In our own day, the purpose of history is less to illuminate than to entertain or reassure. More or less like poetry, history serves at best an ornamental function. Today the only American historians enjoying a significant public profile are those like Michael Beschloss or Doris Kearns Goodwin who specialize in repackaging colorful stories. Innovative, critical, probing history does not lack for practitioners; yet beyond the confines of the professoriate, it commands minimal attention.
The writings of Professor Williams commanded plenty of attention. Members of that amorphous coalition known as the New Left lionized him. Critics of the New Left intent on discrediting Williams called him every name in the book: economic determinist, communist fellow-traveler, and purveyor of anti-American propaganda.
Williams was an unapologetic radical. Yet he was by no means unsympathetic to conservatives. Nor did he lack for patriotism. Indeed, viewed in retrospect, he was one of those American intellectuals who bridge the divide between left and right, thereby representing some distinctive amalgam drawing from both camps. (Among Americans, Randolph Bourne, Charles Beard, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Christopher Lasch offer other twentieth-century examples).
So the remarks that Williams made some fifty-two years ago included the following reflection, worth pondering by present-day conservatives. “If we justify our intervention in Vietnam on the grounds that it is crucial to our national security,” he said, “we will soon be able to justify using our power for whatever we happen at the moment to want, or against whatever at the moment we do not like.” Furthermore, “That kind of moral arrogance—that kind of playing at being God—will destroy any chance we have to construct a good society.” Then Williams added:
Notice that I said good society. We already have a great society, and I think that may be the source of much of the trouble with our leaders. For greatness has primarily to do with size, strength, and power. But we citizens who are gathered here are primarily concerned with quality, equity, and with honoring our potential for becoming more fully and truly human.
In 1965, confusion about the distinction between great and good found American leaders “following the wrong rainbow.” President Johnson was promising Americans a “Great Society.” What he was actually delivering was an unnecessary war destined to cost the country dearly and leave it bitterly divided.