History Doesn't Follow the Rules

By Jeff Greenfield

Looking for a lesson in humility? Stand at a major historical marker, and try drawing a perfectly reasonable, prudent conclusion about where that marker is pointing. Believe me, if you read about a 15th century traveler saying, "I have to get back to Italy now; the Renaissance is starting," you're reading a line from a Woody Allen story. Real life rarely offers such prescience, even from the people paid to deliver it. Some of the days commemorated in this 80-year retrospective slipped by unnoticed at the time. Who could imagine that a gizmo to help techno-nerds talk to one another with their computers would so radically alter how we all would connect with one another? Other days might not have made the list at all if it had been put together a decade ago. History comes with its very own Doppler effect: as our point of observation changes, so does our understanding of what we are seeing.

Think back to July 20, 1969. If you were watching when Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon, you almost certainly believed that this "one small step" was the first in an imminent journey out to the planets and the stars. A year earlier, Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey had portrayed a near future where Pan Am spaceships carried business travelers and vacationers to the moon. Who would have believed then that when 2001 rolled around, there would be no trips to the moon -- and for that matter, no Pan Am.

Look at what we all "knew" on that August day in 1974 when Richard Nixon waved goodbye, boarded a helicopter and flew off into exile. The scandal that engulfed Nixon, his first Vice President, Attorney General and top White House aides was, nearly everyone agreed, clearly a windfall of immense proportions for the Democratic Party. And it was: in the 1974 midterm elections that gave the Democrats huge Congressional gains--43 House seats and three Senate seats -- and in the unlikely elevation of a peanut farmer and Washington outsider named Jimmy Carter to the Presidency two years later. In the long term, however, Watergate proved to be more of a boon for Republicans as it helped convince Americans of a bedrock conservative tenet: government is not to be trusted, the people in power in Washington are up to no good. When President Reagan told us in his 1981 Inaugural Address that "government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem," it was the memory of Watergate that had many in his audience saying "Amen."

Or look at what happened after the Ayatullah Khomeini seized power in Iran in 1979 and raised the specter of a radical, anti-American Islamic nation with messianic impulses for the region. Over the next decade two Presidents, anxious for a counterforce to Iran's fundamentalist ambitions, gave diplomatic, financial and military assistance to the secular, "modernist" regime of Iraq's Saddam Hussein. By 1990, with Saddam in Kuwait and threatening the Saudis, the U.S. realized the error of its ways and dispatched half a million troops to help free Kuwait from the grip of its neighbor Iraq. Surely, we assumed, the response among Muslims would be one of gratitude. Instead we got Osama bin Laden's homicidal fury at the "desecration" of the holy lands by "infidels" that has led to escalating terror against all things Western.

The creation of Israel in 1948 and the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1991 also seemed as though they would mark the end of old enmities, only to set the stage for over five decades of strife between Jews and Arabs in that Holy Land and the recent bloody wars in the Balkan states. And who predicted, when the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan turned into Moscow's Vietnam, that freedom-fighters who had triumphed with the aid of U.S.-supplied Stinger missiles would just a few years later morph into the Taliban and turn that nation into a haven and staging area for al-Qaeda?

Of course, revised views of history are what keep successive generations of historians in business, continuously updating where the latest dominoes have fallen. Eighty years from now, scholars will still be debating the meaning of what happened 80--or even 800--years ago. We journalists like to say that journalism is the first rough draft of history -- a rare acknowledgment, perhaps, that there is a Higher Authority in whose hands rests the final draft.

CNN senior analyst Jeff Greenfield is the author most recently of Oh, Waiter! One Order of Crow! (Putnam)