Why the Cold War Still Matters with John Lewis Gaddis

- The New York Times calls him the Dean of Cold War Historians, John Lewis Gaddis, one of the most accomplished and revered professors of history in the country on Uncommon Knowledge. Now, welcome to Uncommon Knowledge on the campus of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. I'm Peter Robinson. A native of the little town of Cotulla, Texas, and will return to Cotulla. John Lewis Gaddis became one of the most accomplished historians in the country. The man the New York Times called the Dean of Cold War Historians. Professor Gaddis received his BA, MA and Doctorate all from the University of Texas. He has taught since 1997 here at Yale, where he serves as the Lovett Professor of Military and Naval History. Professor Gaddis's many books, this is only a partial stack, include strategies of containment published in 1982, the Cold War, A new history published in 2005, the Pulitzer Prize winning George Kennan and American Life, published in 2011. And on grand strategy, which appeared in 2018. Professor John Lewis Gaddis, thank you for joining us. Yes, sir. It's a pleasure to be here. I can't have the Dean of Cold War historians seated across from me and not ask him to take me through that conflict. Now, this is a filmed conversation. We're reducing a large topic to the size of a bullion cube. But could I just begin with a question about historical memory? Your late colleague, Charles Hill, was a friend of mine. As you know, Charlie used to come to the Hoover Institution. Yes. And he once told me that even among Yale students, ignorance of the Cold War was total, that was the word Charlie used total, the typical freshman matriculating. This autumn will have been born almost a quarter of a century after the collapse of the Soviet Union. And when kids take AP US history in high school, they have one unit. My own kids. Tell me it took one day on the Cold War, how when you were in the classroom regularly or still today, people seek you out. How do you impress on students that this conflict mattered? That this conflict dominated the globe for half a century, that it dominated every presidential campaign from 1948 to 1988 when it seemed so entirely gone?

- Well, you have to understand, Peter, that, that from the students, so much more is gone. Things began to go, continue to go very quickly. So the current crop of students does not remember nine 11. They were not born at that time. You know, so that is something that's just perfectly normal, that young people have short experiences, short ranges of experience, and very little direct experience of what's happened in history. So I think it's important to take an event like the Cold War, put it in the context of history, but I don't think it's the only history that they need to know. So when I was doing the big lecture course as I did here for quite a long time, I would have hundreds of students in the class, and I would do my best to give them some sense of what the Cold War had been like at that point. Videos were very important. Jeremy Isaacs had come out with his Cold War documentary 24 hours, and that was a gold mine for me to impress them with how dangerous it was. And they would come out of the, the, the class on the Cuban Missile Crisis, shaking that had no idea that we came that close. But that's not the only thing that I think they need to know about. I mean, I think there is a much longer range there that is important to teach as well. And that range would partly include the participants in the Cold War. So certainly the Americans, but certainly the Russians, they have a very long history and that very long history had something to do with, with this experience, even more so the Chinese as well.

- Right. - So how do we access that kind of history? How do we go back and pull all of this together? And that's the dilemma I think that we face now because there are so few survey courses at this university and at other universities as well that would actually teach what we used to call world history. And I think we ought to be doing that again, because the history of the world, even far back, even thousands of years back, is still relevant in one form or another. So that's what I'm more concerned with these days.

- So can, could I ask then return to the Cold War specifically? Sure. But the freshmen come in, in the hundreds to your survey course. Yeah. How are they different? How that, how do you want them to be different when they walk out of that? When they put finish the, they don't take, they don't, nobody uses blue books anymore, but when they finish that last exam, how do you want, what do you want to have happened in their minds?

- I want them to have access to a range of experience that goes further, further back in time than they did. And the question is how far back in time you see? And so my concern in teaching the Cold War was to just give them that range of experience. Right? But since then, moving into other areas, this new book on the grand, on on grand strategy, 'cause all the way back to the Peloponnesian War. And so you might ask, well, why is the Peloponnesian War relevant? I think it's because there are certain recurring dilemmas in history that just keep coming back. Maybe the most fundamental is the gap between aspirations and accomplishments. You can't always get what you want. What you want always falls short of what your capabilities are. That was certainly true of our experience in the Cold War, as we had reason to find out in places like Vietnam, as we had reasons to find out even during World War ii, which we could not have won without the cooperation of the Soviet Union for sure. But it also goes all the way back to Xerxes in invasion of Greece 2,500 years ago. So that's important for them to know. That's a recurring principle. It's not gonna go away. It's something they have to have in their heads. It seems to me,

- Professor Gaddis, you can't always get what you want. This is the first time on this program that anyone has ever quoted Mick Jagger. Okay, I'm happy about that. So let's Cold War. I'm going to ask you to take me through a lickety split survey. Sure. Two quotations, president Harry Truman addressing a joint session of Congress on March 12th, 1947. At the present moment in world history, nearly every nation must choose between alternative ways of life. One way of life is based upon the will of the majority and is distinguished by free institutions. The second way of life is based upon the will of a minority forcibly imposed upon the majority. It relies upon terror and oppression. Here's the second quotation, William Appleman Williams writing in 1959, Stalin's effort to avoid conflict with the United States was not matched by American leaders. The Americans adopted policies which closed the door to any result, but the Cold War, well, here professor, we have the great debate that's is still with us who started the Cold

- War. It was not Harry Truman, nor did William Appleman Williams end it. So it was much more complicated than that. I would go back to simply the configuration of power that existed at the end of World War ii. And as I said, the West, the Brits, the Americans, the allies, could not have won the war in Europe without cooperating with the Soviet Union, the Soviet Union, the Russians did 90% of the fighting in Europe. We won the Pacific War, but it was the Russians who won the war in Europe for the most part. And we came in quite deliberately at the last minute. So the result of that was weakness on the part of the Soviet Union, to the point of almost totally destroyed country and strength on the part of the United States. The United States comes out of it with minimal casualties, with a global, with a, the biggest army and the biggest military in the world, not army with the atomic bomb and so on. So there's a disparity of power right there that it seems to me set things up. I would've been surprised if there had not been a competition, a rivalry in that situation. I think most observers expected it to become a hot war in due course as had happened in the runup to World War II and the Runup to World War I. But in this case, something different happened. It became a Cold War, which never resulted in a hot war. And so you ask, okay, what's new about that? What is different? What made the difference? And in my view, it was simply the atomic bomb. The fact that this new technology was so overwhelming, so devastated, and had been demonstrated so graphically at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that there was a new impediment to escalation that prevented the scenarios of 19 39, 41 and 19, 19 14, and kept the Cold War stable. In that sense, yes, the rivalries continued, but at different levels and with an overall motive for management, for cooperation that had not existed in these previous conflicts. So how do you then judge the morality of the atomic bomb in the first place? Think about the number of people who were killed by the use of those bombs on two Japanese cities. Think about the number of lives that were saved because we did not have World War iii. Think about the morality of an arms race that consumed huge resources over the years, over a 45 year period. Think about all of these things. And there are no simple answers to these questions. It seems to me that what the students need to have is some sense of the complexity of the

- Situations, right?

- Some sense of the considerations that went into making decisions on all sides, and maybe even some sympathy for each of the major competitors in the Cold War, who after all, did not manage it all that badly, all things considered.

- Alright, February 22nd, 1946, an American diplomat in Moscow, George Kennan, Here we have, yeah, your book on George Kennan. Response to a request from Washington for an explanation of certain Soviet actions by sending the so-called Long telegram. And it is an astonishing document, about 5,000 words. And Kennan lays out essentially everything, the nature of Soviet communism and the way that we must respond with containment. To quote kenon here, the main element of any United States policy toward the Soviet Union must be that of a long-term patient, but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies. And that would remain the centerpiece of American policy for the next four And some

- It would indeed. And

- How did he get so much right from the get go?

- Well, he was of course a specialist in the history of Western. He's a career foreign service officer. He had a lot of experience. He was also exasperated on that day because he had sent umpteen dispatches by pouch back to the State Department saying this, nobody had read them. So he sends this one by telegraph, violating all the limits on the length of telegraphs, which then caused it to be read. He thought he was gonna be fired as a result of this. So this is partly where this came from. What he counted on and what is basic to canon and container was the concept of internal contradictions within Soviet society that he said would eventually cause it to self-destruct. We would not have to destroy the Soviet system. The Soviets would destroy their own system because of the contradictions that were embedded in having a totalizing ideology that claims to manage everything. And the practical reality that you can never manage everything. And indeed, this is what happened. He was absolutely right about that. He anticipated Gorbachev 45 years before. Before, yes, he did Gorbachev, but if you asked him as I did frequently, don't you feel satisfied? Don't you feel gratified, George? Absolutely not. He said, and he bristled on on this, he said, the variety of containment embraced by the United States government was not what I wanted in the first place. And so this really gets into the question of what kinds of containment were actually employed. And I think that in itself is something that we could usefully keep in mind today.

- So can, can I, this is, I'm being crude because I have to be fast. I'm being crude. I'm not sure that I could be sophisticated anyway, but there is a period of a few years, and the long telegram is, is the emblem of those years in the life of George Kennan, when he gets everything right. And then he becomes ambassador to Yugoslavia, as I recall, first

- To Russia,

- First to Russia, and it doesn't work. And the man lives essentially forever. He goes, he leads a very long life and dies at the age of 101. 101. Yes. And for the rest of that time, I'm sorry to say, but to reduce it to acru, I'm putting it to you as a question. He looks petulant vain in a state of constant irritation. Yes. That he's not the one conducting the policy. That although he had this brilliant moment of intellectual insight when he lays out the whole framework, he wasn't happy being an intellectual. He wasn't happy producing an insight on which other men would act. And so he despises, that may be too, too strong a word, but you can correct it. He despises everyone from Dean Atchison, who's the first man to take containment and put it into effect all the way through to Ronald Reagan, who I believe rightly understood is reasserting containment. So what? So it feels as though John Kennan got everything right. First he got everything right, and then he got everything wrong. Yeah. How well I George Kennan. I'm sorry, I misspoke.

- Yeah. I think what happened was that he was proposing a particular approach to containment, which said, we defend strong points, but not everything. And we have to be conscious of our own limitations. We cannot let our aspirations exceed those. You see? So he is very much a sphere of influence person. And that's all fine until the North Koreans invade South Korea and then suddenly everybody panics and credibility comes in. Nobody thought that South Korea was a vital interest, but it became vital when the North Koreans attacked it. Suddenly credibility is at stake. Suddenly did the, the defense of isolated little places that nobody heard of becomes critical. And that kind of containment, everything is on the line, is what Kennan objected to. So he is very much a critic of the Vietnam War. He's very much a critic of any attempt to try to bring democracy to third world countries. He was very, would've been, I think, very concerned about the efforts post Cold War to push Democrat democratization. That was not what he was up to. He was serious of influence. And he would've been willing, I think, to deal on a sphere of influence basis. So that's the difference. On the one hand, you had the sphere of influence.

- You're not saying that George Kennan would've approved of Donald Trump.

- No, in no way. But I'm, I'm saying that he would've approved and did approve largely of Henry Kissinger. So

- I see. Alright. Okay. So to continue now with our Yep. First phase of the Cold War, George Kennan writes the long telegram. Truman delivers the Truman Doctrine address. We have a period of what I read as amazing creativity, diplomatic creativity, the established nato, the Marshall Plan, the creation, and, and opposing communist expansion in Korea. The idea of limited war is a new one. And there's a, it, it's extremely difficult to work out how to fight this kind of thing. And it all works. Eisenhower builds a nuclear deterrent. JFK holds the line in Cuba, forcing the Soviets to withdraw. So we have a kind of aggressive, mostly self-confident application of containment in my quick reading. Then we come to a new moment where there's at least an appearance of greater conciliation detton. Now, now I'm quoting from strategies of containment, which do I have that one here? Oh yes. Here we have it. Now I'm quoting from strategies of containment. Nixon and Kissinger viewed Deante as a new combination of pressures and inducements that would've successful, convinced Kremlin leaders that it was in their country's interest to be contained. The goal was to build a new structure of peace that would end once and for all that persistent abnormality known as the Cold War. But instead of proving conciliatory, the Soviets expand their Navy, they expand the nuclear arsenal, they expand their presence in Asia, Africa, Latin America, the seventies, the Soviets take advantage. Why did Deton fail? What went wrong?

- Well, I think there were several reasons for it, but one thing you left out is the Vietnam War, because co coming to that, but we'll, we, we'll take it

- On right now.

- Sure. Back to the sixties, you know, so this is the credibility argument that we saw in, in Korea.

- That is the United States has to take certain actions from it has to defend credible to the rest of the

- World, has to defend every little outpost out there, right? That is the, what I would call the symmetrical containment. Wherever they move, we must come and we must hope. You see, And I think as a result of this, we lose the initiative. We lose control of the deployment of our own forces. That happened to some extent in Korea. It certainly happened in Vietnam. I think it has happened in the post Cold War period when we have made commitments, implied commitments to a very wide variety of people who we don't have the capability to defend if it should ever come to that. So what Nixon and Kissinger did is to go back to the Kenon notion that we have to regard some things as more important than other things. And what that implied was that you have to be willing to negotiate with odious dictators. And so just as FDR negotiated with Stalin in World War ii, so Kissinger shakes the hand of Chairman Mao Yes. In Beijing in 19 71, 72, and so on. And this really gets down to the debate that we are involved in. It seems to me today, what should be the objective of American foreign policy? Should we be trying to spread democracy as widely as possible? The International Order of Liberal International Order, should that be our goal? Or should we simply be seeking global stability, which would mean dealing with odious tyrants as well as innocent victims. That's where we are right now today. And that's a recurring question.

- Alright, we'll return to that. Okay. Vietnam two views, the Ken Burns documentary, which was, in many ways I thought quite wonderful, the amount of material that had amassed. But here's a line from the closing lines of the narration quote. The Vietnam War was a tragedy. Immeasurable and irredeemable. Alright, here's the second view. Michael Lind writes a book, and the title is important here, Vietnam, the Necessary War. Incidentally, Charlie Hill was the one who told me to read that book. And Charlie said, this is probably the best book on Vietnam.

- Charlie and I had a lot of arguments.

- Oh yeah, I'm sure you did. I'm sure you did. So let me quote Michael Lind, the South Vietnamese regime did not fall because it was corrupt and illegitimate. It fell to Soviet equipped North Vietnamese tanks only because the United States, which had left troops in South Korea to defend a comparably, corrupt, and authoritarian dictatorship in South Korea, had abandoned its allies in South Vietnam. So we had this one view that the whole thing is a kind of Greek tragedy of errors and misunderstandings. And then we had the other view, not at all. It was reasonable to be there. And we screwed it up by failing to prosecute the war in a reasonable and forceful manner. Now, we didn't get sucked into some tragedy. So something make of this,

- There's something else to think about. Was it reasonable to tear the country apart internally to the extent that Vietnam did? I don't think so. I think the most important thing is saving your own country before you save other countries. And it seems to me the price of Vietnam 54,000 killed in that was exorbitant in terms of what was gained after all the Vietnamese themselves saw the illegitimacy of Marxism and became thriving capitalists on their own as they are now. So what was it all about in the first place? Why did we have to do it in the first place? I think it's because we let others seize control of our own grand strategy. It's because

- We lost, we gave the bad guys the initiative.

- We gave the bad guys the initiative. And I think one of the, one of the unending lessons in grand strategy, which goes back to the ancient Greeks to do Ities and others, you know, is always retain the initiative. Stay in control of your own strategy. Don't let other people control it. That is basic, it seems to me. Alright. Final

- Phase of the Cold War. Yeah. Which actually fits with what you just just said on at least one argument. Now, full disclosure, as I mentioned when we were talking before we start, I, I'm an old Reagan speech writer, so I'm a Reagan guy.

- Yeah. Okay.

- But the notion of taking the initiative, one way of understanding Ronald Reagan in the 1980s is that he cuts taxes and rolls back regulation and gives wonderful speech that reunites the country and produces economic prosperity. So he is putting the country back together. He is after Vietnam. Watergate, yes. The whole horrible mess of the seventies. And then as regards to Soviets, he subjects them to new pressures, new economic pressures, new pressures of public diplomacy, calling them an evil empire. And of course, military pressures the most significant. He builds our rebuilds, our, our conventional forces. But he also, this SDI the Soviets have no idea what to do about, is that, is that a fair reading?

- It's a fair reading. But just remember one other thing about Ronald Reagan. He was a nuclear abolitionist. Yes. He was the only one ever to occupy the White House. So when he actually meets with Gorbachev for the first time, maybe you were there for this, I don't know. But the story is he says, well, Mick, if the Martians should land to borrow, we would solve all of our difficulties. Why aren't, why isn't the nuclear danger a Martian threat? You see, this is something the Russians were not quite prepared for. And I think it's characteristic of Reagan to be able to operate in both of these areas. Yes, he put pressure on the Russians, but yes, he also left openings to them

- Yes.

- For them to walk through. And both are important.

- I can remember if I, do you want hear a little Reagan story? Sure. I think it's to this point. Speech meeting in the Oval Office. Yeah. And the Reykjavik Summit is coming up and everything in the Washington Post. The buzz is, is SDI, how committed is he to SDI? Is it simply a bargaining chip? He'll bargain away. And Reagan didn't address this directly, but he told us a story. And he talked about washing dishes one evening in a sorority at his little college. And, and he said, it wasn't the worst job I've ever had with Chuckle. Chuckle. We'd already heard that story a million times. But then he went on to say that he was washing and another young man was drying. And they got into a dispute because the other young man said, well, when the next war comes, we'll just fly airplanes over the enemy cities and drop bombs on. And Reagan, I can still remember, he's Reagan said, I told him, no, no, we would never do that. We were Americans.

- Yes.

- And then he just fell silent and looked at the floor. And of course we all thought Hiroshima. Yeah, Nagasaki, Dresden. And then he continued with the speech re meeting, of course, but was exact. It was, it was very deep with him. He really was. As you say,

- Peter, I can remember when I was like seven years old. And I asked my mom that same question, why don't we drop bombs on them? And she said the same thing, because we don't do that. We're Americans.

- Wonderful, wonderful. So who won the Cold War? Again? I'm being very crude here. I'm gonna quote you. Okay. A couple of different times here. This is from the Cold War in new history. Yep. Gorbachev was never a leader in the manner of John Paul ii, Margaret Thatcher or Ronald Reagan. They all had destinations in mind and maps for reaching them. Gorbachev Dithered in contradictions without resolving them. That's you former ambassador to the Soviet Union, Jack Matlock and a 2010 interview. The Soviet Union didn't collapse because of external pressures. It was Gorbachev who ended communist rule. He did it in the Soviet Union's own interest. Well, there's a tension between those two. There is, of course, what do you make of

- This? I think Gorbachev genuinely wished to preserve the Soviet Union, but he didn't know how, and he didn't have a clear objective of what the Soviet Union in without the Cold War would be like, what it would be like to get rid of the ideology, what it would be like to have a market economy. He did not have the same vision of someone, someone like De Xing who said, we can turn China into a capitalist country and we can just call it Marxism, Marxist capitalism. You know, Gorbachev did not have that kind of imagination, that kind of vision. And so I don't think he wanted deliberately for it all to come apart. But to his credit, when it did come apart, he accepted it peacefully.

- Yes. But by the way, so I once asked Stephen Kotkin, who, as far as I can tell, Stephen has spent more time with Soviet archives. He's devoted his correct, four decades to actually examining document after doc. As far as I can tell, he spent more time examining the Soviet archives than any other person on the face of the Earth. That's fair. And I said, Stephen, can you reduce it to one finding? What's the big, what's the headline out of your entire career with the Soviet archives? And Stephen immediately replied, they were communist. Yep. That even when they were among themselves, the polar bureaus among them, they have nothing to prove to anybody else. They still speak in communist categories. So is it as simple as this, Gorbachev was a believe in communist, but he failed to grasp what the strong men had grasped, which is that communism cannot succeed unless it's backed by force. I

- Take this. Right.

- That is fair. Yeah. I so, oh my goodness, I just got, I just got a word of praise. Oh, I

- Think that's, that means a lot to me. I was, when the first documents came out, it was pretty clear that they really did believe their own ideology. And yet the theorist of international relations in the West had said the ideology is irrelevant. Yes. It was just great powers. Great powers, you know? Right. And so I can remember going to my political science friends and saying, your theory is not right. We have archival evidence showing that they really did believe the ideology. And my political science friends said, oh, we don't want to hear about it. We have to save the theory. Forget about the archives.

- U pesky historians.

- U pesky historians.

- Alright. Finally, if I may quote you one more time. Yeah. This is strategies of containment. I'm trying to sell a few copies of your books, professor. Thank you. What one can now say is that Ronald Reagan saw Soviet weaknesses sooner than most of his contemporaries did. That he understood the extent to which det was perpetuating the Cold War, rather than hastening its end. That his hard line strained the Soviet system at the moment of its maximum weakness. That he combined reassurance, persuasion, and pressure in dealing with the new Soviet leader Gorbachev. And that he maintained the support of the American people and of American allies. So how can it be that all these years later, again, I'm gonna be a little crude here, but you'll know what I mean. How can it be that all these years later, so much of polite opinion and so much of academia still condescends to Ronald Reagan?

- I think it was partly style for sure. It was partly what they perceived to be superfic superficiality. But superficiality sometimes is not superficial. Superficiality can cut through complexity. And that's what Reagan was able to do. I had long arguments with George Kennan about this because did you, I kept saying to George, look, George Reagan is implementing your own strategy. Exactly. From 1947. You know, he would not believe it. He would not believe it. He said, no, that movie started. He can't possibly. But finally, one day we were doing an interview for the Ted Turner documentary on the Cold War. And I, I asked him once more about this, you know, and he got a kind of faraway look in his eye and he said, but actually I have to admit that Ronald Reagan, without quite knowing what he was doing, made a major contribution to ending the Cold War. Unfortunately, that wound up on the cutting room floor of the documentary. Oh. But that's vital. But that's the only time I ever heard Ron.

- And even then there's that note of condescension

- Not knowing what he was doing. No question about

- It. Oh, alright. Cold war if we make a grand strategy.

- Sure. - Along with your Yale colleagues, Paul Kennedy and the late Charlie Hill, you founded the Yale program and Grand Strategy 25 years ago. That's right. Teaching strategy as a distinct discipline had scarcely been done before the decision makers simply trained in the subjects of history, economics, and so forth. George Cannon, for example, majored in history at Princeton, Henry Kissinger concentrated on political science at Harvard and so forth. So why establish your seminar, which became very famous? Why establish a seminar in grand strategy?

- Well, part because it had been done before, it had been done at the Naval War College. Stan Turner's curriculum. Acidity curriculum, which was put in in the 1970s.

- I was not aware of that.

- Yes. Is still there and is based on, on the classics. And I was brought in, I thought one day just to lecture at the work college, five years outta graduate school, Stan was there in the audience. And after I finished, he got up and said, professor Gaddis was wrong on the following points, but right on these points. And he was right enough on these points that he will be teaching at the Naval Work College next year. I didn't know how to say no to an admiral. And so I was thrown in to teaching grand strategy, having been trained as a conventional diplomatic historian. So I had students who were all older than I was. I had students, all of whom were back from Vietnam with military experience. I had none. I was scrambling to stay ahead of the student students with texts and whatnot. It was the most exciting intellectual experience of my life. It led to strategies of containment that led to George Kennan and so on and so forth. And so when I came here and had colleagues like Paul Kennedy and Charlie Hill, it was just natural that we should try to replicate the Turner curriculum here, which we did. But it didn't really take off until nine 11. And Oh, I see. That is what kicked it, of course, into gear. And it was just one day we were, we had been planning just to teach it every other year. And one day I just looked at Charlie and said, we can't do that. We have to do it every year. And poor Kennedy was sitting there. Yeah. We have to do it every year. So, so we did for a very long time indeed. And students loved it. Students loved it. And what they loved was the combination of what we were doing. They loved the exposure to the classics, the sweep of the first seminar, which went all the way back to Ities, but came up to the present. But they loved the other two components of the course too. So we taught the first semester in the fall, sorry, in the spring, and then there was a summer component to it, which was not an internship anywhere. We called it an Odyssey. And the idea is, we want you to go out somewhere in the world and see things and do things that you won't be able to do when you become an ambassador. And we had people all over the world, you in strange places, being tailed by the security police and all of this kind of thing, perfecting their languages, all of this. It was just immensely invigorating. And each one of these was individually designed. Then we came back in the fall and they presented, we looked, the fall semester was totally devoted to contemporary affairs. So we trained them in how to do PowerPoint briefs in code and tie in front of a very critical audience. These what the mil military calls murder boards.

- Right.

- And then we ended with a hair raising crisis simulation game where we would take over a Yale building for two weekends and have things like completely outrageous scenarios like maybe Putin invades Moldova, which which he's talking about doing right now, you know?

- Right.

- And what would you do? They would elect an administration. They had to write a strategy statement, they had to deal with what we threw at them. And it was hair raising. But they ones who went through it have remembered it ever since as being a wonderfully formative experience.

- And has this institution continued

- The seminar? It has continued the seminar, but not the, not the murder boards that fell as victim to political correctness and DEII think it's also the case, Peter, that the, the class depended on the three of us to a considerable extent. And the three of us would go to every class. We would all sit together up

- Front. Did you really?

- Oh yes.

- Oh, so this is a huge commitment.

- Sure was. Yeah. By senior figures. Yeah. But it was fun. And the three of us would sit there, somebody would take the lead to open the discussion, but then Paul would say something like, Ooh, you know, just don't, oh, you know, not sure. And Charlie would say that, that that's completely wrong. You know, and then we would go at it in front of the students arguing with each other, and the presence of three professors arguing with each other and remaining close friends was a wonderful lesson in civility for the students, I think as well. So that we lost with Charlie and we would've lost it in any event, just from aging, you know? So it's still going on, but it's in a different format. It does attract a lot of students. They had about 200 applications for 18 places. This, this last semester.

- I'm going to ask you to give me a little taste of yours, of this, of the seminar. And I'm gonna quote, the closest I could get of course was from, was reading on grand strategy. You tie the idea of strategy to Isaiah Berlin's famous essay, the Hedgehog and the Fox. The hedgehog relates all of reality to a single overarching vision. And the fox sees reality as complicated, diverse, and so forth. And you define grand strategy here. I'm quoting you as the following, the alignment of potentially unlimited aspirations. This goes back to what you were saying earlier. Yeah. Unlimited aspirations with necessarily limited capabilities. Such alignments are necessary across time, space, and scale. Now, time, space, and scale would seem to favor the fox, the, the one who sees reality is complicated, that would seem to favor Henry Kissinger. And yet we've just spent a few moments or two assessing the place in history and deciding it was pretty remarkable of that great old hedgehog, Ronald Reagan. Whose idea was that the Soviet Union was an evil empire. So how do you, how do you, I'm just, I, I toss that question to you to see what you would do with it and give

- Us a, the fox play. Hedgehog are polarities and they can be seen very clearly through the characteristics of animals, which don't change. Right. The people do change, you know, and if you say, okay, the fox has one big idea, why can't the fox and the hedgehog coexist? This is why I so much like the movie Lincoln Steven Spielberg's Lincoln, and the fake quote that he made up for Lincoln about selling the 13th Amendment to the House of Representatives in the 1865 and confronting Thaddeus Stevens in, in, in one critical scene in which Stevens is berating Lincoln for making so many compromises to get the abolition of slavery through the House of Representatives. And Lincoln says, when I was a surveyor, I had a, an instrument that told me where true north was. But if I had just followed that compass, I would've wound up in a swamp or would've fallen off a cliff or something. So I had to diverge from the compass course to get around the swamp or the cliff and say, but then get back on course. And to me that sums up what the ideal combination of the fox and the hedgehog are. You have to have a sense of where you're going. You can't just let the process take over. The process is an ends to a larger is a means to a larger end. So you have to have that in mind. But if all you have in mind is the end, and you ignore the crevices and the swamps and dangers and diversions and whatnot that lie in in between you and it, then you're also going to suffer. You're gonna fall off a G cliff or something else. So you have to do both. And the question how you do both is, for many people a completely impossible question. They say, you can't do that. Nobody can do that. And I say it's done every day on playing fields in athletics. What do coaches do in the first place, but say, here's the objective, winning, here are the rules of the game, which demand rigorous training. But the coach cannot tell you what's gonna happen out there on the playing field because there is another team out there and the other team is going to introduce uncertainties into the game. So there has to be the capacity for snap decision on the part of the quarterback, on the part of the players who have to know what the game plan was, but have to throw it out if necessary. When it's clear it's going to fail and snap decisions are necessary. So would anybody say that a quarterback would play the game better for not having been coached in the first place? I don't think so. Coaching is very important, but coaching involves both having an objective out there and being able to make decisions according to the real situation that you confront. And that's what life should also do. And I think strategy should also do

- John Lewis Gatis. That was spoken like a real Texan. Sooner or later it all comes back to football. Yeah. I guess by the way, on this business of surveying, one of Bill Buckley's favorite phrases was a quotation from his hero and friend, Whitaker Chambers to live is to maneuver exactly the same idea. Absolutely. Sure. Exactly the same idea. Totally. Alright. To Texas, from the grand sweep of strategy to affairs in a little town in Texas, you have just completed a manuscript on your hometown of Catula. Now I looked up the population of Catula today, and it is 3,600

- And it has not changed for the last 70 years.

- I looked it up on the, the date of your birth, 1941 and it was 3,600. Now Professor Gaddis, those two numbers, 3,600 when you were born and 3,600 today, make Catula sound like a little town. That time has passed by. Why is a major American historian giving it a book length treatment?

- First of all, because of something Lyndon Johnson said in the best speech that he ever made, which this is the 1965 speech on the Voting Rights Act. This is when LBJ unexpectedly said, we shall overcome in talking about racial injustice.

- It's all of us who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice, and we shall overcome.

- And he got a huge standing ovation, obviously quoting Martin Luther King Jr. Quoting, yes, we quo the spiritual as well. You know, and he got a huge standing ovation. And Robert Caro, his biographer, has said that this was the, one of the best speeches in American history. One of the most thrilling speeches in American history. However, a lot of people forget that was not the end of the speech. There's another paragraph in the speech in which Leonard Johnson said, when I was 19 years old, my first teaching job was in the little town of Catula, Texas.

- My first job after college was as a teacher in Catula, Texas, in a small Mexican American school. Few of them could speak English and I couldn't speak much Spanish. My students were poor. And they often came to class without breakfast hungry. And they knew, even in their youth, the pain of prejudice. They never seemed to know why people disliked them. But they knew it was so, because I saw it in their eyes. I never thought then in 1928 that I would be standing here in 1965. It never even occurred to me in my fondest dreams that I might have the chance to help the sons and daughters of those students and to help people like them all over this country. But now I do have that chance, and I'll let you in on a secret, I mean to use it.

- And that got the second big standing in edition of the evening, Mr. So I knew about that. I knew about the speech, but also I knew that not many people knew much about Catula. And I suddenly, after finishing the on grand strategy book, almost by accident, discovered the Texas Digital Newspaper Project, which provides access to something like a million pages of newsprint going all the way back to the days of the Texas Republic. It's all online. You can do it all from your home office. You don't even have to put on shoes to do it. You just sit there and you can do it. You know

- The dates of the Texas Republic?

- 18, 18 36, 18 36.

- 2 45, 45. Okay.

- Alright. Earlier than I thought. Very early. So the town I knew had a terrible reputation for violence back in the 1880s when it was founded. There were stories that when the train would come through town, the conductors would say, we're approaching catula, put your heads down and get your guns out. And sure enough, I found in the newspapers that the coverage of Catula was, was it was an extraordinarily bloody

- Place. John, could I ask, you were born in 1941.

- Yep.

- So as you were grow, as you were a kid, were there old timers who remembered those old Yes, indeed. The violent days?

- Yeah, sure. We heard the, we heard the stories. You know, we had a, they're still there, a monument to a martyred sheriff who at the age of 29 was killed in the defense of outraged female innocence. And so we ask our parents, what does that mean? You know, as little kids, they wouldn't tell us, you know? So, you know, I knew there was an interesting history here and I just thought, well, it would be interesting to look at that history through the digital newspaper project and see what's there. See what got recorded in the paper. I plugged in the name of the town, I got 37,000 hits, and then I decided there's gotta be a book in this. So for various reasons, partly I resist being bored. I've always jumped around in my scholarly career, you know, one thing to another. I just decided to play with this and see what I could do, maybe as a family history or something. But it was, it was all consuming and it was quite wonderful and gratifying to be able to relive the experience of that little town in those years from the time the Fran, the time the train came founding the town 1881, to the time that LBJ appeared, which is 1929. So like a 50 year period. I didn't want it to be a family history. I wanted it to be a town history. But I had a ball writing as it was just a wonderful story. And there were so many instances in which national or international events would have some resonance somehow in this little town. Just to give you an example, the locals noticed in the fall of 1914 that there were a bunch of French aristocrats running around buying up horses. Why? Because World War I had started and they needed war horses. And Texas exported something like 10,000 horses to France instantly. Just like that. I never thought about that. You know? So it's just full of things like that in which you see the connection of the big to the small, which is fascinating to me, you know? So that is what I did. And I wrote a, a manuscript, which is not very long, it's probably 70,000 words or something like that. But it covers those, that period up to the time LBJ arrives. I had expected that LBJs arrival would have made a big impression on the town because Robert Caro suggested that in his book, actually in the, the local newspaper had three articles on LBJ within the first three weeks, obviously press releases that he had put out and then nothing. So he was added, even at the age of 19, my father was out plowing a field one day at the age of 25, a model A turns up and this lanky kid in a blue suit climbs through the barbed wire fence and comes over and sticks up this big hand, says, hi, I'm Lyndon Johnson, I'm the new school teacher. My father said, don't ever vote for that guy. He thinks he's gonna be president of the United States. He's crazy, you know? Wow. So there you are.

- He said. So John, could I ask then about your relationship to Texas? You grew up in a little town, your dad was a, a druggist. Druggist. You loved that little town. You must have loved it because you could have written about any little town.

- Yeah, sure. But this is the only one I knew.

- It's the one, it's the one you knew and you, you, you went to UT and got all three, you did all your academic work at

- Ut. That makes it sound as though it was all designed that way. It was not, it was a series of accidents. So it started off as NIK 1957, which we could see from the roof of our house, the rocket casing, you know?

- Yep. - So everybody panicked, ruskis above catula, you know, so something had to be done. So I had to go into what would later be called stem. So I was told study medicine, study science, whatnot. You know, Catula schools were not good enough. Go off to military school in San Antonio, which I hated. Then go to Rice and study calculus, which I bombed, you know, and, and flunked at Then I said, well, maybe you could at least become a librarian. My mom was the high school librarian. So I went to Texas to do library work, but you couldn't major at library science. You had to major in something else. So I majored in history. And so by accident, senior semester, second, second semester my senior year, I turned in a paper on, in a course on Tutor Stewart history. The professor called me in and said, this is a very good paper, you could publish this. And I was flabbergasted. It was the first time I had been to a professor's office ever. And he called me in and said, you can do this. And I said, how? And he said, go to graduate school. I said, where? Here? He said, and it was too late to apply to any of the other places in the first place, you know. So I trained as a diplomatic historian under Robert Dev Divine, who was perfectly good diplomatic historian and did a dissertation on the origins of the, of the Cold War. Which,

- Which was what year?

- That was 1972. And to my astonishment, the phone rang in the office one day and it said, the voice on the other end of the line said, congratulations professor, professor Gaddis. Your book on the cold on the Cold War has just won the Bancroft Prize. I had to turn to my office mate and said and say, what's the Bancroft Prize? So I was very lucky in that regard. And that is what led to the war college experience and that is what led to Kenon and so on and so forth.

- So you're you, you haven't mentioned one aspect of your career, which is prose. Yeah. Your prose is wonderful. Thank you. You, there are not many historians who make it as enjoyable to read as you do.

- I had two terrific teachers. One was h Wayne Morgan who taught Gilded Age at Austin and died of three or four years ago, but would just return papers to me that were dripping with red ink. You know, he would just go through and, you know, just completely mark them up. Very few of those teachers. The other was Bill Berg, the historian who just died a couple of months ago At the age of 102 or something like that, who was the editor of the series in which the first book appeared. And he made me take another two years before publishing that book. But that was to correct the prose, you see. So I was put through bootcamp by two great prose artists as historians and immensely lucky to have been put through that. And so now I inflicted on my students, I have a, what I call a writing checklist, which I've had for 15 to 20 years, in which I compile students' stylistic atrocities. And, and I say, you know, it sounds six or eight pages. Don't do this. Don't you know, and I gave examples of this. Every class gets this and it's become pretty famous and it gets passed around and so on. I'm now thinking about turning it over to chat GPT and letting chat GPT do that work for me and we'll see how that works. That's on the agenda.

- So the answer to the question, how is it that John Lewis Gaddis writes so beautifully is that he works at it.

- Yeah. In part.

- In part.

- Alright. And take, takes pride in it.

- Yeah, for sure. Some last questions here.

- Sure.

- You've conducted a seminar here at Yale called What History Teaches if you've seen at Yale, anything like what I've observed at Stanford? Well, there's a statistic here that history majors as a proportion of total college majors fell by half between 1997 when you arrived in 2020. And so this, you see good students going off to computer science and all of that. And now along comes artificial intelligence. You just mentioned chat, GPT and I'm struck by recent comments by the tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel, quote, my intuition would be that AI is going to be worse for the math people than for the word people. Silicon Valley in the early 21st century was way too biased toward, yeah. Math people close quote. So along comes AI and it can write software and work calculations faster than you can blink your eyes and do programming. Right? I agree with that. Does this mean hope that, that we get that, that kids are going, that kids who can tell stories, who have a grasp of history, who understand, who understand what those on the humanities side of the equation have always felt? Were the things of enduring importance? Is there hope? Is there hope for those

- Old decisions? I think there is actually. You do you see, you see it, you feel it. I do. There's an article in The Economist just last week on investing and there's beginning to be some evidence that theory is not very helpful for making investment decisions. The reduction of things to simple propositions and all that complexity is much better because the life of and the world in which we invest is complex in the first place. But there was no way previously to grasp the complexity. You see, AI gives us a big ins to give us the ability to deal with complexity and at the same time draw generalizations from it. That is major and I think that is going to change several different things. I think it will change the market, the market for teaching history. I think it's gonna change the market for investment. I'm interested in business schools beginning to hire historians to come in because they have begun to realize that having historical awareness is pretty critical to success in business these days. So yes, I am optimistic for sure. And how can you help but be optimistic when you walk into a classroom and you have in front of you some the best students in the world?

- Mm.

- And they're happy and they're cheerful and they're excited about what they're doing. Maybe they'll get less excited about what they, what they're doing when they're approaching page 1100 of War in Peace, which might students have to read, they have to read the whole thing. But no, not really. They love it. They fall in love with. And so the gratification of simply teaching is more important to me than anything other than the love of my dear wife.

- Wonderful. I'm gonna combine a couple of questions here. You, you said that the the, when we were talking about the Cold War, you named attention and said that's where we are today. And that tension was, should it be the aim of American policy to spread democracy as widely as we can? And I'm gonna call that for the to be crude, yet another time we'll call that the George W. Bush approach. You recall his second inaugural address when he said, I can't quote it exactly, but the United States can't be secure as long as there's a tyranny anywhere in the world. Yeah. Guess where you got that? You, yeah. Oh well then I already know the answer to the question then. Alright. As opposed to our current

- Chief executive, what I said was we, it would be useful to say in the inaugural, in the inaugural address that we should end Tyra tyranny and promote democracy. But in the inaugural address it wound up saying we should end tyranny by instituting democracy in the rest of the world. And I resolved at that point to give up punditry, you know, advising presidents. So, so

- This notion it was spreading democracy. Yeah. Nation building, I suppose maybe that's a dirty trick to include nation building on that side. And then we have our current chief executive and Walter Russell Mead has in his column in the Wall Street Journal called Donald Trump Jacksonian, we're going to hit our enemies and get out. We're going to do low cost and move quickly. We are, and we are defending ourselves, not attempting to promote democracy or create duplicates of ourselves. So in with that is the framework. How do you address this question of China, which, and the conflict with China, which Neil Ferguson is already calling Cold War ii.

- We are going to have to coexist with China. China has been there for a very long time, much longer than we have. It will be there as well. And we will have to find a way to coexist with them. I don't see China as having global ambitions of any kind. I don't think they have a global ideology. I don't think they have a history of that kind of thing. They're not the Soviet Union in that, in that regard. What they are, however, is a possible a threat to at least controlling Eurasia. And that is the great bogey man of Western thinking about geopolitics throughout the 20th century. That's why there was concern about the Germans in the run up to World War I, world War ii. That's why there was concern about the Soviet Union and the communist China in the Cold War period. And now that vision is coming back, the possibility that a single power, whether friendly or hostile could wind up in control of all of Eurasia. And the summit in Beijing, just this last week with Putin and with Kim Jong and with Modi, you know, was, that

- Was not good news for us.

- Not good for us. And so the successes in American foreign policy have come when we have wared that off partly by an offshore military presence, but partly also by diplomacy aimed at splitting those possible collaborators you see. And that is Kissinger in Beijing, you see and so on. And it's what Kennan was recommending as well. Kenna embraced Tito's Yugoslavia and despite the fact that it was a communist country, you know, so you have to find some way to negotiate so that these countries do not all wind up on the same side. And that I think is what's missing today. I think we're just being very careless about that. I think that the current precedent in the interest of cutting a deal has lost sight of the extent to which the

- Destination and the map,

- Well particularly his tariff policy and his negotiation policy don't fit. He's using tariffs as a weapon. Negotiations are an inducement, but the tariff policy is driving some of the people that he should be negotiating with into alignments we don't like you or, or should not support. So that is where I see a gap in grand strategy right now.

- Last question about China. South Korea starts out as a military dictatorship or close enough. Yep. They open up their economy and they become a democracy. Same pattern in Taiwan. Strong guys running the country, economic growth, democracy. Why don't we see that pattern in China?

- I think maybe China is too big for that.

- It's too big. It's not, it's not, it's not that they that, that they're communist believers in some way.

- No, no, no. It's, it's a country that has always had trouble holding itself together because it splits apart periodically and then it comes back together and whatnot. And the extent to which you can have a democracy in a big space, I think is limited. You can do it in a small space, but I think Russia itself will have problems. I don't think Russia will ever be a democracy in our sense of, of the word. We had the luxury in this country of being a big country with two oceans on our east and west and with weak states to the north and south. So we had the luxury of being able to build a democracy in this country. Not everybody is configured in that way geographically. And geography is important. Continental drift eventually will change geography, but we can't wait for that.

- Last question. Here's George Kennan, your old friend and biographical subject writing in 1953. So this is pretty close to the beginning of things. The thoughtful observer of Russian American relations will find a no cause for complaint. You know, the passage will find no cause for complaint in the Kremlin's challenge to American society. He will rather experience a certain gratitude to a providence, which by providing the American people with this implacable challenge, has made their entire security as a nation dependent on their pulling themselves together and accepting the responsibilities of moral and political leadership that history has plainly intended them to bear. Close quote, the American people did pull themselves together. It did. It worked. And it went on and there were problems. The seventies were a problem. We've already discussed this, but in 1989, the, the Berlin wall comes down and in 1991 the Soviet Union becomes defunct. Yeah,

- Well Dr. Johnson said it all, you know, he said the prospect of being hanged in the morning concentrates the mind

- Immensely. Oh. So is this, as the country prepares to celebrate its 250th anniversary, what do you foresee for the coming decades? Can we pull ourselves together again?

- I think we will, but I think we are going to have threats and this illusion of the, what we call the post called war world now from 1991 to 2022, the idea that there were no more enemies out there. The idea that it was just going to be a globalization, you know, that was clear, clearly fallacious. And to a very con, as considerable extent, I, I think we bear some responsibility for the Ukrainian Russian situation by a carrying NATO expansion as far as we did, Because we forgot NATO was the means to a larger end. It was never an end in itself. And that is important to retain. So that sense of purpose and what is there. So I wish we had had a more conciliatory policy toward Russia back when it would've done some good under Yeltsin. But obviously we didn't do that. And that's a big mistake it seems to me. So there we are. I think we can recoup, I think we have recouped in the past. I don't think it's irrevocably disastrous at the point, but I do think we have to learn from history.

- And you would tell your students this country is still plenty of resilient. Don't short the United States.

- Yeah,

- I would. You would. Absolutely.

- Alright. You bet.

- John Lewis Gattis, the Lovett Professor of Military and Naval History at Yale University. Thank you.

- Thank you. Enjoyed.

- For Uncommon Knowledge, the Hoover Institution and Fox Nation. I'm Peter Robinson.