American History Revised (10 page)

Normally, when a new man assumes the presidency because of assassination, you would expect continuity. Indeed, Lyndon Johnson professed as much when he assured reporters, “Let us continue.” Only the reality was quite different: within a quick forty-eight hours of taking office, in the midst of all the turmoil over the assassination, he made the single most important presidential decision of the 1960s: massive involvement in Asia.

In his memoirs,
In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam
, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara provides a photograph with an interesting center: “Nov. 24, 1963: The First Meeting. Among LBJ’s first actions as president—while he was still in his vice-presidential quarters in the Old Executive Office Building and before he had moved into the Oval
Office—was meeting with Dean Rusk, George Ball, Ambassador Lodge, and me to discuss Vietnam. His instructions were clear: Win!”

For a new president with no electoral mandate of his own, such aggressiveness was quite baffling. But not really a surprise. In late 1963, Kennedy and Johnson had their eyes on the upcoming presidential election. They had opposing views on what to do about Vietnam afterward. Whereas Kennedy had told his advisers he couldn’t pull out until after he was reelected, Lyndon Johnson was now telling the Joint Chiefs, “Just let me get elected, and then you can have your war.”

History books talk about America’s long slide into its morass in Vietnam. This is a gross oversimplification. Deeds speak louder than words. Based on the actual deeds—the precise wording of the executive order specifying withdrawal and its abrupt cancellation by another man—there was a defining moment in our Vietnam involvement: the assassination of a president.

Only 48 hours after the assassination: “Win!” (LBJ with Lodge, Rusk, McNamara, and Ball)

America’s other messy war also owed its existence to a certain tipping point. In the aftermath of September 11, George W. Bush unleashed a new policy whereby the
U.S. would take the offensive and attack hostile nations preemptively. However, it did not happen right after September 11, but almost two months later. Look carefully at the facts.

During September, in the aftermath of the attack on the World Trade Center towers, nations throughout the world nodded in agreement with Bush’s bellicosity. The president’s powerful statement, “You are with us or you are against us,” did not raise concerns, nor did his more blunt statement about nations harboring terrorists being equivalent to being terrorists. Obviously the United States was fully justified in going after al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. But the minute Bush announced his intention to go after Iraq, other nations balked. Questions about “weapons of mass destruction” and “chemical warfare” dominated their concern about the legitimacy of Bush’s escalation.

Unfortunately they never grasped the real tipping point (which Bush never communicated fully). This tipping point lacked the drama of the Twin Towers falling down, and while it dominated the U.S. news for weeks, it was quickly forgotten.

But the president, the Defense Department, and the Homeland Security Department did not forget the anthrax scare that killed five and caused widespread panic. Nobody could figure out who the culprit was, and to this day the FBI does not know for sure. “There is no greater enemy than the enemy you cannot see,” goes the old military axiom. Informed by the CIA chief about the scale of potential damage from chemical warfare, the CIA’s report “sent the President through the roof.” All of a sudden, weapons of mass destruction—forget low-tech attacks by hijacked planes that could easily be dealt with—became the issue. Iraq was universally recognized to be the number-one hostile country claiming (pretending, it turned out) to possess such weapons. From then on, President Bush ordered nuclear/chemical/biological terrorism to be given top priority. Terrorist groups, he warned delegates at an international conference on terrorism, “are seeking chemical, biological and nuclear weapons….We will not wait for the authors of mass murders to gain the weapons of mass destruction. We act now, because we must fight this dark threat from our age and save generations to come.”

The turning point in American foreign policy from coalition to unilateralist was not only September 11, 2001, but also the anthrax scare that caused panic in October. One wonders what the French president’s reaction would have been if terrorists had poisoned the Paris water supply. He, too, might have gone through the roof.

S
ome of our greatest Americans are totally forgotten today. History books do not proclaim their exploits. Yet in their day they were enormously well known—and deservedly so. They were men and women of high achievement. They include a presidential candidate expected to be the next George Washington, a businessman-philanthropist who enriched the lives of millions, and a man who wrote the best-selling book of the nineteenth century—in one night. History has not been kind to them.

Take the man who discovered America, for example. He did all the hard work: importuning Queen Isabella to give him funding, sailing off into the far blue yonder where no one had ventured before, quelling mutiny by his frightened men, and establishing once and for all the New World. Then why is America not called the United States of Columbia?

Columbus missed the history boat—literally—because he was too busy exploring to do his propaganda. His mate Amerigo Vespucci was more aggressive. In 1499, after leaving Columbus’s employ, he signed on with another expedition and made four voyages to Brazil. In 1504
several letters appeared, written by Vespucci, claiming he was the captain—which he was not—of the four voyages to
Mundus Novus
, or the “New World.” He wrote letters to his Florentine benefactors, offering vivid descriptions of the new continent. “This land is very delightful, and covered with an infinite number of green trees and very big ones that never lose their foliage … [the] multitude of wild animals, the abundance of pumas, of panthers, of wild cats … of so many wolves, red deer, monkeys … so many species could not have entered Noah’s ark,” wrote Vespucci. Then he moved on to the sexual activities of human beings: “Their marriages are not with one woman but with as many as they like … when their children … the girls, reach the age of puberty, the first man to corrupt them must be their nearest relative.” As for cannibalism, Vespucci had a few words on that subject as well: “One of them confessed to me that he had eaten the flesh of more than 200 bodies.”

In 1506 a compilation of Vespucci’s letters was published in pamphlet form, titled
The Four Voyages of Amerigo Vespucci.
For the next twenty-five years it was a bestseller, published in some forty editions, and outselling the dull journals of Columbus by three to one. In 1507 a book of geography appeared,
Cosmographiae Introductio
, identifying the new continent as “America.” The author eventually realized that Vespucci’s claims of discovery were false and soon removed the name America, but by then it was too late: Vespucci’s bestseller had won the day.

Of course, also left out in the naming sweepstakes were John Cabot, who discovered North America (Newfoundland) in 1497, and Juan Ponce de Leon, who in 1513 discovered what would become the state of Florida. Cabotia? Poncedelonia?

History is brutal in who becomes famous and who doesn’t. Said Theodore Roosevelt after leaving office in 1910, “If there is not the great war, you don’t get the great general….If Lincoln had lived in times of peace, no one would know his name now.”

Indeed, we had one president who today is almost totally forgotten for just the opposite: he steadfastly refused to go to war, and was voted out of office because of it. He would have to rank as one of our most courageous presidents, a man who put principle ahead of expediency: John Adams. He belongs in our panoply of forgotten heroes.

History is replete with examples of situations or people who never got their fair mention because it benefited no one to have the truth known. The Spanish-American War, with its rich prizes of Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Wake Island, Guam, and the Philippines, plus the glory of Theodore Roosevelt and his Rough Riders, is well known. Not well known, however, is the postwar aftermath: our war against Emilio Aguinaldo and the Philippine insurgents, an even bloodier conflict than the war against Spain. Or take World War
I: we all know it as a war against Germany. Russia was our ally. Actually, America was waging a secret war against the Bolsheviks, with more than fifteen thousand American troops involved. We won the war against Germany, but we clearly failed in our underground war in Russia, thus leading to a seventy-year Cold War.

1776
Today, of course, nobody knows this man with such a delicious name, but we include it here because it is so amusing. He was one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, appearing near the huge signature of John Hancock.

And who was this man? A nobody, comparatively speaking. But wait! There is more to the story—a story of immense riches made possible by his own obscurity. Born in England, this young man sailed to America in 1765, opened a store, and by good fortune became a delegate to the Continental Congress of 1776 and signed accordingly. Next year he got into an argument, fought a duel, and got killed. So much for Button Gwinnett—a footnote to history.

Years passed, and when it became clear that America had won the war and the Declaration of Independence was now a document of immense historical value, autograph hunters started gathering up all the autographs they could find. All the other fifty-four signers being significant men, they had no problem—except they could find no document ever signed by that ultimate nobody who had died so early, Button Gwinnett. The price of a Gwinnett signature skyrocketed, worth far more than the signatures of his more illustrious colleagues.

Had he been mayor of New York, there would have been at least five hundred documents he had signed. Had he been a major land owner, there would have been numerous land deeds with his signature. Had he been a merchant, there would have been countless bills of lading with his now-precious signature. But there was nothing. American historians and autograph-hunters bid fabulous prices, but to no avail. Where was the autograph of this mysterious man, Button Gwinnett? Without him, no collection of American heritage could be complete.

Then suddenly he reappeared. Not in America, but in England. In the village of Wolverhampton, an antiques collector stumbled upon some committee minutes that included the missing signature, signed long before Gwinnett had emigrated to America. This discovery caused a flutter on two continents: here, at long last, was the missing signature on the most important document in America.

William Shakespeare once said, “Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.” One of the last was Button Gwinnett.

1781
The creation of the presidency first occupied by George Washington derived from eight years’ experience with a presidential office occupied by no fewer than ten men under the Articles of Confederation. Some historians have gone so far as to argue that the first president of the United States was John Hanson. (John who?)