Alan Axelrod's "Profiles In Folly"

I like nothing better than delving into the rich trove of History's Lessons and trying to learn lessons from the past. Alan Axelrod's book, "Profiles In Folly", contains 35 vignettes, divided into six "Decisions".

The Decision to:

• Gamble and Hope (featuring Custer at the Little Bighorn; the Titanic, and the Space Shuttle);
• Manipulate (featuring Watergate and Dick Cheney's Iraq War);
• Leap Without Looking (featuring the War of 1812 and King George's American Revolution);
• Retreat (featuring Neville Chamberlain's Munich Agreement, and Dred Scott);
• Destroy (featuring the Alamo and WWI's Poison Gas);
• and Drift (featuring Vietnam, Iraq, Secession, and Hurricane Katrina).

These kinds of books are the mental equivalent of snack food, because History is almost infinitely variable and it's just hard to abstract the proper lessons from it. Much depends on the author's maturity of judgment, political viewpoint, and choice of subject material.

Some subjects aren't treated in sufficient detail to be terribly interesting or useful. Watergate, Ken Lay's Enron, and the British difficulties with Gandhi were just written to be a little too abstract to be interesting.

Nevertheless, some subjects were fascinating. The most interesting article (mostly because I had never heard about this before) concerned Edward Bernays and his public-relations campaign to recruit women cigarette smokers, featuring his masterful manipulation of New York City's 1929 Easter Parade to make feminine smoking seem liberating, and thus highly desirable. Cigarettes were called 'torches of freedom'! What a great image! First as a trickle, then, after the Easter Parade success, a tide, millions and millions of women succumbed to the campaign.

When the Surgeon General's report condemning smoking as cancer-causing came out in 1964, Bernays changed course and tried to use some of the very same public-relations methods to make feminine smoking seem uncool and thus something to be avoided. Unfortunately, nicotine addiction had sealed the fate of women cigarette smokers. Amazing how much like clay Bernays seemed to think people in general, and American women in particular, were in the face of propaganda and advertising! Perhaps he was right!

I like how George Bush gets his lumps in this book. That's OK: History has many lessons for everyone. Others of a more-conservative bent are likely to find Axelrod's stealth liberal agenda to be annoying, like this conservative blogger does:

He cites Alfred P. Sloan's concept of "planned obsolescence" as a "folly" (and was he really its inventor? The wiki article mentions him, but not as the orginator of the idea). Sloan's idea was to upgrade the look of a car every year and make major stylistic changes every three years, in hopes that customers would want to have the latest and greatest even if they didn't actually need a new car. It worked, too, for many decades. By the end of the essay, Axelrod has blamed the 1980's decline of the US automobile manufacturers on Sloan's 1932 publication. He notes that in 2007 Toyota sold more vehicles than General Motors, as if this was the direct result of Sloan's planned obsolescence. I'm not expert on the finances and marketing of American versus Japanese cars, but I'm guessing it's just a tad more complicated than that.

By the time Axelrod slides into home plate with a criticism of Bush's handling of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the pattern is clear: all of the "folly" Axelrod points to involves some lesson we are supposed to learn and apply as we move forward. History is rarely like that, however. As everyone who attempted to frame the War on Terror as the Peloponnesian war – with the US cast as the mighty democratic Athens and the Iraqis or the Afghanis cast as the wily and tenacious Spartans – found out, history has a way of twisting around on you. Things that might seem the same on the surface become completely different when you dive below the surface.

What Axelrod was really trying to do here is make liberals feel good about themselves. While a number of his essays are about politically neutral incidents (eg, replacing Coke with New Coke), a number of them are politically charged and, in every instance, the "lesson" is that the conservatives (or politically incorrect, as in the case of Sloan) were wrong.

Even when he takes Kennedy to task for the Bay of Pigs, his criticism is for Kennedy letting the CIA take over and run the operation. Kennedy gets off with an "oh, well, at least he learned his lesson" type of paragraph. In the essay taking Johnson to task for the response to the Gulf of Tonkin incident, he has to first spend a few pages castigating Bush over the war in Iraq (and he never gets around to criticizing Johnson directly, only the general government response to the incident).

So, I admit there is some history in the book. It's overshadowed, however, by all of the liberal claptrap. I don't mind it when historians have opinions, even political opinions, as long as they are up-front and honest about them and, for my money, Axelrod is not.

Like I say, Axelrod's book is mental candy, but I must admit to having a sweet tooth!