Affairs. He is those things but much more. Those further attributes are the reasons why youre here tonight, here to listen to one of the truly great minds working the field of history today. Let me be more specific when i call fred one of the truly great historians of our day. He is in my opinion and i am biased but i have the microphone nothing less than a foremost historian of vietnam working in the country today. Vietnam, of course, vietnam that word which has come to mean so much in american society. It means a war, an era, a period when the United States was perhaps ripped apart at the seams internally more than any other time in recent memory. It is a moment and bloodshed seemed endemic. Vietnam looms large over the field of american contemporary history. There are three basic types of american historians. Those who study the civil war. Those who study the vietnam war. And then there is everybody else. To be at the peak of one of these Three Pinnacles i think is no mean thing and no small feat. Let me tell you why i think fred is there. Because he asks and answers not only the questions of what happened but why. Why the United States intervened in vietnam an intervention that colors so much of the johnson president. Why france returned to vietnam after world war ii and why a series of american president despite the rhetoric of the colonization, why a series of president s continued to support the mission of reestablishing colonial rule in vietnam. And why, and this is of course the topic he will address this evening, why history itself loom so large over the oval office. And what the history means for the president of have to make decisions that affect the world. Fred is the author of numerous works in the recipient of numerous prizes, including the pulitzer. He is a gifted educator. He is also an inspiring lecturer. Let me add, he is also a dear friend and a mentor to a generation of rising diplomatic historians. It is a great honor to have known Fred Logevall before he was Fred Logevall. Thus, it gives me great pleasure to welcome him to the podium. Please join me in welcoming professor Fred Logevall. [applause] professor Fred Logevall jeff, you are much too kind. And that was more of an introduction and i shouldve received but i will accept it with gratitude. I am just very pleased to be here this evening and to have an opportunity at smu to share a few thoughts with you, to talk a little bit about president s and their use of history. Before i do, i want to express a special thanks to everybody involved in making this happen to the university and a special thanks to jeff engle. All you know that jeff is the director of the center for president ial history here. He is also on the faculty in the History Department at smu. What some of you may not know is that he is a leading historian of u. S. Foreign relations history. And is at work on a book that i think is going to be profoundly important a study of george h. W. Bush and the end of the cold war. We now have the requisite amount of archival source material, Interview Transcripts and a range of other bodies of evidence where we can do that subject justice. So jeffs book is already muchanticipated. I look forward to seeing between two covers before too long. Thank you for having me come. When jeff and i talked about the topic for this evening some months ago, the United States was in the midst of a crisis that are googly still that arguably still exists in ukraine and crimea. Countless analysts analogized that situation to crises in the past. In particular to munich, 1938, in which the attempt to accommodate hitler, to appease him, only invited and guaranteed more aggression. In the same way, the commentator said a few months ago some are still saying president obamas in action in the face of ladder near 0 of Vladimir Putins efforts amounts to dangerous appeasement. It is munich all over again. In fact, this crisis continues. Today, we could read the ukrainian and Russian Forces are battling it out in the eastern part of ukraine. I think we are going to continue to have this debate. Other analysts, meanwhile, who were skeptics regarding a vigorous american response in the crisis invoked other historical examples. Hungary 1956. Czechoslovakia 1968. Urging president obama to follow the lead of Dwight Eisenhower and Lyndon Johnson who chose not to respond with force to aggressive soviet actions in those two countries. So, perhaps what i should do with the outset is to say that im grateful to Vladimir Putin and barack obama for giving my talk this evening special contemporary resonance. What i want to do and by the way, i want to make sure we have time for discussion, because it is key for me at l east during these encounters to get a chance to interact with my audience. I want to make sure we do that. I will cast a glance at my watch. But i want to talk today about history and its uses by leaders, in particular american president s. A lot of what i am going to say this evening can be applied to decisionmakers in other countries as well, but the focus in particular will be on american president. Along the way, i want to probe deeper questions about we can and cannot learn from a careful study of the past and what utility that knowledge has for the pressing issues of our day. Now, as a student of u. S. Foreign policy, i have long been fascinated by, confounded by this interaction between history and decisionmaking. Especially at the president ial level. Fascinated by it. Because, by this process, the past becomes a kind of partner in the making of new history. So that is the part i find especially fascinated. But im also confounded by it because the role of history in this process remains both ambiguous and hard to fully comprehend. It remains perplexing. Why . Well, it is ambiguous because when you think about it, all thought which leads to decision of Public Policy is in as its historical in essence historical. Public decisions in contemporary politics or more distance politics implies a guess about the future derived from the experience of the past. It implies an expectation or some might say a hope that certain actions tomorrow will produce the same kinds of results or similar actions produced in history. This guess about the future may be based on a copper has a theory of historical change, as with marxism. Or based on specific analogies and im going to talk about analogies drawn from the past. Or as a third possibility, it could be based on a more intuitive sense, an unstated sense of the way things ought to happen and typically do happen. But whatever it is based on, i think it involves either explicitly or implicitly historical judgment. History is bound to be utilized. So, that is why a think there is ambiguity. Its perplexing to go to the other word i use, its perplexing because when explicit historical judgments intervened, you immediately encounter a question, which is very, very hard to answer. Even with full access to official documentation in the archives. And of course, jeff and i and others, historians, depend on access and use of archives. That is our bread and butter. But even when you have that full documentation, you face the following question is the history that is invoked in the documents, is the history invoked really the source of the policy, or is it more the source of arguments designed to vindicate policies made for other reasons . Policies adopted for antecedent reasons. In other words, is history just being used to justify something europe decided to do for some other reason . Something you decided to do for some other reason . An example could be the bush administrations invocation. Use of munich, reference in munich in the lead up to the invasion of iraq in 2003. Could it be the bush team invoked munich not because it believes that Saddam Hussein was another hitler, but because it thought referencing hitler referencing the nazi, would help close the deal with the populace, would cut off debate in congress, would reduce the matter to a satisfyingly clear danger between evil in the form of Saddam Hussein and good in the form of the United States. Moreover, even when history is the source of the policy, the lessons of history are often hard to fully pin down. They themselves can be ambiguous. And therefore, the antecedent reasons often determine the choice between alternative historical interpretations. So, for example, france between the wars. Thisll be my one reference to a nonus situation. In france, some senior french leaders through one set of lessons from world war i, while another set of leaders to another set of lessons. So history is the source of the policy, but there are differences about how to interpret that history. However, having said all of this, the cynical approach which dismisses the flexion of history in Public Policy to that of near rationalization i think is insufficient. Because historical models often acquire a life of their own. Once a president , shall we say or a National Security advisory for secretary of state begins to identify the present with the past, he or she may in time be carried away with take that analogy farther than she had planned to. She is a victim of the allure of the analogy. I will explain this a bit more as i proceed. So i want to focus on this. I want to consider why president s are so often captivated by analogy. Why indeed we all are. It is in some degree built into us as human beings. There is a deepseated human desire to believe or maybe in a something to believe that if the thing worked once, it will work again. Or if a thing brought disaster in the past, its also going to bring disaster the next time around. I want to suggest, ladies and gentlemen, that its imperative we understand both the limits and the utility of analogies in history. In other words, both what they can give us and what they cannot. And to guard against what has been called the suffocating power of the lessons that we carry around, or the lessons we carry around in our heads. Note what i am not saying here. Im not saying we should embrace the kind of historical nihilism, meaning the active forgetting of past episodes. Like many academic historians, i will confess im skeptical about the success of history as a means of prediction. I understand, i think like most of the historians in this room that historical confers no automatic wisdom, alas, in the realm of public affairs. I wish it did, but i am not sure it does. For me, history is in many respects its own reward. I love as an historian to be able to study the past for the intellectual for it brings me, hopefully also the reader. For the aesthetic fulfillment that historical study brings. I find in the disciplined effort to reconstruct and interpret the past just a marvelous opportunity for those who do it to consider both humanitys here was a a heroism and foolishness. But that is not the only reason why i do what i do. I do see. Here i would be interested to see if historians agree or disagree. I do think, i want to say that what i do has the utilitarian purpose. Because i do think that history can help us better understand the present and foresee the future. It is our collective memory. Just like a person who suffers from amnesia would have a difficult time knowing where she is and how she has gotten to where she is, unless she is told and then she would forget it again. So, society in this case, the United States needs to understand its history. It can help us to better figure out where we are and where we are going. History repeats itself enough to make at least some historical generalizations possible. And because generalization sufficiently interconnected can generate insight into the likely shape of things to come. Mark twain famously said this, if history never repeats itself, sometimes it runs. It rhymes. Now, again, i think im probably on shaky ground with some professional historians in the room , perhaps jeff can set me straight. Some professional historians some historians elsewhere, will say on that contrary, fred history teaches nothing. They would agree perhaps with a great french historian, im not sure he would endorse that notion completely but he said this that for the historian, it is all about the thrill of learning singular things. Thats marc blanc. Its true it is precisely the commitment to reconstruction against abstract generalization that distinguish his history from the social sciences. Yet, i want to suggest it seems silly to insist that no generalization is possible. As the disinterested storing of france brinton once put it. The doctrine of absolute the absolute uniqueness of events in history seems nonsense. Or the great yale historian john lewis gattis is correct when he reminds us that theory is ultimately generalization and without generalization historians would have nothing whatever to say. The very words we use to generalize complex realities this is john gattis words like past, present and future, we cannot do without them as historians. And i think he is right about that. The key. Again, i will spend a few minutes comparing what we as historians do with what social scientists might. The approach they might take. I think we historians tend to embed our generalizations within our narratives