The Game in the Past
John Zeugner
The Game in the Past
Copyright © 2016 John Zeugner. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.
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in memory of
Hiromu Magofuku
Thinking is an attempt to apprehend Reality by catching it in a conceptual net, and a net is able to serve its purpose in virtue of having a texture which leaves gaps between the meshes. It is this open texture which gives a net its fling. If the net were made, not of an open network, but of a tightly woven cloth, the material would be too heavy to allow a net made of it to be effectively extensive. But the price of having a texture which makes it possible to catch something in the net’s meshes is the inevitability that something else will slip out of the net through the gaps.
—Arnold J. Toynbee, Reconsiderations, Volume 12 of A Study of History.
Part I, Guade’s Recruitment, 1979
Historical insight Professor David Moran believed was the end product of diligent, extensive preparation. Only after you had been through and been through and been through the data did the connections begin to emerge.
“Historical linkage—I abjure the term, causality—surfaces only in so far as you rescue the elements of the past from their natural habitat at the bottom of the sea.” Moran had pontificated the sentence more than once to that pasty and malproportioned collection of graduate students who were forced each year to take the department’s seminar on historical methods. “If those elements breathe, it is because you have carried air to them. To pump life into the past you may have to yield sustenance, breath, in the present. The endeavor requires commitment, dedication, monastic discipline, and certain fascination for the inert—a willingness to sacrifice living now in order to discover what it might have been like to refuse that decision in the past.”
All well and good. Repeated earnestly, automatically. No need to check its validity. He believed it once as he composed the phrases, rehearsed them for the dutiful graduate students. The repetition was entirely appropriate and Moran discovered that as the sentiment meant less and less to him, his mouthing of it became more and more convincing. In the early days he had logged up his monastic time. A book on Clarence Gauss, the U.S. Ambassador to China during World War II, had come of it, and tenure and a certain admission to the lower echelons of the mildly revisionist historians of the Cold War. His name turned up more and more regularly at the conclaves of diplomatic history. A modest national reputation had led, through a unique conjunction of recommendations, to the lecturing assignment in Japan. And the apex of the assignment was, apparently, the summer convocation of Cold War historiographers at a posh hotel on a mountain top overlooking Kyoto. Moran and seventeen Japanese historians had been summoned to comment on the most recent papers of the profession’s most ascendant star. At thirty-four Graham Guade, a full professor for four years, had published six books detailing with exquisite density of footnotes in five languages, the interplay of strategy that controlled and throttled U.S. diplomacy from 1942 to 1954.
Guade wore a hearing aid, an oversize beige object clamped to the back of his right ear, a shiny clear plastic line plunging, apparently, into the center of his brain. Moran thought, for a while, he saw fluid from Clio traveling instantly into that categorizing mind. The aid made Guade anomalous. He looked younger than his age, had a rather fit body which might have been, save for a little padding, called athletic. His motions were controlled but incessant. He cast off waves of energy, constant motion that signaled aliveness, and somehow ferocity. And yet the aid enveloped the energy in an image of neurasthenia—as if the young Vulcan had traded in his club foot for a beige tumor behind his right ear. He wore light flannel plaid shirts entirely appropriate to his Western, athletic image. Moran imagined the Japanese saw him as the quintessential American—open, bluff, vigorous, an intellectual cowboy quickly propping up the dominos of their beloved stereotypes.
Each morning he dazzled them by reading a dense, brilliantly documented paper on the American concept of a defensive perimeter in Asia, capping that effort on the last day with fifty pages on the collapse of perimeter strategy in Korea in June, 1950. As always the Japanese made no comment. They took notes and nodded, having no appetite, no sympathy for verbal combat. Guade appeared puzzled by the silence, kept prodding his audience demanding an end to stillness. It fell to Moran to keep the discussion period from collapsing as thoroughly as the strategy Guade had analyzed. Their watched conversation veered quickly out of criticism of the paper. Moran, as always, was awed by the scholarship, overwhelmed by the logic. Instead, he and Guade talked about the importance of certain documents, the accessibility of others, and finally speculated on any American troop withdrawals from Korea. Would the U.S. intervene, for example, if the North Koreans came down across the demilitarized zone?
“When you get to hypotheticals and predictions I guess you can say the discussion has run out of substance,” Guade laughed, refusing to answer the question.
Suddenly a Japanese at the far end of the table began speaking British-accented English. “Isn’t the real problem than no one in the State Department in Washington, or in the U.S. knew very much about Korea in the period after World War II? There was no one who had any knowledge of the peninsula. Isn’t that the real problem?”
Guade seemed delighted the Japanese had spoken; his reply was slow in coming, measured, apparently thoughtful. “I believe you are right. Acheson certainly had almost no feel for the Korean situation. It is a very telling point.”
Moran wondered if the Japanese understood that idiom.
“I’m trying to think who might have had Korean expertise,” Guade continued.
“When did Hornbeck leave the department?” Moran volunteered, “And what about Atcheson, George Atcheson?” The two names Moran could summon up from the Department’s Far Eastern Desk.
The Japanese professor, amazingly, rose quickly to the challenge. “Hornbeck knew nothing of Korea. He was a so called ‘China hand’.”
“And Atcheson,” Guade continued, “was killed in a plane crash in 1947.”
“Well, I suppose that settles it,” Moran said. “It seems the less the U.S. knows about an area, the more likely it is to intervene there.”
“Maybe intervene is the wrong word,” Guade said, smiling.
“We could try decimate,” Moran answered, smiling his best Japanese smile, a signal that whatever you’re doing is not what I want.
