuasive. In the 1930s, and it was almost entirely wrong. Actually, I think it's 100% wrong. In several particular cases, Wilson did things that went exactly against what actually the financiers would have wanted in late 1916 and in early 1917. So that story was enormously persuasive.

And as a result of that, Americans said, well, by golly, one thing we're never going to do again is make loans or sell arms to people who get in a war. So we're going to pass act after act in 35, 36, 37, and we're never going to do that bad thing again.

And so Hitler comes to power, and, no, we're not going to loan money to Britain, we're not going to sell arms to Britain. And then the Roosevelt administration finds itself going through all kinds of legal contortions against this enormous wave of opinion that had been informed, you see, by the knowledge of the great and the good, including the great and the good historians.

I could give another illustration. And these are not small events I'm describing here. How about the Great Depression? David Kennedy is in the audience, knows this history extremely well. And again, the standard story historians quickly produced about what had caused the Great Depression was greedy Americans and greedy stockbrokers, overeager capitalists, and even prominent economists like John Kenneth Galbraith tended to echo that.

This is not, by the way, where the mature historiography about the causes of the Great Depression has ended up. It took more than a generation, actually, I think, for the mature historiography of the Great Depression to really emerge. Charles Kindleberger, actually, who had enormous experience in government as well as an economist, is a good example of the mature historiography, as is your Berkeley colleague Barry Eichman Green and others with different variations of emphasis.

But to offer a kind of a constructive coda to that little story, it turned out one of the historians responsible for that mature historiography, an economic historian, was a man named Ben Bernanke. And that man named Ben Bernanke happened to find himself in a position of extraordinary responsibility for our monetary policy at the time of the global financial crisis of 2008.

And Bernanke remembered, what did I learn from how we stopped the Great Depression? Beggar thy neighbor. International failure to cooperate over things like the value of the dollar did not help much. Bernanke said, I'm not going to make that mistake again, because as a historian, I learned and finally proved that that was a key problem.

And Bernanke did not make that mistake again. In fact, he led the way for things like very extensive dollar swaps, which I think is what prevented the global financial crisis, which started in the. Remember the story the Great Depression is. Starts in the United States, spreads to Europe, deepens in Europe in 1931, which then ripples back to the United States and pushes America off the cliff in 31:32.

That is not what happened in the global financial crisis. Starts in the United States, moves to Europe, but then Europe gets managed between 2008 and 2012, partly thanks to Bernanke and a number of others who had learned the lessons from this history. I wanted to give these two examples of how historians, A, can have this powerful effect in misleading us, including in really tragic ways.

But also B, sometimes by learning to do better, can actually play these enormously constructive roles.
>> Daniel Sargent: Yeah.
>> Andrew Erdmann: I was just gonna. I come from Missouri now, so as Justin just came from St Louis. And yes, the tornadoes are bad in St Louis. I can say that from firsthand.

But the reason why I say that is like I always come back to Mark Twain or at least attribute it to him. You know, common sense isn't that common. So to your question of like horatory, like, hey is what we said. Again, we're expanding the art of the possible.

Expanding the art of the possible related to history. It's not the norm. And you know, again, why. Because we're satisficers to come back to the cognitive psychology. And I think that the, in a way, one of the things that's remarkable about the piece that Ernest wrote in 1962 on the axiomatic, it previewed so much of the logic as a historian coming to grips with dynamics that later would be.

And I'm not saying it's influence this. I'm saying intellectually though, so much in cognitive science, so much in behavioral economics, so much unbounded rationality, so much on. That's what he was getting at as a historian of trying to figure out, wait, a rational actor would be doing this.

Rational actor calculated. But actually that isn't what happens what's going on here? And so I would come back to everything we say is actually for a whole host of reasons, we're led astray. And that's where a whole host of disciplines remind us that we get led astray in our decision making, that sometimes the axioms do make sense and they make life efficient, right?

But oftentimes they lead us astray. And also what does research show? Research show. But we're lazy creatures, we Default to habits, what's the easiest path? And quite frankly, thinking and probing and pushing assumptions when you feel you've got a good enough answer, or if you're driven by another conviction that you have an answer and you're going and you're looking for history to justify it, which happens a lot.

And sometimes they're at this, you know, the same person at different points in time. I would just say like, you know, this is where efficiency can lead you astray because it actually requires some work to slow down and think for a second. And in particular when you got to move fast.

And so it's sometimes it's what you have.
>> Philip Zelikow: I'll add this does mean that historians, they actually have some response, they have some responsibility to their society, I think. For a long time a great many Americans had a whole view of the Civil War and Reconstruction that with the Lost Cause myth, with beliefs with tending to downgrade the role of slavery in causing the war that faulted the north for having ill managed the secession crisis of the 1850s.

That was a view that historians helped develop and make very prominent to the point where it was almost the mainstream wisdom in the first half of the 20th century yet. And it's, I think a tribute is in my lifetime this has conclusively reversed and is conclusively reversed in large part due to the work of professional and academic historians that actually one of whom was here at Stanford, David Potter, did absolutely superb work on the Civil War and Reconstruction in the 50s and 60s, who is a mentor, I think to David Kennedy over there.

His work and the work of a dozen other scholars, including popular scholars like Bruce Catton, who kind of starts out as a Washington journalist and then becomes a popular historian. A kind of Rick Atkinson of his day, you might say. That work was enormously constructive. It really helped reset an understanding of what happened in the Civil War and Reconstruction era that to this day, carried forward by historians like Elizabeth Barron, I think has fundamentally improved the quality of discourse about that formative era in our history.

There are other examples about it today. One thing that's relevant right now is that I grew up in a generation that believed that the American role in the world, the American role in the world was fundamentally good, had been for the good. That's the generation I grew up in.

This generation is now being taught, primarily due to the work of historians of varying kinds, that America's role in the world has, on balance, been fundamentally misguided, and that now, that very broad body of belief is now having very large effects on America's role in the world. So historians and the quality of their historiography actually do make a difference.

They have some responsibility for this. They're going to be a cacophony of views. History is a constant battleground of struggle. That's natural. But the contributions historians choose to make to that struggle matter.
>> Andrew Erdmann: I was just going to add one and one example that's immediate. How many folks here have followed or heard Ezra Klein Affleck lately in policy Abundance Debates.

Abundance, sorry, abundance. How many? Just raise your hand. If you tease it apart, a lot of his critique comes back to a book, I think, published by Yale University Press by a historian about some of the trends on the left against government and the kind of nadirite and other influences of skepticism that led.

But the point I'm making here is this is something that's very contemporary. It's a debate, you know, prominent voice among the cultural commentators, and basically Ezra Greenberg is. Is serving as a translator of an academic historian for a lot of what he is arguing.
>> Philip Zelikow: So Ezra Klein.

>> Andrew Erdmann: Ezra Klein. Sorry, Ezra Klein. Ezra Ginberg's a colleague of mine who does international economics. Sorry, sorry, Ezra, but I won't say which one, but Ezra Klein, if you tease it apart and you look at the footnotes, there's like one PhD from Harvard Design School. There's some. So I encourage you, that's the other path through which people don't even know how they're being influenced.

And it comes out kind of the-
>> Philip Zelikow: Why are we encumbered by all these checks and processes that now make it impossible to build in America? Well, that's a historical story.
>> Andrew Erdmann: That's a historical.
>> Philip Zelikow: And it's a fairly recent vintage. And it was actually kind of, gosh, we have to, we have to check.

Well, we've checked it all right.
>> Daniel Sargent: So I want to hold open time to take questions from the audience, but I do want to give you one question to chew on before we do that. So our conversation has, I think, really reaffirmed a point that Ernest used to make very powerfully, which is the history that matters most for contemporary policy conversation is usually the history of the recent past.

It's the history that we remember. It's the history that impresses most powerfully upon our contemporary debate as we think about our discipline's utility in the society that the university serves. Should we try to countenance a more expansive history as a intellectual domain that can usefully bear upon the problems of the present?

As we grapple with problems like the climate crisis, as we grapple with problems like the rise of artificial intelligence, should we be trying to think about history and its relationship to the President, to the present at more expansive scales? Should we be thinking about planetary histories, about histories at the evolutionary scale as having real relevance to the policy making enterprise?

>> Philip Zelikow: Yes, absolutely. And I'm involved in some of this right now and I work a lot on the AI governance issues, including with a number of people who are prominent in the industry. And actually quite a lot of that conversation immediately is a quest for historical analogies. So let me tell you what is very common and let me tell you what I think might be a more constructive way to do it, actually answering Daniel's suggestion to think more broadly.

So the very common thing is immediately to think of things like nuclear energy and to try to find analogies for AI governance from the, from the precedence with nuclear energy. This is somewhat useful to a point I think relatively limited. I won't go into all the, including the arms control precedents and so forth.

There are some points that are suggestive of possibilities and things to consider, but it can be overdone. Let me step back now and answer your suggestion to think more broadly about this. Our society is going through, I think, a period of world historical change in confronting technology that is changing the nature of our economy, our society and our culture.

Well, that did happen before. That happened in the late 19th and early 20th century in the United States. And by the way, our politics seemed completely out of sync with the technology. We had a politics that was basically for a rural farm based country that was regard as notoriously corrupt and dominated by spoil systems and actually with a minuscule national government.

And here we are with these gigantic burgeoning cities with all their requirements that we were trying to comprehend. Factories, industries, all this. And you see how it was changing culture and beliefs, mass migrations, much larger than now, by the way, much more upheaval in many ways than now.

And so there was an enormous pressure on government to adapt to that. So I think I could make an argument that's the Industrial Revolution, be more technical. You could say the second Industrial Revolution. Today we're undergoing a digital revolution. The digital revolution is having enormous effects even on the definition of communities as physical communities are now being interleaved with digital communities, with all the fragmentation of culture and sources of information and all of that, the atomizing effects that you see.

It's also having very large economic effects that you can notice, including the rise of new Gilded Age tycoons and all the rest of it. So it's not that. Well, we need to do exactly what we did back then, but it is useful to step back. How did we adapt back then?

How did that work? Well, by the way, it's fundamentally a remarkable story and interesting, by the way, it was. By the way, in the United States, it was not mainly a top down story, it was substantially a bottom up story. Like for example, between 1890 and 1940, we created the outstanding public education system in the world.

In those 50 years we invented everything around modern public education, secondary schools and actually the modern college and universities system. Even things like where did we get the idea of having credit hours, right? It's all this period. So there was no like federal legislation that enacted all of that.

There was no federal legislation that strung wires all over America to electrify our industry and provide telephone communication or very little federal stuff on that, very little. So it was actually a grassroots mainly met by business leaders working with interested civic leaders, often frustrated and clamoring for reform, actually in both political parties and from a variety of perspectives and also with a lot of concern about the disorderly cities and all of that.

So in a way what Klein is doing in his book, which is what Jen Palka was doing in her Recoding America, which Klein is partly running off of, which I did in an article I wrote about the software policy, competence and other things, is basically to try to encourage Americans to think back on this period of enormous historical accomplishment.

Why were we regarded by the middle of the 20th century as having by all accounts the most competent national government in the world, universally admired decant, Berlin airlifts, Marshall Plans, right? You name it, the Americans could seem to do it. I don't think today we are afflicted with the reputation of being regarded as the most competent national government on earth.

But if we want our democratic ideals to have some appeal, that helps to be be able to pair them with competence. And stepping back and seeing this history I think actually can encourage us is we have faced problems on this scale before as a country, by the way, under enormous social and political stress and a non trivial amount of violence.

And then how did we adapt and overcome that? But to see that the challenge of this age is a challenge on a scale with that one.
>> Andrew Erdmann: I was just gonna do a personal P.S. which is so just a personal observation, which is when I left state government service, I took a big block of time off to think about what I wanted to do in my next chapter.

And I had previously done national security roles, I'd been in Afghanistan and Iraq and some time in Colombia elsewhere. And so I just share this in a personal way of how history works, which is I reflected on pretty much the story that Philip just outlined and I said, hey, where should I Be in this point in time.

National security begins at home. It's not in the Hindu Kush. I learned that from leading in a state government. But I would also say that those are the institutions where you can actually get something done. And I decided that that's what I'd focus my career on. And I had never done state government before, I served in state government.

That's what I do now. 100% of my time is on state and local thing, including such things as permitting reform and things like that where you can make dramatic changes and improvements. But I say that in a personal way, which is. Does history matter? It matters for me because I do believe we're living in a Brandeisian moment.

Louis Brandeis laboratories of democracy, that's the genius of the American federal system. I believe the central government using these things is immovable object, non partisan observation. But the institutions at the more local levels will be where governance innovation takes place and governance competence is built up again. Because I'm reminded of the fact that in the time that we passed Broadband Equity and Access act, we still don't have a shovel in the ground.

In the last four years, from 2021, as Ezra Klein would say, we managed to win World War II with typewriters and carbon paper in the amount of time that we still haven't been able to put a shovel on the ground on a broadband project. Great, so there is competence that isn't due to technology.

That's like what's our state capacity? I know Frank Fukuyama and others focus, but it's like we've lost that magic. But you can do amazing stuff at the local levels and quite frankly then it can scale from there because there'll be political incentives to be successful.
>> Daniel Sargent: Great. Let's now take questions from the audience and I think we have a microphone coming around.

>> David Berkey: Yes, hi. I'm interested to know, keeping with Ernest May and Philip, with your work as well with him. What the Cuban Missile Crisis, what your work on that project and the Kennedy tapes, what, if you will, what can we learn about how the administration at that time used or did not use his history in that crisis?

Also, is there anything that you know from Ernest May's views on that as to what, if any, were the lessons of history and maybe is there anything, any situations where the Kennedy tapes and the Cuban Missile Crisis could help us to be used for analogous purposes in different crises today?

>> Philip Zelikow: Sure. Thanks. It's a great question. These recordings, these tapes are like discovering a version of the ruins of Pompeii for American government. You can actually travel through a time machine and sit in these White House meetings at these apocal moments. And one of the things you gain is a sense of the immersion, the detail, how lots of different issues are actually interacting with each other.

Cuz mostly academics studying their one topic, but they don't really see well how difficult it is to reconstruct choices which are infused with operational details that are mostly invisible to outsiders. But yet those details are decisive. Now, they're full of historical beliefs in these meetings and they will frequently refer to them with shorthands that they all understand, because as other historians have pointed out, semi spoken and unspoken assumptions are a key way in which these axioms exist.

They all kind of know them. They'll refer to Suez, the just concluded Suez crisis. They'll refer to actually, the head of the Chief of Staff of The Air Force, General LeMay, actually accused President Kennedy of considering an option that he thought would be equivalent to the appeasement at Munich.

Said that directly to President Kennedy in a meeting where there were only about. Six people in the room, just Kennedy and the members of the Joint chiefs of staff. McNamara was not even in that meeting. He has in his head, too. He read Barbara Tuchman's book about the guns of August and takes away from that, I think quite rightly, just more of a generalized sensibility of the complexity of military machines.

Here's an interesting point, too, about kind of historical knowledge and what you take away. You remember, Daniel made the point about the significance of your history with current events or your contemporary history. So Kennedy, yes, he's a veteran of World War II, but he's not a veteran of World War II as one of the top brass.

He's a veteran of World War II as a Navy lieutenant. And frankly, his memory of World War II is very much the memory of an officer who thinks the brass usually screw things up and usually don't know what's going on. That sense of humility and wariness and skepticism infuses his sensibility through throughout.

Probably the most important expert he leans on in the crisis, by the way, who McNamara later called the great unsung hero of the crisis, is a person hardly anyone has ever heard of, named Llewellyn Thompson, Tommy Thompson. A career diplomat who had enormous experience in the Soviet Union and also had a deep sense of Soviet and Russian history.

And he leans heavily on Thompson for that sense of. He knows the backstory of these people. He knows the kinds of stuff that's in their heads, the beliefs that are. And he leans really hard on that. And actually including the policy of what to do. Probably if you had to pick which advisors advice was most influential in the whole crisis, on issue after issue, it would be Thompson.

They're carrying in their heads the axioms. But one of the striking things in that particular case, in that administration is the way Kennedy brings to those axioms a constant sense of wariness and skepticism that's partly produced by the way he had acquired his own historical sensibility, which is very much a critical eye of historical sensibility.

Early in his career, he thought very much of being a globetrotting international journalist on the model of, say, a man at the time named John Gunther, whose work he much admired and was imitating a little bit in his own diaries. And Gunther's attitude is very much of, boy, you really need to know these personalities.

And it's a very jaundiced, skeptical eye. And that's very much Kennedy's approach, too. His team picks up that tone, that openness, the humility, the significance of analysis and I think that general sensibility is one of the reasons we don't go to war in 1962.
>> Daniel Sargent: Great.
>> Audience Question: Yeah, thank you for the discussion.

My question also goes to you, Mr. Zelikow. So in the beginning of the talk you mentioned that the quality of the learnings we draw from history depends on how good the history is we read, right? And you gave one hands on suggestion, which is to look for history, which is actually practical, I would say, where one can think about the decisions that were made and like learn from them.

So I was wondering if, especially with the last part of the discussion where it was about this podcast where, you know, people just telling stories like specific, also like historical stories that are like aligned, how to find good history to read and how to not like fall for the trap of just reading one story.

>> Philip Zelikow: Right.
>> Audience Question: All the way through.
>> Philip Zelikow: So what I would really commend are those histories that seem most lifelike to you in the way they reconstruct people's choices. If you get histories, that's kind of one damn thing after another. They did this, then they did that, and then they did that, really.

Choices. So David Kennedy and Jim Sheehan teach a course here for the community in which they just kind of pick a handful of crucial choices, in this case in the World War II era, and then just dissect the choices. Here are the things that they had in front of them that they could have done, didn't do.

Why? The personalities, the context. Find things like that. I'll give you, Ernest May was very good at this sort of thing actually. It will not surprise you to learn he wrote an account, he has. One of his major late works was an account of why France fell in 1940.

It's called strange Victory. The story actually picks up in the late 1930s. It is a truly international history in which he's in. He reads and is in the world of the Germans, the French, the Belgians, the British. I think it is the. To my taste anyway. It's the best version of that epic story and it's not so much, well, maybe you're interested in that story, maybe you're not.

In a way, it almost doesn't matter. It's like a good novel. Don't pick it because of whether you're interested in the history. Follow the writer. Like, I'm very fond of an old book that was written many years ago by Garrett Mattingly called the Armada, about the story of the Spanish Armada, which turns out actually to be a story of the wars of religion in which a lot of the main characters are actually in France and the Low countries in the 1580s, not actually sailors fighting at sea at all.

But he recovers, in a way, the world of choice and what it is they thought they were fighting about and why they thought the world was at stake. Things like that that I think, in a way, will teach you more for life, including, of course, about these episodes.

But look for histories that pull you into those places and give you that sense of. I now have, really have a sense of the kinds of choices these people really faced and why it was hard and why things turned the way they did.
>> Daniel Sargent: Since the 2 o' clock hour is approaching, I am eager to keep us on schedule and not allow us to fall behind.

So I am going to invite Drew to give a response to the last question. And I think that will be all that we have time for in this response.
>> Philip Zelikow: You rang us in. You can bring us out.
>> Andrew Erdmann: Okay. Don't listen to anything, Philip. No, look, first of all, it's been a great honor to be able to learn from Philip, and it's always great fun.

It's my first time back doing something historical in a few decades because I've been doing some other things. Number one, just huge appreciation. I would turn it around a little bit. Which is my favorite book is Strange Defeat, which is Mark Bloch's book on the fall of France.

And Ernest Mayes is a, but one of the reasons why. And I think it comes back to some of the themes here. I look for things like that parallel what we're doing at a superficial level, but then look for something different, so when I reflect on American politics, I go to Norman Cohen's the Pursuit of the Millennium.

If anyone has ever read Norman Cohn's, The Pursuit To The, then you maybe know why I would be interested in late medieval millennial movements. No, I'm just saying that it's like it's something that is very different and it just challenges me to think immerse myself in a different world.

Totally agree with what Philip said there of like also decision points. That's like individual or organizational histories that come back quite frankly, David Kennedy in my dissertation, I did work on the Food Administration. So I mean, so I just say like there's individual decisions, there's institutional histories and how they work.

These are different things. But you may you know what suits your taste. And there are kind of broad, sweeping kind of what's the patterns of history. But the reason why I always come back to Strange Defeats by Mark Bloch. And for those who don't know Marc Bloch, he was a Jewish academic in France, secular Jew in France.

He served with distinction as an enlisted, I believe a sergeant in the First World War, a medievalist, but he was trained as a medievalist. And he's one of the greatest historians of the 20th century. After the war, he founded the Nales School in France. Truly his work is still amazing.

But he remained a reservist and he's talking about after the 1st World War and then leading up to the 2nd World War, he remained a reservist and then he was activated. And then he, after the fall of France, he wrote this book in six weeks, which is called Strange Defeat where he reflected upon his own personal.

He was trying to make sense of what just happened to France. And it's a wonderful account of that, that lens of a very personal one. But the reason why I keep coming back to it is that because he had the point, we were good historians, but were we good citizens?

Is a question he asked in that book, and I find it a good one. And what I also remember about Marc Bloch is that he could have left France. He had the opportunity to come probably to the new school in New York like many others. But as a good citizen, he stayed behind, became one of the leaders of the Resistance, and then was captured by the Gestapo in the spring of 1944 and tortured and then executed shortly after D Day.

But the point of that being I always reflect upon Marc Bloch as a historian, but who's grounded in reality. So if you read his medieval stuff, but then you read Strange Defeat, it's amazing, and it's still enduring. You have to engage in it. But also, quite frankly, I find it as a historian just incredibly admirable that this is someone who is so engaged that he was also a good citizen in what he did.

>> Daniel Sargent: Good historians, but are we good citizens? That seems like a suitably haunting note on which to conclude. Thank you both for a terrific conversation.