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General Discontent

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Historic Era: Era 10: Contemporary United States (1968 to the present)

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November/December 2002 | Volume 53, Issue 6

EMBATTLED, SCRUTINIZED, POWELL SOLDIERS ON, ran the headline on the front page of The New York Times, as if the writer was astonished to find Colin Powell still at the State Department despite his disagreements with some of the more overweening members of the present administration. Somehow, for all his defeats in various different policy debates, we were informed, the Secretary of State kept “doing his best to justify the administration’s view to often-critical allies around the world.”

No one familiar with Secretary PowelPs character or his record of public service should be surprised that he values the welfare of his country above all. And contrary to what the media like to believe, disagreement and debate at even the highest levels of a functioning democracy are refreshing and, in fact, vital.

Much less invigorating has been the campaign in certain media and political circles that blames Powell for the decision not to go “on to Baghdad” in 1991 when he was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Gulf War. It is unclear whether this is simply another crude attack on the Secretary by his enemies or a more subtle pre-emptive attempt to clear Bush père and his civilian underlings of the time—such as then Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney—of any blame for casualties that may be incurred in a renewed conflict against Saddam Hussein. It is in any case a calumny, one that badly misrepresents both the facts of the Gulf War and the way our constitutional system is designed to work. It has also been tried before, and against no less an American than Dwight D. Elsenhower.

Revisionism is a necessary part of the historical process, and from George Washington on we have regularly hauled up our military commanders for target practice once the fog of battle has lifted.

Yet the campaign that threatened to engulf Eisenhower, like that directed against Secretary Powell, was a much more dangerous thing. The charge was that as supreme commander of the Allied forces in Europe, Ike had deliberately failed to take Berlin ahead of the Red Army during the closing days of World War II. The implication, sometimes stated outright, was that Ike was at best a communist dupe or at worst a traitor.

“The major myth in regard to Berlin is that if the Americans had captured the city they would have held it and there would be no Berlin problem today,” Stephen Ambrose wrote in Elsenhower and Berlin, 1945: The Decision to Halt at the Elbe , published in 1967, just a few years after the German capital nearly became a flash point in the Cold War. “It is impossible to work out the origins of the myth,” Ambrose complained. “I have never seen it in print. Yet nearly everyone to whom I talk, be he a veteran who fought under Eisenhower or a college student who was not even born at the time, believes