http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/28/opinion/28ellis.html
The New York Times
January 28, 2006
Op-Ed Contributor
Finding a Place for 9/11 in American History
By JOSEPH J. ELLIS
Amherst, Mass.
IN recent weeks, President Bush and his administration have mounted a
spirited defense of his Iraq policy, the Patriot Act and, especially,
a program to wiretap civilians, often reaching back into American
history for precedents to justify these actions. It is clear that the
president believes that he is acting to protect the security of the
American people. It is equally clear that both his belief and the
executive authority he claims to justify its use derive from the
terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
A myriad of contested questions are obviously at issue here foreign
policy questions about the danger posed by Iraq, constitutional
questions about the proper limits on executive authority, even
political questions about the president's motives in attacking Iraq.
But all of those debates are playing out under the shadow of Sept. 11
and the tremendous changes that it prompted in both foreign and
domestic policy.
Whether or not we can regard Sept. 11 as history, I would like to
raise two historical questions about the terrorist attacks of that
horrific day. My goal is not to offer definitive answers but rather to
invite a serious debate about whether Sept. 11 deserves the historical
significance it has achieved.
My first question: where does Sept. 11 rank in the grand sweep of
American history as a threat to national security? By my calculations
it does not make the top tier of the list, which requires the threat
to pose a serious challenge to the survival of the American republic.
Here is my version of the top tier: the War for Independence, where
defeat meant no United States of America; the War of 1812, when the
national capital was burned to the ground; the Civil War, which
threatened the survival of the Union; World War II, which represented
a totalitarian threat to democracy and capitalism; the cold war, most
specifically the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, which made nuclear
annihilation a distinct possibility.
Sept. 11 does not rise to that level of threat because, while it
places lives and lifestyles at risk, it does not threaten the survival
of the American republic, even though the terrorists would like us to
believe so.
My second question is this: What does history tell us about our
earlier responses to traumatic events?
My list of precedents for the Patriot Act and government wiretapping
of American citizens would include the Alien and Sedition Acts in
1798, which allowed the federal government to close newspapers and
deport foreigners during the "quasi-war" with France; the denial of
habeas corpus during the Civil War, which permitted the pre-emptive
arrest of suspected Southern sympathizers; the Red Scare of 1919,
which emboldened the attorney general to round up leftist critics in
the wake of the Russian Revolution; the internment of
Japanese-Americans during World War II, which was justified on the
grounds that their ancestry made them potential threats to national
security; the McCarthy scare of the early 1950's, which used cold war
anxieties to pursue a witch hunt against putative Communists in
government, universities and the film industry.
In retrospect, none of these domestic responses to perceived national
security threats looks justifiable. Every history textbook I know
describes them as lamentable, excessive, even embarrassing. Some very
distinguished American presidents, including John Adams, Abraham
Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, succumbed to quite genuine and
widespread popular fears. No historian or biographer has argued that
these were their finest hours.
What Patrick Henry once called "the lamp of experience" needs to be
brought into the shadowy space in which we have all been living since
Sept. 11. My tentative conclusion is that the light it sheds exposes
the ghosts and goblins of our traumatized imaginations. It is
completely understandable that those who lost loved ones on that date
will carry emotional scars for the remainder of their lives. But it
defies reason and experience to make Sept. 11 the defining influence
on our foreign and domestic policy. History suggests that we have
faced greater challenges and triumphed, and that overreaction is a
greater danger than complacency.
Joseph J. Ellis is a professor of history at Mount Holyoke College and
the author, most recently, of "His Excellency: George Washington."
* Copyright 2006The New York Times Company