More on “Law Office History”

More on “Law Office History” v. Academic History – At first I was going to post this below, as a Post-PostScript to my Bellesiles entry, but if it’s worth entering it’s worth entering on its own. So: For another historian patting his profession on the back for its devotion to “admitting ambiguity or uncertainty in our findings” and “the sense of nuance historians bring to their work — in marked contrast to lawyers and even “legal scholars” who are “are used to adversarial argument, and cavalierly happy to deploy whatever materials serve the cause they favor without the historian’s due regard for the limits and ambiguities of the evidence” — see “Dr. Clio Goes to Washington,” by Prof. Jack Rakove in the same issue of Common-Place that contains Prof. Bellesiles’ article discussed immediately below.

In this article Prof. Rakove recounts and offers reflections upon his Congressional testimony and other public activity opposing President Clinton’s impeachment. In defending his political and even admittedly partisan engagement he is at pains to argue that nothing in his testimony, etc., was at odds with his prior scholarly writings. This is no doubt true, especially inasmuch as the preface to his Pulitzer Prize-winning study of Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution (Vintage paperback, 1997) contains the following refreshing admission. After noting “two powerful criticisms” of originalism, that it is undemocratic because it subordinates the present to the past and that it is all but impossible to reconstruct intentions and understanding from the evidence left to us, he adds: “On the other hand, I happen to like originalist arguments when the weight of the evidence seems to support the constitutional outcomes I favor.” (p. xv)

Finally, it may be worth noting that Prof. Rakove candidly admits here that “Hillary Rodham Clinton (coincidentally the mother of one of my better-known students…) was close to the mark in her famous remark blaming a ‘vast right-wing conspiracy’ for the impeachment,” and he concludes the article by in effect blaming that conspiracy for the 9/11 attack:

While politics dictated that the national government be paralyzed for a year with partisan foolishness, our enemies elsewhere were making other plans for us — plans that we perhaps could have been better prepared to confront. But of course Monica was more important.

Perhaps recalling the episode when Ms. Lewinsky, according to her testimony, was performing oral (non-)sex on the president while he spoke on the phone with Rep. Sonny Callahan (R, Ala.) about additional troop deployments, I suppose a member of that conspiracy could reply, “More important to whom?”