Samet quotes a memoir by the Shakespeare scholar Alvin Kernan, who joined the Navy in 1941 in order to escape a dire economic situation in rural Wyoming. Not that Ambrose’s heroes would have necessarily recognized themselves in his beatific portraits. Samet, whose new book is “Looking for the Good War: American Amnesia and the Violent Pursuit of Happiness.” Credit. But she maintains that it’s been a national fantasy to presume that “necessary” has to mean the same thing as “good.”Įlizabeth D. Yes, she says up front, American involvement in the war was necessary. Like the cadets she teaches at West Point, civilians would do well to see World War II as something other than a buoyant tale of American goodness trouncing Nazi evil. Her book is therefore a work of unsparing demystification - and there is something hopeful and even inspiring in this.
As “the last American military action about which there is anything like a positive consensus,” World War II is “the good war that served as prologue to three-quarters of a century of misbegotten ones.” Glib treatments of World War II have done real harm, she says, distorting our understanding of the past and consequently shaping how we approach the future.
She briskly enumerates the speech’s jumble of platitudes - “‘Great Crusade’ (Eisenhower), ‘Freedom’s Altar’ (a Civil War song), ‘consecrated to history’ (bastardized Lincoln), ‘new frontiers’ (misappropriated Kennedy), ‘heat of battle,’ ‘fires of hell,’ ‘Nazi fury,’ ‘awesome power,’ ‘breathtaking scale,’ ‘cherished alliance,’ ‘undying gratitude’ (clichés) and ‘tough guy’ (ad-lib).” What Samet calls our “tin-eared age of tweets” can make it harder to distinguish soaring oratory from flimsy bombast, but “most of the sentences won’t bear the weight of careful reading,” she writes.Īnd “careful reading,” as Samet provocatively (and persuasively) argues, can in fact be a matter of life or death. But Samet, a professor of English at West Point who has previously written about teaching the literature of warfare, refuses to grade on a curve. Some listeners were so surprised by the solemnity of Trump’s words that they eagerly welcomed it as evidence that he was donning the mantle of dignified statesman. Samet’s discerning new book about the gauzy mythology that has shrouded the historical reality of World War II, she reminds us of the 2019 speech that then-President Trump gave at Normandy, on the 75th anniversary of D-Day. Toward the end of “Looking for the Good War,” Elizabeth D.
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