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that he didn't cite enough Spanish material.
"One reason I didn't use more
Spanish sources," he explains, "is because
some of them are so critical of the
United States that it would look as
though I loaded the book. Maybe I
should have put some of it in; maybe I
made a mistake.
"The other reason I didn't is because
some of the best stuff—for example, on
the impact of American policy on the
Central American military—is in English."
In general, says LaFeber, the book's
detractors "tend to be people who were
closely associated with John F. Kennedy
or Jimmy Carter. I'm very harsh on
Kennedy and Carter in the book, and
these people read the book, don't like
what I did to their heros, and so they
don't like the book in general.
"And that's understandable," he
continues. "If I didn't want to get into
that kind of thing, I would have written
a book about one hour of the Battle of
Gettysburg. When you get into a highly
politicized, highly sensitive topic like
this, you expect it. And I take a very
strong, critical view of American
policy."
LaFeber says he arrived at his conclusions
through his determination to read
the information he found as objectively
as possible, something he suggests is not
always done, especially in Washington,
DC.
"The White House gets excellent information
on what's going on in Central
America," he says. "But it's also very
clear that the White House has not paid
a whole lot of attention to that information.
They simply filter it out."
After LaFeber finished work on his
book, he decided to take a trip to Central
America, "to see what I'd been writing
about." As on a 1977 trip to Panama,
Tom Holloway joined him. Holloway
is fluent in Spanish; LaFeber is not,
although he can, according to Holloway,
read the language very well, and
understand "a lot more than you might
think for not having lived in a Spanishspeaking
country."
The two of them traveled to Costa
Rica and Nicaragua—two countries
about as different as could be, according
to LaFeber. "Costa Rica is democratic,"
he says. "Really democratic. It has
a higher literacy rate than the United
States." It also has, he discovered, a
considerable community of Cornellians.
"Then you fly for about forty-five
minutes," LaFeber notes, "and end up
in Nicaragua. And there you are in the
middle of the Sandinista revolution. In
the middle of a city that was just devas-
24 CORNELL ALUMNI NEWS
Sheer volume
of data puts
a big premium
on experience
among historians
tated by the '72 earthquake and never rebuilt."
LaFeber and Holloway were able to
see a little of the countryside during their
Nicaraguan stay. LaFeber was struck by
how great an American cultural and economic
influence remains there, even as
the country strives to break away from
all things North American: "It's very
strange," he says, "that the Nicaraguan
national anthem—the revolutionary national
anthem—condemns the United
States, and then you look across the
street and there they are playing baseball."
LaFeber's visit confirmed his apprehension
over what American policy has
been doing to Nicaragua. "The United
States is putting such tremendous military
pressure on Nicaragua now that the
Nicaraguans are going to get help from
anywhere they can get it. So, in a real
sense, Reagan's policy has pushed Nicaragua
closer and closer to Cubans and
Soviets. And I think that has to be understood."
Regardless of the high profile his involvement
in Central American issues
has given him, Walter LaFeber remains
nothing but what he has been now for
more than twenty-five years, a dedicated
historian. He rejects the thought that
any one type of history might be more
"relevant" than another. "Any field in
history or political science is important
for what it tells us about the present, depending
on the kinds of questions you
ask of it.
"All of us are historians in one way or
another," he adds. "We all make decisions
every hour of the day based on our
view of history. That's not even a question.
It's just whether or not you're conscious
of it, and you do it on the basis of
good or bad history, that's all."
LaFeber acknowledges that the ability
to make such historical judgments is not
getting any easier. One reason is the advent
of telecommunication. "Presidents
like Washington, Lincoln, and the
Adamses conducted a lot of their busi-
ness in writing," he says. Starting with
McKinley, however, presidents began to
conduct their affairs by cable or by telephone.
"It changes the nature of the research.
You depend more and more on
oral history, and that is a very dangerous
kind of history."
Another complication is sheer volume.
"There was a great historian at
Cornell named Carl Becker," LaFeber
says, "and he and his generation believed,
in the words of one of them, that
written history was an act of faith. And
to a certain extent it is. You can't totally
recreate the past. Particularly when you
get into 20th-century material, there is
so much archival material, so much
manuscript material, that you can research
your subject forever."
Ultimately, he says, "you've got to
work out some kind of basis for selection
and be able to defend that. That's
the nature of history, whether you're
writing about the medieval period, or
about US policy in the 1980s. You cannot
totally recreate the past. You've got
to do it on the basis of selected evidence,
and particular kinds of approaches, and
then be ready to defend it.
"Many years ago," adds LaFeber,
"the American Historical Association
heard all this business about how either
mathematicians or physicists do their
best work before the age of 30, or something
like this—their most innovative
work. So they took a poll of the profession
to find out when historians do their
important work, or their most innovative
work. The average age was 49.
"And I think that's the nature of the
profession," says LaFeber, who turns 51
in August. "It usually takes you that
long to figure out what's important, and
how you handle evidence, and how you
can do it honestly and creatively. It takes
you an awful long time to do that."
More than fifteen years ago, LaFeber
himself wrote for the Alumni News an
article discussing the work of the revisionist
historians. His conclusion is
worth restating. For just as Walter La-
Feber has risen to become, in Joel Silbey's
words, "a very, very important
historian—a leader in the revisionist
school of history," so do his words from
1968 acquire renewed meaning when reflected
onto his own exceptional career.
"[W]hatever else the revisionists accomplish,"
he wrote, "perhaps their
greatest contribution will be a reaffirmation
of the faith that the study of history
is the necessary means through which
the promise of the past can be transformed
into fulfilment." Luckily we
have people like Walter LaFeber to remind
us of the promise of the past.