My dissertation explains the reversal in U.S. foreign policy from victory at any cost in World War II to peace at any price in the Vietnam War. Between 1943 and 1973, the United States enacted an astonishing strategic and moral volte-face – from unconditional surrender to peace with honor, from unlimited war to limited war, and from an unwavering will to win against Germany and Japan to a desperate desire to escape Vietnam. Diplomatic and military historians have largely attributed these changes to different times and circumstances, concluding that U.S. strategists made different decisions according to different political and military realities. But the reversal from unconditional surrender and unlimited war in World War II, to containment and limited war in Korea, and then to peace with honor in Vietnam constituted not just a story about changing national strategies to meet ever-changing international needs and military realities, but a story of America’s evolving ethics, values, and attitudes about war and its costs. Indeed, U.S. strategists turned from victory at any cost in World War II to peace at any price in the Vietnam War because they thought victory was impossible and immoral. Stalemate in Korea, a “nuclear taboo,” fears of World War III, and guerrilla warfare in Vietnam all led U.S. strategists to debase victory, reject the human costs of war, and lose the will to win. The result was an end not only of “victory culture,” but of victory doctrine – the disposition, determination, and willingness to pay the price of victory.
This paper examines why the Nazis annihilated the Czech village of Lidice in 1942 and how the massacre was used and interpreted by the Nazis, the Czechs, and the Western Allies. While the Nazis destroyed Lidice in order to punish, prevent, and publicize violence, the Czechs made the massacre the central atrocity in the history of the Protectorate and publicized Lidice to incite resistance and to mobilize international sympathy and support for Czechoslovakia. At the same time, the Western Allies used Lidice as a symbol of human freedom and memorialized the massacre in ways that allowed the name of the village to live on.
This article considers whether the Holocaust is comprehensible. Because of the extreme suffering involved, the Holocaust defies human conceptual capacities for understanding and challenges our sense of reality and rationality. Auschwitz, in particular, has become the metonym for human evil – immoral actions that cannot be explained or reconciled. The history of the Holocaust is thus challenged by the problem of Auschwitz but impelled by the impulse for explanation or theodicy. This essay therefore compares arguments about the comprehensibility of the Holocaust which include both Functionalist and Intentionalist interpretations, special or Sonderweg explanations, and historical and philosophical perspectives that range from agnosticism towards complete historicization. The spectrum of comprehension is balanced by polarized interpretations that insist that humans cannot understand Holocaust history and the argument that human beings must make the Holocaust intelligible if we are to avoid intellectual and spiritual homelessness. In the end, scholars must make a moral choice between incomprehension and understanding. I argue, however, that human beings can feel at home even in a world with Auschwitz because historians can build conceptual shelters through theodicies like the banality of evil or sufficient reason. Historians should also continue to try and unite the real and the rational in spite of the problem of Auschwitz because the Holocaust is rife with tensions that drive history in the first place.
This paper explains how the Office of War Information and the Office of Censorship in the Roosevelt administration created a “Good War” myth about World War II. Through propaganda, the Office of War Information inflated public opinion, domestic morale, and moral tolerance to meet the needs and realities of the war effort. Through censorship, the Office of Censorship deflated military experiences and costs to match the public willingness to fight and sacrifice. The federal government’s official narrative about the war therefore reflected the moral equilibrium that the government artificially created between domestic moral sensibilities and the military’s demands for victory.
My thesis examines the records of the Truman administration to explain how and why anti-communism became a cornerstone of American democracy during the Cold War. Shows how the administration moved across the ideological spectrum from pro-democracy to anti-communism as officials came to see defying Soviet tyranny as part of what it meant to be a democratic nation.
This article from my dissertation discusses the controversy over preventive war in the midst of the Korean War which highlights the persistence of Americans’ victory-at-all-costs attitude and the emergence of conflicting values and ethics that questioned the human costs and morality of victory in war.
This article from my dissertation introduces the concept of “moral inflation” and argues the United States turned from victory at all costs to peace at any price because Americans came to believe that victory was immoral and impossible. And victory became immoral and impossible because the value of victory decreased, while the value of American and enemy lives increased. The moral price of U.S. victory inflated over time as Americans became more concerned about the human costs of war. Thus, as victory became less ethical – a shift Edward Luttwak calls “debellicization” – and as minimizing casualties became more virtuous – a change I call “moral inflation” – Americans determined that victory was no longer worth the cost.
Considers Winston Churchill’s views about his own greatness and destiny before he was elected as a Member of Parliament in November 1900.
Examines articles by American journalists who turned from spectators into witnesses as they observed the purges and trials of collaborators in Europe during and after World War II.
An essay about Abraham Lincoln based on the works of Eric Foner, Doris Kearns Goodwin, and William Lee Miller.