c. 1998 Religion News Service
(Andrew M. Greeley is a Roman Catholic priest, best-selling novelist and a sociologist at the University of Chicago National Opinion Research Center. Check out his home page at http://www.agreeley.com or contact him via e-mail at agreel(at)aol.com.)
UNDATED _ Only those who live in the future can write the history of the present.
Those who would try to hold that history captive to support their present political arguments are both dishonest and irresponsible. And when historians themselves, eager for the celebrity of punditry, present their guesses as proven facts, they forfeit the right to be taken seriously.
Projections beyond six months or a year are nothing more than flights of fancy. Hence, when historians, in their talking-head mode, tell us President Clinton’s”legacy”will forever be besmirched they are not only trying to hold history captive, they are dishonest and irresponsible. They should admit no one knows what will be said about the present crisis in American life 20 years from now, much less in 100 years.
However, it is worth noting that in the past, judgments of presidents made by their contemporaries have not stood up well in hindsight.
Andrew Johnson, who was impeached because of his moderate policies for”reconstructing”the South now seems to have been a wise and sensible man. His program for the South was much harsher than that of Lincoln who, had he lived, also might have been impeached for his”softness”towards the defeated confederacy.
And Harry S. Truman, who was almost universally despised when he vacated the White House in 1952 _ his approval rating was only 32 percent _ is now hailed as a great president. Warren Harding, who was widely admired at the time of his presidency, is now considered to have been a failure.
Those pundits, talking heads and editorial writers who have already written the history of the Clinton presidency should admit that they’re trying to hold history captive for their own present political purposes.
My guess _ acknowledged as such _ is that future historians will be confused about the impeachment of Clinton. A lame-duck Congress, on partisan lines, voted to impeach a president on charges that would never stand up in court, against the will of more than 60 percent of the American public and in the face of their own rapidly declining popularity.
How could this have happened? It seems to make no sense at all.
Yet consider this paragraph:”Each member wants the approval of all the others, and this produces a strong tendency toward uniformity. No one wants to raise controversial issues, question weak arguments, or puncture unrealistic hopes. They sustain an illusion of invulnerability, marked by excessive optimism. They rationalize away any warnings and decline to reconsider past policy commitments that have brought them to this predicament. They take their own group’s morality for granted and do not look carefully at the ethical consequences of their decisions. They assume that their enemies are too evil to warrant negotiation efforts, and too stupid or weak to stop whatever plans the group may devise. Each person censors his or her own doubts instead of voicing them.” Those words are NOT a description of the current House of Representatives. They are a 26-year-old description of the mentality that affected the military leaders at Pearl Harbor and President Kennedy’s advisers at the time of the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. Professor Irving Janis called the phenomenon”groupthink”:”… the tendency of a closed group to exclude all `normative dissonance’ from their thought in order to maintain the unity of the group.” The admirals and generals at Pearl Harbor had many warnings. They ignored them because to have heard the warnings would have disrupted the smoothly working unity and the high morale of their group. They failed not out of ill-will or incompetence, but because their collective mindset forbade them to hear the warnings.
Similarly, the evidence that the Bay of Pigs landing was folly almost inundated President Kennedy’s advisers, but they could not see it. Their problem was not that they did not want to see it, but that, because of their group mindset, they could not see it.
The model seems to fit the Republicans in the House of Representatives perfectly. They have convinced themselves _ doubtless in all sincerity _ that their”honor”demands they bring the country to a halt and then tear it apart. All other considerations are swept aside because the collective mentality obliterates them. One wonders how a man like Rep. Henry Hyde, R-Ill., whose life certainly appears less than honorable in many respects, can make such a claim.
However, the collective mindset of the House _ one could well call it a collective neurosis _ cut them off from all contrary evidence. The lame-duck impeachment of 1998 was a”groupthink”impeachment.
DEA END GREELEY
