The architect of ‘critical oral history’ sheds new light on the cold war
While an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, in the 1960s,
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Colloquy Live: Read the transcript of a live, online discussion with James G. Blight, a professor of international relations at Brown University, about critical oral history.
James G. Blight joined the Ann Arbor chapter of Students for a Democratic Society. The escalation of what peace activists often called “McNamara’s war” was mirrored by an escalation in their tactics. Mr. Blight was not the only campus radical of the Vietnam era to hang an effigy of Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara. But he was the only one who went on to write books with the former Pentagon chief -- something Mr. Blight wouldn’t have believed in a million years had someone suggested it to him at the time.
Mr. Blight, now a professor of international relations at Brown University, has collaborated with Mr. McNamara not only on two books but on a series of innovative conferences at which key decision makers in historical events -- particularly the Cuban missile crisis and the Vietnam War -- revisit those experiences and analyze them anew. Joining the government officials are former adversaries -- their foreign counterparts -- as well as a team of researchers armed with documents (often recently declassified) that can contradict the memories and claims of the statesmen and generals. The sixth and probably final conference on the missile crisis, scheduled to mark its 40th anniversary, was to begin last week in Havana. Participants were expected to include Cuba’s president, Fidel Castro, and Mr. McNamara.
What emerges from the process, Mr. Blight has written, is “a more accurate picture of the past than would be possible if we relied on recollection or scholarship alone.” The method, which he calls critical oral history, is his life’s work.
Few scholars involved in critical oral history work in history departments. They include political scientists, archivists, policy analysts, and the former government officials themselves. Mr. Blight is not particularly interested in traditional oral history, and several oral historians contacted for this article were unfamiliar with his work. But it is regarded by many scholars as pathbreaking.
Mr. Blight has made a “massive and uniquely valuable contribution” to the historical literature, says Philip D. Zelikow, a professor of history at the University of Virginia and a co-editor of The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House During the Cuban Missile Crisis (Harvard University Press, 1997). The critical-oral-history conferences and the documentary records Mr. Blight and his colleagues have unearthed are, he says, a “fundamental source” of evidence about the missile crisis and are “likely to remain so forever.”
“No one will be able to write the same way” about Cuban-Soviet relations, says Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., the Harvard historian.
Narrow Escape
Four weeks before the Havana conference, the telephone in Mr. Blight’s office here rings almost nonstop. Janet M. Lang, Mr. Blight’s wife and colleague at Brown’s Watson Institute for International Studies, fields the calls. They come from potential financial supporters as well as a Hollywood studio interested in making a film about the event.
The office is a museum of critical oral history. On one wall is a large Soviet map of Cuba that, Mr. Blight explains, symbolizes how the Caribbean island was viewed as a pawn by both cold-war superpowers. On another wall is a photograph of Mr. Blight standing next to Mr. Castro during one of the Havana conferences. On his desk is a reinforced-concrete fragment of one of the dismantled missile sites. Mr. Blight waxes enthusiastic about the shard as he recounts memorable conversations with Mr. Castro, who has grown to trust him, the scholar says. (They bonded quickly over baseball; both are former pitchers.)
One can imagine Mr. Blight’s bonding with just about anyone. Arrestingly warm, he has an infectious passion for historical events and the people who shaped them. Those qualities come in handy in what one former student calls his “ringmaster” role at the conferences. It’s Mr. Blight’s job not just to organize the meetings -- rustling up grant money, recruiting participants, and getting reluctant decision makers to sit down at the table -- but to make sure things run smoothly once the conferences are under way.
Mr. Blight gave critical oral history what he calls “its first test” in 1987. On the 25th anniversary of the Cuban missile crisis, he gathered surviving members of the Kennedy administration, prominent American scholars of the episode, and noted American Sovietologists to help explain Moscow’s role in what he calls “the most dangerous moment in modern history.” Although the crisis was among the most exhaustively studied events in postwar international politics, Mr. Blight and his collaborators learned, at this and subsequent conferences, much that was new. They “began to doubt even more what we thought we had known,” he says, about the missiles of October.
Before 1987, the common view of the crisis was that it was “simple, short, clean, salutary,” and ultimately irrelevant, Mr. Blight has written. Critical oral history revealed it to be “complex, immense, horribly violent,” and of lasting consequence for Cuba’s relations with the superpowers.
Among other things, Mr. Blight’s research has revealed “the myth of the controlled crisis” -- the notion that disaster was averted in a model of rational decision making. In fact, Mr. Blight argues, there were many miscues and a great deal of indecision. The outcome could have gone either way. President John F. Kennedy himself felt that the chances of a nuclear war were one in two.
In conventional lore, the Kennedy administration was tough and resolute in standing up to the Soviets and getting them to remove their missiles from Cuba.
In reality, the special executive committee that the president assembled to deal with the crisis was deeply divided. A majority of the Joint Chiefs of Staff urged the president to invade Cuba, an option Kennedy considered seriously.
What the Joint Chiefs did not know at the time -- but what Mr. Blight’s team uncovered at a 1992 conference -- is that Cuba’s missiles were already equipped with nuclear warheads before the crisis began and that they were poised to be launched against American troops in the event of an invasion, which Cuba believed to be imminent. That almost certainly would have triggered a nuclear response from the United States, which in turn would have prompted a nuclear launch by the Soviet Union.
“The escape from nuclear oblivion,” Mr. Blight argues, was “little more than miraculous.”
The uncompromisingly tough course of action advocated by the hawks on the executive committee would, we now know, have led to nuclear war. It was instead, Mr. Blight believes, the president’s calm under pressure, his clarity amid the clamor -- and a considerable measure of luck -- that saved us from that fate.
For Mr. Blight, there was an unmistakable psychological dimension to the episode. The standard academic account, Graham T. Allison’s The Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis (Little, Brown, 1971), applied a “rational actor” model to the crisis, viewing the decision-making process through the prism of strategic logic. (Mr. Allison, a professor of government at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, did not return The Chronicle’s phone calls.) But for Mr. Blight, there was something extra-rational at work, an emotional component. Thus, rather than pursue a strictly political-scientific analysis, he opted for what he would later call a reconstruction of “the psychological reality of the decision makers.”
Radical Change
Mr. Blight’s interest in the psychological angle is not casual. It flows from his training in cognitive psychology, the field in which both he and Ms. Lang earned their doctorates. In fact, Mr. Blight never intended to focus on international politics at all. He wrote his master’s thesis on hypnosis and his doctoral dissertation on the psychology of religious conversion.
But he was so unnerved by the escalation of the arms race when President Ronald Reagan took office, in 1981, that he shifted his work to the psychology of the nuclear threat. He enrolled in the Kennedy School to study the arms race and cold-war diplomacy, and he joined an antinuclear group called Psychologists for Social Responsibility, which gathered in Quaker meetinghouses to discuss, as he puts it, “the psychopathology of the arms race.”
His classes at the Kennedy School got him thinking that there was more to the doctrine of deterrence than mere warmongering madness. He became disenchanted with what he saw as the heavy-handed moralism of the disarmament camp, and intrigued by the dynamics of real-world decision making, a realm he felt his friends in Psychologists for Social Responsibility tried to imagine but didn’t understand. Rather than snipe at the system from outside, Mr. Blight wanted to learn how it worked from deep inside.
After earning a master’s degree at the Kennedy School, Mr. Blight was named a fellow of its Center for Science and International Affairs. He directed the center’s Project on Avoiding Nuclear War from 1985 until he moved to Brown, in 1990.
It was during his Kennedy School years that Mr. Blight developed his fascination with the Cuban missile crisis, and combined his training in psychology and geopolitics. Interviews he conducted with members of President Kennedy’s inner circle led him to believe that some of the officials involved in the crisis were deeply afraid of what might happen. That “fear factor,” he concluded, was pivotal in their decision making. While the generals argued forcefully that from a strategic perspective there was no choice but to invade, something kept the president and Mr. McNamara from fully accepting their logic.
Although Mr. Blight believes that political psychologists tend to “over-psychologize” international affairs, what goes on in the heads of decision makers is a crucial ingredient in critical oral history. Indeed, he describes the face-to-face meetings as a cross between “history and group therapy.”
In the 15 years since the 1987 meeting, Mr. Blight has convened five further conferences on the crisis. They have involved high-level Soviet and Cuban officials, and taken advantage of newly opened Soviet archives. The documents placed the 1962 crisis in a new light.
Beginning in 1997, he also staged a series of critical-oral-history conferences in Hanoi about the Vietnam War. As perilously close as the world came to nuclear catastrophe during the Cuban missile crisis, in the end war was averted. In the Vietnam War, by contrast, more than three million Vietnamese and upwards of 50,000 Americans were killed. So when the Vietnamese generals sat across the table from Mr. McNamara, they were confronting a man they considered a war criminal. Likewise, Mr. McNamara was eye to eye with the architects of the Tet offensive.
Attraction-Repulsion
The leaders he invites to participate in critical-oral-history conferences, Mr. Blight says, are at once fascinated, attracted, and repelled by the prospect. They are interested, he says, in “learning more about the events in which they participated,” but “they don’t know what’s going to happen when they get to that table.”
After all, their reputations are at stake. What they say can be flat-out contradicted by the documentary evidence assembled by Mr. Blight and his research team. “Getting to ask questions of people you never thought you’d meet,” he says -- and in what he calls a “document-soaked context,” no less -- holds tremendous appeal for both scholars and former officials. At the same time, many fear a “show trial,” he says.
In addition to the tricky job of getting the ambivalent decision makers to participate, an essential component of critical oral history is Mr. Blight’s partnership with the researchers and archivists who do the intellectual grunt work of assembling the documents for the conferences. “You need real geeks,” he says, people who “live inside a bubble” of facts and archives. They tend not to be people, he says, who are likely to “pick up the phone and call Bob McNamara.”
Fortunately for Mr. Blight, he has been able to collaborate with George Washington University’s National Security Archive. The archive, which Mr. Blight calls a “mobile, off-site truth commission,” houses the most comprehensive collection of documents in existence on the cold war, the Central Intelligence Agency, American foreign policy, and covert operations.
And then there are Mr. Blight’s scholarly collaborators. Robert K. Brigham, an associate professor of history at Vassar College and the author of Guerrilla Diplomacy: The NLF’s Foreign Relations and the Viet Nam War (Cornell University Press, 1998), worked closely with Mr. Blight on the Hanoi conferences.
By putting the major protagonists from a historical event in a room together, Mr. Blight in effect “turns a heat lamp” on oral history, says Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman, a professor of history and American foreign relations at San Diego State University, who has taught Mr. Blight’s work in her classes.
Mr. Brigham agrees. What’s vital about Mr. Blight’s method, he says, is that it lets scholars get to the bottom of controversies that conventional oral history does not. When two people offer conflicting accounts of the same event, for example, an oral historian, interviewing them one at a time, has to go back and forth between the two parties. “Things never get resolved” that way, he says, “because they never sit in the same room and discuss it.”
The research that Mr. Blight’s methods have generated is “more than impressive,” says Mary Marshall Clark, president of the Oral History Association and director of Columbia University’s Oral History Research Office. But, she says, his implicit contention that oral history is not “critical” is dated. The field’s voluminous theoretical literature, she says, shows that oral historians have done important work on such questions as the fallibility of memory and how people “weave and reweave” their stories.
But Mr. Brigham says that the theoretical literature adds little to the historical record. The Vassar professor, who has conducted countless interviews on the Vietnam War, views much of oral history as “static and passive.” “If you’re trying to figure out what actually happened, you have to go and fact-check everything [the subject] says,” whereas fact-checking is built into the critical-oral-history model, he says.
But that advantage is simultaneously a disadvantage, says the University of Virginia’s Mr. Zelikow. Yes, decision makers placed in a room of their peers are less likely to tell blatant lies, but they are also constrained by the presence of those very people, who are often their friends, former friends, or former adversaries. There is a desire, says Mr. Zelikow, “not to dis people at the table” and a tendency to “mute condemnations of one’s interlocutors.”
In a closed, one-on-one session, he says, decision makers are often less inhibited. “It’s a trade-off,” Mr. Zelikow says. What one method lacks, the other one possesses, and vice versa. “Ideally,” he says, “the best of both methods would be employed.”
Of course, critical oral history is circumscribed in other ways, as well. Because its face-to-face encounters must be staged while key decision makers are still alive, the method can be applied only to relatively recent events. It is also dependent on the availability of relevant archival material to give the conferences the proper documentary backdrop. Had the Soviet Union not collapsed, for instance, many key documents (and people) would simply not be available today.
A Cautionary Tale?
Mr. Blight believes that critical oral history can reveal as much about the present and the future as it does about the past. A book he wrote with Mr. McNamara, Wilson’s Ghost (Public Affairs, 2000), is subtitled “Reducing the Risk of Conflict, Killing, and Catastrophe in the 21st Century.” Indeed, he sees ominous parallels between the events of 1962 and those of 2002.
Forty years ago, Cuba was believed to possess weapons of mass destruction that the United States threatened to remove -- along with the Castro regime. The United States was uncertain what kinds of weapons Cuba had and what ability it had to use them.
Sound familiar? Iraq could very well possess weapons of mass destruction right now, and be prepared to use them if it is invaded -- just as the Cubans were. A calamitous chain of events could be set in motion by precipitous or pre-emptive action, with unknown consequences. (President Bush recently invoked the Cuban missile crisis himself -- in support of action against Iraq. All the president has done, says Mr. Blight, is “hijack the missile crisis for his own purposes.”)
Mr. Blight believes that the insights of critical oral history may provide food for thought.
Had the United States consulted Cuba directly, rather than dealing exclusively with the Soviets, it might have gained a different understanding of the Cuban leadership’s thinking at the time. The lessons to take from 1962, he says, are extreme caution and coolheadedness. They probably saved the world 40 years ago.
http://chronicle.com Section: Research & Publishing Volume 49, Issue 8, Page A16